Synopses & Reviews
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 first published. Krausandrsquo;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 andldquo;defensiveandrdquo; war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Krausandrsquo;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 armyandrsquo;s call to arms, peopleandrsquo;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, todayandrsquo;s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.
Synopsis
Fritz Wittels (1880-1950) was a pioneering Viennese psychoanalyst, the first biographer of Freud, and friend and rival of Freud and of the great critic of psychoanalysis, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. Toward the end of his life, while living and practicing as an analyst in the United States, Wittels wrote a memoir of his early life and career in Vienna and his first impressions of America. Those memoirs are now published here for the first time, edited and introduced by Edward Timms, whose valuable explanatory notes reveal the identification of the "child woman" of the title, Irma Karczewska.
In his memoirs Wittels writes frankly and vividly about the erotic subculture of fin-de-siecle Vienna, early controversies within the Psychoanalytic Society, and the interactions between the two. Freud himself plays a crucial role in the story, and the erotic triangle in which Kraus, Wittels, and Irma Karczewska were involved is shown to have impinged directly on the activities of the famous Society. In his final chapters, Wittels reflects on the controversies that erupted in the New York Psychoanalytic Society during the late 1930s, especially his own opposition to the feminist psychology of Karen Horney.
Generously illustrated with a range of little-known photographs, this book sheds startling new light on the origins of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to historians of psychoanalysis, students of Freud, and anyone interested in the Viennese artistic avant-garde.
Synopsis
Krausandrsquo;s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time
About the Author
The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874andndash;1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems. Edward Timms, founding director of the University of Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies, is best known for his two-volume study Karl Krausandmdash;Apocalyptic Satirist. The title of his memoirs, Taking Up the Torch, reflects his long-standing interest in Krausandrsquo;s journal. Fred Bridgham is the author of wide-ranging studies in German literature, history, and the history of ideas. His translations of lieder and opera include Hans Werner Henzeandrsquo;s The Prince of Homburg for performance by English National Opera.