Karl Kraus Biography Quotes 46 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Karl Kraus was born in 1874 in the Bohemian town of Jicin, then part of the Habsburg monarchy, and moved with his family to Vienna as a child. Growing up amid the swirl of languages, newspapers, and competing ideologies of fin-de-siecle Vienna, he absorbed the citys tensions as well as its brilliance. He attended the University of Vienna, beginning studies in law and then in the humanities, but he left without taking a degree. The absence of formal credentials mattered little; he had already discovered the arena in which he would make his name: the public sphere of pamphlet, polemic, and performance. Early attempts as an actor and critic brought him into contact with the circle known as Jung-Wien, including Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Hermann Bahr. His disillusionment with what he saw as their complacent aestheticism sparked one of his formative gestures: a ferocious break with the group and a lifelong suspicion of literary fashion.

Vienna and the Birth of Die Fackel
In 1899 Kraus founded Die Fackel (The Torch), a slender red-covered journal that quickly became the principal vehicle for his criticism and satire. Over time he wrote most of it himself, and from 1911 onward he was almost its sole author, responsible for every line of its essays, aphorisms, dialogues, and dramatic fragments. Die Fackel practiced a new kind of cultural criticism, one that read politics through language and exposed how routine phrases in headlines, advertisements, stock-market chatter, and courtroom reports helped normalize injustice. Kraus made the Viennese press his prime target, especially the newspaper Neue Freie Presse and its editor Moritz Benedikt, whose mixture of grandstanding and moralizing he considered emblematic of a corrupted public sphere. He also attacked the style of the popular mayor Karl Lueger, seeing in it the dangerous blend of populism and prejudice to which modern cities were prone.

Polemicist and Cultural Critic
Kraus wrote as a satirist with a jurists precision, fixing on grating locutions, cliches, and euphemisms. He believed that linguistic decay was not a symptom but a cause of social decay. His aphorisms, later collected in volumes such as Spruche und Widerspruche, made him famous across the German-speaking world. He admired the sharp urban comedies of Johann Nestroy and edited and championed Nestroy at a time when serious critics had neglected him; through this work Kraus helped define a specifically Viennese tradition of stage satire. Public quarrels were part of his method. He feuded with the theater critic Alfred Kerr, reproached Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and ridiculed fashionable psychology when it slid into jargon. In architecture and the applied arts he found allies in figures like Adolf Loos, whose attacks on ornament and cant resonated with Krauss insistence on clarity. Among his literary contemporaries in Vienna he moved, argued, and sometimes reconciled, notably with Peter Altenberg, whose fragile, impressionistic miniatures he respected even as he kept his distance from the literary salon.

War, Satire, and The Last Days of Mankind
The First World War radicalized Krauss critique. From the first months he pounced on the jubilant tone of editorials, the patriotic poetry, and the confident lies of official communiques. His massive antiwar drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), published in the early 1920s, assembled headlines, speeches, soldier talk, and bureaucratic prose into an epic of the home front and the front line. It is a play written to be unstageable in full, a documentary nightmare whose characters include generals, profiteers, and the ordinary Viennese trying to find bread. Its voice is choral and archival, yet unmistakably Krauss: distrustful of sentiment, allergic to propaganda, obsessed with accuracy of quotation and citation. The work consolidated his reputation as the most relentless conscience of wartime Vienna.

Performances and Voice
Kraus became a phenomenon as a reader. He toured with his texts and with works by Nestroy and other writers, filling halls in Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Zurich. Eyewitnesses remembered the precision of his diction and the way he could shift character with a pause or an inflection. These evenings were central to his reputation and to the life of Die Fackel. They also shaped younger writers and thinkers who listened closely. Elias Canetti later recalled in memoirs how Krauss readings taught him to hear the moral stakes in a sentence; Walter Benjamin studied Krauss prose and wrote an essay on him, fascinated by the way satire could be documentary without losing its sting.

Relationships and Circles
At the center of Krauss private life stood Sidonie Nadherna von Borutin, an aristocrat from Bohemia whose long relationship with him, sustained by letters and visits, provided companionship and intensity through years of public tumult. The friendship and sometime alliance with Adolf Loos gave him an architectural and urban counterpart to his campaign against kitsch language. In the broader world of Viennese modernism he crossed paths with Arnold Schoenberg, Oskar Kokoschka, and many others, though Kraus remained wary of movements and manifestos; he insisted on being a party of one. His quarrels with influential journalists and theater directors, including Alfred Kerr and sometimes Max Reinhardt, had less to do with programs than with standards: Kraus abhorred slogans and the softening effect of compromise.

Religion, Politics, and the 1930s
Kraus was born into a Jewish family, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911, and formally left the Church in 1923. These steps were less a journey of piety than a critique of social identities as they were wielded in Vienna. He could be scathing about Zionist rhetoric and equally scathing about anti-Semitic agitation in the Christian Social camp; in both he heard abuses of language conflated with abuses of power. In the 1930s, as authoritarian and fascist forces gathered strength, he confronted a new register of threat. He issued a brief, bitter line about having nothing to say about Hitler, a provocation that some took for silence. But his book-length polemic Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, written in 1933, attacked the new regime with ferocity. Fearing seizure and retaliation, he did not publish it openly; it circulated in limited form and appeared publicly only after his death. The episode epitomized his final years: an absolute refusal to make peace with the bully rhetoric of the age, paired with grim knowledge of what that rhetoric could enable.

Style, Method, and Legal Battles
Krauss method relied on quotation, montage, and a prosecutorial sense of evidence. He compiled dossiers, followed court cases, and turned the courtroom into a stage on which he could argue for the ethical weight of syntax and punctuation. He sued and was sued, often successfully defending himself by showing that his most outrageous charges were, in literal terms, summaries of what the press had itself printed. He celebrated economy in prose and cataloged the ways words got bent out of shape. To his admirers, he was the conscience of the metropolis; to his enemies, a scold and a threat. He wore both roles with the certainty of a man who trusted the sentence as a moral instrument.

Later Years and Death
After the war and through the 1920s, Kraus kept Die Fackel alive, occasionally pausing publication when circumstances or the political climate made printing untenable. He continued to give readings and to refine his collected writings. Though his name was sometimes overshadowed by flashier modernists, he remained a touchstone for younger intellectuals who sought a rigorous standard for public language. He died in Vienna in 1936, having witnessed both the splendor and the breakdown of the culture that had formed him.

Legacy
Karl Kraus left behind a model of criticism that has rarely been matched: a critique grounded in the forensic reading of newspapers and the belief that public life can be judged by the words used to describe it. Die Fackel stands as a record of Vienna in its most creative and most catastrophic decades, and The Last Days of Mankind remains one of the twentieth centurys strangest and truest plays about war. His influence runs through the testimony of listeners like Elias Canetti, through the essays of Walter Benjamin, and through every later writer who has tried to hold journalism, advertising, and political speech to account. That influence is audible not as a doctrine but as a tone: exacting, sardonic, and convinced that a civilization is legible in its smallest phrases. In the company he kept and the enemies he made, in his devotion to Nestroy and in his bond with Sidonie Nadherna, the figure of Kraus emerges as at once solitary and surrounded, an artist who made scrutiny itself into an art.

Our collection contains 46 quotes who is written by Karl, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

• 1922 Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Play)
• 1899 Die Fackel (Collection)