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Other authors named Karl:
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Author's popularity: 2
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Popularity: 0
Vote: | A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children? |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. ClichTs walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | This is something that I cannot get over - that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. |
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Biography
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Karl Kraus (April 28, 1874 - June 12, 1936) was an eminent Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, and poet. He is generally considered one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century.
Kraus was born into a Jewish family of Jacob Kraus, a papermaker, and his wife Ernestine, née Kantor, in Jičín, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The family moved to Vienna, Austria in 1877. Kraus enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna, where he also studied philosophy and German literature (1894-1896).
In 1896 he left university without a diploma to begin work as an actor, stage-director and performer, joining the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) group, which included Peter Altenberg, Leopold Andrian, Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Dörmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Felix Salten. In 1897, however, Kraus broke from this group with a biting satire Die demolirte Literatur [Demolished Literature], and was named Vienna correspondent for the newspaper Breslauer Zeitung. One year later, as an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation, he attacked the Zionist Theodor Herzl with his polemic Eine Krone für Zion [A Crown for Zion] (1898).
On April 1, 1899, he renounced Judaism and in the same year founded his own newspaper, Die Fackel ("The Torch"), which he continued to direct, publish, and write until his death, and from which he launched his attacks on hypocrisy, psychoanalysis, corruption of the Habsburg empire, nationalism of the pan-German movement, laissez-faire economic policies, and numerous other bêtes noires. In its first decade, contributors included many well-known writers and artists such as Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Egon Friedell, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schönberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, and Oscar Wilde. After 1911, however, Kraus was sole author except for a few pieces by Strindberg.
In addition to his writings, Kraus gave numerous public readings during his career - between 1892 and 1936 he put on approximately 700 one-man performances, reading from the dramas of Bertolt Brecht, Gerhart Hauptmann, Johann Nestroy, Goethe, and Shakespeare, and also performing Offenbach's operettas, accompanied by piano and singing all the roles himself. He irritated Sigmund Freud, who in 1910 wrote to a friend 'he is a mad half-wit'.
Kraus never married, but from 1913 until his death, he had a close relationship with the Baroness Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin (1885-1950). In 1911 he was baptized as a Catholic, but in 1923 he left the Catholic Church.
Selected works * Die demolierte Literatur [Demolished Literature] (1897)
* Eine Krone für Zion" [A Crown for Zion] (1898)
* Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität [Morality and Crimical Justice] (1908)
* Sprüche und Widersprüche [Sayings and Contradictions] (1909)
* Die chinesische Mauer (1910)
* Pro domo et mundo [For Home and for the World] (1912)
* Nestroy und die Nachtwelt (1913)
* Worte in Versen (1916-30)
* Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1918)
* Weltgericht (1919)
* Nachts [At Night] (1919)
* Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie [The End of the World Through Black Magic](1922)
* Literatur (1921)
* Traumstück (1922)
* Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragädie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog [The Last Days of Mankind: Tragedy in Five Acts with Preamble and Epilogue] (1922)
* Wolkenkuckucksheim (1923)
* Traumtheater (1924)
* Die Unüberwindlichen (1927)
* Epigramme (1927)
* Die Unüberwindlichen (1928)
* Literatur und Lüge (1929)
* Shakespeares Sonette (1933)
* Die Sprache (posthumous, 1937)
* Die dritte Walpurgisnacht [The Third Night of St. Walpurgis] (posthumous, 1952)
Some work has been re-issued in recent years:
* Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Bühnenfassung des Autors, 1992 Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-22091-8
* Die Sprache, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37817-1
* Die chinesische Mauer, mit acht Illustrationen von Oskar Kokoschka, 1999, Insel, ISBN 3-458-19199-2
* Aphorismen. Sprüche und Widersprüche. Pro domo et mundo. Nachts, 1986, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37818-X
* Sittlichkeit und Krimininalität, 1987, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37811-2
* Dramen. Literatur, Traumstück, Die unüberwindlichen u.a., 1989, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37821-X
* Literatur und Lüge, 1999, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37813-9
* Shakespeares Sonette, Nachdichtung, 1977, Diogenes, ISBN 3-257-20381-0
* Theater der Dichtung mit Bearbeitungen von Shakespeare-Dramen, Suhrkamp 1994, ISBN 3-518-37825-2
* Hüben und Drüben, 1993, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37828-7
* Die Stunde des Gerichts, 1992, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37827-9
* Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, 1989, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37814-7
* Brot und Lüge, 1991, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37826-0
* Die Katastrophe der Phrasen, 1994, Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-37829-5
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Karl Kraus".
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