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ISBN: HB: 9780300236002

Yale University Press

August 2020

320 pp.

22.8x15.2 cm

1 black&white illus.

HB:
£25,00
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Third Walpurgis Night

The Complete Text

Now available in English for the first time, Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus's "Third Walpurgis Night" was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kosel 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.

About the Author

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 conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems.

Edward Timms, founding director of the University of Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies, is best known for his two-volume study Karl Kraus-Apocalyptic Satirist. The title of his memoirs, "Taking Up the Torch", reflects his long-standing interest in Kraus's journal.

Fred Bridgham is the author of wide-ranging studies in German literature, history, and the history of ideas. His translations of lieder and opera include Hans Werner Henze's "The Prince of Homburg" for performance by English National Opera.