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.

Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Austrian writer and journalist, was a foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century and also a well-known essayist, aphorist, playwright, and poet. Edward Timms is research professor and director of the Centre of German Studies, University of Sussex. Fred Bridgham is retired senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds.