Crucible of the 20th Century

...During World War I, Kraus wrote an enormous play, The Last Days of Mankind, in which he dramatized the horror of the War by drawing on quotations from the Austrian and German press and heightening the trivia of daily propaganda into a veritable Dance of Death...

...Turn-of-the-century Vienna was a large city, but much smaller than Paris, London or New York, allowing the principal actors in the drama to know one another and to interact in front of a public informed and intelligent enough to grasp what was going on...

...There is, in fact, something Dantesque in Karl Kraus' determination to raise the local and personal issues of his own life and time to the importance of cosmic events...

...Vienna will, I am sure, one day be regarded as the very crucible of the 20th century...

...In his own periodical, Die Fackel, published at irregular intervals from 1899 until his death and written largely by himself, Kraus castigated the Viennese press and through the press the whole of Vienna, the whole of Western society...

...Between 1890 and 1930 a good number of the key cultural and political developments of the age started there: Freud developed psychoanalysis...

...To comprehend this vast masterpiece anyone unfamiliar with the background would need footnotes akin to those in modern editions of Dante's Divine Comedy...

...Kraus' polemical writing would undoubtedly be regarded as masterpieces of European literature, were there not one snag: The reader must be familiar with the subject matter, the personalities, the social background of Kraus' Vienna to understand his brilliance in manipulating allusions, in making comparisons, in laying bare the essentials of a situation...

...As a result, 19th-century bourgeois culture and society gave way there first, releasing dynamic forces for good and evil...

...Indeed, Vienna's cafes and salons were a perfect meeting place for its highly aware society...

...But, alas, a very bad book...

...He might start from a single un-grammatical sentence, a single woolly thought, and by turning such passages over and over and round and round, uncover an abyss of dishonesty and insincerity in their perpetrators...

...No mean poet and a brilliant translator of Shakespeare's sonnets, Kraus was above all a master of vituperative prose who handled his pen like a rapier as he annihilated one hack-journalist after another...

...I personally would suggest that the explanation has something to do with the fact that the Austrian Empire was the most vulnerable thread in the fabric of 19th-century Europe...

...Meanwhile, Hitler developed, from the very essence of the Viennese soil, those doctrines of dynamic evil that blew the 20th century sky-high...

...There is no attempt to show the nature of Kraus' stylistic brilliance, and hardly any attempt to give the feel of Viennese society and culture in his day...

...A new tenor at the opera, a new philosophical book, a new building designed by Adolf Loos (the first truly modern architect)—all were eagerly discussed by the community as a whole, a community which had not yet split into self-contained compartments of blinkered specialties...

...Kraus and his Vienna, therefore, are a subject for a masterpiece of literary criticism and social history...

...A wonderful subject, yes...

...Mach, Schlick, Car-nap and Wittgenstein modern analytical philosophy...

...Schoenberg 12-tone music...

...Reviewed by MARTIN ESSLIN Author, "Brecht," "The Theater of the Absurd' Frank Field, a lecturer in History at Britain's University in Keele, has chosen a fascinating subject...

...and Herzl laid the foundations of Zionism...

...Why should all these seeds have sprouted in Vienna at about the same time...

...Trotsky played chess in another corner of the city...

...A fiery, fanatical near-hunchbacked little man, he became the Savonarola of Vienna, the idol of the young intellectuals, an object of burning hatred for the Establishment...

...Instead, most of the book is occupied by a rather pedestrian retelling of Austrian history, and even here—in his own field —the author does not inspire real confidence...

...When the solid structure of bourgeois society and culture began to collapse in France during World War II, there was a similar intellectual upsurge—the existentialists, the Theater of the Absurd, the nouveau roman and now that the process has finally reached the last strongholds of 19th-century optimism and respectability, Britain and the United States, we are witnessing an analogous development in the theater, Pop art, and the social ferment of the underground...

...What is one to think of a historian of postwar Austria who seems to think that the Parliament of the first Austrian Republic was called the Reichstag"} (It was the Nationalversammlung...

...Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was Austria's press polemicist par excellence, the critic of the critics...

...Musil, Kafka, Broch, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler forged many of the essentials of contemporary literature...

...The press played an extremely important role, for the papers were read in the cafes by everyone...

...But Frank Field's book, it must be admitted, is far from being that masterpiece...

...Thus polemics among newspapers or their individual critics enjoyed an appreciative audience that cheered and booed from the sidelines...