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“... retracing its argument from Goethe through Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt to Rilke, Spengler, Karl Kraus and Kafka: and concluded by commending the book to ‘everyone who cares for the survival of literature and of human values. The condition it describes is our condition, and I can think of no other modern book in which it is described so ...”

“... funny: his opening quip, ‘Krupp makes only cannons, Mahler only symphonies,’ has the touch of Karl Kraus. He also gives an early, sceptical perspective on the Mahler legend as it was gestating among the young people of Vienna. After a predictable assault on the material of the Sixth, he meditates interestingly on the spirit behind the music: The ...”

“... proto-Nazi circles was Bloch’s introductory and style-defining essay ‘Rettung Wagners durch Karl May’(Rescue of Wagner through Karl May), which was included in the 1974 anthology under the later title ‘Rettung Wagners durch surrealistische Kolportage’ (Rescueof Wagner through Surrealistic Penny ...”

“... artists, in the 1930s. Carey’s populism sees only gentle Wellsian cyclists, not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they ...”

“... i.e. more often than not the focus of murderous aggression. ‘Some women are not beautiful,’ Karl Kraus wrote: ‘they just look as though they are.’ And so on and on and on. When misogyny isn’t horrifying or dispiriting, it is unrelentingly boring. Everybody loves and hates the people they most depend on; traditionally, it was a woman, though ...”

“... Feuilletons were brief sketches, sometimes arguments but often exquisite descriptive snatches. Karl Kraus was an earlier master of the form; in the Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s ...”

“... with German letters. We tend to forget that this was once so. German was the gateway to modernity. Karl-Emil Franzos’s story ‘Schiller in Barnow’, written on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Schiller, the classical voice of moral and political freedom for common readers of German in the 19th century, illustrates this wonderfully well. In the ...”

“... during the World Cup under normal circumstances, would have gone beyond the darkest reveries of Karl Kraus. Imagine the editorials. Imagine the diagrams. The Sun would have had a daily feature called ‘Nadwatch’.12 June. I was slightly surprised to learn that Australia is richer than Japan, in terms of GDP per capita. The reason I was looking it up ...”

“... realities of the Wilhelmine state, was not so promising as that of Vienna (the figure of Karl Kraus haunts these letters), let alone that of Paris, which for these intellectuals – like most other Western ones – remains the ideal: Benjamin’s approach to this centre of destiny (with which only a few foreigners could hope to be intimately ...”

“... more satire than it needed. This suspicion is not necessarily dispelled by an extended study of Karl Kraus, who in my experience becomes more disheartening as you read on through Die Fackel and its attendant works. His aggressive sensitivity to journalistic and political clichés – a critical propensity of which Humphries is a latterday incarnation ...”

“... process of writing his novel. But the greatest formative influence in Vienna at that time was Karl Kraus, the extraordinary nature of whose achievement – partly because it was histrionic, acted out in his recitals – can probably never be adequately presented to an Anglo-Saxon readership. Indeed, it would probably not be too much to say that Auto ...”

“... and works as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind). They all, Winter argues, ‘turned back to the ancient tradition of apocalyptic drama’. Even the English war poets, usually Exhibit A for Hynes and Fussell’s position, are read for their historical embeddedness ...”

“... but it buys you a better class of enemy (the aphorism, originally applied to money, has a ring of Karl Kraus but is Spike Milligan’s). Bennett had been dead for five years when Cape announced the imminent appearance of The Roaring Queen in 1936, but there was enough disobliging matter elsewhere in the book to alarm the publishers, and it didn’t reach ...”

“... citational strategies of mimetic satire and impersonation anticipate those of Flaubert … of Karl Kraus … of Walter Benjamin.’ There’s only one text I thought it might arguably anticipate, but it doesn’t get a namecheck: William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (a work also assembled in fragments by a sick and addicted man via a kind of performed ...”

“... more impossibilia, less and less consolation – left his followers orphaned from his meanings. Karl Kraus was alert to this, and to Freud as unmistakably a Viennese phenomenon. Freud’s cultural outlook may or may not have been as insular as we are told, with his indifference to contemporary developments, but the air of valediction places him ...”