Karl Kraus

"From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous and feared intellectuals in Europe. Uniquely combining humor with profundity and venom with compassion, Dicta and Contradicta is a bonanza of scandalous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde.". "Through the polemical and satirical magazine Die Fackel (the torch), which he founded in 1899, Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression, militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-siecle Vienna. His barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture."--BOOK JACKET.

One hundred years after Austrian writer and satirist Karl Kraus began his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus'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 a necessary war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus's towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature on the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the great dramatic work of modernism. In the apocalyptic play Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian Army's call to arms, people'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 news readers, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities and openness to war as remedy, today's readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

„Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein.“ Mit diesem berühmt gewordenen Satz eröffnet der große Satiriker und Sprachkritiker Karl Kraus seine hunderte Seiten lange polemische Bestandsaufnahme und Kritik über Hitler und die nationalsozialistische „Machtergreifung“. Als Kraus das Buch 1933 schrieb, hätte man es für eine groteske Zukunftsvision halten können. Karl Kraus sah aus den unterschiedlichsten – persönlichen, literarischen und politischen – Gründen von der Veröffentlichung des Werkes ab. Als das Buch dann posthum sieben Jahre nach dem Krieg erschien, wirkte es wie eine prophetische Darstellung der nationalsozialistischen Barbarei. (Quelle: [Buchhandlung am Markt](

Satirical account of misuses of language by journalists.

As the driven executive director of The Sanctuary, a program dedicated to reaching out to victimized women, Jolene Walker has neither the time nor the energy for a personal life...until she meets United States Army Captain Michael Kirkland, a sexy, powerfully compelling intelligence expert who tempts her to trade in her eighteen-hour work days for sultry nights of sizzling passion. But their bliss is shattered when Jolene takes on a mysterious new client whose deadly secrets plunge her into a terrifying world of danger, leaving Michael no choice but to risk everything to save the woman he loves...

A hundred years ago, the writings of Viennese satirist Karl Krauswere among the most penetrating and prophetic in Europe: arelentless criticism of the popular media?s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. Framzen annotates Kraus the way Draus annotated others, surveys today's cultural and technological landscape and gives us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college when he fell in love with Kraus's work.