‘The Devil is wildly optimistic if he thinks he can make human beings worse than they are.’ One could hardly conceive of a darker flash of wit than this judgment from an acute observer of a former generation, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Kraus’s satirical barb surely earns him a front-row seat among pessimists, but who can deny that it touches reality? It certainly holds at least a measure of realism at the end of the century of Auschwitz and Kigali, of Beirut and Bosnia,