Carefully selected by Hans Wollschläger: Karl Kraus’s best texts as published in »Die Fackel«.
What would he have to say to us today? On the brutalization of language in social networks, on the rhetoric of the New Right? Could he think of anything to say about the active »anti-fascism« of Vladimir Putin? Karl Kraus was born 150 years ago in Jitschin, eastern Bohemia. In his magazine »Die Fackel«, which was published for 37 years from 1899 onwards, he passionately and tirelessly confronted the disgraces of his time. With furor, anger, and wit that was second to none.
This fearless and non-partisan revolutionary still has much to say to us today with his tireless fight against injustice and hypocrisy, double standards and war mongers and, not least, cant. What does it mean to have a social conscience? Why is accuracy in language important? And why are the phrase and the matter one? Karl Kraus can now be rediscovered through Hans Wollschläger‘s reader: In a cross-section of one hundred selected texts, the best of 23.000 printed pages of the »Fackel«, for the first time in the original text form.
Karl Kraus (1874–1936), was the editor and almost sole author of the »Fackel« and one of the most revered and at the same time most hated critics of his time.
Hans Wollschläger (1935–2007), was a translator (of James Joyce‘s »Ulysses«, amongst other works), writer, historian, religious critic, rhetorician, essayist and literary historian. Throughout his lifetime, he received many awards.
