Satire (Karl Kraus – The Great Wall of China)

May 1910: Karl Kraus holds his satirical lecture Die chinesische Mauer (The Great Wall of China) in Vienna. We know from Alban Berg and Anton Webern that Schönberg based one of his paintings on this lecture. “One knows the powerful beginning, which rushes down abruptly, booming like the crash of a thunderbolt: ‘A murder has occurred, and humanity would like to call for help. It cannot.’ […] It was extraordinarily fascinating to observe the reader of the text: how his face was rigid and menacing; how his shoulders were raised like a predator’s; how his right shoulder twitched in short jerks above the desk, rolled over itself and seemed to claw at an invisible neck that formed a cascade of words which gushed down upon the breathlessly listening audience, up to a titanic conclusion, in which the pent-up, swollen tide freed itself and spread majestically: ‘The knees strung with cord under the chin, the face caked with caustic lime, thus the body vanished in the suitcase of the Chinese.’” (Mirko Jelusic, Die Wiener Vorlesung. Karl Kraus, in Der Sturm. Wochenschrift für Kultur und Künste 12 [19 May 1910]).