Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He directed his satire at the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics.
Background
Kraus was born in April 28, 1874 into the wealthy Jewish family of Jacob Kraus, a papermaker, and his wife Ernestine, née Kantor, in Jičín, Austrian-Hungarian Empire (now the Czech Republic). The family moved to Vienna in 1877. His mother died in 1891.
Education
Kraus enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna in 1892. In 1894, he changed his field of studies to philosophy and German literature. He discontinued his studies in 1896.
Career
In 1896, Kraus left university without a diploma to begin work as an actor, stage director and performer, joining the Young Vienna group.
In 1897, 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 founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, with his polemic Eine Krone für Zion (A Crown for Zion).
He began contributing to the paper Wiener Literaturzeitung, starting with a critique of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers. Around that time, he unsuccessfully tried to perform as an actor in a small theater.
He worked as a critic for several magazines; he published an essay in 1897 in which he denounced the excesses of fin-de-siècle decadence (Gustav Klimt) and attacked his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
On April 1, 1899, Kraus renounced Judaism, and in the same year he founded his own newspaper, Die Fackel (de) (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 subjects.
In 1901 Kraus was sued by Hermann Bahr and Emmerich Bukovics, who felt they had been attacked in Die Fackel. Many lawsuits by various offended parties followed in later years.
Die Fackel targeted corruption, journalists and brutish behaviour. Notable enemies were Maximilian Harden (in the mud of the Harden–Eulenburg affair), Moriz Benedikt (owner of the newspaper Neue Freie Presse), Alfred Kerr, Hermann Bahr, Imre Bekessy (de) and Johann Schober.
In 1907, Kraus attacked his erstwhile benefactor Maximilian Harden because of his role in the Eulenburg trial in the first of his spectacular Erledigungen (Dispatches).
After 1911, Kraus was the sole author of most issues of Die Fackel.
Kraus's masterpiece is generally considered to be the massive satirical 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 by two characters called "the Grumbler" and "the Optimist". Kraus began to write the play in 1915 and first published it as a series of special Fackel issues in 1919.
Also in 1919, Kraus published his collected war texts under the title Weltgericht (World Court of Justice). In 1920, he published the satire Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn (Literature, or You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet) as a reply to Franz Werfel's Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man), an attack against Kraus.
During January 1924, Kraus started a fight against Imre Békessy, publisher of the tabloid Die Stunde (The Hour), accusing him of extorting money from restaurant owners by threatening them with bad reviews unless they paid him.
A peak in Kraus's political commitment was his sensational attack in 1927 on the powerful Vienna police chief Johann Schober, also a former two-term chancellor, after 84 people were shot dead in the police massacre of the July Revolt. Kraus produced a poster that in a single sentence requested Schober's resignation; the poster was published all over Vienna and is considered an icon of 20th-century Austrian history. In 1928, the play Die Unüberwindlichen (The Insurmountables) was published. It included allusions to the fights against Békessy and Schober.
In 1933 he wrote a text critical of Hitler that was published only after his death, but a poem of his clearly indicated his position.
Kraus, in his criticism, was ambiguous about the question of Judaism, and in it he expressed what Otto Weininger referred to as hatred of the Jewish self.
His pacifism, before and during the First World War, resulted in various forms of censorship.
Freud was one of the readers of Die Fackel around 1903, and mentioned it for the first time in 1905 in relation to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
The last issue of Die Fackel appeared in February 1936. Kraus died of an embolism of the heart in Vienna on June 12, 1936, after a short illness.
Religion
Kraus converted to Roman Catholicism in 1921 after having officially left the Jewish faith four years earlier. He believed that Jews and the Jewish press wxre responsible for anti-Semitism, and he treated Zionism disparagingly. He was generally considered anti-Semitic himself, a charge he attempted to refute a number of times, with little success. Szasz believes Kraus's attitude toward Jew's “depended more on their linguistic than on their religious behavior.”
Politics
Kraus supported the Social Democratic Party of Austria from at least the early 1920s, and in 1934, hoping Engelbert Dollfuss could prevent Nazism from engulfing Austria, he supported Dollfuss's coup d'état, which established the Austrian fascist regime.
Views
Kraus was a fierce defender of the purity of the German language, and a venomous critic of liberalism, attacking what he view'd as permissiveness and hypocrisy. The press, which he considered one of the main corruptors of the language, was one of the chief victims of his pen. The Neue Freie Presse, a favorite target, led a counterattack of the Austrian and German press by ignoring him and refraining from mentioning his name.
Kraus saw compromise as his greatest enemy, and he judged everything in terms of the ideal. He was a conservative moralist who yearned for more discipline, and believed that the atmosphere of liberalism prevailing in Austria would lead to the decline of humanity and despiritualization of man. His aim was to improve society through the purification of its language, and to that aim he devoted his life.
Connections
Kraus never married, but from 1913 until his death he had a conflict-prone but close relationship with the Baroness Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin (1885–1950).