The 700th lecture was held by Karl Kraus at Vienna’s Konzerthaus on 2 April 1936, a good two months before his death. It was something of a ‘swan song for the speaker’ (Jacques Le Rider): Kraus read and sang hits including Das Lied von der Presse, Reklamefahrten zur Hölle and Frank Wedekind’s Diplomaten-Lied. Volkstheater star Samouil Stoyanov and Petra Slottova (flute) give it another go.

Kraus lectures – A tribute to the 150th birthday of Karl Kraus in five lectures

‘There is nothing more desolating than his acolytes, nothing more godforsaken than his adversaries’, wrote Walter Benjamin about Karl Kraus, the oft-cited and much too rarely read language and culture critic, satirist and talented performer born in 1874. In the Free Republic of Vienna, different artists and intellectuals will stage a series of ‘lectures’ like those held by Kraus himself between 1910 and 1936 to great acclaim in Vienna’s Konzerthaus, in workers’ homes, in theatres and other venues. On five weekends, Kraus will not be regurgitated, but his ‘Theatre of Poetry’ will be dusted off: Linguistic analysis and text demolition as demonstrated by him as the editor of the Fackel, in The Last Days of Mankind, the Third Walpurgis Night and hundreds of trials against corrupt politicians and media personas receive a new interpretation. Contemporary historian Katharina Prager, who manages Kraus’ estate in Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, will already give an insight into the life and work of Karl Kraus on 29 April 2024 in a Wiener Vorlesung at Gartenbaukino.