Karl Kraus (1874–1936) and Robert Menasse (b. 1954) both oversaw an Austria in the last days of its respective form of existence, and both authors' appraisals of the Austrian condition provoked controversy among readers and critics of various political stripes. Their acerbic wit, intelligence, and literary talent place Kraus and Menasse close to the center of the Austrian public discourse of their times. Most important, in addition to their expository and polemical writings, both authors created literary works in which major cultural, political, and philosophical questions of the day assume a complex and compelling aesthetic life. This essay will illuminate the beginning and the end of the twentieth century in Vienna and Austria in light of these two important commentators, while using the historical comparison of 1900 and 2000 to elucidate their works critically as well.

Both Kraus and Menasse reveal the distance between language and reality that lies at the bottom of the political crises of their respective times, but while Kraus appeals to a conservative, utopian notion of integral culture, Menasse immerses himself in the free-for-all of postmodern civilization and explores the dialectic of social and intellectual impulses.

The dates 1900 and 2000 are more symbolic than precise, for, in Central Europe at least, the twentieth century turned out to be shorter than its allotted hundred years: it began in 1918 with the end of the First World War and the demise of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, and ended in 1989 when the bisected map of Europe drawn at Yalta lost its ideological polarity.