Books by Karl Kraus
In This Great Time and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)
by Karl Kraus
Product Description
A new selection from the writings of Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist
Karl Kraus was a passionate and witty essayist and a sharp-eyed observer of the elegant fin-de-siecle Vienna in which he lived. He published almost all his satirical writings in his own journal,
The Torch, and was also the author of
The Last Days of Mankind, an apocalyptic theatrical masterpiece with a cast of almost five hundred. This collection of selected writings includes "Salome," a defence of Oscar Wilde’s play; "Self-Admiration," an essay on publishing one’s diaries; and "The World of Posters," a wonderful description of the power of advertising, among others.
About the Author
KARL KRAUS (April 28, 1874-June 12, 1936) was an eminent Austrian essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is generally considered one of the foremost German-language satirists of the twentieth century, especially known for his witty criticism of the press, politics and Austrian culture.
PATRICK HEALY is a professor of interdisciplinary research at the Free International University, Amsterdam, and also lectures in aesthetics and the philosophy of science at the Delft School of Design.
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The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
by Karl Kraus
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.
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The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (German Edition)
by Jonathan Franzen, Karl Kraus
A GREAT AMERICAN WRITER'S CONFRONTATION WITH A GREAT EUROPEAN CRITIC-A PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but also annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America. Interwoven with Franzen's survey of today's cultural and technological landscape is an intensely personal recollection of the author's first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.
Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
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The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
by Karl Kraus
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] 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.
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.
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Dicta and Contradicta
by Karl Kraus, Jonathan McVity
"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.
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Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
by Karl Kraus
"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
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