April 1 Saturday – In Vienna at an unspecified banquet, Sam made four speeches [Apr. 5 to Howells].

Karl Kraus chose this day to launch Die Fackel, which Dolmetsch describes as “the most eagerly awaited, most widely read, most intently discussed periodical in the Habsburg capital if not, indeed, in the entire Germanic world” [243]. The third edition of the red-covered magazine heaped scorn on what Kraus saw as the “continuous fawning over Mark Twain’s every movement in Vienna.” Kraus attacked the Neue Freie Presse as well as Mark Twain himself for this situation. Dolmetsch likens Kraus to H.L. Mencken as occupying a similar place in Vienna literary regard, “a supreme master of verbal subtlety and nuance.” The new magazine had long been looked forward to, and the second issue sold 30,000 copies. Did Twain and Kraus meet? Dolmetsch explores the possibilities:

What personal contact Mark Twain actually had in Vienna with Karl Kraus cannot now be ascertained. Kraus was then but twenty-five and not the kind of established writer, like Eduard Pötzl, that Twain would have sought out. The Countess Wydenbruck-Esterházy’s daughter recalled that both Twain and Kraus were among the choice circle of writers, artists, and musicians her mother cultivated, but whether these two ever visited her salon at the same time is moot. Details in “U.A.” indicate its author was present at Twain’s Concordia speech and at least one of the American humorist’s charity benefit readings in Vienna, but if Kraus took either of these occasions to be introduced to Twain, as many of his press colleagues did, he did not record the fact and neither did Twain [247]. Note: Dolmetsch writes an entire chapter on Kraus: “Diogenes in Vienna.”