Over the last decade, a renewed visibility for Karl Kraus has emerged in the Anglophone world, driven by academic research, new editions, new translations, as well as a more public and broader discussion driven by Jonathan Franzen's (with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann) The Kraus Project. Ari Linden's study of Karl Kraus and modernist theory continues the widening aperture on Kraus's place in Central European thought. The book succeeds, with deep analysis and clear and vibrant writing, in showing Kraus as a modernist writer and theorist, as well as a public intellectual whose work is as valuable as more familiar figures such as Adorno or Benjamin. It is a book that both intellectual historians and historians of public media in fin-de-siècle Vienna and First Republic Austria will find of interest, but is sparse in terms of historical methodology.

Linden's book is first and foremost a book of Germanistik. The book “probes the iterations, implications, and rearticulations of Kraus's critical insights into the relationship between mass media, the state, the public sphere, and the modern subject” (4). While the book certainly provides a critical reading of Kraus's use of language “as a social practice and thus a site where political impulses and ideologies coalesce” (4), its examination of historical context in terms of mass media, state, and the public sphere of interwar Central Europe is thin. The book is primarily, as the title suggests, an attempt to position Kraus within the larger intellectual discourse of modernism and to argue that his modernism was an ethical and socially engaged undertaking.

Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Satires and Counterdiscourses,” provides a close reading of Kraus's three major projects (outside of his primary intellectual commitment, Die Fäckel): The Last Days of Mankind (1918–22), Couldcuckooland (1923), and The Third Walpurgis Night (written in 1933, but not published until 1952). The three chapters that compose part 1 provide deep readings of the three texts in order to demonstrate the social purpose of Kraus's “language-oriented satire” (8). Linden concludes that in all three works Kraus employs laughter and obscenity in such a way that laughter “draws our attention to the war's seriousness, sensitizes us to its violence, and thereby works against modernity's anesthetizing mechanisms” (12). Part 1 does not fully ignore the social context from which Kraus operates his satire, but overall, the context remains studied only within the texts. Linden does not provide a deep historical reading through other primary sources of the audiences, events, or social dilemmas of First Republic Austria.

Part 2, composed of two chapters, examines the intellectual affinities and relationships of Kraus to other modernists thinkers (chapter 4, Kierkegaard and Benjamin and chapter 5, Adorno and to some degree Heidegger). Both chapters in the second half of the book are about what Linden calls “dialogues.” By this, he means to distinguish the study of patterns of influence or historical and personal interactions from his more ahistorical reading through “reciprocal illumination.” By this method, “Kraus's work—examined . . . more for thematic consonance and less stringently with respect to its chronological appearance—can be understood as something of a cipher in relation to these other figures” (13). The result for the Kierkegaard “dialogue” is that it comes off as a bit forced; Kierkegaard appears more as a historical legacy for Kraus to engage with than as a direct participant in a conversation. Overall, there is an unevenness to Linden's concept of “dialogues.” Perhaps in a theoretical, timeless, space this has little effect on his argument. But the fact that Kierkegaard comes to Kraus, as Linden shows, through Theodor Haecker, exposes a key difference between the Kraus/Kierkegaard dialogues and those of Adorno, Benjamin, and Kraus. The latter three experiencing the “modern,” in vastly different ways than Kierkegaard's “critique of modernity.” The technique of reciprocal illustration does allow Linden to Europeanize Kraus within a wider arena, but it seems to me that Linden's argument that Kraus radicalizes Kierkegaard's idea on subjectivity and the press/public opinion have much more to do with Kraus's lived experience of the fin de siècle, world war, and the rise of fascism. In a book this focused and short, such historical experiences are absent. In the end, Linden builds a series of interactions with modernist critical tools and convincingly argues for the placement of Kraus amongst the key figures of Central European critical modernism. For historians, however, the conclusions remain primarily outside their concerns.

The relationship of part 1 to part 2 is not as fully integrated as one would like. Though the exposition of Kraus's modernism through satirical “counterdiscourses” provides some depth to Kraus as a critical theorist, the two halves of the book remain alienated in terms of book level organization and thematic focus. In the end, Linden's book is a nice addition to the growing discussion of Kraus beyond the limits of Vienna. Readers will be rewarded most with a deeper understanding of Kraus's satire and the importance of media to the political conception of modernity, not only in early twentieth-century Central Europe, but also in our contemporary world. The book ends with a “coda” that emphasizes, perhaps unnecessarily, this very fact.