Charlotte Joel-Heinzelmann: Karl Kraus at his desk, photo, 1921

Karl Kraus’s anti-war drama is a satire in which reality parodies itself, with more than two hundred scenes, most of them short, but no continuous plot. The work was produced in the years 1915 to 1922 as a reaction to the First World War.

Karl Kraus has given an apt summary of the way in which mechanized warfare provided new conditions for the demonstration of heroic forms of behaviour and the loss of manly and militaristic attitudes. He describes the First World War as a ‘technoromantic adventure’, in which courage has become entangled with technology and confrontations on the basis of muscle power have become obsolete.