seitens der Städte.. WIEN: Karl Kraus

WIEN 2008
Kino:G.Ludovice


Karl Kraus

(28 de Abril de 1874 - 12 de Junho de 1936) foi um escritor e jornalista austríaco eminente, conhecido como um satirísta, ensaísta, aforísta, e poeta. É considerado geralmente um dos maiores satiristas da língua alemã do século XX, especialmente pelo seu criticismo à imprensa da cultura alemã, da política da Alemanha e Austríaca.

Kraus nasceu no seio de uma família Judia rica cujo pai Jacob Kraus, um fabricante de papel, e sua esposa Ernestine, née Kantor, em Gitschin, Boémia (agora Jičín na república Czech).
A família foi para Viena em 1877 e sua mãe morreu em 1891. Kraus matriculou-se como estudante de Direito na Universidade de Viena em 1892. Em Abril do mesmo ano começou a contribuir para o jornal, Wiener Literaturzeitung, começando com uma crítica a Gerhart Hauptmann die Weber. Nesse tempo, tentou sem sucesso, vida como actor num pequeno teatro. Em 1894 mudou seu campo de estudos à Filosofia e à literatura alemã. Interrompeu seus estudos em 1896. A sua ligação e amizade a Peter Altenberg vem desse tempo.
Karl Kraus foi um assunto da maior controvérsia durante toda a sua vida. Tal se deve à indubitável consciência da sua própria importância. Esta imagem não era de todo completamente infundada: aqueles que o observavam nos seus desempenhos ficavam fascinados com a sua personalidade. Viam nele espécie de autoridade infalível e, alguém que faria também qualquer coisa para retribuir ou ajudar aqueles que o apoiavam. Não obstante, fez também numerosos inimigos, devido ao seu carácter inflexível.

Retrato de Kraus, pintado por Kokoschka

Some Quotations
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
When someone behaves like a beast, he says: 'After all, one is only human.' But when he is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, one is human.'
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.
The real truths are those that can be invented.
You don't even live once.
The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.
To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to man, not to other dogs.
Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.
Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor that just wanted to see what it was like in there.
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.
Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.
No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time.
Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.
To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden.

Escrita
Die demolirte 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 [The Wall of China] (1910)
Pro domo et mundo [For Home and for the World] (1912)
Nestroy und die Nachwelt [ Nestroy and Posterity](1913)
Worte in Versen (1916-30)
Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1918)
Weltgericht [World Court] (1919)
Nachts [At Night] (1919)
Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie [The End of the World Through Black Magic](1922)
Literatur (1921)
Traumstück [Dream Piece] (1922)
Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog [The Last Days of Mankind: Tragedy in Five Acts with Preamble and Epilogue] (1922)
Wolkenkuckucksheim [Cloud Cuckoo Land] (1923)
Traumtheater [Dream Theatre] (1924)
Die Unüberwindlichen (1927)
Epigramme [Epigrams] (1927)
Die Unüberwindlichen [The Insurmountables] (1928)
Literatur und Lüge [Literature and Lies] (1929)
Shakespeares Sonette (1933)
Die Sprache [Language] (posthumous, 1937)
Die dritte Walpurgisnacht [The Third Walpurgis Night] (posthumous, 1952)
Alguns trabalhos recentemente editados
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
Trabalhos traduzidos em inglês
The Last Days of Mankind: a Tragedy in Five Acts (1974), an abridgement tr. Alexander Gode and Sue Allen Wright
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (1984), ed. Harry Zohn, contains translated excerpts from Die Fackel, including poems with the original German text alongside, and a drastically abridged translation of The Last Days of Mankind.
Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus' Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (1990) by Thomas Szasz contains Szasz's translations of several of Kraus' articles and aphorisms on psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Dicta and Contradicta, tr. Jonathan McVity (2001), a collection of aphorisms.
Im:Wikipedia