| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Edward Timms. Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005, Pp. xxi, 639. $50.00.
Edward Timms dedicates this second volume of his Karl Kraus study to the memory of J. P. Stern "and the refugees of the 1930s from whom I have learnt so much." This magisterial work is a fitting tribute to Timms's mentors and a significant contribution to Austrian intellectual history during the interwar period. Volume one, which appeared in 1986, is a cultural analysis of fin-de-siècle Vienna that portended World War I, the end of the Habsburg Empire, and the collapse of European civilization. Volume two resumes in the early postwar period. Although the apocalypse had been postponed, the rise of fascism threatened to complete the destruction of civilization begun by the war and hurl mankind backward thousands of years. As one dedicated to peace, Kraus could not stand idly by.	1
One of the most positive aspects of Timms's book is its demonstration of both the timeliness and the timelessness of Kraus's polemics, the vehicle for which was his critical periodical with red covers, Die Fackel (The Torch). Timms refutes those who would dismiss Kraus as merely a Viennese critic of the early twentieth century whose preoccupations were often ephemeral. The 1921 selling of "the horrors of World War I as a tourist attraction" by the newspaper Baseler Nachrichten through trips to the Verdun Battlefield—"There will be time for lunching at the best hotel in Verdun with wine and coffee" (p. 81)—anticipated the Daily Telegraph marketing of concentration camp tours in 2001:"THE HOLOCAUST Great guides, great company. Full colour brochure from Midas Tours" (p. 83). Timms convincingly argues that although Kraus "did not live to witness the emergence of the media-generated myths of the television age ... his ideas have been taken up by more recent critics of the nexus between mass communications, global corporations and the military-industrial complex. Thus the spirit of Kraus ... transcends its own times" (p. 549).	. . .

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