Timms: ∗karl Kraus∗: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture & Catastrophe In Hasburg Vienna (cloth): Apocalyptic Satirist - Culture and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna - Hardcover

TIMMS

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300036116 ISBN 13: 9780300036114

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1986

Synopsis

The focus of the first volume of 'Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist' was on the cataclysmic final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This book takes up the 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 such as Walter Benjamin regarded Kraus as a heroically isolated figure, this book places him within a dynamic field of cultural production, highlighting the court cases he pursued with his lawyer Oskar Samek and the theatrical projects that earned him the friendship of Bertholt Brecht. The legend that the satirist responded to Hitler's seizure of power with stunned silence is refuted in the final section of the book, 'Into the Third Reich', which highlights his analysis of 'creeping fascism' and of the swastika as the 'twisted cross' of politicised religiosity. His career culminated in 'Dritte Walpurgisnacht', an analysis of Nazi ideology that has proved enduringly influential. Timms argues 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. 'Edward Timms meticulously interprets this major writer's most complex period of literary, cultural and political activity, providing what amounts to an entire cultural history of the period.' Professor Gilbert Carr, Trinity College Dublin Edward Timms is Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex and a Life Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He has a special interest in Austrian-Jewish cultural history and is best known for his earlier volume 'Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna' (1986). In 2002 he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for History of the Social Sciences and in 2005 he was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship.

About this title

Review

'...Timms has completed his magnum opus...In delineating Kraus's world with such masterly care, he has illuminated a whole society'. -- Nigel Jones, Literary Review, December/January 2005/6

'...a considerable achievement...His command of his subject's subtle and allusive prose is impressive.' -- Joe Bord, The Jewish Chronicle, 20th January 2006

'...not only a magisterial exploration of the entire interwar period, but a monument of scrupulous yet deeply engaged scholarship.' -- Times Literary Supplement, December 2005

About the Author

Edward Timms is Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He has a special interest in Austrian Jewish cultural history and is best known for volume one of Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (ISBN 030004483 6, paperback). In 2002 he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for History of the Social Sciences.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0300036116
• ISBN 13: 9780300036114
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352