Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind

“When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty”, according to the motto chosen by Arthur Ponsonby in 1928 for his book Falsehood in War-Time . 5Kraus had arrived at this insight twenty years earlier. His targets, from the very first number of Die Fackel , were “Phrasen” (clichés and slogans) and “Lügen” (deceptions and lies). His analysis of patriotic propaganda acquired an even sharper edge in autumn 1915 when he wrote: “How is the world governed and made to fight wars? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and believe them when they see them in print” (F 406–12, 106). This introduced a subtle conception of media-induced false memory: the hypnotic power of repetition leads politicians to believe the falsehoods they have themselves put into circulation. The result was a self-generating system of mendacity with disastrous consequences for the future of mankind.

The Last Days of Mankind

Kraus’s most effective technique was to reprint propagandistic statements from the press, highlighting their fatuousness and barbarity. A similar documentary method is deployed with even greater versatility in his masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind , conceived in the summer of 1915 and largely composed during the war. In this grandiose satirical panorama journalists and military commanders, politicians and profiteers, are re-created as dramatic characters, mouthing the dehumanizing slogans of the day. The claim that Germany and Austria have “drawn the sword” is ridiculed as a prime example of the way newspaper language disguises the horrors of a war that in reality involves trenches, shrapnel, and poison gas. Kraus’s play, which could not be published until after the collapse of the Central Powers, concludes with an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the earth.

Publication began immediately after the lifting of censorship. The first edition, enhanced by a number of photographs, filled four special issues of Die Fackel , dated November 1918 and April, June, and August 1919. This was followed in 1922 by the expanded book edition, framed by two even more expressive photographs, which also accompany our translation. These photos have both documentary and symbolic value. The frontispiece, which records the scene after the Italian dissident Cesare Battisti was hanged as a traitor by the Austrian authorities, was circulated as a warning against disloyalty to the Habsburg crown. For Kraus, who highlights the complicity between cruelty and the camera, this epitomizes the sadistic attitude towards persecuted minorities.

The subject of Kraus’s play is the tragedy of mankind, bent on self-destruction by the methods of modern warfare, while still clinging to outdated ideals of military heroism and national glory. Interwoven with the cataclysmic action are a multitude of satirical strands, each embedded in its cultural matrix: bungled Austrian diplomacy, aggressive German expansionism, brutal military leadership, the greed of war profiteers, the complicity of international big business, the injustices of martial law, the gullibility of newspaper readers, and above all the sloganizing of the press. The cult of war as an “age of grandeur” is satirized in scene after scene, following the approach defined in the Preface: “The document takes human shape; reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials; the newspaper column has acquired a mouth that spouts monologues.”

There are numerous scenes that reproduce — as dramatic monologue or tragicomic dialogue — the purple prose that some fanatical patriot or propagandist has perpetrated during the war. Political speeches, military bulletins, newspaper editorials, commercial adverts, interviews with public figures, snippets from the gossip columns, chauvinistic sermons, and patriotic songs — the range of sources is remarkable. But this documentary technique is enlivened by an irrepressible satirical imagination. The Preface may suggest that the “most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations.” But the impact is intensified by scenes that blend documentary transcription with comic invention, punctuated by satirical verse. The play concludes with visionary images projected in cinematic style, followed by a verse Epilogue entitled Die letzte Nacht (The Final Night).

This mixing of modes is evident from the Prologue, set in June 1914 as news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo hits the streets of Vienna. Almost the first figures we encounter are a group of officers on the Ringstrasse planning a supper party at their favourite restaurant — they decide on Hopfner’s. “D’ya see the latest Schönpflug cartoon?” one of them asks. The underlying irony is that these officers, who reappear in the opening scene of each Act, are themselves modeled on Schönpflug cartoon characters, reshaped in accordance with the “restaurant/battlefront” paradox formulated by Kraus in December 1912. Their fatuous exchanges now hint at something far more sinister. The Schönpflug drawing they admire might well be that venomous cartoon portraying King Peter of Serbia and Tsar Nicholas of Russia as blood-stained criminals. It is left to our imagination whether the officers are chuckling about that prototype of visual hate speech or some harmless humoresque.

Trivial local responses to cataclysmic events generate a pervasive black humour. As the scene shifts to the Café Pucher, the prime minister, while preparing to issue a communiqué, asks the waiter for a humorous magazine — not Die Muskete but Die Bombe ! The tragedy of mankind is indeed being played out by “operetta figures” (as the Preface suggests). Kraus shows an exceptional ear for the rhythms of Austrian vernacular, interspersed with patriotic rant and journalistic verbiage. Each of the five Acts opens in similar style, with crowds convulsed by the cries of news vendors announcing the latest sensation: the euphoria in August 1914 after the ultimatum to Serbia has precipitated world war (Act I); reactions after the Italian declaration of war on Austria in May 1915 (Act II); the Romanian declaration of war on the Central Powers in July 1916 (Act III); and the ultimatum by President Wilson leading to the American entry into the war in April 1917 (Act IV). Within this framework the handling of chronology is flexible (there are already references to Italian treachery in Act I). For Kraus, as he observed in 1917, operates “not with mathematical but with apocalyptic precision” (F 462-71, 171).

The fluctuating fortunes of war on the Southern and Eastern Fronts are most vividly reflected in Act V. Gloating over the rout of Italian forces at Caporetto in autumn 1917 followed by the capitulation of Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, an Austrian parliamentarian declares: “We are the victors, and we demand the spoils” (V, 3). Attitudes in Berlin are even more euphoric as Pan-Germans demand vast territorial annexations at a mass rally (V, 7). But growing pessimism on the streets of Vienna is reflected in rumours that a desperately weakened Austria-Hungary may be seeking a separate peace (V, 17). Finally, the collapse of the Central Powers in October 1918 is dramatized by a grandiose drunken banqueting scene at army headquarters (V, 55).

Kraus’s underlying humanism is reflected in the prominence given to the word “Menschheit” (“mankind” or “humanity”), both in the title and in the dramatic chorus, the scenes in which a naively patriotic Optimist discusses the war with the Grumbler, Kraus’s raisonneur. One of their most striking dialogues, which deals with attempts to legitimize air raids that kill civilians, offers a further instructive parallel between then and now. Although the aerial destruction of urban areas was a rare occurrence when Kraus wrote this play, his analysis has proved paradigmatic. Experience, the Grumbler observes, should have taught the perpetrators of “murder from the air” that “when they intend to hit an arms dump they infallibly hit a bedroom, and instead of an armaments factory a school for girls.” When the Optimist objects that this is not “deliberate”, the Grumbler replies: “No, worse than that: fortuitous!” (I, 29). They can’t help it happening, so they express regret and do it again.