Excerpt from Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, 1918
In his epic tragicomedy The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus gives the First World War a mouth. As this hellmouth speaks, into its open maw dances the entire cosmos of bourgeois civilization; a swirling collage of real and imagined conversations, news articles and government reports interspersed with Kraus's own apocalyptic poetry.
For us today, the purpose of The Last Days of Mankind might be elusory. Kraus does not condemn modernity but on the contrary registers the regression of society as historical forgetfulness. He likens this phenomenon to a blinded dying man crawling out of the ruins of civilization who wishes only to return to his mother's bosom, to the innocence of infancy. As Kraus notes, this willful amnesia was already taking its place in official culture at the time as the horror of the war was being kitschified in “heroic melodies.”
A decade after Kraus’s death, Theodor Adorno, taking up Kraus, suggested the Second World War might be called “After Doomsday.” He wrote “Life has transformed itself into a timeless succession of shocks, between which gape holes, paralyzed intermediary spaces.” Today the masks of death and disease don't explode out of the continuum of history but quietly stalk out of a “paralyzed intermediary space” to adorn a society once again relegated to sexless duty. The cacophony of history has been silenced and Adolph Hitler declared the inheritor of modernity by the academy. The project has been cancelled. The hellmouth no longer speaks but softly sings a nonsense verse as we suckle at its infernal teat in forgetful slumber.
— Jonathan Black
FEMALE GAS MASK (approaching):
A man fell here, and by God’s will, I know.
We’re that sort too, when duty calls we go.
In these grave times frivolity’s been banned.
Fashion is unwomaned and unmanned.
We have equal rights in death, disease, distress,
And in hunger, filth and human sexlessness.
MALE GAS MASK (positions himself across from her):
O unknowable face!
O beautiful mask!
Meet my embrace,
That’s all I ask!
Dread filled with danger,
Dutiful, proud,
We’re stranger to stranger,
No looks are allowed.
There’s only our mission,
Our fight, but alas,
There’s a threat of attrition
From poisonous gas!
The skies puke down fire;
Blood boils, congeals.
It’s a redoubt we require,
Oh, let’s take to our heels.
Far off barrage.
Gas masks kiss. Getty
FEMALE GAS MASK:
We’re compelled to keep hidden
What each mask encases.
Duty’s forbidden
Us gender and faces.
A life spent with carrion,
Maggots and flies —
Now harp, horn and clarion
Fill my night skies!
BOTH (arm in arm):
Duty’s forbidden
Us gender and faces.
We’re compelled to keep hidden
What each mask encases.
They disappear. //
Lucid Dreams, Johnson Tsang, Porcelain, 2020. Artist’s website.