ABSTRACT
Karl Kraus was most famous for basing his satires and polemics in The Torch on quirks in his targets' grammar and prose style. His obsession with word choice, slang, jargon, punctuation became a signature element of his satire. Kraus's work presents one of the earliest examples – if not the earliest – of a writer-performer using documentary forms to stage ideology critiques of dominant discourses and memory practices. The documents quoted by Kraus are not instruments for cutting through official mendacity; they themselves are unmasked as vectors of mendacity through collage juxtaposition. The Last Days of Mankind borrows heavily from newspapers, political speeches, advertisements, soldiers' letters from the front, and pieces that Kraus himself had previously written for publication in The Torch. For Walter Benjamin, who attended several of Kraus's Berlin performances, Kraus's ability to devour and regurgitate the speech of others was akin to cannibalism. Kraus's methods exemplify a documentary pedagogy of reception.
