A report for an academy

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A report for an academy is a story by Franz Kafka . After it was first published in 1917 in the magazine Der Jude , it appeared in 1920 as part of the volume Ein Landarzt .

The monkey named Rotpeter is invited by the members of an unspecified academy to submit a report on his “monkey past life”. After several years of "absolute self-denial and adaptation", captured on a hunting expedition in Africa and shipped in a cage, while looking for a way out, he soon realized that a second way was open to him in addition to living in a cage in the zoological garden: of the variety show and to become a " person " there. The subject of the report is then rather its description of the adjustment process and its role as an imitator. The account of the monkey incarnation can also be understood as a story of forced assimilation and as an educational satire .

Summary

Captured by a hunting expedition from the Hagenbeck company , kept for months in an oppressively narrow cage on a steamer, the monkey is looking for a way out. He imitates people because he wants to be as "undisturbed" as they are obviously. Apparently he learns meaningful gestures and speaking easily. He has the greatest problems drinking schnapps. A ship passenger gives him theoretical and practical lessons "at various hours". So he learns that with the greatest effort. He emphasizes several times that he only imitates people because he is looking for a way out, but not because he hopes for freedom.

Faced with the alternatives of the zoological garden and vaudeville, he strives to work in vaudeville and has "successes that can hardly be increased". His life is successful between banquets, scientific societies and social gatherings. He has achieved what he wanted to achieve and he certifies that he is average European.

He is obviously a virtuoso when it comes to crossing borders between humans and animals. Not so two other beings around him. His first trainer, with whom he learns to be “inconsiderate”, becomes almost monkey himself and has to go to a sanatorium at times. The little, half-trained chimpanzee, with whom he “indulges in ape-style” at night, has the “insanity of the confused trained animal in view”, which he cannot bear during the day.

background

In September 1908 and April 1909, a trained chimpanzee named "Consul Peter" was shown in a Prague variety theater. It stands to reason that Kafka derived suggestions for the present narrative from it. He has also dealt intensively with Brehm's animal life and questions of behavioral research and social Darwinism .

Elsa Brod, Max Brod's wife , performed the work on December 19, 1917 in the Prague Club of Jewish Women and Girls with great success. Since then, the story has often been included in their program by reciters. The depiction of the great ape by Klaus Kammer in the German premiere of the text by the director Willi Schmidt at the Akademie der Künste as part of the Berliner Festwochen 1963, which was recorded by the SFB and repeated over and over again on television for decades, is still admired today .

There are several small fragments of the report for an academy . There is a bizarre encounter between a narrator and Rotpeter's impresario , a conversation between Rotpeter and a visitor and the beginning of a letter from the (temporarily mad) first Rotpeter teacher.

shape

The human ape is the first-person narrator of this story; only he overlooks the facets of his incredible incarnation and comments on them. Significantly, however, the memories of youth are no longer accessible to this I; they are suppressed. This reflects the trauma of his violent abduction from the original state. Overall, it is not the experiencing, but the narrative and reflective self that comes to the fore in the narrative. Because the narrative is primarily geared towards evaluation and judgment, and indeed from a quite higher point of view, because Red Peter's horizon includes animal and human existence, natural instinct and spiritual discipline, freedom and social organization.

Rotpeter's comments concern not only his own story but also the image people make of themselves.

The alcohol episode is particularly detailed; it seems to be the climax of the dramatic representation with large arcs of tension. This long period is like an alternating film montage between teacher and ape pupil.

Text analysis and interpretive approaches

Rotpeter's report can be read as a parable of the tribal history of humans and their individual socialization, because what the monkey experiences can be transferred to the entire human species. With a melancholy undertone, Kafka sees the lack of people as a - if not entirely - sad achievement and an acceptable compromise on the whole. At the same time, however, he engages in satirical attacks that pull people down from the high horse of their self-importance.

The basic motive is almost manic learning (at times with five teachers at the same time) as a way out of a hopeless situation while denying one's own needs. The prerequisite for this was forgetting and reversing the usual perspective.

It is noteworthy, however, that despite all the learning efforts, the monkey is still a monkey at first glance due to its unchanged physical appearance - the fur. With regard to his appearance, which classifies him most clearly in the monkey category, he has never expressed or strived for the desire to look human, and from this he also derives the right to expose himself to what a person - like himself thinks - would not do well.

The people in his immediate vicinity may see him almost as their own, like the leader of the Hagenbeck hunting expedition, with whom Red Peter has already emptied many a bottle of red wine. For the public in the form of journalists, whom Redpeter contemptuously calls greyhounds, he remains a trained monkey who lowers his pants to show his fur and scars. So although he has acquired the intellectual knowledge of people, he evades the rules for adequate interpersonal interaction and for the great effect of externalities contained therein.

One can see history as a travesty of an assimilation process and also as a satire on the occidental history of civilization. Above all, history points to the pressure to adapt that the Jewish people were under for centuries in order to survive. Max Brod emphasized this interpretation in particular. He characterized this story as the most ingenious satire on Jewish assimilation. A similar tendency is contained in jackals and Arabs . Both prose pieces were first published together in 1917 in Der Jude and are part of the volume Ein Landarzt from 1920.

References to other Kafka stories

Ultimately, the goal of becoming human is not achieved, although the protagonist himself does not seem aware of it. Rotpeter making it as a figure comparable to the failing animal forms of Investigations of a Dog or Construction . There is also a reference to the Kafka story The Metamorphosis , where the character Gregor Samsa turns into an animal, namely a beetle, overnight. The inconspicuous poor samsa becomes animal, however, effortlessly during sleep. The monkey's excessive efforts, on the other hand, stem from the desire for access to a cultivated sphere and a saturated life, denying its own roots, as a way out - because the only alternatives are death and ruin or the sad fate of a monkey exhibited in the zoo.

Text quotes

Introducing the human ape Rotpeter in his report ...

  • "Gentlemen from the Academy! | You do me the honor of asking me to submit a report on my monkey past to the academy. | With this in mind, I am unfortunately unable to comply with the request. Almost five years separate me from apes, […]. This achievement would have been impossible if I had stubbornly wanted to hold onto my origins, the memories of my youth. It was precisely the renunciation of any attachment that I had set myself at first; I, free monkey, submitted to this yoke. As a result, my memories became more and more closed to me. "

… between …

  • “… Openly speaking, as much as I like to choose images for these things, frankly speaking: Your apeism, gentlemen, if you have something of this kind behind you, cannot be further from you than mine. But everyone who walks here on earth is tickled on the heel : the little chimpanzee like the big Achilles . "
  • “And I learned, gentlemen! Oh, you learn when you have to; one learns when one wants a way out; one learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with the whip; one tears oneself to pieces at the slightest resistance. The monkey nature raced out of me and away, rolling over itself, so that my first teacher himself became almost monkey from it and soon had to give up teaching and be taken to a sanatorium. Fortunately, he soon came out again. "
  • “This progress! This penetration of the rays of knowledge from all sides into the awakening brain! I do not deny: it made me happy. But I also admit: I didn't overestimate it, not even then, how much less now. Through an effort that has not been repeated on earth, I have achieved the average education of a European. Perhaps that wouldn't be anything in itself, but it is something insofar as it helped me out of the cage and gave me this special way out, this human way out. "

... he concludes in summary :

  • “All in all, I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. Don't say it wasn't worth the effort. Besides, I don't want anyone's judgment; I just want to spread knowledge; I only report; I only reported to you, gentlemen from the Academy. "

reception

  • Sudau (p. 177f.) Emphasizes a special circumstance: “The whole gate of heaven - with the mouse from ' Kleine Fabel ' the all too great breadth of the world - purrs together. The mouse has no way out, only a fatal outcome; the monkey does indeed find its self-chosen 'way out'. With this, Rotpeter stands in a unique way in Kafka's work: a hero who does not go under; a hero who knows exactly what he wants and achieves it too! However, he has to forget 'this great feeling of freedom on all sides'. "
  • Ries (p. 91) points out that the report predicts the work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur by Sigmund Freud , written in 1930 , which is a balance sheet of civilizational advances and setbacks.
  • Kindler's Lexikon (p. 27) explains that the report is deeply rooted in the scientific-historical situation of the time: Description from Brehm's animal life, Darwin's theory of evolution, contemporary variety events.

Text output

  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe , Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 219-313.
  • Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version. Published by Roger Hermes, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: A Report for an Academy  - Sources and Full Texts

Example interpretation:

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Franz Kafka: A report for an academy. Radio play directed by Martin Sailer . Adaptation, lecture and singing: Felix Mitterer ; Music: Siggi Haider and Juliana Haider; Editing and sound: Jürgen Brunner. Production: ORF - Landesstudio Tirol , 2013. ( A report for an academy. In the Ö1 radio play database. In it: description of the content, broadcast dates and trailer for listening. Accessed on February 3, 2018.)
  2. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 . P. 522.
  3. ↑ Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Norbert Winkler: The diversity in Kafka's life and work. Vitalis, 2005, ISBN 3-89919-066-1 , p. 90.
  4. ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 522
  5. ↑ Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler pp. 83, 87
  6. ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 521
  7. ↑ see e.g. B. SPIEGEL Interview with Bruno Ganz and the documentary "He played his shadow - the actor Klaus Kammer" by Andreas Lewin
  8. ^ Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 . P. 333 ff.
  9. ↑ Ralf Sudau p. 183 f.
  10. ↑ Alt Kafka and the film
  11. ↑ Ralf Sudau p. 178
  12. ↑ Peter-André Alt pp. 521, 524
  13. ↑ Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler
  14. ↑ Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler p. 524
  15. ↑ Ralf Sudau p. 181
  16. ↑ Kafka-Handbuch Jagow / Jahraus p. 299 Mark Gelber
  17. ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 523