Franz Kafka lived six months in Berlin
A life of weird anti-/social relationships.
This story comes with a “shout-out” to some very good, comprehensive journalism by Elif Batuman (“The Elif Life”), who ‘lucked into’ a great story about items in the estate of his friend and fan, Max Brod (1884-1968). I have at least one other back-burner “Berlin Story” on Kafka, based on my reading of him years ago, at a German university. -ts
BERLIN (mid-July 2024) — Some years ago, the Martin Gropiusbau museum mounted an exhibition of the life & work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924). One gallery was filled by a ring of glass cases containing Kafka’s 100-year-old hand-written manuscript of “The Trial” (Der Prozess). (Credit for showing the manuscript publicly goes to the German Literary Archive, in Marbach — a great resource for researchers of German literary history.)
The exhibit text explained that Kafka was inspired to write “The Trial” after several meetings in Berlin. He had felt forced to end his engagement with a woman, summoning all his now-famous self-doubt to give her the many reasons why she’d be better-off forgetting the whole thing — and to forget him, too. (Aside from the fact of knowing himself to be a very “strange agent,” Kafka was also diagnosed with tuberculosis.) In Berlin, he lived in a house just down the street from me. He left here in March 1924 and moved to Prague, where he died of his illness in June, 100 years ago this summer.
A lot of Americans of my generation remember reading Kafka in school. Millions of us read his short story, “The Penal Colony” as part of our secondary-school “Language Arts” (alternatively “Communications”) curricula. Also required in many-many high-school and college lit courses was Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis” — in which the young man awakens to find that he has become a cockroach overnight.
Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” seems especially relevant today, thinking about “Man’s inhumanity to man,” as our English/Lit teachers instructed us. In that story, a retired Officer waxes nostalgic over use of a torture-and-execution machine. The awful device uses sharp needles to inscribe (repeatedly) some strange, sanctimonious message into the body of the condemned, like “Be Just.” There’s mention of a “judicial process” which (quickly and efficiently) declares all defendants guilty without being given the chance to defend themselves. For Kafka (a Czech-German writer), the story’s context was not the Holocaust, but Europe’s crazy “sleepwalk” into World War I, whose own efficient cutting-edge technologies (sorry) killed young men by the millions. (Kafka wrote “The Penal Colony” the year the war began — then revised it in 1918, as the war was ending.)
Brief lessons for today’s writing students below the paywall.