In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader

Literature & Fiction

Kraus, Karl

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Rear cover notes: "No hypocrisy or lunacy of early twentieth-century Europe was safe from the biting satire of Karl Kraus. A contemporary of Freud, Musil, and Wittgenstein, Kraus was one of the most influential figures of his day. From 1899 to 1936, his acerbic and fiercely independent journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), exposed the foolishness and sentimentality of the age."

"An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths," wrote Kraus. The aphorism was "a sub-genre [Kraus] considered the height of linguistic integrity. . . . With the help of notes and introductions by Zohn, the subtlety and archness of Kraus' linguistic gifts shine through."—Peter Filkins, Bloomsbury Review "Kraus is a superb aphorist."—D. J. Enright, New York Review of Books

Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

"A woman is more than just her exterior. The lingerie is also important." "The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span." "Art serves to rinse out our eyes." Uniquely combining humor with profundity and venom with compassion, Dicta and Contradicta is a bonanza of scandalous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde. From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous–and feared–intellectuals in Europe. Through the polemical and satirical magazine Die Fackel (The torch), which he founded in 1899, Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression and militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Kraus's barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus's highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. Kraus shies away from nothing; the salient issues of the day are lined up side by side, as before a firing squad, with such perennial concerns as sexuality, religion, politics, art, war, and literature. By turns antagonistic, pacifistic, realistic, and maddeningly misogynistic, Kraus's aphorisms provide the sting that precedes healing. For Dicta and Contradicta, originally published in 1909 (with the title Spruche und Widerspruche) and revised in 1923, Kraus selected nearly 1,000 of the scathing aphorisms that had appeared in Die Fackel. In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus's multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus's life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus's literary and sociohistorical allusions.

Dicta and Contradicta

Humor & Entertainment

McVity, Jonathan

Humor

University of Illinois Press

Die Fackel, 1900 (Classic Reprint) (German Edition)

Biographies & Memoirs

Forgotten Books

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Die Fackel (German Edition)

History

Europe

Wentworth Press

Kraus’s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Dramas & Plays

Yale University Press

<div>The first complete English translation of a far-seeing polemic, written in 1933 by the preeminent German-language satirist, unmasking the Nazi seizure of power "[A]&nbsp;drop-dead analysis of the rhetorical barbarities of the Hitler cult."--Bill Marx, Arts Fuse Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus's Third Walpurgis Night was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but was withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kösel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime's corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to Kraus that, in his indictment of Nazism, "you have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language." This masterful translation, by the prizewinning translators of Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, aims for clarity where Kraus had good reason to be cautious and obscure. &nbsp; The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he single-handedly after 1912 conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, satirical plays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems.</div>

The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Humor & Satire

Kraus’s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time\n"[A] superb translation."—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse\nOne hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars.\nBertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

Excerpt from Die Fackel: April, 1916Wehe, w'ehe über die Tagespresse! Käme Christus jetzt zur Welt, so nähme er, so wahr ich lebe, nicht Hohepriester aufs Korn, sondern die Journalisten!Gott im Himmel weiß Blutdurst ist meiner Seele fremd, und eine Vorstellung von einer Verantwortung vor Gott glaube ich auch in furchtbarem Grade zu haben: aber den noch, dennoch wollte ich im Namen Gottes die Verantwortung auf mich nehmen, Feuer zu kommandieren, wenn ich mich nur zu vor mit der ängstlichsten, gewissenhafte sten Sorgfalt vergewissert hätte, daß sich vor den Gewehrläufen kein einziger anderer Mensch, ja auch kein einziges anderes lebendes Wesen befände als - Journalisten.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Die Fackel: April, 1916 (Classic Reprint) (German Edition)

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In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader

In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader

Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

Dicta and Contradicta

Die Fackel, 1900 (Classic Reprint) (German Edition)

Die Fackel (German Edition)

The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Die Fackel: April, 1916 (Classic Reprint) (German Edition)