NOW THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR STAGE PRODUCTION FEATURING THE TIGER LILLIES! WORLD PREMIERE AT EDINBURGH'S LEITH THEATRE ON 11-11-2018 Intended ‘for a theatre on Mars’, with a cast of nearly five hundred and running to over two hundred scenes, Karl Kraus’s apocalyptic tragedy 'The Last Days of Mankind' is the longest play ever written. It is also a biting satirical commentary on the outbreak and subsequent horrors of World War I. Karl Kraus (1874-1936) ranks as one of the great satirists of 20th-century literature. In 1899 he established his own journal, 'Die Fackel' (The Torch), to ‘drain the marsh of empty phrase-making.’ His wide-ranging oeuvre comprises essays, short stories, poetry and aphorisms, and culminated in the five-act play presented here. First published in 1920, 'The Last Days' employs a collage of modernist techniques to evoke a despairing and darkly comical vision of the Great War from the perspective of Kraus’ hometown, Vienna. At its centre Kraus places a cabal of war mongering press barons and self-serving hacks, whose strategies of mass manipulation he holds responsible for the very atrocities they report on in dispatches, editorials and feuilletons. With this translation of the play in its entirety, Patrick Healy completes the work begun in 2014 when he published the first ever English-language version of the Prologue and Act I in the Kraus anthology 'In These Great Times: Selected Writings'. The present edition includes an introduction and a glossary of names and relevant terms.

The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts

Literature & Fiction

Kraus, Karl

Dramas & Plays

November Editions

'I am wildly in love with someone, but I'll say no more about it. That way it could always be .. you.'  Set around the Café des Westens, the epicenter of early twentieth century Expressionist Berlin, Else Lasker-Schüler chronicles the demise of her marriage in a series of letters to her husband Herwarth Walden, publisher of the avant-garde journal Der Sturm. Assuming the guise of alter egos such as Tino of Baghad or the Prince of Thebes, she weaves a web of Oriental fantasies to inform her husband of her infidelities. In so doing, she transforms a personal crisis into a metaphor for the end of an era. Starring a host of leading artists, including Karl Kraus, Alfred Döblin, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde and Arnold Schönberg, My Heart offers an unforgettable insider's glimpse into one of Berlin's most artistically vibrant and fascinating periods.  This edition - the first English-language translation to appear to date - features an introduction by Professor Jakob Hessing of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a glossary of relevant names and terms.

My Heart

Lasker-Schüler, Else

Literary

This collection contains the early writings of the German art historian Max Raphael, published between 1910 and 1913. First rediscovered by Patrick Healy and published in German as Das schöpferische Auge (1993), they are presented in English translation here for the first time. In these texts, Raphael develops the earliest analytical account of a new art movement emerging in the German speaking world, and will name it 'Expressionism'. In defending the modernism of artists such as Pecstein, Nolde, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff, Raphael challenges the hostile reception of their work by institutions and contemporary criticism. From a comparison of their output to that of Impressionist luminaries like Liebermann and Corinth, he will proceeed to identify the guiding principles of Expressionism, ultimately formulating a solid theoretical foundation for this artistic revolution.

The Invention of Expressionism: Critical Writings 1910-1913

Arts & Photography

Raphael, Max

History & Criticism

"There is hardly any other art which Europeans approach with so much mistrust as African art. The first move is to even deny that there is such a thing as ‘art’, and then to emphasise the distance which separates such products from the creations of the Europeans, with a contempt that leads to demeaning terminology […] In his judgements on the Negroes the European retains one major postulate: his invincible, however exaggerated, superiority. Such disrespect for the Negro is de facto born of our ignorance and the source of the unjust harm done to him." Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was a pivotal figure in the development of European modernism that occurred during the years leading up to World War I. With the short, dense and revolutionary text of Negro Sculpture, Einstein undertook the first (European) critical response to African sculpture, challenging various prejudices and misconceptions around this subject. It would quickly become a crucial text for the European avant-garde and today remains indispensable to understand the shift in discussion towards non-European art taking place at the time. Originally published in 1915, the complete text of Negro Sculpture is presented in English translation here for the first time, including all 108 original plates. Patrick Healy, writer and philosopher, currently works as a senior researcher at the Technical University Delft. He lives in Amsterdam. Healy's forthcoming translations for November Editions include Carl Einstein’s Bébuquin and a revised edition of the selected writings of Karl Kraus, In These Great Times.

Negro Sculpture

Einstein, Carl

‘People do not understand German, but I will not write for them in journalese …’ Karl Kraus (1874-1936) ranks as one the greatest twentieth-century satirists. His inventive, subversive and acutely insightful work remains as relevant today as it was a century ago. In 1899, Kraus established his own journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), and began ‘to drain the marsh of empty phrase-making’, aiming at targets such as the press, Zionism and psychoanalysis. In Kraus’ view, much of Vienna’s social and political divide – where the issue of immigration created mounting tensions and a virulent rise in anti-Semitism – was caused by the mass-circulation of the press and its manipulation of public opinion. This view dominates his most outstanding creative achievement, the apocalyptic drama written in response to the outbreak of WWI, The Last Days of Mankind. Alongside key essays such as ‘A Crown for Zion’, ‘Salomé’ and ‘In These Great Times’, this collection features a crucial scene from The Last Days of Mankind, as well as a selection of aphorisms culled from Die Fackel. PRAISE FOR PATRICK HEALY’S TRANSLATION OF THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND: ‘Healy conveys the communal bewilderment and rage in a dazzling vernacular as a chorus of voices reacts to the outbreak of the Great War and the hell it created. […] It sizzles and flares.’ - EILEEN BATTERSBY IN THE IRISH TIMES

In These Great Times: Selected Writings (Library of German Expressionism)

Essays & Correspondence

‘I am a mirror, a motionless puddle glittering with reflected gaslight. But has a mirror ever mirrored itself?’ Bebuquin is the first and only novel of Carl Einstein, arguably the most influential art critic of the early-twentieth century. An anarchist, street fighter and European intellectual of astonishing range, Einstein was hailed as the ‘prophet of the avant-garde’. The novel charts the young Giorgio Bebuquin’s hallucinatory journey through the Museum of Cheap Thrills in search of a way to smash the boundaries of logic and causality. Exploding all narrative conventions Bebuquin is an experimental tour de force, indispensable to understanding the development of literary Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism. Translated into English by Patrick Healy, the present edition also features an introduction, a chronology of Einstein’s life and the original German text, first published in 1912. ‘Einstein had it, he really was at the top.’ Gottfried Benn

Bebuquin: or the Dilettantes of the Miracle

Clearly, someone had spoken the word, the fatal word that towered over the firmament of his nights and slowly cut him into pieces, a remorseless machine even in its sound: 'Co-caine! ... Co-caine!' Bit by bit it cut him up, until someday soon he would be pulverised entirely. Walter Rheiner remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, despite a small but remarkable oeuvre which explores typical Expressionist themes - including metropolitan estrangement, intoxication and the horrors of trench warfare - in a manner as daring and poignant as that of better known contemporaries such as Trakl or Heym. Rheiner's was a short-lived career; most of his output was originally published between 1917-1918. An attempt to escape active service in World War I by posing as a drug addict marked the onset of his lifelong dependency on cocaine and, later, morphine. In the hallucinatory novella Cocaine, Rheiner provides the reader with an arresting close-up of Berlin's underbelly during the war years. The demise of the novella's protagonist Tobias foreshadows the author's own tragic end; he died at the age of 30 from an overdose of morphine. This bilingual edition, the first to present Rheiner in English translation, includes the bulk of his known prose work as well as a small but representative sample of his poetry.

Cocaine: Selected Writings

Rheiner, Walter

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