The Last Days of Mankind chronicles the events of WW I from the perspective of Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The play begins with Vienna newsagents crying the headlines, “Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo! Murd-ra’s a Serb!” (“Thank God, not a Jew” remarks a passerby to his wife, who immediately drags him off stage.) The play ends, 800 pages later, with the voice of God intoning, as Kaiser Wilhelm did in the aftermath of the war, “This is not what I intended.”
Kraus’s play is far more than another comic diatribe against the insanity of war, it is both a warning and an indictment.
Patriot: …and it’s not just our humanity in war that they lack, but something more valuable – endurance! Look at them: despondency already reigns supreme.
Subscriber: That struck me as well. For instance, defeatism in France!
Patriot: Dejection in England!
Subscriber: Disillusionment in Italy.
Subscriber: The overall mood of the Entente…
Patriot: The edifice is crumbling
Subscriber: The Tsar tosses and turns in his bed.
Kraus never expected his play to be staged in its monstrous entirety, as he said, “Theater-goers on planet earth would find it unendurable. For it is the blood of their blood and its contents the narrative of those years, unreal, unremembered, unthinkable years, preserved only in bloodstained dreams, when operetta figures played out the tragedy of mankind.”
Patriot: …Your Viennese is a real diehard when it comes to holding out to the end. He can endure all hardships as if they were pleasures.
Subscriber: Hardships? What hardships?
Patriot: I mean, if there happened to be hardships.
Subscriber: Luckily, there aren’t any.
Patriot: Quite right. There aren’t. But then…if there aren’t hardships – why do we have to hold out?
Subscriber: I can explain that. It’s true there are no hardships, but if there were, we would easily endure them if we had to – there’s an art in that and we’ve always had the knack.
The action, said Kraus of his play, “is likewise without heroes, fractured and improbable, as it picks its way through a hundred scenes and hells… “Kraus’s cast of demagogue politicians, financiers and manufacturers – the celebs of the day – engage in a collective charade, performed in partnership with the press, piling deception on self-deception in support of the profitable and disastrous war.