Publisher Description

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus'.
– Bertolt Brecht
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 professor of German Languages and Literatures, Anna Souchuk.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Deborah Sengl's Karl Kraus
Marjorie Perloff
The Mousetrap
The Turn to Abstraction
Representation

"The Document Is a Figure"
Matthias Goldmann
Conversion of Horror into Words
Operetta Figures Play out the Tragedy of Mankind
Come Forward and Be Silent
Masks of the Tragic Carnival
Flesh for Blood and Blood for Ink
The Word Died

Trench Rats
Anna C. Souchuk
Miniatures
Taxidermy and Tableau: An Invitation to Look at Animals
Metaphorical Animals: The Role of Rats in the Stories Humans Tell

The Last Days of Mankind [installation images and excerpts from Karl Kraus' play]
Deborah Sengl

Afterword
Paul Reitter

Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Review

The Last Days of Mankind is, naturally enough, about the First World War, and about all war, but it is also about what our civilization is and about who we are. That is why, like all great works of art, it is, and will always remain, a 'contemporary' work. Those questions; who we are, what are our beliefs and values, what do we stand for, are as urgent today as they were in 1914–18 and its aftermath. Kraus, like the other three great writers he stands beside (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift) [...] is the voice we need to hear.– Michael Russell, author of City of Shadows and City of Lies
[Deborah Sengl's] stunning display of 176 taxidermied rats as actors presenting forty-four scenes from The Last Days of Mankind deliver[s] a bracing test of [the play's] potential. […] The preparation, costuming and posing of the rats as well as the meticulous attention to miniature props – facsimiles of period newspapers, a factory owner's top hat and bow tie, the sample cases of traveling salesmen, infantry rifles – reflect a deep knowledge of Kraus' text and disciplined commitment to an unconventional representation of its meaning. The powerful effect of this large assemblage of monochromatic tableaux is heightened by juxtaposition with the preparatory drawings, which were exhibited next to them and are beautifully reproduced in the catalogue. These delicate line drawings all use color, sparingly but pointedly, so that the viewer is inevitably drawn to a comparison with the corresponding tableaux. Seen up close, as they are in the catalogue photographs, which include some unsettling enlargements, every white rat's cocked head, gaping mouth, or crooked claw points back to the linguistic physiognomy of the speakers of a war-contaminated language who people Kraus' drama.
– Leo Lensing, "Karl Kraus at War", Times Literary Supplement
When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus'.
– Bertolt Brecht
Modern fables for adults.– Widewalls
The initial reaction to seeing the white rats wearing the tiny corsets and holding rat-sized guns results in deeply conflicted emotions. Cuteness and horror collide in these miniature scenes. [...] Sengl continues the legacy of acid-tongued Austrian artists from Kraus and Kafka to more contemporary voices like Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. Her adaptation of Kraus' war epic, The Last Days of Mankind, makes it more accessible to audiences and helps to render the experimental play into a more comprehensible whole.
– New York Journal of Books

Promotional

Pre-pub finished review copies sent to select bookstores and reviewers

DRCs on Edelweiss

Tailored campaign to academic and museum audiences

Social media campaign

Promotion of the book through Marjorie Perloff's lecture at The Getty Museum, which is on YouTube and features Sengl's installation

Pursuing blurbs from two important Kraus scholars: Edward Timms (has said yes) and Jonathan Franzen (maybe a long-shot, but Paul Reitter was his coauthor and helped him a lot on his Kraus Project book, so if Reitter likes it, maybe Franzen will look at it)

Marketing to select English-language bookstores in Austria and Germany Marketing to British libraries and bookstores

Long Description

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus'. - Bertolt Brecht 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 professor of German Languages and Literatures, Anna Souchuk.

Review Quote

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus'. - Bertolt Brecht

Excerpt from Book

Deborah Sengl''s Karl Kraus Introduction by Marjorie Perloff Today, in the midst of its centenary, we recognize World War I (1914-18) as one of the watersheds of European history. It was the "Great War" that forever changed the identity of Europe and sowed the seeds of World War II (1939-45) and the Holocaust; indeed, it is now customary to think of the two world wars as one. The intense nationalism that set off the first world war is especially remarkable. Even some of the most beloved German writers of the period like Thomas Mann and Rainer Marie Rilke were, at least at its outset, enthusiastic proponents of the war. German and Austrian writers and intellectuals felt that the newly united Germany, having rapidly industrialized and modernized itself, must take its rightful place as the most "advanced" of European nations, and that the English and French colonial empires, with their imperial power, must give the German-speaking nations their due. One of the few major writers who felt otherwise was Karl Kraus, the famed editor of -- and only contributor to -- Die Fackel (The Torch), the journal that the Viennese intelligentsia read religiously every day. In 1915, Kraus began to write his great anti-war play The Last Days of Mankind, publishing the early sections in Die Fackel. Not completed until 1922 and almost never produced in its entirety because of its inordinate length and complexity -- Kraus himself remarked that a performance "would take some ten evenings in terrestrial time" and so was fit only "for a theatre on Mars" -- Last Days is perhaps the first, and surely one of the greatest, documentary dramas. As Kraus tells us in his Prologue: The most improbable actions reported here really occurred. [...] The most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations. Sentences whose insanity is indelibly imprinted on the ear have grown into the music of time. The document takes human shape: reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials. [...] An unending cacophony of sound bites engulfs a whole era. [...] Spectres and wraiths, masks of the tragic carnival, necessarily have real-life names, for nothing is fortuitous in an age conditioned by chance. [...] Even what occurs at the corner where Vienna''s Ringstrasse meets the K

Description for Sales People

Published to coincide with the Armistice of the Great War, the subject of Karl Kraus' play The Last Days of Mankind . Well-wrought scenes using taxidermy make an unperformable and extremely intimidating piece of literature immediately accessible. There is a wide, strange body of Karl Kraus fans that intersect every indie bookstore loving crowd. The conjunction of scholars and endorsers make clear Deborah Sengl's necessary contribution to the scholarship around this important play. Not just part of the wave of "Karl Kraus mania" sweeping literature studies, this book is timeless because of its singular artist's vision. 2018 marks an important year for the artist Deborah Sengl, whose first monograph has been released by Verlag f

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