Why do I do things? My head is filled of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuff right now, so I feel like Zaphod when he realizes he’s locked off part of his brains from himself. But, instead of stealing space ships, I’m like why did I request a six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s to read? What possessed me to do that? At least I managed to request it in English and didn’t get six hundred pages of Austrian-German vernacular when my German skills are roughly on par with reading books in German that have one noun per page, i.e. Katze (underneath picture of cat), Hund (underneath picture of dog), etc.
So why do I do things? I don’t know.
So I spent the past week reading my six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s. I read an act a day, plus the intro and the glossary at the back. I have an epub and there doesn’t seem to be any clever way of getting back and forth between the glossary and the play itself (am I missing something on my kobo or is it really just not possible to do this simply), so I simply read the glossary after finishing the play. That was no real problem. Likely I missed a lot of the specific political jokes, but I don’t feel like I was really missing that much. Most of what the play says is this: the war benefits the rich, manipulates the press, and sends the poor to their deaths. So lots of fat men bemoaning a lack of butter while war amputees wander about in the foreground. About five hundred pages of this reiterated, then a descent into a Boschian bacchanal of talking hyenas and Martians. I seem to read a lot of books where aliens suddenly appear. Do I have some subliminal interest in surprise aliens? I’ll add that question to the why do I do things one.
Basically The Last Days of Mankind is an unperformable play. There are stage directions such as continue for two hours and I think something like forty googol characters. I don’t even know how one would stage certain parts, although I guess projecting film on a screen behind might solve that problem. I couldn’t help thinking that if one is going to write an unperformable play, why not recast it as a novel? I guess art comes to the artist as it comes, but essentially, long soliloquies in the play are taken from newspaper articles of the time, so there are pages and pages that already reads less like a play and more like a creative non-fiction essay. But it’s a play. So a play it is.
I know I’m sounding really down on The Last Days of Mankind, but it ends up transcending a lot of my complaints (not the one about surprise aliens though). I gave it four stars out of five. It’s surprisingly prescient for a play from the 1920s. There’s the foreshadowing of Nazis with the casual antisemitism (although Kraus was ethnically Jewish, so it isn’t necessarily his antisemitism, more a comment on the antisemitism of the time). There’s a harsh critique of globalisation. The Grumbler, Kraus himself inserted into his own play, has media critiques that would fit into any modern issue of AdBusters. It’s surprisingly readable, in part due to Kraus and in part due to the translation, which has been, as the translators explain, modernized for an English speaking audience. But it is long, and it hits many of the same points again and again: War is Hell, in a democracy we are all complicit, and those who profit from it aim to keep it going for as long as they can. I don’t know if I needed six hundred pages to hammer that point home.
And Martians.
The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, newly translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms went on sale November 24, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.