Scott Spector

Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument

Scott Spector is Associate professor of History and German studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (University of california press, 2000). He is currently working on a book on sexuality and violence in German-speaking metropolitan central europe from 1860 to 1914. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 615–633.

Where Personal Fate Turns to Public Affair: Homosexual Scandal and Social Order in Vienna, 1900–1910

Beginning in September, 1902, Karl Kraus turned his critical vision and poison pen toward what he saw as a misguided encroachment on private matters by the public organs of the state and the press. He saw it as more of an attack than an encroachment—he decried a campaign, conducted with “sword and fi re,” to battle “immorality,” a charge he saw hailing from diverse if linked quarters from legislature to judiciary to the daily newspaper of record. Th e whole off ensive, Kraus maintained, originated in a “grandiose misunderstanding,” a slip, a logical or even linguistic fallacy: instead of protecting society from the off ense of public indecency, the crusaders inverted their task when they sought to provoke public indignation in response to private morality.