Karl Kraus' most famous work today, 'The Last Days of Mankind', was created as an immediate response to World War I. Kraus writes in the preface: "It is blood from their blood, and the content is from the content of those unreal, inconceivable years, inaccessible to any waking mind, unreachable by memory, and only preserved in bloody dreams, when operetta characters played the tragedy of humanity. The plot, leading through a hundred scenes and hells, is impossible, jagged, and as unheroic as those. The humor is merely the self-reproach of one who did not go mad at the thought of having witnessed these events with a sound mind. The contemporaries who tolerated the occurrence of these things, which are recorded here, place the right to laugh behind the duty to weep. The most improbable acts reported here have truly happened.".