The Last Days of Mankind ― A Visual Guide to Karl Kraus' Great War Epic

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus’.
– Bertolt Brecht

With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl (b. 1974) has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus’ nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915–22). Featuring Sengl’s entire installation, the DoppelHouse Press edition also includes essays that examine her ambitious dramaturgy, which condenses Kraus’ ten-to-fifteen hour drama into an abridged reading of its themes: human barbarism, the role of journalism in war, the sway of popular opinion and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus’ original provide a window to see his other “war” — a war on the misuses of language itself.

Published in conjunction with the centenary anniversary of the Armistice, which ended The Great War but bred another soon to come, this edition of The Last Days of Mankind offers an agit-prop protest crossing the boundaries of art and spanning the knowledge of the century that has passed since Kraus penned his play. Deborah Sengl offers her stylistic model for envisioning human folly through animal actors, who become more than human, while confronting a violence particular to humankind, laced with selfishness and greed.

Contributors include modernist poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff (The Edge of Irony, University of Chicago Press 2015); arts writer Matthias Goldmann; Paul Reitter (editor/contributor to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Harper, 2013); and Associate Professor of German, Anna Souchuk.

Dr. Anna Souchuk is both Associate Professor of German and German Program Director in DePaul's Department of Modern Languages. She received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2008, with a dissertation on constructions of place in the novels of Elfriede Jelinek, Josef Haslinger, and Robert Menasse. Since then, her research has concentrated largely on the collected works of Josef Haslinger and his depictions of families in relation to Austrian Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (coming to terms with the past), though Dr. Souchuk has also written on other Austrian writers and artists, such as Linda Stift and the filmmaker Markus Schleinzer. Her research has been presented widely in panels on Kinship, Family, and Memory at the yearly Conferences of the German Studies Association and Austrian Studies Association (the leading conferences in the fields of German and Austrian Studies in the U.S.), along with the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association. She is currently co-editing a book project on the family novel in German(ic) literature, which draws on her own interests in the generational transmission of the family story as an emblem of problematic Austrian Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, while exploring the recent increase in popularity of so-called Familienromane (family novels) in German-language literature.