Professor David Peimer
Kafka’s Circle
Summary
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. Professor David Peimer discusses not only the influence of Kafka himself, but also the wide-ranging influence of those in his immediate artistic circle.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s a great question. I think some of the humour is certainly full of irony, paradox, wit. Would I call it Kafka-esque? I’m not sure because Seinfeld deals more with, you know, almost friend and love relationships, ups and downs, snakes and ladders, rarely. I dunno if it deals with the bigger pic, the picture of being a file, being data, of searching for whatever you’ve done wrong but you haven’t done anything wrong. All these things. I would hesitate to call it Kafka-esque, I call it comedy more than satire. Satire is about ridiculing something. Comedy not necessarily has the quality of ridicule.
He died in Prague, and he’s buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, 1924. His parents, yeah, as I said, stayed in Prague and died there before the war.