‘When the age died by its own hand that hand was Karl Kraus’s’ Brecht

Writing in Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Karl Kraus (1874-1936) is a satirist whose work has been compared to Aristophanes, Juvenal and Jonathan Swift. His writing is barely known in English, yet his great play about the First World War, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 'The Last Days of Mankind', is a compelling dissection of human folly in the debris of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, a prescient vision of a media-dominated world, and one of the 20th century’s greatest works of experimental theatre. The play has never been translated fully into English and this version of the epilogue, The Last Night, a self-contained verse play-within-a-play, is an introduction to a complete translation of Karl Kraus’s 800 page drama to be published in 2015 and 2016. The Last Night was among Bertolt Brecht’s first productions in Berlin in 1930, following the success of 'The Threepenny Opera'. This first ever translation of The Last Night, appears almost 100 years after the play was written, and 100 years after the start of World War I, the apocalyptic conflict that The Last Days of Mankind so bitterly chronicles.