The Last Days of Mankind – A Visual Guide to Karl Kraus’ Great War Epic

Artwork by Deborah Sengl   
Contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Matthias Goldmann, Anna Souchuk and Paul Reitter  

"Sengl expressly states that she is not in a position to offer a quick solution for all the injustices of our times. But her works urge us to cast a more open and more empathic view of our environment, and that would already be a very commendable first step."–Acid Rain

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

"No folly, no mendacity is exempt from Kraus’ gaze."–Marjorie Perloff

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, war profiteering, the role of journalism in war, and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus’ original excerpted from the edition by Bridgham and Timms (Yale University Press, 2015) provide a window to see Kraus’ humor as well as 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, literature and history 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 professor of German Languages and Literatures, Anna Souchuk.

Hardcover
176 pages | fully illustrated in color
DoppelHouse Press, 2018 
The Last Days of Mankind was originally published in 1918
8.25 x 8.25 inches
ISBN 9780999754412
Conceptual Arts, Historical Literature