Karl Kraus

Karl Kraus, who died in 1936, is known as a great Viennese intellectual. Little of his work is as yet available in English. The following, by Hugh McDiarmid, was quoted by Thomas Szasz in his Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors (1976), a book about Kraus's lack of veneration for the sacred cow of psychoanalysis.

And, above all, Karl Kraus . . .
. . . whose thinking was a voyage
Of exploration in a landscape of words
And that language German.
—For, while an English writer or speaker
Over long stretches of his verbal enterprise
Is protected by the tact and wisdom
Of linguistic convention, his German counterpart
Risks revealing himself as an idiot
Or a scoundrel through the ring and rhythm
Of his first sentence. Had Hitler's speeches
Been accessible to the West in their unspeakable original
We might have been spared the War
For the War was partly caused
By Hitler's innocent translators
Unavoidably missing in smooth and diplomatic
French or English the original's diabolic resonance.
Only German, in all its notorious long-windedness
Offers such short cuts to the termini of mankind.
It was Karl Kraus who knew them all.
He examined the language spoken and written
By his contemporaries and found
That they lived by wrong ideas.
Listening to what they said he discovered
The impure springs of their actions.
Reading what they wrote he knew
They were heading for disaster.