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At the height of his legendary attack on the press, Karl Kraus (1874-1936) used an alienating metaphor in his writings several times that compared the newspapers’ effect on Viennese society to “Black Magic”. This image was broadly developed in an essay published in his magazine The Torch in December 1912, significantly entitled The End of the World through Black Magic. Here, in his style – at once grotesque and apocalyptic – the writer presages the immense tragedy that would soon devastate Europe. The essay’s content and tone anticipate the structural themes and typical elements of his great dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind, written during and after World War I, containing his revolutionary description of the nature of the conflict, focusing on those not at the front, who ‘fight’ through the news published in the newspapers. This essay analyses the function of the “Black Magic” metaphor in Kraus’s writings and contextualizes it in historical and anthropological terms in view of a mimetic theory, in order to assess its significance and usefulness as a tool for interpreting some of the phenomenological functions of the media in the international crisis. Kraus sees “Black Magic” as a technique, involving phrases and preconceived representations repeated like mantras and disseminated by the media, for controlling the fears and desires of the masses, taking advantage of their innate characteristics and sacrificial nature. As Roberto Calasso remarks in the stage directions to The Last Days of Mankind about the news arriving from the front, the expression “They are gathering in groups” often recurs, referring to those who make these clusters of people do it in obedience to an “officially powerless, essentially persecutory power: the press”. They crowd frantically around an empty space: “long ago there – René Girard reminds us – you could see the tortured body of the victim of the original lynching”.
