The Perpetual War

By Roberto Calasso

Reproduced by permission of the author on the occasion

of the reading of Karl Kraus’s The Lats Days of Mankind

Center for Jewish History

Translated by John Shepley

“Hardly anyone could venture to write an introduction for The Last Days of Mankind. It would be both arrogant and superfluous. The introduction is carried inside by everyone born in this century and doomed to live in it.” Thus wrote Elias Canetti, who for nine years had “let every spoken and written word [by Karl Kraus] take effect on me: for five years without resistance, for four with growing criticism.”_ What follows is not an intro-duction but a cluster of occasional notes that have sprouted around some of the joints in that majestic and monstrous construction known as The Last Days of Mankind.

Kraus’s fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but his voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafés, and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.” There, behind a reading desk on a bare stage, Kraus himself became the voice-that-catches--all-voices, while in the darkness other unknown beings were transformed into the Wild Hunt of legend: “Imagine the army of the Wild Hunt in a concert hall, trapped, locked up, and forced to sit still, and then repeatedly summoned to its true nature.” There was a vibration in his voice that sent a quiver through the audience: “Chairs and people seemed to yield under this quivering; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the chairs had bent.”






	The Perpetual War By Roberto Calasso Reproduced by permission of the author on the occasion of the reading of Karl Kraus’s The Lats Days of Mankind Center for Jewish History Copyright by Roberto Calasso Translated by John Shepley “Hardly anyone could venture to write an introduction for The Last Days of Mankind. It would be both arrogant and superfluous. The introduction is carried inside by everyone born in this century and doomed to live in it.” Thus wrote Elias Canetti, who for nine years had “let every spoken and written word [by Karl Kraus] take effect on me: for five years without resistance, for four with growing criticism.”_ What follows is not an intro-duction but a cluster of occasional notes that have sprouted around some of the joints in that majestic and monstrous construction known as The Last Days of Mankind. Kraus’s fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but his voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafés, and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.” There, behind a reading desk on a bare stage, Kraus himself became the voice-that-catches--all-voices, while in the darkness other unknown beings were transformed into the Wild Hunt of legend: “Imagine the army of the Wild Hunt in a concert hall, trapped, locked up, and forced to sit still, and then repeatedly summoned to its true nature.” There was a vibration in his voice that sent a quiver through the audience: “Chairs and people seemed to yield under this quivering; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the chairs had bent.”