12623 - after - commemorations - Karl Kraus - Life and Times

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. Karl Kraus was the son of a wealthy Viennese paper merchant. Kraus also gave popular stage performances, in which he played piano, and read Shakespeare’s sonnets. He even acted out parts from his monumental masterpiece, the 800-page play, 'Die letzten Tage der Menschheit', usually translated as 'The Last Days of Mankind'. This play, which if performed in its entirety would take ten evenings. It is set in the early weeks of World War I, from the perspective of Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He is best known as editor of the literary journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which he founded in 1899. The objective of the journal was to hold a “torch” to the hypocrisy of German and Austrian society and the Austro-Hungarian government. Freud was one of the readers of Die Fackel around 1903 and mentioned it for the first time in 1905 in relation to his 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'. Even today, Karl Krauss is widely discussed in German-language newspapers, and it speaks of his strong influence in German literature and cultural studies. He is also considered to be the first major European satirist since Jonathan Swift.