Sinopsis

“Perhaps one day man will [...] see what a small occurrence such a world-war was when set against the spiritual self-mutilation of mankind by its newspapers, and how the war was at bottom just one of its manifestations [...] Allow me to overestimate the press. But if I maintain incorrectly that an epoch which takes the special edition so lightly as the event itself, and with excited nerves takes lies for facts, if it is not true that more blood has flown from telegrams than they claimed to contain, then let this blood be on my hands." Karl Kraus was a razor-sharp observer of fin-de-siècle Vienna. His work is inventive, subversive and immensely insightful. In 1899, Kraus established his own journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), and set out 'to drain the marsh of empty phrase-making', aiming his satire at favourite targets such as the press, psychoanalysis and Zionism. According to Kraus, much of the social and political divide in Vienna – where the issue of...