The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (First Edition)

Kraus, Karl (author); Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms (translation); Marjorie Perloff (forword)

ISBN 10: 030023600X / ISBN 13: 9780300236002

Published by Yale University Press / Margellos, New Haven, 2020

About this Item

New Haven, Yale, Margellos, 2020. First edition. First printing (with full number line including 1). Hardbound. Very Fine in a very fine jacket. A clean tight unread copy. Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Smoke-free. Ships in well padded box. A satire, translated from the German.

Seller Inventory # Yale-2022

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (First Edition)
• Publisher: Yale University Press / Margellos, New Haven
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030023600X
• ISBN 13: 9780300236002
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • German Literature

About this title

Synopsis

The first complete English translation of a far-seeing polemic, written in 1933 by the preeminent German-language satirist, unmasking the Nazi seizure of power

"[A] drop-dead analysis of the rhetorical barbarities of the Hitler cult."—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse

Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus’s Third Walpurgis Night was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but was withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kösel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime’s corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to Kraus that, in his indictment of Nazism, “you have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language.” This masterful translation, by the prizewinning translators of Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, aims for clarity where Kraus had good reason to be cautious and obscure.
 
The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he single-handedly after 1912 conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, satirical plays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems.

About the Author

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was the preeminent German-language satirist, who conducted a sustained critique, notably of propaganda and the press, in his Viennese journal Die Fackel. Translators Fred Bridgham and the late Edward Timms were awarded the MLA Scaglione Prize for their translation of Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind.