The last days of humanity

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The last days of mankind is a “tragedy in 5 acts with prelude and epilogue” by Karl Kraus . It was created in the years 1915–1922 as a reaction to the First World War . In 220 loosely connected scenes, many of which are based on authentic contemporary sources, the inhumanity and absurdity of war is depicted. The piece is intended for a “Marstheater” and has never been performed in full before.

History of origin

After the outbreak of World War I, Karl Kraus initially remained silent in public, and his magazine Die Fackel did not appear even after the usual summer break. It was not until November 19, 1914, that Kraus gave the “Salutation” in his 80th lecture in this great time , which also appeared in No. 404 of Die Fackel on December 5, 1914. In it he resolutely opposed the war.

In July 1914 Kraus formulated his work program for "The Last Days of Mankind":

“I stand before the deathbed of time, with the reporter and the photographer on my side. He knows her last words, and he keeps her final face. And the photographer knows their ultimate truth even better than the reporter. My office was just a copy of a copy. I took over noises and told them to those who no longer heard. I received visions and showed them to those who no longer saw. My job was to put the time in quotation marks, to let it be distorted in print and brackets, knowing that what was most unspeakable could only be said by itself. Not to speak out, to repeat what is. Imitate what seems. To quote and photograph. "

- (Karl Kraus, 1914)

Perhaps due to his reconciliation with Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín in the summer of 1915, Kraus' opposition to the war also expressed itself in increased productivity. Between July 5th and 22nd, he put together the volume Doom of the World through Black Magic from articles from the torch . From July 26th he worked on his world war drama, which was titled The Last Days of Mankind from October . He published individual scenes in numbers of the war torch , many other texts of the torch are preliminary stages to scenes in the drama, torch and drama were largely created at the same time. Significant parts were made by the summer of 1917, especially during Kraus' stays in Switzerland.

Over a third of the final text is made up of quotations: from newspapers, military orders of the day, court judgments, own and third-party letters, ordinances and edicts, statements from the war press headquarters, orders from the civil authorities, war sermons, speeches, brochures, but also postcards, photos and posters, etc. . a. Kraus wrote about this in the foreword: The most improbable acts reported here really happened; I painted what they only did. The most unlikely conversations that take place here have been spoken verbatim; the most glaring inventions are quotations. The first version of the drama is still essentially shaped by Kraus' conservative attitude, which he maintained until the second half of the World War. He had been an admirer of the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand , and held the Habsburgs and the Austrian military in high regard. During this phase he made the liberal press, especially the New Free Press , primarily responsible for the war. It was only from around 1917 that he broke away from this point of view and approached social democracy . In addition to the press, he now also blamed the Habsburgs, irresponsible politicians and the military for the war. He grabbed Wilhelm II particularly sharply . to whom he - based on the memories of his contemporaries - accused of incompetence, megalomania and sadism.

The work could only appear after the censorship was lifted. The epilogue appeared on December 13, 1918 as a special issue of the torch , further parts (each with two files) followed in April, August and (probably) September 1919. This so-called nude edition reached a print run of 6,000 copies.

Due to his greatly changed attitude towards the Habsburgs and the military, as well as information that was only accessible after the end of the war, Kraus changed the last days significantly over the next few months . Around 50 new scenes were added, while only one was deleted. The sequence of scenes has been completely changed. The dialogues between the optimist and the complainer were significantly expanded, as were the areas critical of Germany. The admirers of the Reichspost were added to expose the Christian-social Reichspost as well as the liberal New Free Press .

The so-called book edition appeared on May 26, 1922 with an edition of 5,000 copies. The corrected proofs were over 16,000 pages before the work got its final version. A second, equally high edition followed in December 1922. The third edition of 7,000 in 1926 remained available until Kraus' death. The frontispiece of the first book edition shows the official photo of the execution of the Italian irredentist and former member of the Reichsrat Cesare Battisti by the Viennese executioner Josef Lang in Trento in 1916 .

The work

content

The drama has no continuous plot, but consists of 220 scenes of different lengths that show a multitude of real and fictional characters - from the emperors Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II to the "simple soldier who is nameless" - in the most varied of everyday situations in the war . The work is chronologically arranged from the summer of 1914 before the outbreak of war (prelude), through the four and a half years of the war in five acts, to an expressionist epilogue that takes place entirely on the battlefields.

Only a few scenes lead the reader close to the fighting or even directly to the front. Kraus sees the real atrocities of war in the behavior of those people who, in their superficiality, neither want to - nor can - perceive the seriousness and horror of the war, but enrich themselves far away from the scene and gloss over the war with phrases: journalists, war profiteers, high-ranking soldiers, who wallow in the glory of their military rank far from the battlefield.

“So far we have seen the war too much from the front. Very few thought about the backdrop. Here it is shown to us for the first time in terrifying plastic. What we have seen so far of the misery, the murder and the extermination, has not yet been the war in its full extent. The torn bodies, the wounded wriggling in the wire, the sufferings of the trenches, the burning villages and cities, the plundered homesteads, the dishonored women, the enslaved men are appearances at the front of that supposedly God-willed institution. Kraus turned our gaze mercilessly to the even greater atrocities on the back. He gives us a glimpse into the mechanism out of which the poison has grown and shows us how this has an invigorating effect on the microbes of putrefaction. He shows us how the thrown up mud turns lovely in the sun, the pus gleams in gold, the excrement gives itself as a precious stone. Reading this work you hold your head and say meekly: We have seen wrong up to now, our view of war was a mistake; He only discovered the land of war, the coast of which we have been wandering around until now. This teaches us to see. In Karl Kraus', the Viennese, »Last Days of Mankind« we see the war for the first time from all sides. "

- ( Alfred Fried )

The technique of Kraus' satire consists largely in the fact that he assembles what is quoted in the dialogues of the scenes partly literally, partly only according to the tone of voice, in such a way that thoughtless ruthlessness, stupidity and mendacity become apparent: For example, in the fine tone that we ourselves towards the Hit enemies who are the greatest pakash on God's ground (I, 11). Kraus exposes the phrases and empty words (“The war has broken out ” - apparently like an inevitable natural disaster) and points out the profiteers. In a nutshell, Kraus finds' related thereto criticism in the set of Nörglers , Kraus's alter ego in the book: Yes, it is in this war!

The dialogues contain scraps of Jewish, Viennese and Berlin words, dialect expressions, idioms, winged words, phrases as well as literary and musical allusions and quotations. The piece is a structured large collage, collected, assembled, incorporated, digested - and spat out again as a great drama. Over half of the text are verbatim quotations based on documents that Kraus has collected over many years. Newspaper articles, conversations overheard by chance and those in which he himself was involved, letters, pronouncements, court judgments, ordinances and decrees, advertisements, speeches, diaries, war sermons, brochures, but also postcards, photos, posters.

The drama ends in an apocalyptic scene with the extinction of humanity by the cosmos . “ I did not want it ” - God's last sentence in the drama - is also an allusion to a statement by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Locations

The 220 scenes take place in a total of 137 different locations, the locations encompass the entire war-ridden area, from Serbia , Bosnia and Galicia to France , Italy and Russia . Over half of all scenes take place in Vienna , others in Berlin , Belgrade , Constantinople , Sofia , in the Carpathian Mountains , on Semmering and in the Vatican . Despite the constant change of location, the viewer usually remains at a great distance from the actual fighting. Only 33 scenes are set directly at the front and 20 of them are part of the epilogue, which is set entirely on the battlefields.

characters

In the 220 scenes of the piece, new, diverse characters appear constantly, in hundreds of voices and dozen dialects, in all colors and shades of official, technical and colloquial languages, a total of 1114 speaking and silent roles, voices, groups and choirs. The monumental list of people ranges from Viennese Pülcher and the street whore to imperial highnesses, archdukes, ordinary soldiers and the Pope, it names newspaper criminals, newspaper readers and newspaper publishers as well as war-loving children, opportunistic actresses, fanatical priests, war-drunk writers, decadent feschaks, beggars , Invalids, war cripples, larvae and lemurs, hyenas, wounded, dying and dead. But she doesn't call a hero. Anti-heroes are not individual characters, but the whole of humanity, who have proven to be unworthy of life on earth:

"" I wrote a tragedy of which humanity is the declining hero. Because this drama has no other hero than humanity, it also has no listener. But how does my tragic hero perish? Was the order of the world stronger than his personality? No, the order of nature was stronger than the order of the world. He breaks on the lie. He dies in a condition that has acted on him as intoxication and compulsion at the same time. ""

- (The last days of mankind, scene 5.54)

Particularly striking contemporaries - such as Kaiser Wilhelm II or the "Lord of the Hyenas" ( Moriz Benedikt ) - Kraus built into his drama almost true to the original. In the drama he cast a disgrace to war correspondent Alice Schalk ; Since then she has been remembered as the Schalk (" I want to know what did you feel when you bored the giant colossus into the wet, silent grave with so many people in your body ", II 31). Other historical figures in the drama include a. Pope Benedict XV , Army Commander Archduke Friedrich , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Paul von Hindenburg , Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf , Emperor Franz Joseph I , Hansi Niese , Prince Leopold IV zu Lippe, Rainer Maria Rilke , Interior Minister Karl Freiherr von Udynski , Franz Werfel , Anton Wildgans .

The characters of the nagger and the optimist appear again and again in the play as satirical commentators and use elements from entertainment culture in the "tradition of the comic couple " ( Hilde Haider-Pregler ): optimist (plump, small), nag (lean, large). They were played by Peter Lühr / Leonard Steckel , Karl Paryla / Hans Holt , Helmuth Lohner / Peter Weck or Thomas Maurer / Florian Scheuba . The characters of "Subscriber" and "Patriot", fanatical newspaper readers whose dialogues resemble the sketch and the double conference in cabaret, meet in an even more cabaret-like manner .

On the problem of real satire

A basic theme of this Kraus' satire arises from a novel problem of commentary. Can the problem of real satire be solved with the mere documentation, the pure quotation? (A question that Kurt Tucholsky later asked himself) And how garishly sarcastic does his satire have to be in order to be heard against the real satire? Real satire thus means the absurdity of daily political events; These indications of the absurd are listed in the scenes that reproduce real-political realities, particularly in the first three acts. These include:

  1. the world war triggered by an event characterized as "minority" (I.5)
  2. the war-promoting role of the press in the sense of the "blood guilt of phrase" (II.10; IV.20) or propaganda (V.38-41), but also in the sense of rumor (V.23)
  3. the alliance between Austria-Hungary and Germany, which lacks common ground in terms of language and mentality (II.1, 2; V.9, 27)
  4. the interpretation of war as an event of moral purification (I.29)
  5. the German or Austrian self-image of being a "cultural nation" (I.6, 29; II.13; III.3-5; IV.29, 37)
  6. the lying ideology of the "war of defense" (I.5; II.26; III.34)
  7. the ridiculousness of leading monarchs such as Emperor Franz Joseph I (IV.31) or Wilhelm II (I.23; IV.37) and politicians such as Paul von Hindenburg (IV.25)
  8. the world war as a whole, since Kraus or the nag sees this as a secret religious war between "Judaized Christianity" and the "Asian spirit" (I.29) and even claims a "similarity between the new German and the old Hebrew urge to conquer" ( III.14)

The course of the war supplements this level of the original farce with further, no less absurdly ridiculous facts:

  1. the absurdity partly Jewish ( Alexander Roda Roda , II.15), partly female ( Alice Schalk, I.21, 26; II.7, 19, 30, 31; III.2, 33; IV.10; V.16, 48) War correspondent
  2. the loss of multicultural language culture, which is expressed in the process of Germanization of foreign terms (I.8; II.17)
  3. the culture of the slackers, which Kraus counts among the real winners of the war (I.11; III.25-26)
  4. the harmonization of various areas of social life such as science (I.22), art (I.14), church (II.6; III.15-18) and health care (IV.7-8)
  5. the misjudgment of the Entente Powers and their supposed moral crisis by the allies (I.11; IV.26)
  6. the barbarization of people in the course of advancing war events (I.6);
  7. the war poetry of Felix Dörmann , Ludwig Ganghofers (I.23), Hans Müller (II.10; III.9), Alfred Kerrs (III.20), Ottokar Kernstocks (III.32) or Richard Dehmels (III.35)
  8. the children's enthusiasm for war (III.40; IV.22)
  9. the false receptions of returning war invalids (v.51-52)
  10. the fact that England and France are fighting with the weapons provided by Reich Germans (II.10)

Performance history

Karl Kraus himself initially declared the piece unplayable. In the foreword to the book edition, he wrote: The performance of the drama, which according to earthly time would amount to about ten evenings, is intended for a Marstheater. Theater-goers in this world are unable to withstand it. At first there were several performances of the epilogue, the first one in which Kraus himself participated on February 4, 1923 in Vienna. Kraus also worked out a stage version in 1929/30, with about a third of the scenes, without prelude and epilogue, and without most of the scenes of the nag. He also presented this in his lectures. However, when well-known directors such as Max Reinhardt or Erwin Piscator wanted to stage The Last Days , he declined, probably out of fear that they would turn the play into an entertainment spectacle. Karl Kraus did not consider his tragedy to be performable, because he feared that "a receding of the intellectual content before the material sensation would be inevitable" . Since the rights administrators took Kraus' dictum that it could not be performed literally, there was no staged performance until 1964 ( Wiener Festwochen ), and the entire drama was pending .

Staged performances

Performance at the Salzburg Festival 2014

Readings and radio plays

Reading by Justus Neumann , Vienna 2010

Film adaptations

Expenses (selection)

  • Nude edition [1919]: The last days of mankind. Tragedy in five acts with prelude and epilogue . In four issues of the “Fackel”, Vienna 1918 (epilogue) and 1919 (prelude and acts 1-5). With 7 fig.
  • Book edition [1922]: Verlag " Die Fackel ", Vienna / Leipzig 1922. XXIV + 792 pages. With 2 fig.
  • Stage version [1930] by the author. Edited by Eckart Früh . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1992.
  • Stage version [1964] for one evening by Heinrich Fischer and Leopold Lindtberg . Gustav Kiepenheuer Bühnenvertriebs GmbH, Berlin-Dahlem 1964.
  • The last days of humanity. Tragedy in five acts with prelude and epilogue . Edited and with an afterword by Franz Schuh . Verlag Jung und Jung , Salzburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-99027-006-6
  • The last days of humanity , drawn by Daniel Jokesch. Holzbaum Verlag.

CD recordings

Adaptations

  • Reinhard Pietsch, David Boller : The last days of mankind. A graphic novel based on Karl Kraus . Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-8316-4372-1 .
  • Deborah Sengl, the last days of mankind, art exhibition Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg / Vienna

College work

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karl Kraus “The Last Days of Mankind” “The Torch” satire on glarean-magazin.ch
  2. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl : The cruel executioners of the First World War. Die Welt , November 12, 2008
  3. ^ Theodor W. Adorno : Dissonances: Music in the administered world. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 1991, p. 138
  4. ↑ Hilde Haider: Theater in the 20th century, theater from the end of the 1st World War to the end of the 2nd World War. ( Memento of the original from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 314 kB) University of Vienna (theater studies) script for the main lecture winter 2001/2002. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.unet.univie.ac.at
  5. ^ Leo A. Lensing: "Photographischer Alpdruck" or political photo montage ?: Karl Kraus, Kurt Tucholsky and the satirical possibilities of photography, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 107 (1988), pp. 556-571.
  6. ↑ Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek : What is literary sarcasm? A contribution to German-Jewish modernity. Fink Verlag, Paderborn / Munich 2009, pp. 321-264.
  7. ↑ Ekkehart Krippendorff: Causes of war and anti-politics: Karl Kraus' Die last Tage der Menschheit, in: Ders .: Politische Interpretationen, Frankfurt am Main 1990, pp. 141–177.
  8. ↑ Hermann Schlösser: "Ahwoswoswaßiwossöwulln": Germans as comic characters in Kraus and Hofmannsthal, in: Komik in der Austrian literature, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Berlin 1996, pp. 198-211.
  9. ↑ See: Sigurd Paul Scheichl : Karl Kraus, Die last Tage der Menschheit, in: Dramen des 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 1996, pp. 224–241.
  10. ↑ For an overview see: Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek: What is literary sarcasm? A contribution to German-Jewish modernity. Fink Verlag, Paderborn / Munich 2009, p. 350ff.
  11. ^ CULTURE: Kraus prohibition. In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1963 ( online - Mar. 20, 1963 ).
  12. ↑ Teatr Powszechny im. Zygmunta Hübnera - sezon 1996/1997 , accessed January 12, 2012
  13. ↑ Theater: "The last days of mankind" in the bunker. In: Spiegel Online . April 22, 1999, accessed April 12, 2020 .
  14. ↑ [1]
  15. ↑ https://kurier.at/meinung/so-viel-theater-in-diesem-sommer/400074152
  16. ↑ deborah sengl. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on October 13, 2017 ; accessed on October 13, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / sammlung-essl.at