Full Description
The Great War drama by Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, restaged by Sengl in "stunning display" of taxidermied rat-actors, with commentary.
When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus'.
- Bertolt Brecht
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - TOP 10 IN ART, ARCHITECTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY, Fall 2018
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.
Contents
Deborah Sengl's Karl Kraus
Marjorie Perloff
The Mousetrap
The Turn to Abstraction
Representation
"The Document Is a Figure"
Matthias Goldmann
Conversion of Horror into Words
Operetta Figures Play out the Tragedy of Mankind
Come Forward and Be Silent
Masks of the Tragic Carnival
Flesh for Blood and Blood for Ink
The Word Died
Trench Rats
Anna C. Souchuk
Miniatures
Taxidermy and Tableau: An Invitation to Look at Animals
Metaphorical Animals: The Role of Rats in the Stories Humans Tell
The Last Days of Mankind [installation images and excerpts from Karl Kraus' play]
Deborah Sengl
Afterword
Paul Reitter
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
