This is a fascinating study of the life and work of Karl Kraus, brilliant Austrian writer, satirist and personality of fin de siecle Vienna. This encyclopaedic study of his life, his work and his generation will be of great interest to both the enthusiast and the general student of European culture. Drawing on unfamiliar sources, Edward Timms analyses Kraus's involvement in the fundamental ideological issues of his time, and shows that Kraus's political position - caught between traditional Habsburg loyalties and new democratic commitments - was far more complex than has previously been suspected. 'A major landmark in Kraus studies, and an important contribution to our understanding of the culture of the early twentieth century. It abounds in discoveries and insights.' Times Higher Education Supplement 'Timm's lucid prose, his masterly organization of the voluminous material he treats, his excellent translations of the documents he cites and his broad, readable portrayal of Viennese fin-de-siecle culture makes this study accessible to the average reader and a pleasure for the literary professional ... An example of German studies at its best.' European Studies Journal 'This study, which takes us to the end of the Great War, is unquestionably the most detailed and thoughtful book about him in amy language. Edward Timms' account skilfully interweaves his life, times and work.' The Listener 'Timms successfully weaves a colourful, and thoroughly researched and documented account of essential cultural currents in Habsburg Vienna around his central figure. Copious illustrations and photographs enhance a most enjoyable text, making this an ideal introduction to Kraus and his work.' Choice Edward Timms is lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

The focus of the first volume of 'Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist' was on the cataclysmic final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This book takes up the story in November 1918, when the satirist responded to the creation of the new republics with a defiant hope, invoking international law against the dual threat of reactionary politics and irresponsible media. While contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin regarded Kraus as a heroically isolated figure, this book places him within a dynamic field of cultural production, highlighting the court cases he pursued with his lawyer Oskar Samek and the theatrical projects that earned him the friendship of Bertholt Brecht. The legend that the satirist responded to Hitler's seizure of power with stunned silence is refuted in the final section of the book, 'Into the Third Reich', which highlights his analysis of 'creeping fascism' and of the swastika as the 'twisted cross' of politicised religiosity. His career culminated in 'Dritte Walpurgisnacht', an analysis of Nazi ideology that has proved enduringly influential. Timms argues that Kraus's lifelong critique of the media, combining Orwell's political radicalism with Joyce's linguistic playfulness, incisively anticipates the propaganda techniques of our own age. 'Edward Timms meticulously interprets this major writer's most complex period of literary, cultural and political activity, providing what amounts to an entire cultural history of the period.' Professor Gilbert Carr, Trinity College Dublin Edward Timms is Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex and a Life Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He has a special interest in Austrian-Jewish cultural history and is best known for his earlier volume 'Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna' (1986). In 2002 he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for History of the Social Sciences and in 2005 he was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship.

A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic—a personal and intellectual awakening A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, DieFackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them. In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose "calm, passionate critical authority" has been praised in TheNew York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America. While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today's cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus's work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

Ari Linden’s Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity reconsiders the literary works of the Viennese satirist, journalist, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Combining close readings with intellectual history, Linden shows how Kraus’s two major literary achievements (The Last Days of Mankind and The Third Walpurgis Night) and his adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes (Cloudcuckooland) address the political catastrophes of the first third of Europe’s twentieth century—from World War I to the rise of fascism. Kraus’s central insight, Linden argues, is that the medial representations of such events have produced less an informed audience than one increasingly unmoved by mass violence. In the second part of the book, Linden explores this insight as he sees it inflected in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. This hidden dialogue, Linden claims, offers us a richer understanding of the often-neglected relationship between satire and critical theory writ large.