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In his perplexing and rich essay on Karl Kraus (1874-1936) Walter Benjamin is exploring the character and the work of one of the cult figures in Austrian and German culture in the first third of XX century. Kraus is a brilliant stylist and a fierce critic of bourgeois hypocrisy and conservative institutions. His political views and religious convictions may change, but his principles of defending the disadvantaged and denouncing the arbitrariness of those in power are immutable. For Benjamin Kraus is a perfect example to illustrate a series of his own concepts: the divine nature of language and word, the enormous potential of quotation to refer to the source of things, the creative power of misanthropy for resisting conformist indifference leading to the degeneration of the human, the progressive eschatology of social conflict, the unity between aesthetics and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]