Erich Heller - Other Works; or The Last Days of Mankind

Other Works; or The Last Days of Mankind

Bibliographies are a dull business (as Erich Heller remarks in his ‘The Last Days of Mankind’). The Disinherited Mind was followed by another collection of essays, The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (1965; German ed., Die Reise der Kunst ins Innere und andere Essays, 1966; Japanese translation, 1972); then by The Poet’s Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and Thomas Mann (1976); and finally by Im Zeitalter der Prosa: literarische und philosophische Essays, published simultaneously in German and in English editions (the latter under the title In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays) in 1984.

Heller’s early article on Karl Kraus, ‘The Last Days of Mankind’, was originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1948, its title taken from one of Kraus’s plays, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1919).