Karl Hans Strobl (1877–1946) was an Austrian author and editor of fantasy and weird fiction who studied at Charles University in Prague. His own writing was strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Hanns Heinz Ewers, author of such weird horror classics as “The Spider.” After World War I, Strobl relocated to Germany, where he founded the magazine Der orchideengarten: Phantastische blätter (The Orchid Garden: Fantastic Pages) in 1919 with Alfons von Czibulka, which is now regarded as the world’s first specialized fantasy magazine, predating Weird Tales in the United States by two years. His own 1910 novel Eleagabal Kuperus was adapted as the film Nachtgestalten in 1920, starring Conrad Veidt of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Strobl carved out a space for himself as a unique writer of macabre fiction, earning comparisons to the Czech writer Gustav Meyrink and to Alfred Kubin. However, Strobl also became increasingly extremist as an advocate for German nationalism. This impulse led to Strobl’s adopting right-wing and anti-Semitic views late in the 1920s. Some of the racism inherent in Strobl’s worldview had been visible as early as the illustrations commissioned for Der orchideengarten but metastasized when Strobl joined the Nazi Party before World War II and became a high official in the Nazi writers’ organization, spending the rest of his literary career producing pro-Nazi propaganda. As a result, his works were banned by the Allies at the end of the war. In horribly tangible ways, then, Strobl ended up embodying the antithesis of every hope Paul Scheerbart had had for the future of Germany and humankind.
It would be easy to read into Strobl’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907), never before translated into English, some precursor or indication of his later proclivities and political views. But what comes through behind the apparent faith and optimism about industry and industrialization is the threat inherent in a mechanized society: the rebellious artificial legions stealing the world from their masters, foreshadowing one of the themes of classic science fiction. In “The Triumph of Mechanics,” the author’s dystopia is laced with humor. This stance is in direct opposition to the “can-do, gee whiz” attitude about humanity’s endeavors on Earth and beyond the stars that dominated some early American science fiction.