Early life Kraus was born into the wealthy Jewish family of Jacob Kraus, a papermaker, and his wife Ernestine, née Kantor, in
Jičín,
Kingdom of Bohemia,
Austria-Hungary (now Czechia). The family moved to
Vienna in 1877. His mother died in 1891. Kraus enrolled as a law student at the
University of Vienna in 1892. Beginning in April of the same year, he began contributing to the paper , starting with a critique of
Gerhart Hauptmann's
The Weavers. Around that time, he unsuccessfully tried to perform as an actor in a small theater. In 1894, he changed his field of studies to philosophy and
German literature. He discontinued his studies in 1896. His friendship with
Peter Altenberg began about this time.
Career Before 1900 In 1896, Kraus left university without a diploma to begin work as an actor, stage director and performer, joining the
Young Vienna group, which included
Peter Altenberg,
Leopold Andrian,
Hermann Bahr,
Richard Beer-Hofmann,
Arthur Schnitzler,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and
Felix Salten. In 1897, Kraus broke from this group with a biting satire, (
Demolished Literature), and was named Vienna correspondent for the newspaper
Breslauer Zeitung. One year later, as an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation, he attacked the founder of modern Zionism,
Theodor Herzl, with his polemic (1898) (
A Crown for Zion). The title is a play on words, in that
Krone means both "crown" and the currency of Austria-Hungary from 1892 to 1918; one
Krone was the minimum donation required to participate in the
Zionist Congress in
Basel, and Herzl was often mocked as the "king of Zion" (
König von Zion) by Viennese anti-Zionists. On 1 April 1899, Kraus renounced Judaism, and in the same year he founded his own magazine,
Die Fackel (German:
The Torch), which he continued to direct, publish, and write until his death, and from which he launched his attacks on
hypocrisy,
psychoanalysis, corruption of the
Habsburg empire,
nationalism of the
pan-German movement,
laissez-faire economic policies, and numerous other subjects.
1900–1909 In 1901 Kraus was sued by
Hermann Bahr and Emmerich Bukovics, who felt they had been attacked in
Die Fackel. Many lawsuits by various offended parties followed in later years. Also in 1901, Kraus found out that his publisher, Moriz Frisch, had taken over his magazine while he was absent on a months-long journey. Frisch had registered the magazine's front cover as a trademark and published the
Neue Fackel (
New Torch). Kraus sued and won. From that time,
Die Fackel was published (without a cover page) by the printer Jahoda & Siegel. While
Die Fackel at first resembled journals like
Die Weltbühne, it increasingly became a magazine that was privileged in its
editorial independence, thanks to Kraus's financial independence.
Die Fackel printed what Kraus wanted to be printed. In its first decade, contributors included such well-known writers and artists as
Peter Altenberg,
Richard Dehmel,
Egon Friedell,
Oskar Kokoschka,
Else Lasker-Schüler,
Adolf Loos,
Heinrich Mann,
Arnold Schoenberg,
August Strindberg,
Georg Trakl,
Frank Wedekind,
Franz Werfel,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain and
Oscar Wilde. After 1911, however, Kraus was usually the sole author. Kraus's work was published nearly exclusively in
Die Fackel, of which 922 irregularly issued numbers appeared in total. Authors who were supported by Kraus include Peter Altenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Georg Trakl.
Die Fackel targeted corruption, journalists and brutish behaviour. Notable enemies were
Maximilian Harden (in the mud of the
Harden–Eulenburg affair),
Moriz Benedikt (owner of the newspaper
Neue Freie Presse),
Alfred Kerr,
Hermann Bahr, and
Johann Schober. In 1902, Kraus published
Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität (
Morality and Criminal Justice), for the first time commenting on what was to become one of his main preoccupations: he attacked the general opinion of the time that it was necessary to defend sexual morality by means of criminal justice (
Der Skandal fängt an, wenn die Polizei ihm ein Ende macht,
The Scandal Starts When the Police Ends It). Starting in 1906, Kraus published the first of his
aphorisms in
Die Fackel; they were collected in 1909 in the book
Sprüche und Widersprüche (
Sayings and Gainsayings). In addition to his writings, Kraus gave numerous highly influential public readings during his career, put on approximately 700 one-man performances between 1892 and 1936 in which he read from the dramas of
Bertolt Brecht,
Gerhart Hauptmann,
Johann Nestroy,
Goethe, and
Shakespeare, and also performed
Offenbach's operettas, accompanied by piano and singing all the roles himself.
Elias Canetti, who regularly attended Kraus's lectures, titled the second volume of his autobiography
"Die Fackel" im Ohr (
"The Torch" in the Ear) in reference to the magazine and its author. At the peak of his popularity, Kraus's lectures attracted four thousand people, and his magazine sold forty thousand copies. These plays' frank depiction of sexuality and violence, including lesbianism and an encounter with
Jack the Ripper, pushed against the boundaries of what was considered acceptable on the stage at the time. Wedekind's works are considered among the precursors of expressionism, but in 1914, when expressionist poets like
Richard Dehmel began producing war propaganda, Kraus became a fierce critic of them. In 1907, Kraus attacked his erstwhile benefactor Maximilian Harden because of his role in the Eulenburg trial in the first of his spectacular
Erledigungen (
Dispatches).
1910–1919 After 1911, Kraus was the sole author of most issues of
Die Fackel. One of Kraus's most influential satirical-literary techniques was his clever
wordplay with quotations. One controversy arose with the text
Die Orgie, which exposed how the newspaper
Neue Freie Presse was blatantly supporting
Austria's Liberal Party's election campaign; the text was conceived as a guerrilla prank and sent as a fake letter to the newspaper (
Die Fackel would publish it later in 1911); the enraged editor, who fell for the trick, responded by suing Kraus for "disturbing the serious business of politicians and editors". ("In this grand time, which I used to know when it was this small; which will become small again if there is time; … in this loud time that resounds from the ghastly symphony of deeds that spawn reports, and of reports that cause deeds: in this one, you may not expect a word of my own.") In the subsequent time, Kraus wrote against the World War, and censors repeatedly confiscated or obstructed editions of
Die Fackel. Kraus's masterpiece is generally considered to be the massive satirical play about the
First World War,
Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (
The Last Days of Mankind), which combines dialogue from contemporary documents with
apocalyptic fantasy and commentary by two characters called "the Grumbler" and "the Optimist". Kraus began to write the play in 1915 and first published it as a series of special
Fackel issues in 1919. Its epilogue, "Die letzte Nacht" ("The last night") had already been published in 1918 as a special issue.
Edward Timms has called the work a "faulted masterpiece" and a "fissured text" because the evolution of Kraus's attitude during the time of its composition (from
aristocratic conservative to democratic
republican) gave the text structural inconsistencies resembling a
geological fault. Also in 1919, Kraus published his collected war texts under the title
Weltgericht (
World Court of Justice). In 1920, he published the satire
Literatur oder man wird doch da sehn (''Literature, or You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet'') as a reply to
Franz Werfel's
Spiegelmensch (
Mirror Man), an attack against Kraus.
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. This satire on Nazi ideology begins with the now-famous sentence, "" ("Hitler brings nothing to my mind"). Lengthy extracts appear in Kraus's apologia for his silence at Hitler's coming to power, "" ("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 10 June. He died in his apartment in Vienna on 12 June 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, Nádherný 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. == Character ==