Karl Kraus

Karl Kraus published a magazine that he eventually wrote entirely himself, and used it for thirty-seven years to prosecute the Viennese press for the corruption of language. He came from a wealthy Bohemian Jewish paper-manufacturing family, dropped out of law, and founded Die Fackel in 1899; from 1911 he was its sole author, and he wrote most of the roughly nine hundred issues alone. His method was quotation: he reprinted what newspapers had actually written and let the sentences convict themselves, on the principle that a society that tolerates cliché will tolerate atrocity, and that corrupted language is the advance guard of corrupted action. The Last Days of Mankind, a documentary drama of the First World War assembled largely from real reported speech, runs to some eight hundred pages and he said it was written for a theatre on Mars. He read it aloud in public performances that filled halls. He converted to Catholicism and later left the church. On Hitler he wrote that nothing occurred to him, a line that has been read as failure and as the most precise thing he ever said. He conducted long feuds with Heine s reputation, with psychoanalysis and with the journalist Moriz Benedikt of the Neue Freie Presse, and his aphorisms are quoted in German the way Wilde s are in English. Wittgenstein, Kafka, Benjamin, Canetti and Schoenberg all read him closely, and Schoenberg wrote that he had learned more from him than he was perhaps able to take. He gave about seven hundred public readings. His sentence about Hitler opened a long essay he then suppressed, and the full text was published only after his death. He died of heart failure in 1936, having outlived the Austria he was arguing with.

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