Karl Kraus, an Austrian writer, was born April 28, 1874, in Bohemia and died in Vienna on July 12, 1936.

He was the ninth child of the businessman and manufacturer Jakob Krauss and his wife Ernestine. The family moved to Vienna in 1877. Kraus became interested in the theater while still quite young. He studied law, philosophy, and German, and worked as a critic for several magazines; he published an essay in 1897 in which he denounced the excesses of fin-de-siècle decadence (Gustav Klimt) and attacked his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In 1910 the first reading of Kraus's work was held in Berlin. This was followed by approximately seven hundred other readings in different European cities, where the work of other authors was read—William Shakespeare, Johann Nestroy, Frank Wedekind, Jacques Offenbach—some of which had been translated and adapted by Kraus.

Kraus converted to Catholicism in 1911 but abandoned the religion...