In These Great Times: a Karl Kraus Reader

Engendra Press, 1976. Hardcover, 263 pp. [From front jacket flap] My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness. The voice of Karl Kraus (1874-1936), Vienna's legendary satirist, polemicist, and Pacifist, today speaks with a timeliness and a freshness that the passing of four decades has not diminished. Kraus assailed the sins of early 20th-century Europe in vitriolic fashion, often finding himself virtually alone in the unpopularity of his stance. In 1919 Kraus indicated the compass of his themes as follows: "Sex and untruth, stupidity, abuses, cadences and cliches, printer's ink, technology, death, war and society, usury, politics, the insolence of office ? . ? art and nature, love and dreams..." The present Reader includes samples of Kraus's thoughts and feelings on all these subjects, in prose and in verse, culminating in a readable and performable condensation of modern literature's most trenchant antiwar drama. The Last Days of Mankind. The English-speaking public thus has available for the first time a representative selection from the writings of one of the modern era's most influential and original thinkers.