The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Paul Reitter, Associate Professor

Paul Reitter PhD (University of California, Berkeley, December 1999). Associate Professor.

Specializations: German-Jewish literature and culture; German modernism; fin-de-siècle Vienna, critical theory.

Articles and essays on: Freud; Kraus; Kafka; Heine; the erotics of Viennese modernism; biographing Thomas Mann; Erich Auerbach and Edward Said; Holocaust historiography; Jewish self-hatred.

Major courses taught: the Holocaust in German literature and film; Weimar culture and fascist culture; literary theory.

Paul's first book, The Anti-Journalist, is a study of the Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus. It was published last year by the University of Chicago Press, and has been reviewed to date in The Forward, The German Quarterly, H-Net, The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/21976), and the Times Literary Supplement, which named The-Anti-Journalist one of the best books of 2008. Currently, Paul is working on a monograph-length reckoning with the topic of Jewish self-hatred--to be published by Princeton University Press--as well as a translation of Salomon Maimon's brilliant and scabrous autobiography. His articles and essays have appeared in such forums as Jewish Social Studies; The German Quarterly; Harper's Magazine; The Nation; and the TLS.