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Karl Kraus

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thumb Karl Kraus (April 28, 1874 - June 12, 1936) was an eminent Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is generally considered one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially known for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics.

Contents

Early life

Kraus was born into a wealthy Jewish family of Jacob Kraus, a papermaker, and his wife Ernestine, née Kantor, in Gitschin, Bohemia (now Jičín in the Czech Republic). The family moved to Vienna in 1877. Kraus enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna. Beginning in April of the same year he began contributing to the paper Wiener Literaturzeitung. In 1894 he changed his field of studies to philosophy and German literature. He discontinued his studies in 1896.

Writing

In 1896 he left university without a diploma to begin work as an actor, stage-director and performer, joining the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) group, which included Peter Altenberg, Leopold Andrian, Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Dörmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Felix Salten. In 1897, however, Kraus broke from this group with a biting satire Die demolierte Literatur [Demolished Literature], and was named Vienna correspondent for the newspaper Breslauer Zeitung. One year later, as an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation, he attacked the Zionist Theodor Herzl with his polemic Eine Krone für Zion [A Crown for Zion] (1898).

On April 1, 1899, he renounced Judaism and in the same year founded his own newspaper, Die Fackel (The Torch), which he continued to direct, publish, and write until his death, and from which he launched his attacks on hypocrisy, psychoanalysis, corruption of the Habsburg empire, nationalism of the pan-German movement, laissez-faire economic policies, and numerous other bêtes noires.

While at the beginning Die Fackel was similar to journals like the magazine Weltbühne, it became more and more a magazine that was privileged in its editorial independence, that Kraus could provide by his funding. Die Fackel printed what Kraus wanted to be printed. In its first decade, contributors included many well-known writers and artists such as Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Egon Friedell, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schönberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Oscar Wilde. After 1911, however, Kraus was usually the sole author. Kraus' work was published nearly exclusively in Die Fackel, of which 922 irregularly-issued numbers appeared in total.

Authors who were supported by Kraus include Peter Altenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Georg Trakl.

Die Fackel targeted corruption, journalists and brutish behaviour. Notable enemies were Maximilian Harden (in the mud of the Harden-Eulenburg affair), Moritz Benedikt (owner of the newspaper Neue Freie Presse), Alfred Kerr, Hermann Bahr, Imre Bekessy and Johannes Schober.

In addition to his writings, Kraus gave numerous highly influential public readings during his career - between 1892 and 1936 he put on approximately 700 one-man performances, reading from the dramas of Bertolt Brecht, Gerhart Hauptmann, Johann Nestroy, Goethe, and Shakespeare, and also performing Offenbach's operettas, accompanied by piano and singing all the roles himself. Elias Canetti, e.g. who regularly attended Kraus' lectures, titled his autobiography "Die Fackel im Ohr" (translation : The Torch in the Ear) in reference to the magazine and its author.

Kraus' masterpiece is generally considered to be the massive satiric play about the First World War, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), which combines dialogue from contemporary documents with apocalyptic fantasy and commentary from two characters called "the Grumbler" and "the Optimist". The play was begun in 1915 and published in its final form in 1922. Edward Timms has called it a "faulted masterpiece" and a "fissured text" because the evolution of Kraus' attitude during the time of its composition (from aristocratic conservative to democratic republican) means that the text has structural inconsistencies resembling a geological fault.

His last work, unpublished at his death, was the verbally rich, densely allusive anti-Nazi polemic Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht (The Third Walpurgisnacht).

Kraus never married, but from 1913 until his death, he had a close relationship with the Baroness Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin (1885-1950). In 1911 he was baptized as a Catholic, but in 1923 he left the Catholic Church. He is buried in the Zentralfriedhof cemetery outside Vienna.

Kraus was the subject of two books written by noted libertarian author Dr.Thomas Szasz. Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors and Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry portrayed Kraus as a harsh critic of Sigmund Freud and of psychoanalysis in general. Other commentators, such as Edward Timms (Karl Kraus - Apocalyptic Satirist) have argued that Kraus respected Freud, though with reservations about the application of some of his theories, and that his views were far less black-and-white than Szasz suggests.

Selected works

Some work has been re-issued in recent years:

Works in English translation

References

External links

 

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