The further the distance from which we look back at Karl Kraus, the more he seems to be looking back at us from up close: in the final ‘lecture’, the artists Thea Ehre (Silver Bear, Berlinale 2022), Nick Romeo Reimann and Olivia Axel Scheucher trace the vestiges of the ‘soldierly body’ in our contemporary culture. Setting out from their own biographical references and the Last Days of Mankind, they look at narratives and structures that are steeped in the violence of patriarchal socialisation and disciplinary strategies.

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.