Volume 20, Number 7 · May 3, 1973
Dark Laughter
By Erich Heller
Werke
by Karl Kraus, edited by Heinrich Fischer
Kösel-Verlag (Munich), 14 vols with 2 supplements pp.
Karl Kraus
by Harry Zohn
Twayne, 178 pp., $5.95
Karl Kraus: A Viennese Critic of the Twentieth Century
by Wilma Abeles Iggers
Martinus Nijhoff (The Hague), 248 pp.
Karl Kraus is among the most important and remarkable writers in modern German or any other literature, and yet he is hardly known in the United States. Born in 1874 in a provincial Bohemian town, the son of well-to-do Jewish parents, he spent almost all his life in Vienna, and died there in 1936. When he was young he thought of working for a newspaper or as an actor, but in 1899 he founded his own journal Die Fackel (The Torch). It was immediately obvious that a satirical talent of great force had arrived on the Viennese scene, a writer supremely thoughtful in his use of language and recklessly determined to attack those whom he regarded as the journalistic, literary, and political corrupters of the human condition.
Review, 5153 words
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