Kraus's iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of
war, now in English in its entirety for the first time
"[A] superb
translation."--Bill Marx, Arts Fuse
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 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.