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The Last Days of Mankind

The Last Days of Mankind

Last updated on: October 26, 2018 at 12:38 am by Philip Jenkins

The Last Days of Mankind 2018-10-24T19:50:30-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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We are presently commemorating the centennial of the end of the First World War, and , that year of 1918 proved to be a moment of apocalyptic expectations around the world. Really unexpected and normally secular-minded authors were using extraordinary messianic and millenarian ideas, many of which would be appropriated by rising political movements of all shades. Among others, I have written about Aleksandr Blok and W. B. Yeats, and also the 1920 blockbuster film of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but here I’ll discuss a very significant Modernist writer who is little known in the English-speaking world, namely Karl Kraus (1874-1936).

Kraus was a Vienna-based journalist and editor best known for his controversial magazine Die Fackel (Torch), and during the war years he became ever more disenchanted with the war effort, and the whole idea of a national or imperial cause. He despised the ruling Habsburg dynasty. His fury poured forth in the sprawling play The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) which he began in 1915 and which was eventually published in 1920. To apply a much over-used phrase, it is like nothing you have ever read before. An excellent recent English translation by Patrick Healy runs to over six hundred pages, and performing the whole play on stage would take ten lengthy nights: there are five hundred characters. To quote Niall Ferguson, “Name one other play that requires 1,200 horses to trot out of the sea in the wake of a singing flame-thrower.” Kraus himself proposed that his play should properly be performed on Mars.

The play is very radical and innovative in its style and its wildly creative use of language. It often recalls Joyce’s Ulysses or John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, and it deeply influenced the more celebrated works of Bertolt Brecht. (Brecht’s Mother Courage would not be written until 1939). Ferguson calls Last Days “certainly the greatest dramatic satire of the 20th century. I would go so far as to call it the greatest drama.”

But if you are not likely to see an actual production in the near future (or ever), you certainly can read The Last Days, and it is hugely rewarding. The work deals with many themes that sound familiar today, especially the role of mass media in distorting truth, and serving the crass self-interest of governments and lying politicians. Every line of the play touches on the idea of propaganda and, to use a modern-day cliché, of fake news. As Kraus asked, “How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists, and believe these lies when they see them in print.” To quote a publisher’s description,

In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

Ultimately, the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost at least 1.2 million dead in the war, more than the whole British Empire.

As an Austrian, Kraus was appalled to see his country increasingly drawn into a subservient and near-colonial relationship to that German Empire. He offers a devastating vision of German nationalist activism and its propagandist media allies, and we often recognize the emergence of ideas that would become standard in the Nazi era. (Remember, this was all written before 1920). Kraus himself claimed to be free of racial or nationalist bias: he just hated stupid people, regardless of their race, creed, or ethnic origin. The more you know about the political and military issues of the war, the more you appreciate the play’s incisive commentary. There is absolutely nothing like it in the English-speaking world.

But here, let me focus on the religious and apocalyptic aspects. Kraus himself was a very secular Jew with no particular religious interest or commitment, and he rejected Zionism in favor of total Jewish assimilation. He loathed the role of religious institutions in supporting the war, and justifying its horrors. German Protestant clergy come in for particular attack on this count, and we hear such sentiments as “This war is punishment sent by God for the sins of the people, and we Germans and our allies are the executioners of the divine judgment.” Another fictional cleric proclaims that “Wars are the supreme tribunal and divine judgment in universal history. That’s why it’s God’s will that all people in this war make full use of all means and weapons he has made available to them in order to bring justice to the people.” Incidentally, every word here credited to German pastors is either a direct quote from an actual statement, or a very near adaptation of one.

Yet in describing the war years, and especially as move towards 1918, Kraus can hardly avoid drawing on religious imagery and ideas. If in 1918 you were not speaking the language of the Apocalypse – of famine, plague, death and war – you can’t have been reading the newspapers. Just look at the title – The Last Days of Mankind (Humanity). This impression becomes very strong in the play’s fifth Act, which focuses on 1918, and which is littered with apocalyptic images. City streets are lined with the wounded, the dead and the living dead, in a hellish vision straight from Dante. Starvation is everywhere. Characters describe unimaginable atrocities committed by themselves and by their own armies. As in the Book of Revelation, Kraus’s world is overwhelmed by systematic deception and Satanic illusion, from which it will only be set free by a mighty act of Judgment.

The use of Revelation becomes increasingly explicit, especially in a lengthy monologue by the key character of the Nörgler, the Grumbler (Act V, scene 54). He describes the Four Horsemen galloping across the German Empire, and warns of various prophetic figures, including the Beast, and “the Whore of Babylon, who persuaded us in all the tongues of the world that we were each other’s enemy and that there should be war!” Kraus even introduces as characters the giants Gog and Magog, here represented as two indescribably enormous spheres of talking fat, who parrot German propaganda slogans.

A magnificent Epilogue ends with supernatural voices becoming ever more evident, both from above and below – the spirits beneath God’s throne, and those direct from Hell. In an act of supreme Judgment, they agree to suppress the vicious planet on which such ghastly evil has spring forth. Humanity is to be exterminated for allowing the horrors that have so poisoned the Creation. These really and literally are to be the last days of humanity. And then the concluding Voices from Above:

A perfect storm. The night was mad.

God’s image died a gruesome death!

The final words are given to God himself:

I never wanted that (Ich habe es nicht gewollt).

One quibble about translation. If God is the speaker, would it not be more natural to say “I did not will that”? In either case, that is God’s response to years of propaganda screams about righteous and holy war.

Once again, I have no hesitation in claiming 1918 as a year of special fascination with the Apocalypse, and in surprisingly Christian forms.

The Last Days of Mankind

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