"Austrian political satire" sounds as though it should be one of those famous examples of oxymoron - like "military intelligence" and "English cooking". But it turns out that satire actually flourishes in conservative, authoritarian cultures. It isn't much fun attacking sacred cows unless they really are treated as sacred.
Karl Kraus seems to have devoted his life to the cause of satire: with his paper Die Fackel he was a thorn in the flesh of everyone in authority from Franz-Josef to the Nazis. But Die letzten Tage... is the work for which he is remembered. A vast, complex, unperformable play, as full of contradictions and inconsistencies as The Good Soldier Švejk; the Austrian Oh, what a lovely war; the ultimate hatchet job on k. und k. pretentions. And, given that it was written well before the Nazis came to power in Austria, a scarily prescient look at how cultural and ethical values break down in wartime.
It isn't easy to read: part of the reason it spent so long on my TBR shelf is the all-but-impenetrable Viennese dialect Kraus uses in many scenes; another is the wealth of topical references, hard to make sense of even with the glossary in the back of the book. But I think it was worth the struggle. ( )

...Leopoli è ancora in nostre mani. (28-05-2014) ( )

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