Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

On June 12, 1936, Karl Kraus, Austrian satirical writer, died at the age of 62. An excerpt from the article:

"1920-1936

During January 1924, Kraus started a fight against Imre Békessy, publisher of the tabloid Die Stunde (The Hour), accusing him of extorting money from restaurant owners by threatening them with bad reviews unless they paid him. Békessy retaliated with a libel campaign against Kraus, who in turn launched an Erledigung with the catchphrase “Hinaus aus Wien mit dem Schuft!” (“Throw the scoundrel out of Vienna!”). In 1926, Békessy indeed fled Vienna to avoid arrest. Békessy achieved some later success when his novel Barabbas was the monthly selection of an American book club.

A peak in Kraus’s political commitment was his sensational attack in 1927 on the powerful Vienna police chief Johann Schober, also a former two-term chancellor, after 89 rioters were shot dead by the police during the 1927 July Revolt. Kraus produced a poster that in a single sentence requested Schober’s resignation; the poster was published all over Vienna and is considered an icon of 20th-century Austrian history.

In 1928, the play Die Unüberwindlichen (The Insurmountables) was published. It included allusions to the fights against Békessy and Schober. During that same year, Kraus also published the records of a lawsuit Kerr had filed against him after Kraus had published Kerr’s war poems in Die Fackel (Kerr, having become a pacifist, did not want his earlier enthusiasm for the war exposed). In 1932, Kraus translated Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Kraus supported the Social Democratic Party of Austria from at least the early 1920s, and in 1934, hoping Engelbert Dollfuss could prevent Nazism from engulfing Austria, he supported Dollfuss’s coup d’état, which established the Austrian fascist regime. This support estranged Kraus from some of his followers.

In 1933 Kraus wrote Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht (The Third Walpurgis Night), of which the first fragments appeared in Die Fackel. Kraus withheld full publication in part to protect his friends and followers hostile to Hitler who still lived in the Third Reich from Nazi reprisals, and in part because “violence is no subject for polemic.” This satire on Nazi ideology begins with the now-famous sentence, “Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein” (“Hitler brings nothing to my mind”). Lengthy extracts appear in Kraus’s apologia for his silence at Hitler’s coming to power, “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint” (“Why Die Fackel is not published”), a 315-page edition of the periodical. The last issue of Die Fackel appeared in February 1936. Shortly after, he fell in a collision with a bicyclist and suffered intense headaches and loss of memory. He gave his last lecture in April, and had a severe heart attack in the Café Imperial on June 10. He died in his apartment in Vienna on June 12, 1936, and was buried in the Zentralfriedhof cemetery in Vienna.

Kraus never married, but from 1913 until his death he had a conflict-prone but close relationship with the Baroness Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín (1885–1950). Many of his works were written in Janowitz castle, Nádherny family property. Sidonie Nádherná became an important pen pal to Kraus and addressee of his books and poems.

In 1911 Kraus was baptized as a Catholic, but in 1923, disillusioned by the Church’s support for the war, he left the Catholic Church, claiming sarcastically that he was motivated “primarily by antisemitism”, i.e. indignation at Max Reinhardt’s use of the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg as the venue for a theatrical performance.

Kraus was the subject of two books by Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors and Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, which portray Kraus as a harsh critic of Sigmund Freud and of psychoanalysis in general. Other commentators, such as Edward Timms, have argued that Kraus respected Freud, though with reservations about the application of some of his theories, and that his views were far less black-and-white than Szasz suggests."