134 The Greatest Night of Franz Kafka's Life

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

Arts, History, Books

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2018

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We use the term Kafkaesque to describe bureaucracies and other social institutions with nightmarishly complex, illogical, or bizarre qualities - and in most biographies of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) we find that his life often mirrored the strangeness in his fiction. In this episode, host Jacke Wilson examines the origins of Kafka’s particular sensibility, suggests how those characteristics played out in Kafka’s life and art, and finally uncovers what may have been the greatest night of Kafka’s life. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. Learn more about the show at historyofliterature.com or facebook.com/historyofliterature. Contact the host at jackewilsonauthor@gmail.com or @WriterJacke. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello.
0:11.0	In 1904, a struggling young writer wrote the following words to a friend, quote,
0:16.0	I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
0:21.0	If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for?
0:26.3	So that it will make us happy as you write?
0:29.0	Good Lord!
0:30.2	We would be happy precisely if we had no books.
0:33.0	And the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to.
0:37.5	But we need the books that affect us like a disaster,
0:41.5	that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far
0:48.9	from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
0:56.7	That is my belief."
0:59.9	End quote.
1:00.9	The struggling young writer was Franz Kofka, known today as one of the greatest writers of his age,
1:07.0	the author of celebrated novels like The Trial and The Castle, and shorter works like The Hunger Artist, and above all his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis.
1:17.0	He's the literary patron saint of the very literary city of Prague, if not all of Europe.
1:24.6	In 1941, the poet W.H. Auden said, quote, had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing
1:31.3	the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare,
1:35.2	and Gerta bore to theirs.
1:37.3	Kafka is the first one would think of.
1:41.4	His name has become an adjective, Kafka-esque, which the Oxford Dictionary calls
	...

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