Karl Kraus spent decades dismantling the pretensions of Viennese intellectual life through his one-man journal Die Fackel, which he wrote almost entirely himself from 1911 until his death in 1936. Issuing his likeness on a commemorative ECU — the European Currency Unit, a basket currency that existed only as an accounting instrument and never as circulating money — carries an irony he would not have let pass quietly.
Karl Kraus spent decades dismantling the pretensions of Viennese intellectual life through his one-man journal Die Fackel, which he wrote almost entirely himself from 1911 until his death in 1936. Issuing his likeness on a commemorative ECU — the European Currency Unit, a basket currency that existed only as an accounting instrument and never as circulating money — carries an irony he would not have let pass quietly.