The last days of mankind
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 11, 2025
Starting from October 1915, after the news of the outbreak of the Great War, Karl Kraus began to write “for a theatre on Mars” the drama The Last Days of Mankind, which he did not want to be put on stage, because “Theatergoers of this world would not be able to bear it”. The drama — or rather, as one reads in the subtitle, “A Tragedy in Five acts” — was “blood of their blood, and its content is the content of those unreal, unthinkable years beyond the reach of walking memory, preserved only in a bloody dream where operetta figures played out the tragedy of mankind”. And in Weltgericht [The Last Judgement], published after the end of the war, he would speak of the “great times”, which he knew “when they were very small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it”, as times “in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen”.
Like any relentlessly lucid discourse, Kraus’s diagnosis fits perfectly with the situation we are living in. The Last Days of Mankind are our days, if it is true that every day is the last day, that eschatology is, for the ones able to understand it, the historical condition par excellence. Especially with regard to war, one can say of our times, as Kraus does, that “It’s all too easy to understand the disenchantment of an epoch forever incapable of experiencing such events, or grasping what’s been experienced, compounded by the failure to be convulsed by its collapse”. And even today, when lies about the ongoing war mean to authorise any future war, isn’t it true that “the continuing existence of war appears least inconceivable to people whom the slogan ‘Now we are at war’ enables to commit and endorse every possible infamy?”. And it’s likely that, like Austria in 1919, Europe too will not survive its lies and shames, and in the end will only be able to repeat Kaiser’s words that conclude the book: Ich habe es nicht gewollt, “I did not want it”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 11, 2025
Starting from October 1915, after the news of the outbreak of the Great War, Karl Kraus began to write “for a theatre on Mars” the drama The Last Days of Mankind, which he did not want to be put on stage, because “Theatergoers of this world would not be able to bear it”. The drama — or rather, as one reads in the subtitle, “A Tragedy in Five acts” — was “blood of their blood, and its content is the content of those unreal, unthinkable years beyond the reach of walking memory, preserved only in a bloody dream where operetta figures played out the tragedy of mankind”. And in Weltgericht [The Last Judgement], published after the end of the war, he would speak of the “great times”, which he knew “when they were very small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it”, as times “in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen”.
Like any relentlessly lucid discourse, Kraus’s diagnosis fits perfectly with the situation we are living in. The Last Days of Mankind are our days, if it is true that every day is the last day, that eschatology is, for the ones able to understand it, the historical condition par excellence. Especially with regard to war, one can say of our times, as Kraus does, that “It’s all too easy to understand the disenchantment of an epoch forever incapable of experiencing such events, or grasping what’s been experienced, compounded by the failure to be convulsed by its collapse”. And even today, when lies about the ongoing war mean to authorise any future war, isn’t it true that “the continuing existence of war appears least inconceivable to people whom the slogan ‘Now we are at war’ enables to commit and endorse every possible infamy?”. And it’s likely that, like Austria in 1919, Europe too will not survive its lies and shames, and in the end will only be able to repeat Kaiser’s words that conclude the book: Ich habe es nicht gewollt, “I did not want it”.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Gustave Doré, Dom Quixote luta com os iangueses, 1863. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. |
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