Professor David Peimer
Kafka’s Circle

Professor David Peimer - Kafka’s Circle

- So, hi everybody, and hope everybody as well in these times of the gathering storm, as I think to use Churchill’s phrase of what is going on everywhere. Nevertheless, we, I guess carry on and, you know, find the light where we can and find the shining moments of humanity. So, today I’m going to look at Kafka’s Circle for a couple of reasons. I mean, we’ve been looking, I know historically with Trudy and William, and they’re fascinating talks in terms of Vienna and other parts of Europe, of the inter-war period, basically. And I’d be looking at the post, the World War I poets and the films and so on, and now it’s coming, moving on to Prague after looking at some Prague or Czech innovations in theatre, looking specifically, not only at Kafka, but his circle and his circle of very close friends. And in particular, I’m going to look at four of his friends and Milena briefly, who he was briefly involved with. I think, you know, possibly the great love of his life. And there’s a couple of reasons for that because for me, the overall narrative is not only to look at Kafka and his, we’ll look later very, a little bit at what I think are the key ideas in his remarkable novels. And I do regard him as one of the great poets and novelists of the century, of many centuries. But I will come back onto the, looking a little bit at the novels later, but to frame it in this context of this period of Vienna, Prague, elsewhere, and looking at the situation of Jewish people who are, you know, perhaps second generation or third generation in terms of the emancipation or relative emancipation happening in the Austria Hungarian empire, in Germany, in elsewhere in Europe, and in England of the times.

And I think Kafka really is part of that particular story. And his circle are so important because when we discover the key players, the key friends in his circle, we will see one is much more Zionist, the one is less, et cetera, the Judaism, the Jewish family, you know, the second or third generation. And we will discover in that, what I’m going to put, if I may, in a simple way, to assimilate or not to assimilate, to belong or not to belong in terms of Jewish tradition, Jewish thought, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, nationalism, ethnicity, all the questions that have been looked at, I know by Trudy superbly and many others, you know, and looking at this question because I think this period captures these dilemmas, you know, so remarkably. And because they had access to education and they were writing all the time, they could articulate their ideas and their thoughts about all these questions of assimilation, of a universalist, possibly romantic dream. You know, it’s of a universal escape, the kind of shtetl mindset or escape from the religious, from the cultural aspects to embrace a universalist mindset. To those who would argue, no, you cannot get far away from the tree from which you fall, if I may jump a little bit around with metaphors, you know, stay within the group, stay within the group that you know, and that is your tradition and that, you know, what is the role of the enlightenment?

The enlightenment was about transcending religious, cultural, ethnic background and the belief in a universalist future. The belief that there could be something of democracy, human rights, other things, et cetera, better society, improvement, rational, all that stuff. And the dream of being part of the world, not only being part of one’s own upbringing in a way. And then of course, the alternative to the universalist would be, perhaps we could use the word particularist. “No, you have to stay particular to your culture, your ethnic group, the extended family”, whether one is more secular or more religious in terms of religion specifically. But it’s the universalist particularist debate and the assimilation or not to assimilate. And obviously it’s not as simple because everybody is caught up in that. Everybody partly or not partly and so on. But I think framing the narrative of Kafka and his friend circle in that context captures for me the essence of who he was, the friends, and so many of the other intellectuals of the times, not only in Prague, but in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, elsewhere, who were of, obviously of Jewish descent, Jewish origin. And I think it’s so important because I think this resonates, goes way back to the previous centuries, and I think it resonates today very much so.

And I think it’s there, and I think it, the Jewish story, is a bit different to the story of any other ethnic groups because there are so many layers, certainly in a western consciousness. I’m not talking about an African or an Eastern consciousness, totally different. So I want to get a couple of the ideas in that story, in that overall narrative and position. I believe it’s accurate to position Kafka and his circle in that, and this remarkable give and take amongst him, and his friends to create quite an extraordinary set of real friends who are discussing and debating all these issues. And obviously not only their writing, their writing and all, they’re all writing in different ways, but they are, they’re passionate and obsessed with, I think the very questions that we face today and have been faced over the millennia, you know, by Jewish people in so many different contexts to assimilate or not to assimilate, where do you belong? How do you belong? How does one choose or not choose? If I may, and I know there’s debates about Heidegger, you know, the great German philosopher, I’m not talking about Heidegger’s life and belonging to the Nazi party, but he does have a phrase in his philosophy where he says, “One has a certain thrown-ness in life, one is thrown in certain ways in life, and one is thrown with religion, with culture, with family, with community, with larger group, ethnic origin, race, whatever, one is, has a thrown-ness into life.” And I like that, like that phrase, because this, to me, is part of the Jewish condition.

And Kafka is circle are part of that. And I don’t think it’s about, you know, the naive words of escape or not, et cetera, but it’s about positioning oneself given this overall, overarching narrative, as I said, going back millennia, because the ideas of being the outsiders, the insider, we’ve spoken about Shylock often it’s, and others. And being the other and being overt, superior, inferior. And ultimately, is it back to, you know, Sartre, because in Sartre’s essay, that brilliant hundred pages on the antisemite and the Jew, where in essence Sartre argues that the Jew is whatever the antisemite decides he is, that’s a, it’s a remarkable phrase. And Sartre had many other ideas there, but it is, in other words, it is an inescapable framing by the other however Jew is framed in European culture, certainly. So it’s part of this, I think, feeds into the debate. I, just to say, we all know I’m not going to go too much into detail of Kafka’s life. I did that before in a previous lecture. And we, I think we all know it fairly well. I’m going to spend a bit more time on his friends, and a little bit about his life, and then a little bit about his books. And I want to show a short clip in a few minutes where Max Brod, his greatest friend of all, is interviewed much later after the war, after he’s published and Kafka’s become so huge and famous internationally. I’m going to show you clips from that interview.

But before I do, I want to just remind us, if I may, These are Kafka’s parents, his mother and his father. Julia, his mother coming from a fairly wealthy Jewish family, as we know. And his father in Max Brod’s, I think accurate phrase, the self-made man, you know, he’s the businessman in Prague and the self-made man, you know, proud of his origins, proud to be Jewish, proud to have certain amount of religion, certain amount of secularism, and a self-made man of business, not really, and expecting the son to take over, you know, to become part of the business and to continue. We’ve seen that in “Leopoldstadt”, Stoppard’s brilliant play and others. So then I want to go on to here, okay, and I just want you to hold on for a second. This is young Kafka, obviously, not just this kind of intensity of the look, but Max Brod will talk about the elegance. Kafka always dressed smart, he always had a tie and a suit. He was smartly, elegantly dressed, you know, none of what we might say today, the teenager or ourselves of jeans and t-shirts, you know, smart, hair back, parted, everything. And Max Brod talks about this a little bit in the interview. You know, that Kafka was anything but the cliche of the word bohemian. This here, picture of his sisters, who I’m sure we know were killed in Holocaust This here, this is the statue to Kafka in Prague. And what I’ve always loved is, you know, when I spoke about the first World War poets and films, you get the rage and the terror and the pain and the suffering of those ordinary soldiers in the trenches, not the officers, the ordinary soldiers writing about their daily experience.

And that’s the German and the English and the French poets and writers from the novels to the poems. You get it in the films, as well. Whereas, when I’m talking about the Czech Theatre, it was, and this is encapsulated for me by Hasek’s brilliant novel, the satire, “The Good Soldier Svejk”. And what it is a satire of the ordinary, a bit like “Catch-22”, the ordinary soldier caught up in this quagmire of utter insanity, of utter absurdity, and grotesque horror. But the way of the ordinary soldier dealing with it is with ironic wit and ironic humour. And that’s what makes such a difference to the Wilfried Owens, Sassoons, and the war poets of the trenches and the horror and the slaughter, and the Czechs, you know, they had to, they were called up and they had to fight as well, Austria, Hungary, the Empire, et cetera. But the way of writing about it, so fascinatingly captured in Czech, in that remarkable satire, which Brecht later made into a brilliant play, is this ironic, witty humour and idea of the main character is to outwit the officer, outwit the military at every turn, you survive on your wits and with humour. And it’s how this quality, almost like the trickster, but the trickster who takes real agency to outwit and succeeds, and in that way, the sheer stupidity and ineptitude of the military leaders is shown. And this image of Kafka captures a bit of that for me. And when you read about how his friends responded when he wrote his stuff and he read it to them and how they laughed and thought, “This is so funny.” And the jokes and all that, a way of dealing with such pain and adversity, with humour and wit.

And I think it’s seriously overlooked in a western consciousness, you know, where we focus so much on alienation, despair, existentialism, and Brod talks about, you know, it’s a complete misunderstanding of Kafka, the man, and of his work. Okay, and I think this image, for me, captures that a little bit quite accurately. Just a little bit more on Kafka. This is a page from one of his writings, pieces of the Kafka’s actual, you know, handwriting. And then I think this is one of the favourite images of all, there’s Freud and this is, of course, “Metamorphosis” and the insect has come, you know, Gregor all has become an insect and has gone to Freud for therapy. “I dreamed I was Kafka, oh my God, what am I going to do?” And I love, because this captures the attitude of Kafka, I think, to deal with trauma, to deal with these questions, to assimilate and not disseminate, all the what the characters go through, the kind of life. To be able to deal with it with some wit and some humour in satire ‘cause I believe his novels are kind of a dreamy satire or serial satire, if you like. And they, all of them, knew about surrealism, you know, all him here and his friends. And I think this cartoon, for me, captures something of that, you know? And because the work lends itself to it, I don’t think we could ever imagine something of this kind of cartoon with the brilliant poems of Wilfred Owen and the other First World War poets. Okay, I want you to show here a briefly a picture.

This is a picture of Kafka on the right and Max Brod on the left, Brod is with the moustache. Two young guys having fun, you know, outside, on the seaside together, two university friends, so close, so such good friends, celebrating youth, fun, life. And you know, this is not the scared, timid little Kafka, which is promulgated often in certain western images of the guy. You know, this is very, very different, and this is what Brod talks about quite a lot. I wanted to show this because it’s a very different kind of picture, I think for us today. This is one of Kafka’s drawings 'cause you know, he did a lot of drawings all the time. And this is called “Jockey on His Horse”. You can see the little jockey on with the whip, and this is the sketch of the horse underneath, obviously, you know, they all knew about, you know, was the art that was happening in Paris, cubism, the beginnings of so many art movements, surrealism, et cetera, et cetera. You know, this is, it’s a doodle, but nevertheless it captures a certain mindset of wit and humour and movement, you know, and restlessness. This is one of his little sketches called the drunk. You know, there’s a certain playfulness, a charm, a wit. And you know, without going on and on about it, I just want to show us, to share, so that we can have a different sense of Kafka the man, Kafka with his friends in the circle. And this here is Kafka’s, one of his notepads, which is written where we’ve got the Hebrew. He studied Hebrew, he studied under a rabbi and he spoke Hebrew, as well. Very strong Jewish upbringing from his family. He had a Bar Mitzvah, Kafka, et cetera, and learned Hebrew. And not only that, I think learnt a certain quality of the Talmudic and the Jewish thinking, the idea of debate, and question, and challenge, and look at one same thing from different angles. And of course the ironic wit. Okay, I’d like to show, this is Max Brod, and this is the first clip I want to show with the interview with Brod, it’s in German, but the English subtitles underneath.

• Okay, I’m going to hold it there. And what I really like, I’m going to show a little bit more of the interview in a moment or two. First, this is a picture of Max Brod, you know, 'cause he immigrated and lived in Israel. Well, a couple of things I wanted to take from that little clip was, you know, he said he was neither as depressive as people make him out to be, nor of a cheerful disposition. Sounds pretty human as all of us, you know, in between the two. And he speaks about his wit, about his charm, his intelligence, that he was never scared to say what he thought and sometimes be aggressive and, you know, argue his ideas say it, you know, this is not the scared little character, if you like, tiptoeing on the cobbled streets of Prague. You know, I get a very different sense. I want you to show that image earlier that I showed, of Brod and Kafka on the beach. You know, they used to go hiking together, they went swimming together, you know, a lot of activities out in nature, which Kafka would organise as much as Brod and the other friends. So, and then the other point, of course, about the father that he knew, Kafka knew his father loved him, and he loved his father, although that, you know, his, that “Letter to His Father” is brilliant, as we all know, but it is so carefully thought through. It’s not an emotional outrage or a delayed adolescent rebellious attack on the father.

It is a considered, thoughtful, understanding, as if he was in the father’s shoes of how his father might think, as well as he, the son, Franz. And I think that’s very important, the way he writes with it, considered an always ironic tone, ironic attitude. So, and the other point that I like is that, you know, he wasn’t full of all these neurosis and other things that have been passed down in the Western imagination. Of course it’s there, but as much as it is in anybody else, I’m trying to show a portrait, which is more real, which is not stereotyped, and it fits into that larger narrative of having submitted debates and discussions that we all have today. Assimilate or not, right or not right, follow with the father once, or not, go into daddy’s business or not, you know, what to study at, at university, et cetera, et cetera. Max Brod himself, at four years old, was diagnosed with severe spinal curvature, which gave him pain and serious suffering for life. From 1924 on, he worked as a critic for the Prague Daily Zionist newspaper, and he attributed the influence of Martin Buber as having the big influence on his life. Then he, and he worked mostly for that newspaper. Then in 1939, after the Nazis took over Prague, Brod and his wife Elsa managed to get out, to the then Palestine, settles in Tel Aviv, and he worked as a dramaturge for the Habima Theatre. And later, of course, as we all know, the Israeli National Theatre for the next 30 years. And in that position, he’s crucial to bringing out, and he talks about it, Hasek’s “Good Soldier Svejk”, Janacek’s Operas, and many other great pieces.

And of course we all know his remarkable contribution to Kafka, the publishing of Kafka’s novels, stories, everything, diaries and so on. We all know the story, I’m not going to go into it now of what happened, you know, of Kafka wanting to burn, you know, and so on. and what Brod does talk about, and he does say it in his book on his biography of Kafka that he regards him as the great 20th century poet. It’s picked up W. H. Auden, Orson Welles, and many others. Interestingly, because Max Brod was a Zionist, and that’s very important because these are the four friends, the three friends with Kafka, I’m going to draw little portraits of today. And so you can imagine the conversations happening amongst them. Brod to, gets to the then Palestine, he gets out just before the war. You can imagine the articles he is writing, the debates with Kafka and many others of the intellectuals and writers and artists of the time. Brod believes that Kafka’s “The Castle” is an allegory of the wandering Jew. And he writes about this in, Brod writes about it in his biography. We can debate it end endlessly or not. Milan Kundera argues that he doesn’t agree with that at all because he says that for him, it’s, the books are not an allegory. Kafka is writing about the concrete existence of daily life.

He’s not writing religious allegory. Brod argues it’s religious allegory. You know, there’s neither, I don’t think either of them is right or wrong. It’s an interesting, if you like, debate. What is important, I think is this quality of, you know, the Zionist in Brod and managing to get out, trying to convince, and he almost manages to convince Kafka to leave, sorry, not Kafka, but others, okay? There’s, of course, Kafka dies in 1924. Anyway, you can imagine these debates and these discussions, and these are happening, you know, just after, before the First World War, during the First World War and then after it. So these discussions are happening in the very early part of the 20th century amongst these friends. Okay, I want to show one other part of this interview, which is a little bit here, where he talks about the circle of friends.

• I think what really strikes me is that the circuit of four friends that he talks about and how they’ve met all the time for years, and they would meet and would read each other’s works, they would share, they would debate, they would discuss different philosophical points of view, their perceptions and their ambitions and how they saw their life living at the time and their future, their different beliefs about Judaism, about Zionism, about literature and so on. And this sort of very rich, alive buzz that I get a sense going on that Brod is describing. And of course, the last point, that of course he never saw himself as a prophet of any kind. Okay, I want to just go and I’m going to show, talk a little bit about some of the friends that he mentions as well. This is Felix Weltsch, who Max Brod mentions there, he was a philosopher and author, and he’s one of the four, if you like, the four main characters of the Kafka Circle. And Felix Weltsch is born in Prague, studies law and philosophy at Charles University, becomes a philosopher. And he lived in, worked as a librarian. And he, then on March the 15th, 1939, he and his wife leave Prague literally on the last train out of Czechoslovakia of the times, 15th of March, 1939, a day that will, as we all know the rest of the phrase, he worked as a librarian in the philosophical faculty in Charles University, and then as a librarian in Jerusalem afterwards. So he gets out on the, literally on the last train out of the then Czechoslovakia and manages to get to the then Palestine.

Just out of interest, is that his sister-in-law, his sister-in-law was the Prague-born concert pianist, Alice Herz-Sommer, who was forced to perform and also performed and yet survived Theresienstadt. And he wrote mainly in addition for working as librarian, he also wrote for, in English, I’m going to give the English translation, he Jewish-Zionist weekly in Prague called “Self-defense”, from 1919 to 1938. He’s a Zionist, he’s writing about Jewish affairs, Jewish community, Jewish thought, culture, Jewish life, you know, from Eastern Europe, the origins, moving into the cities of Prague, Vienna, elsewhere, capturing that whole period of, let’s call it very broadly emancipation, second, third generation, et cetera, which they all were absolutely part of. Okay, this is one of the other friends, the very close ones, Oskar Baum, the Blind Poet that Brod talks about. Extraordinary, extraordinary life for me. Oskar Baum was a music teacher and a writer. He’s the son of a Jewish clothing merchant, and when he is 11 years old, he has a fight. He’s quite a, he’s a physical character as a kid. And he has a fight with another kid at the school and he loses sight. He’d already lost his sight in his one eye when he was very little. But he lost the sight in his other eye as a result of this fight when he is 11.

He’s not allowed to carry on school in Prague. He’s sent to Vienna at this young age to study, high school. He trains as a music consultant. He learns the organ and piano, in 1902 he returns to Prague and he works as an organist, a cantor in a synagogue, and a piano teacher. He marries a lady called Margaret Schnabel, and the couple’s apartment becomes very important. This is the main meeting place of the Kafka Circle, of all the friends. He’s the first and he marries and the apartment, et cetera. They’re married there, and that’s where so much of the reading and the writing and this connection happens. And you can imagine all these philosophical debates. He also is the editor and writer for the Prague Jewish Nationalist Weekly from 1910 onwards, when he goes back to live in Prague. He writes a memoir, which in the English translation, 'cause these are all German, by the way, all German speaking Czechs, and he writes a memoir called “Life in the Dark”, which is about his dark, which is about his blindness, being Jewish, being German speaking in a Czech city at the aftermath of the collapsed Austria-Hungarian Empire, or the about to collapse and then collapsing. So, all these different qualities, making him the margins of the margins of the margins, if you like, and let’s never forget, he’s blind, However, Baum identifies as a German writer, but also as Jewish. But he is probably the most fervent Zionist of all.

And he’s seriously opposed to assimilation, doesn’t believe in it for a second. But nevertheless, when the First World War started, he makes a conscious stand with German language writers from Prague, from Berlin, Germany, elsewhere, et cetera, et cetera, and they, the framing of the conflict in a very broad context as it’s come down through the decades, is a certain sense of a spirituality in central Europe. A soul, they would call it compared to the soulless of emerging modernization, more Western, if you like, and modernity. So it’s contradictions after contradictions, you know, the committed non-assimilationist Zionist. But nevertheless, he makes a clear stand with Germany during the war. After the war, he’s a charismatic lecturer. He’s the most charismatic of all, I think. And according to Brod and the other notes that we get, woman students loved him, and his gets married, and they go to his lectures, and his wife becomes dedicated to Baum. She takes his notes, he’s blind, of course, takes dictation, writes all his letters, correspondence, notetaking, et cetera. Then the Nazis, of course, occupied 1938, and he tries to immigrate to Britain, the British don’t let him in, and he dies in the Prague Jewish hospital of heart disease and heart complications. So we get this big sense of a literary group of philosophers, writers, thinkers, as I’ve said, the second, third generation and all their, I think all their dilemmas and conversations around these fundamental ideas which we face today. Czech nationalism is emerging, German nationalism, obviously, they’re speaking the language of German, but they’re living in a Czech city, in Prague.

There’s the dream of Zionism and the realistic hope of Zionism. And then there’s their own religion, their own family backgrounds. There’s the Eastern European origins of their families, the shtetls, but where their parents have come from and achieved, their grandparents and so on. So it’s, all of this is caught up and in “Life in the Dark” of Baum’s, his memoir, he tries to capture all, let’s call it, to use the, I suppose the kindest word would be all these contradictions, all these dilemmas. It’s human, all too human. Okay, this here is a picture of Ludwig Winder, and this is the fourth of the great friends of the circle. And he’s the son of Jewish religious family, very religious. And he works again for the nationalists. And these are nationalists. So the Deutsche Zeitung Bohemia in Prague, and he belongs obviously, he’s crucial to the four, the Prague Circle. In 1917, he publishes his first novel, which explores in the critics phrase, the German critics of the time, the difficulties faced by Jews from original religious eastern communities in integrating and assimilating themselves in modernity, in the modern emerging Europe, as it’s framed. A semi-autobiographical novel, which is fascinating, is called in English, of course, “The Jewish Organ” 1922. And it’s about the conflict or even the battle of young eastern European Jews for a secular existence. Exactly everything we’re talking about, assimilate or not to assimilate, where to belong, belong here, belong there, speak this language, but you live in this other country, you’re part of this culture, et cetera. We all get the picture. He wrote a play called “The Woman Without Qualities”.

And this was used by the great novelist Robert Musil, and I’m sure many people know of his novel called “The Man Without Qualities”. Musil took totally from Ludwig Winder’s play “The Woman Without Qualities”, he even took the title adapted so many of the ideas and the stories into his own context, Musil. As one lecturer, as one professor of mine said when I was studying at Columbia, “ Originality is lack of information.” Maybe. He also wrote later novels about the downfall of the Habsburg and so on. “The Jewish Organ”, his novel, is a story about the Jewish guy Albert, who grows up in the ghetto in a small town in Moravia, and the themes are conflict with the father and the grandfather about religion, whether to assimilate or not to assimilate, integrate into this universalist attitude. Is it romantic and idealists to have a Zionist belief as well, or to stay with a more particularist attitude and not assimilate, you know, anti-assimilate. And the novelist called, this character Albert, goes through all these challenging questions that I’ve been describing. Then, of course, comes the German occupation, and he flees on the 29th of June, 1939, just before the war starts, he managed to flee with his wife and the eldest daughter, Marianne to England. He managed to get out and the English let him in. But his younger daughter, Eva, chooses to stay behind in Prague. She’s murdered in Bergen-Belsen. In 1941, Winder dies of a heart disease in England at the age of 57.

So, these are some of the main characters, as you can see part of Kafka’s life. I want to talk a little bit about Milena Jesenska and you can see her dates there. I think this was his real great love. And of course there was Felice Bauer later and Dora Diamond as well, at the end of his life. Milena, he’d only met twice and he wrote so many letters to her, for four days in Vienna and then briefly later, for, we are not sure if it’s a day or two. I mean, it’s so brief and it’s, obviously, it feels totally like young, youthful, romantic love, which is never forgotten and which may or may not come back at some point in life. This is Milena and a closeup picture of her and the passion in their letters, the philosophy, the thinking, the sharing, all, there is so much between the two, in the endless letters. For examples, they met in 1920, by the way, four days in Vienna. So it’s after the first World War. Kafka writes, “I could have built the pyramids with the effort it takes me to fight in this life and live in this life. I could have built the pyramids.” “One has to either take people as they are or leave them as they are. One cannot change people, one can merely disturb their balance.” He’s young Kafka and he’s writing, it’s so thoughtful, it’s so subtle. It’s so intelligent, for me, with such nuance. These early, early letters.

Another letter that I want to write, that I want to mention about, which is written to Felice, which will show another aspect of Kafka, Felice Bauer. “You say you go to the synagogue and what sustains you is it the ideas of Judaism or of God? This God would be the most important thing. It shows a continuous relationship between yourself and a reassuringly distant, if possibly infinite height or depth. He who feels this continuously, this God, has no need to roam, to roam about like a lost dog. No need to slip into the grave as if it were a warm sleeping bag.” This is Kafka just writing letters. The beauty, the language, you know, you just feel, I feel, anyway, when I read it, I felt like music taken almost into another world with Kafka, and I know I may be romanticising him, but I’m happy to be accused of that. Okay, with Milena, I think some of the main things about her are the discussions. Anyway, she eventually to cut a long story short, she marries a Jewish guy, then she divorces, married somebody else, and during the war, she tries to oppose the Nazis in her own little way, in her own sense. I’m not going to go into details here, but she’s eventually captured and killed by the Nazis. Okay, these are some of the main people here, and I think what I, what I would like to just add, I’m not going to go into the whole of Kafka’s writing, but what I would like to share is a couple of phrases from Kafka’s own work to show in a sense, if we can imagine, just to imagine him reading this to us. If we are part of his circle of buddies and he’s coming and reading, you know, Gregor Samsa is that, you know, wakes up one morning and discovered he’s an insect.

Someone had forgotten to tell him and so on. He’s an insect, “Metamorphosis” and so on, how we would laugh, imagine, you know, we are all at university and somebody comes and runs, you know, we’d laugh, we’d enjoy, we’d tease, we’d joke and so on. And I want you to read a couple of things of, for me, how he transformed images, ideas, bureaucracy, the office, into what he called in a letter to Milena, a fantastical, poetic literary experience. And he uses the word that the office is not as banal and stupid. It is full of the fantastical, I’m translating it loosely from the German. It is full of the fantastical in life, in the office, humans have become data, they’ve become files, numbers, nothing more. And it, yet in the office we find all the passions of war, jealousy, love, hate, desire, kindness, forgiveness, compassion, all the great passions of great literature and possibly on war that come out in those times are in the office together with the reduction that he called it in the letter to Milena. The reduction of the human to a file, to piece of data, et cetera. You know, today we would call it performance outcomes. Today we, you know, performance reviews, today we would say, you know, everything is known about us, the abolition of privacy in our lives, you know, the surveillance state, whether it’s from the crazy political correctness or from the other side, wherever the, you know, the surveillance in democracy is not only obviously totalitarians that I think he politically intuited in the office where everything can be known and found out by anybody about anybody. And we never know. So many laws are made so many rules by people we don’t know who, where, what, we’re caught up in this labyrinth, as Orson Wells spoke about the castle, you know, and his other novels.

He transformed profoundly anti-poetic material into poetic images for the century. And it is, I think as Kundera would say, a concrete sense of daily life. This is Kafka. “We live in an age which is so possessed by demons that soon we shall only be able to do goodness in the deepest secrecy, as if it were almost a crime.” To do goodness, we will be forced to be so secret as if we were committing a crime. It’s an extraordinary statement. Not only talking about the legal aspects, but of how to do goodness in daily life. Is it seen as weakness, all the rest of it. Then he says, “I usually solve my problems by letting me devour there.” I solve my problems by letting them devour me. This man is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t lived a day yet. Bob Dylan’s phrase, “He’s not busy being born, he’s busy dying.” It’s Kafka, we can see it here. Kafka, “I am free and that’s why I’m also lost.” It’s the Jewish mindset, the Talmudic way of thinking. It’s parables, and if you read Kafka’s aphorisms, he’s full of parables. “When you crucify a man, you have to lift him, and you have to look up at him.” You can’t look down although you’re killing him. It’s constantly irony upon irony, juxtaposition. All of these qualities, for me, are so deeply embedded in him. You know, there’s the great Woody Allen line, “Well, what have I got in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.” Now that’s taken to, you know, the extreme humour.

But I see a direct link to the wit of Kafka in that. To paraphrase, you know, what a good friend of mine once said, if I may, does he have a Jewish soul and a German mind? Is that part of the fundamental dilemma in the character of Kafka, or part of the intriguing richness in the character of Kafka? Dimensions upon dimensions. In “The Trial”, the protagonist Joseph K. is arrested by a German, a Czech, and a Jew. You know, Kafka often spoke with Brod about going to live in Palestine and later, with Felice first and later with Dora Diamond. And he even sent a postcard to one of his friends in Tel Aviv and he wants to immigrate, et cetera, et cetera. But of course he was far too sick and other things, you know, the tuberculosis that killed him. Orson Wells said that Kafka is the greatest writer of the 20th century. “Any one of his novels is far greater than "Citizen Kane.” W. H. Auden, “ Kafka is the Dante, the greatest poet of the 20th century.” And I want to finish with one of the great phrases which I think of Kafka’s, where he speaks about, ultimately, Kundera picks us up, this is from the “Letters to Milena”, where the punished seek the crime which they have not committed. Where the feeling is so strong of becoming a foul, becoming just an automaton, becoming a piece of data, the reduced man, you know, in some philosophical phrases that the sense of being punished without knowing what I have done wrong. In other words, the societies are set up and it doesn’t matter what the economic structure, it doesn’t matter totalitarian or democratic for Kafka. 'cause he doesn’t, he’s not an interest in that. he doesn’t talk about that and there’s hardly, all those friends are very involved, you know, in politics and discussions, how the punishment seeks the crime.

The punished seeks the crime. “What have I done wrong? Here comes a letter from the bureaucracy, from the government, from my employer. I’m called to this tribunal, I’m called to this meeting. The boss says this, the officer says that, I wake up, I’m an insect and my biggest anxiety is not that I’m an insect and call the doctor. In fact, my biggest anxiety is that I’m going to be late for work.” I know friends in England, university people and others, theatre people who, you know, so anxious they’re going to be late for the interview, for the job, to get on time and fall, they’ve fallen, broken their arms. I mean, it sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. So I guess in short is the idea of the punished seek the crime. like the bird seeks the cage. And for me that image of Kafkas is so powerful. The bird seeks the cage, how people can feel they’ve done wrong without having done anything wrong. Already, they’re guilty, and that we have set up an a way of society, which already has got these things inside the daily elements of life. Whether it’s in the job, maybe in the family, wherever. That’s, I think, and this is what he writes in the one great, great letter, the greatest letter I think where he says, I say it again, “The Office” isn’t due to Milena. “The Office” is not a secret. “The Office” is not a boring, stupid institution. It is a profound poetic image and all these other things that happened there. And in this, where you can feel punished at any time or wrong, but you haven’t committed anything wrong. But the but the ability of a society to do that so quickly is obviously so fast.

Third, I want to share, these are some thoughts and we come back finally to the assimilationist debate of Kafka. And he, I think does capture it. And I think in this idea of being, I suppose subject to bureaucracy, to institutions, to environments of work and life and governments, which set up an individual like that. Where is the autonomy? Where is the self-agency? And I think he’s very aware, and I don’t think he’s aware in this paranoid, only freaked out, existential, angsty way. Of course there’s that, but I think, you know, as Brod says, you know, he, I wouldn’t say he is cheerful, but I wouldn’t say he is depressive either. More human and all too human, and full of all these discussions and debates. Not by chance that his circle is all Jewish, that some of them are very committed Zionists, come from religious backgrounds and similar meilleure, if you like, to the way that he does. His remarkable brilliance is that what he does see intuitively and what he does write intuitively transcends his own time. And I think amazing writers can do that, where they transcend it and they create images which last, and speak directly to us from his times to today. Okay, thank you so much everybody. All right, I can take some questions. Shauna, that’s it, if I should.

• [Shauna] Sure.

• Okay.

Q&A and Comments:

• [Shauna] Dennis Glover’s asking, was Joseph Heller inspired by “The Good Soldier Svejk” in writing “Catch-22”?

• That’s a great question, Dennis. And I remember, I think you mentioned that last time was talking about Prague theatre. I don’t know, and it’d be, I haven’t yet found out and it’d be fascinating to find out. I imagine yes.

Yana, who drew the cartoon? I’ve found that cartoon, but I haven’t been able to find the cartoonist, I’m still looking.

Ross, which Brecht play were you referring to? That’s the play “The Good Soldier Svejk” which is an adaptation of Hasek’s novel of the same name. Joel, thank you for your comment.

Janice, Brod took all Kafka’s papers manuscript to Israel, published them, on his death, his secretary took them to court battle. Yes, what happened was that, we don’t know, it was a lady Esther, who was Brod’s secretary, and we don’t know for many years and if she had a romantic affair or not. And anyway, Brod left all the manuscripts, the originals of Kafka to her, and then her children wanted the estate and the money and it went to court in Israel and the Israeli, the Supreme Court decided it must go to the National Museum in Israel, which was the national library, and that was the decision. There are all sorts of things, we can go into more legalistic detail.

Q: Yolandi, Is Brod talking in German?

A: He’s talking in German. They all spoke German. I mean they all spoke some Czech as well 'cause they lived in Prague, but they were all German speaking and all German, and they wrote in German. Yanna, what became a Baum’s wife. She survived, she was okay.

Susan, I think he was prophetic in his views on data, et cetera, in the office. Yeah, I think so very much, you know, and in a way, it’s taken up in the world’s surveillance today. I mean the one hand we have, you know, this crazy obsession with surveillance culture by the politically correct people where it’s, you know, you do something, you know, when you were 11 year old and it’s on Facebook or wherever, and yet can be held up 20, 30, 40 years later, and you know, it’s a surveillance culture coming from political correctness, and it’s as crazy to me as from the right wing, you know, of the state interfering and everything and has the right to find out almost anything about anybody. So, and he talks about, I don’t have a chance to read it now, but he talks in a letter to Milena about the paralysing effect of fear in this kind of data-driven surveillance culture and how fear can become the dominant emotion. And then of course the reaction to fear, which is rage.

Q: Jeffrey, would you call some of Seinfeld’s episodes Kafka-esque?

A: 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.

Monty, about assimilations, two men walking down Wall Street, one turns to the other and says, “I used to be Jewish.” The other replies, “I have a brother. He used to be a hunchback.” Yeah.

Q: Susan, do you think he instructed Brod to burn his writings because he didn’t want them interpreted without his input?

A: No, I haven’t had a chance to show more of that interview 'cause it goes on quite long. But Brod talks about, and in his book, his biography, that he thinks Kafka chose him because he knew he wouldn’t burn them. and he left a letter, but there was nothing legal that Kafka wrote to say to Brod “Burn them.” It was just a letter. There was no legal equivalent in a will as such, and he knew that Brad would, they were friends for many, many years. He knew that Brod would never burn, according to Brod. So it’s, I think that there was ambivalence in one way or contradiction or he was very ill, you know, at the time. We’ve got to bear that in mind, also. Marian, thank you, Susan, thanks. Okay, Adele, thank you.

Kafka’s parents, well they died before the Second World War. His father died, I think it was the late twenties, if I’m right. They died after Kafka died in 1924. His, I think his father was '28 or '29, and then the mother. Judy, Freud write a paper criminality from a sense of guilt. I’m not sure I’ll check it.

Harold, small detail of translation. Gregor Samsa found himself transformed into vermin and not, as often translated, into insect. You’re right, it can be verb or put into an English word insect. A more visceral English word probably is insect. Okay, Riva, thank you. Avron, thank you for your current comments, Barry, Barbara, thanks so much.

Q: Where did Kafka die?

A: 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. Thelma, thanks.

Yes, they all spoke Yiddish, absolutely Yiddish, German, Czech, and some of them spoke others as well. Bit of English, but of French, and Hebrew, Kafka studied Hebrew.

Glenda is Kafka’s “Strafkolonie” about being punished without being guilty, reflection of his Jewishness. Maybe, he never actually talks about that in his books or in his diaries or letters. He talks about the Jewish thing. He doesn’t really link it to that, he’s trying more to understand the question of assimilation, not assimilate, integrate, modernity, religion, or secularity. All these dilemmas if you like, together with his friends trying to find their own position. And the ultimate question, where do they belong more than in other areas. I think that’s more the thrust to me of his questions. I don’t think it’s by chance the circle is all French, is all Jewish.

Okay, Ruth, okay, thank you, Richard, Susan, okay, thank you.

Okay, great. I think that’s most of the questions.