Die letzten Tage der Menschheit by Karl Kraus Fred Bridgham Edward Timms

Abstract

Reviews 284 Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, the Reichsverein für Kinderschutz and the Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels operated at a supranational and supra-confessional level. Did this make imperial Austria something of an anachronistic oddity, always behind other countries which supposedly focused more on the spectre of national, eugenic or racial ‘degeneration’ than on the moral or trans-European public order threat posed by prostitution? Wingfield is a little unsure on this. The imperial capital, Vienna, did come to regulation comparatively late, in 1873. State bureaucrats, police physicians and district officials, rather than elected national politicians, drove through reforms in the years 1906–11. Yet on the other hand, the categorization of some prostitutes as being ‘incorrigible’, ‘asocial’, ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘work-shy’ looks ahead to Nazi times, as does the frequent association between prostitution, trafficking of ‘Christian’ girls and East European Jews made in the Viennese antisemitic press. Much of the late imperial legislation and police ordinances remained in force in the successor states after 1918, as did the military and security concerns around prostitution. Indeed, in many ways, Habsburg Austrian policies seemed more indicative of what the twentieth century had in store for social outsiders than did the British experience, where state regulation, in the form of the Contagious Diseases Acts, was overturned by parliament in 1886. Matthew Stibbe Sheffield Hallam University Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. By Karl Kraus. Translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms as The Last Days of Mankind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2016. 672 pp. £19.13. ISBN 978–0-30020767–5. ‘My tragic drama synchronizes our sufferings with the forms and sounds of a world bent on destruction’, claims the Grumbler of Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–22). Or so it has been rendered by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms in the first unabridged and annotated English translation of Kraus’s epic First World War satire (p. 381). Bridgham has edited and authored multiple wide-ranging studies on German culture and history, and his translations of German lieder and operas include Hans Werner Henze’s The Prince of Homburg. But if there is an authority on Kraus in and beyond the Anglophone world, it is Timms, whose two-volume biography of the ‘apocalyptic’ Viennese satirist is an ur-text for interpreting Kraus’s immense — and immensely complex — body of work. With its keen eye (and ear) for journalistic impropriety, bureaucratic stupidity, technological mania and nationalistic delirium, Die letzten Tage stands as an unparalleled satire not only of the First World War, but perhaps of any modern war. And nearly a century after its initial publication, there finally exists an English translation adequate to the demands of the original. These demands are, indeed, legion. First, there is the problem of satire itself: for more than most modes or genres of literature, satire’s weddedness Reviews 285 to the moment of its production often renders it less intelligible to posterity. In this respect, Kraus’s drama — which he never intended to stage because of its perceived incomprehensibility — is no exception. Thus among the many challenges Die letzten Tage poses to contemporary readers are its numerous references to the cultural and political landscape of early twentieth-century Germany and Austria. Thanks, however, to the comprehensive glossary and index appended to The Last Days, we now have greater access to this bygone world. Yet it is the translation itself that warrants our critical attention. Kraus famously possessed an uncanny talent for reproducing local (and not so local) dialects, accents and even class- and/or profession-indexed intonations. From his perspective, he was reproducing the world-views contained in such modes of speech. Translating this text thus required, as Timms and Bridgham suggest in their afterword, a hermeneutic flexibility that sought, on the one hand, to capture the ‘keynote of the era’ (p. 516), and, on the other, to mediate the drama’s intensity for a contemporary audience. As an example of the latter impulse, the instances of Yiddish, Swabian, Austrian and Bavarian littered throughout the original are occasionally translated as colloquial Britishisms. A couple of concrete examples from the translation should further illustrate some of the...