A short life of the author
Karl Kraus (28 April 1874 – 12 June 1936) was an Austrian satirist, journalist, playwright, poet, and aphorist who was the most feared cultural critic in the German-speaking world for nearly four decades. From 1899 to 1936 he wrote, edited, and for most of its run single-handedly produced Die Fackel (The Torch), a Viennese periodical of cultural and political criticism that attacked the corruption of language in journalism, politics, and public life with a ferocity, precision, and moral absolutism that has no real equivalent in any literature.
Life
Kraus was born in Jičín, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), into a wealthy Jewish paper-manufacturing family. The family moved to Vienna when he was three, and he would spend his entire life in the city, becoming its most savage and devoted critic. He briefly studied law and philosophy at the University of Vienna, attempted an acting career, and then turned to journalism — or rather to the annihilation of journalism as it was practised.
In 1899, at twenty-five, he founded Die Fackel. The periodical initially published contributions from other writers (including Peter Altenberg, August Strindberg, and Else Lasker-Schüler), but from 1911 onward Kraus wrote every word himself — an extraordinary one-man publishing project that produced 922 issues and over 20,000 pages over thirty-seven years. He also gave public readings — legendary performances in which he read from Die Fackel, performed operettas, and recited Shakespeare — that attracted devoted audiences in the hundreds.
He converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1911, left the Church in 1923, and was an intensely private figure despite his public ferocity. He died in Vienna in 1936, two years before the Anschluss that would have endangered him as a person of Jewish origin.
Die Fackel (The Torch, 1899–1936)
Die Fackel is Kraus’s life work and one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of journalism. Its targets were the corruption of the Viennese press (particularly the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s most prestigious newspaper), the degradation of the German language by journalism and advertising, the hypocrisy of Viennese sexual morality, the jingoism that led to the First World War, and the general mendacity of public discourse.
Kraus’s method was close reading — he quoted his targets verbatim and then demonstrated, through meticulous analysis, the lies, evasions, and logical absurdities concealed in their prose. He believed that corrupt language was the root of corrupt politics — that the clichés of journalism did not merely reflect a degraded society but actively produced it. This conviction gives his work a prescient relevance in an era of propaganda, spin, and media manipulation.
The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1922)
Kraus’s masterwork — a vast, unperformable satirical drama about the First World War. The play runs to over 200 scenes and 800 pages, with hundreds of characters drawn from every level of Austrian and German society: generals, journalists, war profiteers, ordinary soldiers, civilians, bureaucrats, and the figure of “the Grumbler” (der Nörgler), Kraus’s own satirical alter ego.
Much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from newspapers, speeches, and overheard conversations — Kraus’s technique of letting reality indict itself. The play documents the obscene gap between the language used to describe the war (heroism, sacrifice, fatherland) and the reality of mass slaughter. It ends with a vision of planetary destruction: God’s voice declaring “I did not will it” — the phrase Emperor Franz Joseph used at the war’s outbreak, now spoken by the deity disclaiming responsibility for the civilisation his creation has produced.
The play has been staged in excerpted form — a complete production would take days — and is now recognised as one of the great literary responses to the First World War, alongside the works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Erich Maria Remarque.
The Third Walpurgis Night (Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, 1933)
Kraus’s response to the Nazi seizure of power — a 300-page manuscript that he completed in 1933 but chose not to publish, knowing it would endanger the Jewish community in Vienna. It opens with the famous line: “Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein” (I cannot think of anything to say about Hitler) — a statement of the satirist’s impotence before a reality that exceeds satire. The manuscript was published posthumously in 1952 and is now regarded as one of the earliest and most penetrating analyses of Nazism.
Aphorisms
Kraus was one of the great aphorists in the German language, alongside Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. His aphorisms — collected in various volumes — distill his critique of language, media, and power into razor-sharp formulations:
- “A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.”
- “Psychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure.”
- “Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual; the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.”
Critical Standing
Kraus was revered by an extraordinary range of admirers: Wittgenstein considered him one of the few great minds of the age; Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about him; Canetti devoted a major portion of his autobiography to Kraus’s influence; Brecht drew on his techniques. Thomas Szasz, the anti-psychiatry movement, and media critics from Orwell to Chomsky have all been compared to him.
Outside the German-speaking world, Kraus remains insufficiently known — partly because his work depends so heavily on the specific language, context, and cultural texture of Viennese life that translation inevitably diminishes it. Jonathan Franzen’s translations have introduced Kraus to English-language readers, and Edward Timms’s two-volume biography (Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist) is a major scholarly achievement.
Collecting Kraus
Original issues of Die Fackel are collected, with complete runs being extremely valuable. The first book publication of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Verlag Die Fackel, 1922) is scarce. Modern editions — particularly the Suhrkamp collected works — are the standard German texts. English translations remain limited, making translated editions relatively affordable.