The Kraus Project

The Kraus Project
Jonathan Franzen

A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In THE KRAUS PROJECT, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments.While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen’s annotations soar over today’s cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

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Copyright (#)

4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013

Simultaneously published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Franzen

Footnotes by Paul Reitter copyright © 2013 by Paul Reitter Footnotes by Daniel Kehlmann copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kehlmann

Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral

Jacket art by Matt Buck, after the cover for the first issue of Die Fackel

Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

The original essays and afterwords in this volume are from Karl Kraus's collection Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). "Man frage nicht…" appeared in Die Fackel no. 888, October 1933.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007517435

Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007517459 Version: 2017-03-28

Praise (#u063d2b6d-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)

From the reviews of The Kraus Project:

Financial Times Book of the Year

‘An experimental collage of texts, and all the better for it … The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly skeptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and a polemical force’

Jason Cowley, Financial Times

‘Engrossing, highly original … Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work’

Edmund Fawcett, New York Times Book Review

‘It IS worth it, despite, as well as because of, the difficulties, so congratulations all round … thanks to Franzen, more people will remember him’

Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard

‘A passionate and concerned work … You can understand why Franzen likes him, and sees a dearth of such elegance today’

Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times

TO

DORIS AVERY

AND IN MEMORY OF

GEORGE AVERY

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE (#u063d2b6d-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)

COPYRIGHT (#)

PRAISE

DEDICATION (#)

HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (1910) (#)

NESTROY AND POSTERITY (1912) (#)

AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (1911) (#)

BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE: FINAL WORD (1917) (#)

LET NO ONE ASK … (1933) (#)

NOTES (#)

HEING UND DIE FOLGEN (#)

NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT (#)

NACHWORT ZU „HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN“ (#)

ZWISCHEN DEN LEBENSRICHTUNGEN (#)

MAN FRAGE NICHT … (#)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#)