IMAGINE KARL KRAUS, initially, not as a mouse, which seems irreverent enough, but rather as a different symbolic species, as the missing link in the ongoing process of situating the seemingly indeterminable figure of Franz Kafka in the literatures of the German-speaking world in the twentieth century. Demonstrating the intermittent, but intense impact of Kraus and his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch) on Kafka's work would open up new perspectives on three intersecting aspects of literary history. First of all, the consequences of Kafka's late reading of Kraus would have to be written back into the intellectual biography from which Max Brod effectively erased it. Second, the “Jewish Kafka,” certainly one of the dominant scholarly concerns of the last three decades, could no longer be seen primarily in terms of the author's enthusiasm for the Yiddish theater, for example, or his ambivalent stance towards Zionism. It would also be necessary to assess more carefully the ways in which Kafka responded to German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish writers and to the sometimes radically different discourses on Judaism in their work. Finally, Kafka's response to Kraus would have to be seen within the still relatively neglected context of a specifically Austrian literary history.