In 1911 he had been received into the Catholic Church, and his opposition to war was nourished by an underlying religiosity. Resisting the politically orchestrated euphoria that swept through Europe, he launched his antiwar campaign in November 1914 by reading in public a critique entitled “In dieser großen Zeit” (In This Age of Grandeur).4

Despite the censorship, Kraus succeeded in publishing “In dieser großen Zeit” the following month. His argument deconstructs the idea that the World War has ushered in a heroic era, as proclaimed by the propaganda apparatus set up in every belligerent country. The telegram, Kraus observes in this critique, is “an instrument of war like the grenade” (F 404, 12). In order to make the thousands of casualties acceptable, the public was saturated with poems and articles celebrating the ethical value of war and the glory of laying down your life for your country. When Kraus argued that people’s minds had been numbed by clichés, he had one slogan especially in mind: “dying a hero’s death.” Through decades of practice, he argued, “the newspaper reporter has so impoverished our imagination that it becomes possible to fight a war of annihilation against ourselves.” A more truthful use of language would reveal the “hero’s death as cruel destiny” (F 404, 9–10). During the years 1915–18 he intensified his campaign against the insanity of modern warfare, publishing incisive articles, pithy aphorisms, and plangent poems. Being exempt from army service (due to curvature of the spine), he frequently travelled from his home in Vienna to Berlin and other cities to give further readings criticizing the war. His subversive satire led him to be denounced to the authorities as a traitor.

“When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty”, according to the motto chosen by Arthur Ponsonby in 1928 for his book Falsehood in War-Time.5 Kraus had arrived at this insight twenty years earlier. His targets, from the very first number of Die Fackel, were “Phrasen” (clichés and slogans) and “Lügen” (deceptions and lies). His analysis of patriotic propaganda acquired an even sharper edge in autumn 1915 when he wrote: “How is the world governed and made to fight wars? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and believe them when they see them in print” (F 406–12, 106). This introduced a subtle conception of media-induced false memory: the hypnotic power of repetition leads politicians to believe the falsehoods they have themselves put into circulation. The result was a self-generating system of mendacity with disastrous consequences for the future of mankind.

The Last Days of Mankind

Kraus’s most effective technique was to reprint propagandistic statements from the press, highlighting their fatuousness and barbarity. A similar documentary method is deployed with even greater versatility in his masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind, conceived in the summer of 1915 and largely composed during the war. In this grandiose satirical panorama journalists and military commanders, politicians and profiteers, are re-created as dramatic characters, mouthing the dehumanizing slogans of the day. The claim that Germany and Austria have “drawn the sword” is ridiculed as a prime example of the way newspaper language disguises the horrors of a war that in reality involves trenches, shrapnel, and poison gas. Kraus’s play, which could not be published until after the collapse of the Central Powers, concludes with an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the earth.

Publication began immediately after the lifting of censorship. The first edition, enhanced by a number of photographs, filled four special issues of Die Fackel, dated November 1918 and April, June, and August 1919. This was followed in 1922 by the expanded book edition, framed by two even more expressive photographs, which also accompany our translation. These photos have both documentary and symbolic value. The frontispiece, which records the scene after the Italian dissident Cesare Battisti was hanged as a traitor by the Austrian authorities, was circulated as a warning against disloyalty to the Habsburg crown. For Kraus, who highlights the complicity between cruelty and the camera, this epitomizes the sadistic attitude towards persecuted minorities.

The subject of Kraus’s play is the tragedy of mankind, bent on self-destruction by the methods of modern warfare, while still clinging to outdated ideals of military heroism and national glory. Interwoven with the cataclysmic action are a multitude of satirical strands, each embedded in its cultural matrix: bungled Austrian diplomacy, aggressive German expansionism, brutal military leadership, the greed of war profiteers, the complicity of international big business, the injustices of martial law, the gullibility of newspaper readers, and above all the sloganizing of the press. The cult of war as an “age of grandeur” is satirized in scene after scene, following the approach defined in the Preface: “The document takes human shape; reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials; the newspaper column has acquired a mouth that spouts monologues.”

There are numerous scenes that reproduce—as dramatic monologue or tragicomic dialogue—the purple prose that some fanatical patriot or propagandist has perpetrated during the war. Political speeches, military bulletins, newspaper editorials, commercial adverts, interviews with public figures, snippets from the gossip columns, chauvinistic sermons, and patriotic songs—the range of sources is remarkable. But this documentary technique is enlivened by an irrepressible satirical imagination. The Preface may suggest that the “most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations.” But the impact is intensified by scenes that blend documentary transcription with comic invention, punctuated by satirical verse. The play concludes with visionary images projected in cinematic style, followed by a verse Epilogue entitled Die letzte Nacht (The Final Night).

This mixing of modes is evident from the Prologue, set in June 1914 as news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo hits the streets of Vienna. Almost the first figures we encounter are a group of officers on the Ringstrasse planning a supper party at their favourite restaurant—they decide on Hopfner’s. “D’ya see the latest Schönpflug cartoon?” one of them asks.