TheLastDaysofMankind Format: Hardback

The Great War drama by Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, restaged by Sengl in "stunning display" of taxidermied rat-actors, with commentary.

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus’.

– Bertolt Brecht

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY – TOP 10 IN ART, ARCHITECTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY, Fall 2018

With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl (b. 1974) has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus’ nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915–22). Featuring Sengl’s entire installation, the DoppelHouse Press edition also includes essays that examine her ambitious dramaturgy, which condenses Kraus’ ten-to-fifteen hour drama into an abridged reading of its themes: human barbarism, the role of journalism in war, the sway of popular opinion and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus’ original provide a window to see his other “war” — a war on the misuses of language itself.

Published in conjunction with the centenary anniversary of the Armistice, which ended The Great War but bred another soon to come, this edition of The Last Days of Mankind offers an agit-prop protest crossing the boundaries of art and spanning the knowledge of the century that has passed since Kraus penned his play. Deborah Sengl offers her stylistic model for envisioning human folly through animal actors, who become more than human, while confronting a violence particular to humankind, laced with selfishness and greed.

Contributors include modernist poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff (The Edge of Irony, University of Chicago Press 2015); arts writer Matthias Goldmann; Paul Reitter (editor/contributor to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Harper, 2013); and Associate Professor of German, Anna Souchuk.

Deborah Sengl (b. 1974, Vienna) is an Austrian artist whose paintings, drawings and sculptures pose questions about the role of individual identity in modern society. She uses taxidermied animal actors staged in tableaux and two-dimensional works of human-animal chimera that suggest a cathartic release of violence and trauma associated with institutions, culture, politics, consumerism, poverty, and leisure. Recent solo exhibitions include the Essl Museum of Contemporary Art; IFK, Linz; Museum of Modern Art, Carinthia; Galerie Geschler (Berlin); Galerie Hilger (Vienna); and the National Gallery in Tirana, Albania. She studied art at both the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the University of Art in Berlin, and has made a secondary career in costume design.

Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures and Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University. He is the author of three books: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Chicago press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has also collaborated on multiple collaborative editions including Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project (Harper, 2013) and he has contributed essays and reviews to Harper's, TLS, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum and The Nation, and others. He recently co-edited Anti-Education, a new translation of Nietzsche's lectures on the German educational system, and The Rise of the Modern University, an anthology of sources having to do with the mission of the research university.

Marjorie Perloff is among America’s leading critics of poetry and the author of over a dozen books of literary criticism. She teaches courses, lectures around the world and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California as well as being an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Perloff’s titles include Wittgenstein’s Ladder, The Futurist Moment and Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Several recent books take up the subject of her Viennese heritage, her exile, and Vienna’s cultural milieu. The Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004) “sweeps elegantly and often amusingly from historical and political events to family anecdotes, from literature to love affairs, from religious (or at least group) traditions to philosophical insights. It is the author’s (successful) attempt to come to terms with a Vienna that was her physical childhood home and also a kind of alma mater from which she obtained parts of her identity, derived from what she herself labels ‘Kultur’ and at the same time a place fraught with dark depths both real and virtual” (The Vienna Review). Her most recent book The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) was praised by Adam Kirsch in The New York Review of Books and features the seed of the analysis that blooms in her writing on Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind.

Dr. Anna Souchuk is Associate Professor of German and Director of the German Program in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, Chicago. Her research primarily concentrates on the writings of Josef Haslinger and his depictions of Austria’s conflicted relationship to processes of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (coming to terms with the past). She researches and writes about other Austrian writers and artists, too, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Linda Stift, Deborah Sengl, and the filmmaker Markus Schleinzer. Most recently, she edited a special edition of the scholarly journal Modern Languages Open that focused on the family novel in German-language literature, a project that drew on her larger interests in the family story and its generational transmission as a metaphor for coming to terms with the past in Austria.

Matthias Goldmann is a writer and translator. He has published essays, poetry, and stories, has created and exhibited computer text animations, and has cooperated with visual artists and authors on various projects and publications including coauthoring the artist monograph Franz West: Man with a Ball (Rizzoli, 2014).