In this second volume of Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, Edward Timms takes up Kraus’s story in November 1918, when the satirist responded to the creation of the new republics with a defiant hope, invoking international law against the dual threat of reactionary politics and irresponsible media. While contemporaries like Walter Benjamin regarded Kraus as heroically isolated, this book places him within a dynamic field of cultural production. Timms highlights the court cases Kraus pursued with his lawyer Oskar Samek and the theatrical projects that earned him Brecht’s friendship.In the final section of the book, the author refutes the legend that Kraus responded with stunned silence to Hitler’s seizure of power. His career culminated in Third Walpurgis Night, an analysis of Nazi ideology that has proved enduringly influential. Timms concludes that Kraus’s lifelong critique of the media, combining Orwell’s political radicalism with Joyce’s linguistic playfulness, incisively anticipates the propaganda techniques of our own age.

Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist : Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna

Literature & Fiction

Timms, Edward

Humor & Satire

Yale Univ Pr

A fascinating study of the life and work of Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist whose critiques of the mass media, the military-industrial complex, and technology running out of control have earned him a following fifty years after his death. Drawing on unfamiliar sources, Edward Timms analyzes Kraus's involvement in fundamental ideological issues of his time, such as psychoanalysis, social morality, design and architecture, the role of the artist, Zionism, anti-semitism, and war, and shows that Kraus' political position―caught between traditional Habsburg loyalties and new democratic commitments―was far more complex than has previously been suspected. "Dr. Timms' book is a major landmark in Kraus' studies, and an important contribution to our understanding of the culture of the early 20th century. It abounds in discoveries and insights."―W.E. Yeats, Times Literary Supplement  "Timm's lucid prose, his masterly organization of the voluminous  material he treats, his excellent translations of the documents he cites and his broad, readable portrayal of Viennese fin-de-siecle culture make this study accessible to the average reader and a pleasure for the literary professional. . . . An example of German studies at its best."―James Knowlton, European Studies Journal "Timms successfully weaves a colorful, and thoroughly researched and documented, account of essential cultural currents in Habsburg Vienna around his central figure. Copious illustrations and photographs enhance a most enjoyable text, making this an ideal introduction to Kraus and his work."―Choice

Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna

Yale University Press

Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, Volume 2: The Postwar Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

In this second volume of Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, Edward Timms takes up Kraus’s story in November 1918, when the satirist responded to the creation of the new republics with a defiant hope, invoking international law against the dual threat of reactionary politics and irresponsible media. While contemporaries like Walter Benjamin regarded Kraus as heroically isolated, this book places him within a dynamic field of cultural production. Timms highlights the court cases Kraus pursued with his lawyer Oskar Samek and the theatrical projects that earned him Brecht’s friendship.
In the final section of the book, the author refutes the legend that Kraus responded with stunned silence to Hitler’s seizure of power. His career culminated in Third Walpurgis Night, an analysis of Nazi ideology that has proved enduringly influential. Timms concludes that Kraus’s lifelong critique of the media, combining Orwell’s political radicalism with Joyce’s linguistic playfulness, incisively anticipates the propaganda techniques of our own age.

Arts & Literature

Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word &amp; Image.

Arts & Photography

Schultz, Deborah

History & Criticism

Routledge

Visions and Blueprints

History

Manchester Univ Pr

Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art

Kelley,David

Manchester University Press

Suggesting that Freud's version of the history of psychoanalysis has triumphed by default, this book presents what aims to be a more balanced view, taking account of the ideas of his dissenting followers and forgotten adversaries. Articles by a number of contributors are included in this volume addressing subjects such as the late 19th-century debate about racial identity. It shows how biological concepts of race became transformed into psychological categories. For Freud and his fellow analysts, being "Jewish" meant participating in a shared set of intellectual and emotional attitudes. The problem for psychoanalysts, as for ethnopsychologists like Lazarus and Steinthal, was how to separate the psyche from the body. The problem was compounded by turn-of-the century debates which associated Jewishness with femininity - with the female body. Freud never entirely resolved the difficulties arising from this rhetoric of race, which had a distorting effect on his conceptions of gender. Attitudes towards Jewishness and femininity are explored from another angle in a commentary, drawn from a small number of Freud's letters to his fiancee, which reconstructs some of the patterns underlying Freud's choice of wife. Further articles deal with the reactions of Viennese feminists during Freud's lifetime; Otto Rank; the divergent responses of literary authors to psychoanalysis; and further exploration of the cultural context of psychoanalysis. Each volume of "Austrian Studies" is designed to make the results of specialist research more accessible through a range of book reviews, as well as to offer a close focus on one specific field.

Psychoanalysis in Its Cultural Context (Austrian Studies)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Edinburgh Univ Pr

Taking up the Torch is an unusual, autobiographical narrative that successfully combines subjectivity (how an English person was led by a sequence of educational developments, personal encounters, and historical constraints to become the founder of the German-Jewish Center at the University of Sussex) and objectivity (a book that introduces English and American readers to the important and evolving fields of historical and cultural studies). This autobiography documents the formative experiences of a scholar who was to become a pioneering teacher and researcher in the field of German culture and politics. The aim is to relate the shaping of self to the drift of history in a period of radical social change, extending from the refugee crisis caused by Hitler's seizure of power through the ordeals of the Second World War to post-war reconstruction, and the transformation of Britain into a modern multicultural society. The focus is on the formative role of institutions: a vicarage childhood, Anglican schooling, Cambridge and other university environments, and especially the academic direction taken at Sussex University in the 1960s. The 'Torch' in the title alludes to the transmission of a radical intellectual tradition and to a specific commitment to the study of Die Fackel, the satirical journal edited by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 to 1936. From this emerged the innovative agenda developed by the Center for German-Jewish Studies. "This autobiography ranges from the very personal to intellectual achievement and discovery. In recommending it to the general reader, as well as the academic specialist, one recalls Thomas Carlyle's words: "A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one" and Timms is to be admired on both counts." H-Net Reviews, Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online. www.h-net.org/reviews/

Taking Up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multi-Cultural Commitments

Community & Culture

Liverpool University Press

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