Karl Kraus Books

The most telling line against Freudianism: "Psycho-analysts are the disease posing as the cure". Kraus had a real nose for blather and imposture, and dissected the Vienna circle around Freud as Mencken did the fundementalists. An exposure to Kraus is a sure and certain innoculation of the psychobabble that passes nowdays as charcter analysis. Take two hours to slowly devour, digest, and delight in this tasty intellectual treat.

What a combination: Kraus, the man who first denuded the emperor Freud, and Szasz, the man who methodically stripped psychiatry/psychotherapy of any scientific pretensions. Aside from a lesson in history, a major debunking of psychiatric fraud, and an interesting biography, this book is a lot of fun. Kraus ranks with Twain and Mencken as an aphorist, and Szasz's translations of the original German make the quotes ring clear and powerful.

Freud tried to cozy up to him (and was rejected); his work was fundamental to Wittgenstein's philosophico-linguistic theories, and three times he was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature by French academicians; yet he remains essentially unknown in this country, despite this marvelous exegesis of his work by Thomas Szasz, which was published in 1976.

Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was, and continues to be, an embarrassment to many intellectuals. His punishment has been to have his work misread, misinterpreted, untranslated, and finally ignored. He has been attacked as being antisemitic ("self-hating Jew"), mentally disturbed, and (symbolically) envious of his father's penis.

Kraus's commentaries and aphorisms concerning psychiatry and psychoanalysis are delightful, powerful, and as accurate today as when he uttered them. Szasz, who has been fighting the good battle against psychiatric abuses and pretensions all of his career, is the ideal person to introduce Americans to Kraus and his work. A short, well indexed book. Worth having to keep and to read over from time to time.

Karl Kraus is still well known in Germany, and deserves to be better known here. THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND, 'a play to be performed on Mars' is one of the most trenchant satires written this century. Kraus compiled the play from newspaper articles, official bulletins, and overheard conversations during World War One in Vienna. He actually performed excerpts from this damning indictment of the human race during the war. I wish that someone would translate all of this book from the German; one flaw of this edition is the note early on which states that 'since modern Americans are not familiar with minutiae of the life of the Emperor Franz Joseph, these chapters have been cut.' With all due respect, if we did not know something about the later Habsburgs we would not be reading THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND in the first place. The lowest pit in Kraus' hell is reserved for those vultures who treated wartime reporting as popular entertainment--which makes him an uncomfortably modern writer. Please, please beg borrow or steal a copy of this book and try to get it reprinted in a full translation!

Compiled out of quotations, newspaper articles, different folk songs and own experiences with Austria-Hungary and Germany through World War One Karl Kraus wrote this book to show the people of the time after the War their own absurd behavement. The book is written as a Drama, but without a continuous story it shows the war with examples of Journalists, Politics, Aristocrats, Workers, Soldiers. It is an important forefather of Brecht's epic drama. To understand the different quotations you should know a bit about the Austrian and German history and the Emperors of the time.

It was a pleasure to receive Timms' second volume on Karl Kraus. It came new and in mint condition. Thank you Amazon.

This book heralds the emergence of two great minds.
Karl Kraus, who because of his fearless critique of the media, politics, religion, and the other humbugs of the world Hitler & Co. was trying to shove down the world's throat...and Mr. McVity, who not only translates the difficult work of Kraus brilliantly, but provides, in his concluding essay, a history and examination of Kraus and his world, and great insights into those troubling times, whose wake we are still witnessing... but also rises, in his own writing, to such heights and depths as to be truly humbling. And yet I am excited that such a mind might surface in such a time as this...where content nor form offer much to chew on, beyond the official story and the infantile rant.

Share this wondrous book with your friends, but realize it may return dog-eared, pages now sea-foam green in highlighter. Sharing, after all, is a very Krausian thing to do. Karl Kraus donated much of his proceeds to homeless shelters, low-cost housing, Quakers caring for starving tubercular children, and the like. And Kraus shared ideas and art with his friends Brecht, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Rilke, and others whose greatness is already well-known, perhaps because of their being less a thorn in the side of the system.
As Kraus once said, "Art serves to rinse out our eyes."
But I would also suggest that his, and McVity's, art serves to rinse out our ears as well. Especially since our ears are now filled with the likes of...well...you know! But "Kraus named names." Read all about it! And then imagine random names such as Rush, O'Reilly, and others that miraculously make their way to the top of the list, forgetting perhaps that the list is boogerpasted to the wall of a sandbox. [Head shakes left then right. Repeat.]

I am pleased to give this book 5-stars, but regret that I couldn't give it more. As Lin Yutang once said: "I regard the discovery of one's favorite author as the most critical event in one's intellectual development. There is such a thing as affinity of spirits, and among authors of ancient and modern times, one must try to find an author whose spirit is akin with his own."

I eagerly await the next offerings of this protean mind among us, and urge that he not limit himself to translations, as his own writing is such a pleasure, and translations do take so dreadfully long...

Kraus is almost unknown to Americans, but he was one of the shining social critics of the 20th century. He was the first major debunker of Freudian nonsense. He wrote brilliantly on language, politics, and culture. He was, like all great critics, fearless.

This book is a mixed presentation, including many quotes that seem outdated or inscrutible. It also has the editor's odd and distorted rendering of Kraus.

If you are unfamilair with Kraus you will be better served by Thomas Szasz's "Anti-Freud : Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry."...The Szasz book provides fascinating biographical info about Kraus. Szasz has also nicely translated many of Kraus's pithiest and funniest aphorisms.

Chicken soup for the spleen!

Damn. And I thought I had a bleak perspective and a cutting cacpcity for quick critical insight- Karl leaves me and everyone else in the dirt. A comedian could quite possibly mine an entire erudite, Dennis Miller-esque routine from this book. Kraus' witticisms are as spot-on today as they were when he edited Die Fackel (The Torch), in Vienna about a century ago.

My only beef- it's a lot of dough for not a lot of tree-gut. I mean 918 aphorisms? these aren't sprawling, long-winded Nietzschian aphorisms. They're quick. And this is a page turner... Ah well, it still gets the 5 for being so damn right!

Hey- if you think people (by and large) are lying, manipulative, weak, dishonest scum- this is a book for you. Great essay by the translator too!

It takes a whole lot of courage to translate the works of Karl Kraus. By just about anybody's standards, he is a bigot and a misogynist, but his bile is not without purpose. He reserves most of his barbed comments for women, criticizing their deceptively weak and ultimately treacherous nature, but also praising them for being strong-willed and defiant. Kraus is a vivisectionist, peeling away our comforting hypocrisies and revealing the ugly truths of life. Nothing escapes his knife, not even religion or education. In the pitch darkness of society's lies, Karl Kraus is a light of truth and wisdom. His words may wound tender egos, but they'll become stronger for it.

"The Ghost-Seer" is a novel written by Friedrich Schiller, the German playwright, poet and philosopher. The story was published in the 1780's, and Schiller eventually left it unfinished. While this is no doubt annoying, the work nevertheless has a certain interest.

The main character is a German Prince who is manipulated by unknown forces during a visit to Venice. At first, the Prince is moral, pious and intellectually curious, but unfortunately his religious convictions are of a simplistic Pietist kind. He is also very superstitious and easily lead. A group of conspirators, led by a mysterious Armenian, takes advantage of this. First, they stage a Spiritualist seance during which the spirit of the Prince's best friend is conjured up. Next, they reveal that the seance was just a hoax. By this double bluff, the conspirators make the Prince loose his religious faith, and turn him into an out-and-out sceptic.

As a sceptic, the Prince becomes immoral, lustful and completely uninterested in serious philosophy. He begins to advocate what's essentially an early version of Nietzscheanism: life is meaningless, and the only thing that matters is brute power. How or why power is won, is irrelevant. Eventually, the Prince realizes that his new "philosophy" only brings him personal unhappiness. How can anyone be happy, if life is meaningless?

Unfortunately, the Prince doesn't want to end his immoral lifestyle. He wants "meaning" only for the sake of his own personal consolation. At this point, the conspirators strike again, and eventually converts the Prince to a false religion: Catholicism. The conversion is facilitated by stage-managing an unhappy love affair with a devout Catholic woman. In other words, the Prince embraces Catholicism for reasons of lust, rather than reasons of faith or intellectual conviction.

During his stay in Venice, the Prince goes deeply into debt, to finance his new, libertine lifestyle. At the end of the story, he begins to contemplate a coup in his German principality, and perhaps an assasination of the legitimate heir to the throne, simply to get his hands on the family fortune. The story ends with the Prince attending a mass celebrated by the Armenian, who turns out to be a Catholic priest.

What strikes modern readers as most odd with the story is that Schiller sees scepticism, libertinism and Catholicism as part of the same problem, even the same conspiracy. Perhaps this is how German Protestants and Deists saw Catholicism during the Enlightenment? The story becomes more comprehensible to modern readers if Catholicism is seen as a symbol of false religion. After all, somebody might argue that New Age and interest in the occult is simply the flip-side of Western libertine, libertarian materialism. New Age promises the believer quick fixes, and some versions of it are notoriously commercialized. And isn't worship of raw power typical both of certain "atheist" philosophers (Nietzsche) and some "New Religious Movements" (Satanism)? When the Prince slips from immoral "atheism" to immoral "religion", he only thinks of his own individual well-being, his own quick fix.

At the same time, Schiller obviously didn't sympathize with good ol' religion either. Schiller could perhaps be described as a Deist, and one of the reasons why the Prince falls for the machinations of the Armenian, is that his own religion is simple-minded and uncouth. He also nourishes a superstitious belief in the supernatural, including communication with the spirits of the dead. Although there is a certain sympathy in Schiller's description of the Prince's old faith, it's nevertheless obvious that it's regarded as dangerously out-moded, and incapable of withstanding the allurements of a purely negative scepticism. Schiller's alternative seems to have been a spiritual form of the Enlightenment, as described in his "Aesthetic Letters".

Schiller lived during a time when the old religions were increasingly being challenged by materialism and scepticism, and he seems to have resented both camps. This, I take, is the main point of "The Ghost-Seer".

PS. For some unfathomable reason (another double bluff, perhaps?), this edition of "The Ghost-Seer" carries a preface by one Martin Jarvis, who treats this philosophical masterpiece as if it was a literal story about...conjuring tricks, a kind of "how to" manual for the aspiring stage illusionist. My God, whatever gave him *that* idea???

The compiler and editor Heinrich Fischer has arranged this selection from Kraus' printed tirades topically in ten or twelve sections. Each section begins with aphorisms, then continues with the wild pun-laden, allusion-rich holdings-forth that Kraus was famed for.
Though quite a lot of these speeches-on-paper (Klaus remained a talker more than a writer, and his writings are scripts for declamation, really) are prefaced by the fatuous and inelegant journalistic Schwulst that prompted him to fire off his intelligent rants, none of these extracts from the Viennese press are identified, and indeed, none of extracts from Kraus himself are provided with a citation or even assigned a year of origin. Nor are there any explanatory notes. I wouldn't expect that Suhrkamp would see the need to explain Kraus' language to the readership who are largely highly educated native speakers of German, but I'd be willing to bet that many Germans and even a few Viennese are left baffled by allusion after allusion, and really, part of the charm of this sort of thing is the illumination of the historical and ideological background. This background is just not quite present enough among people of average education for the publisher to assume it, and after all, Suhrkamp IS a popular publisher.
So, I'd grant that this is an acceptable anthology of Kraus' activity, but it isn't for people whose German isn't highly advanced nor would I recommend it for students who don't already have a fair grounding in early 20th Century Vienna.