One Bonn acquaintance was Johannes Gross, the editor of the business magazine Capital and star columnist on the arch-conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Having interviewed prime ministers and chancellors for years as a television presenter, Gross exuded the sovereign self-confidence that is required to preserve intellectual integrity in the bear-pit of politics. At his favourite restaurant, much frequented by politicians, he confided in me that he too had been a disciple of Carl Schmitt, who had in his view been the only serious political thinker in the Federal Republic. The fact that Schmitt had been ready to throw in his lot with Hitler did not trouble Gross. Had not Virgil glorified Augustus, Dante the Ghibellines, Shakespeare the Tudors, Milton Cromwell, Hazlitt Napoleon? Many of the greatest writers and thinkers in Europe had flirted with fascism, after all, and Schmitt's willingness to use anti-Semitic rhetoric was pure opportunism. Had not his oldest Jewish friend, Georg Eisler, who had broken with Schmitt in 1933, reconnected with him in old age? If a Jew could forgive the old man's betrayal, who were we to judge him? Gross had come to know Schmitt through a mutual friend, Rüdiger Altmann, with whom he had edited the Christian Democrat student magazine Civis in the 1950s. Reinhard Mehring's recent biography of Schmitt makes it clear that many Christian Democratic intellectuals were in contact with Schmitt almost as soon as he was released from Allied detention in 1947. Like Heidegger, Schmitt exercised a subterranean influence on the intellectual life of postwar Germany, long before he was taken up by Taubes and, partly through him, by American academics. One friend played a unique role in his rehabilitation, though: in the very last photograph of Schmitt on his 95th birthday, the only non-family member visible is Johannes Gross. I am still not sure what to think about the fact that both Taubes and Gross treated Schmitt with a respect that bordered on hero-worship. Both are now dead, and I am proud to have known them. But I am troubled by their spiritual affinity with a man whose cynicism makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa.

For 30 years, I have been accumulating periodicals, especially German ones. Some, such as the complete runs of Akzente (the most important West German literary magazine after 1945) and the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (the journal of the Frankfurt School), are reprints. From 1904-05 I have four ornate volumes of Die Neue Rundschau, which include stories by Hermann Hesse, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, and Thomas Mann's only play Fiorenza (about Savonarola and Lorenzo the Magnificent: it flopped, and Mann decided the theatre was unworthy of his talents). Martin Buber's Der Jude, of which I have the first volume (launched, incredibly, in 1916), was a pioneering organ both of Zionism and of German-Jewish culture; among the contributors was Kafka. 

But the dark-red volumes of Die Fackel ("The Torch") are as fresh today as when it was first published in Vienna from 1899 to 1936, edited and largely written by Karl Kraus. The editorial chair does not do justice to the grandeur, even megalomania, of his conception. Nobody has approximated more closely to the Platonic ideal of the periodical editor. Kraus not only saw himself as the self-appointed guardian of the German language, but invested that language with profound moral significance. For Kraus, execrable prose offended not only against aesthetic sensibilities, but against the ethical foundations of civilisation. The first commandment of Kraus was never to exploit language to deceive or delude people for an ulterior purpose. The abuse of language was sacrilege, the true sin against the Holy Ghost. The cultivation of linguistic excellence required him not only to set an example in his own writing and public speaking, but the merciless pursuit of those who debased the language. It followed from this that the role of editor was quasi-sacerdotal. The editor was a kind of censor, but the traditional form of censorship (which of course still existed) was unacceptable, because coercive. Kraus, like the God of Abraham, wanted his mainly Viennese, mainly Jewish audience to obey him, even to the point of sacrificing their most precious possession — not their sons but their culture, with all its insincerity and vulgarity — but only if they did so freely. His only means of enforcing his will upon the world was mockery: to mock those who did not merely find themselves in this world, as he did, but were also of this world, as (in his own eyes, at least) he was not. But Kraus had good reason to be obsessed with the German language and those who sought to abuse it. Like all Jews, he was vulnerable to the anti-Semitism which usually simmered just below the surface, but which manifested itself in throwaway remarks, newspaper articles, official documents and countless other forms. What all had in common was language. Not surprisingly, it was the assimilated Jews who were most sensitive to these nuances and insinuations. For Freud, language was a window onto the unconscious; for Wittgenstein, it was the alpha and omega of philosophy. But for Kraus, language was the canary in the mine, the early warning system of impending catastrophe.

As the youngest son of a Bohemian Jewish paper manufacturing family, Karl decided early on that he would not go into the family business. Fortunately, apart from a brief flirtation with the theatre, his literary vocation was never in doubt. His father, Jacob, indulged him; three of his brothers became industrialists. Unique as Karl Kraus was as a literary phenomenon, his family shared the common fate of European Jewry. According to Wer Einmal War, the gigantic genealogy of the entire Jewish upper middle class in Vienna compiled by Georg Gaugusch, many of the Kraus family died in concentration camps, including at least two of Karl's siblings and four of his nephews and nieces. Despite his diminutive stature and deformed left shoulder, he had a strikingly handsome, expressive, cerebral face. Kraus was a highbrow in every sense. As an editor he was also a perfectionist — so much so that he eventually decided to dispense with contributors altogether. From 1899 until 1911, Die Fackel had a select group of writers that included the architect Adolf Loos, and it was there that Loos published the words that became programmatic for modernism in all its forms: "Ornament is crime." But Kraus came to find contributors, however eminent, more trouble than they were worth. So, for that matter, were advertisers, publishers and everybody else who tried to solicit space in his magazine. He wanted nothing from anybody. Henceforth, he would write the whole thing himself. From 1911 to 1936, Kraus was the sole contributor. When he died, Die Fackel died with him. He held the world to account, because he alone had the chutzpah to hold court and serve as judge and jury on a society destined for perdition.

Despite this relentless animus against a world his parents had seen as a veritable paradise, for the sake of which they had renounced their own language, Yiddish, Kraus had another side to his character. Though he never married, he loved beautiful, intelligent and promiscuous women — above all, the independently wealthy and sophisticated Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin. Until the war wrecked everything, he had hoped to marry her, but his plans were frustrated in part by Rilke. Egged on by his wife Clara, a sculptress who disapproved of Kraus, Rilke wrote a letter in February 1914 to Sidonie, who treated the great poet as a sage, warning against marriage to a man so essentially "alien" and urging her to keep her distance — the strong implication being that Kraus, as a Jew, was no match for an aristocrat like her. Sidonie seems to have heeded Rilke's warning; like most people of her background, she was not above casually anti-Semitic remarks herself. Yet she comes across as a woman who knew how to make friends of her lovers, who gave Kraus the run of her castle, Schloss Janowitz, while he was writing, and who inspired him like no other. His letters and poems to her testify to the truth of her diary entry (written in English) in 1918: "There was goodbye for ever between K.K. & me — he who loves me as no man ever did." In reality they never did say goodbye, and he remained "a true friend" to the end. Her letters to him are lost, but she kept his "wonderful love letters" to her. According to Kraus's biographer Edward Timms, after her death in English exile, Sidonie's remains were reinterred at Janowitz (now Janovice in the Czech Republic), where Kraus had written his own testament. Just before he died, Kraus wrote to Sidonie in May 1936, to say that the "global stupidity" — he meant the failure to stop the rise of Hitler, which by now acutely threatened Austria — had made all work impossible, apart from adapting Shakespeare. I have a copy of Kraus's Nachdichtung of the Sonnets-less a translation than an adaptation into German by a man who knew very little English but nurtured a deep love of Shakespeare. Kraus's Shakespeare is a prophet and a lawgiver — exactly like Kraus himself. Shakespeare's Sonnet 67 ends: "O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had / In days long since, before these last so bad." Kraus turns a personal reflection into a political one: "In schlechter Zeit bewahrt sie ihn als Bild / von jenem Reichtum, der sie einst erfüllt." ("In these bad times she keeps him as an image / of the wealth she once possessed in full.") "She" here is Europe in the throes of death, clutching Shakespeare as a talisman of the civilisation of which Kraus is the last defender.

Kraus is less defined by his loves than by his hatreds — like many editors, he saw himself vindicated only when he aroused vehement resistance. Most of his enemies were, like him, Jewish: "I admit that I give the Jews a hard time," he wrote, "making no secret of my wish, which borders on fanaticism, that not only the laws of the language but also the laws of the criminal code should be obeyed." 

Chief among his innumerable bêtes noires was indeed another Jew, but also one of Germany's greatest writers: Heine, whom Kraus held responsible for the decline of the German language, and who became the butt of some of his cruellest gibes: "Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts." There is a slight implication of anti-Semitism here, but it is more explicit in the following passage: "Heine was a Moses who struck the rock of the German language with his rod. But speed is not magic. The water did not flow from the rock; rather, he had brought it along in his other hand — and it was really eau de Cologne." 

The irony here is that it was Heine who had created the German essay form — the Feuilleton — of which Kraus would become the greatest exponent of his day. Heine was the German Hazlitt, in the sense that both modernised the idiom of literature, writing in a fluent, conversational prose that instantly made everybody else seem old-fashioned. It was Heine who, emerging as he did just after the greatest age of German literature and living through a period of romanticism, revolution and reaction, saw the need to do something new: make the Germans laugh at themselves. Whatever Heine wrote — letters, lyric or narrative verse, travelogues, memoirs, literary or philosophical history and criticism — irony, self-awareness and satire were never far away. (This is just as true of Kraus, who was in many ways the Heine of his day.)

These qualities are ubiquitous, for example, in Heine's Vermischte Schriften ("Assorted Writings"), a first edition of which is one of my treasured possessions. I found it in a bookshop in the Portuguese town of Cascais, near the resort of Estoril. What was this rare German book doing there? I concluded that it had been left behind by one of the many intrepid refugees from the Nazis who had made the perilous crossing of the Pyrenees and found themselves waiting long weeks and months in Estoril for the ship that would take them to transatlantic safety. My Heine volume had perhaps once graced the library of some poor wretch who had trodden the same path as Walter Benjamin, driven like Heine himself into Parisian exile, only to be hounded to a desolate death on the Spanish border.