Kafka conference

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Franz Kafka

The Kafka Conference , also known as the Liblice Conference of 1963, an international conference of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, later went down in history as a milestone in the democratization process, which provided important impulses for the Prague Spring of 1968. The conference at Liblice Castle dealt with the effects of the writer Franz Kafka, who was still largely banned in the Eastern Bloc at that time, and with the phenomenon of alienation .

backgrounds

Franz Kafka, the Prague poet and writer of Jewish descent who died in 1924, was banned in the communist countries for a long time. Although he was by no means explicitly politically committed, his works had a timelessly explosive expressiveness. After the literary magazine Sinn und Form published a speech by Sartre about Kafka in the GDR in 1962, the editor-in-chief Peter Huchel was fired. His novel The Trial was only allowed to appear in Czechoslovakia in 1965, the first sentence " Someone must have slandered Josef K., because he was arrested one morning without doing anything bad ", reminded the writer Alena Wagnerová of the normality of the Stalinist era . The novel, which at that time was secretly circulating in samizdat in the Soviet Union (without naming the author or the year of creation), was regarded by intellectuals as the work of a Russian dissident because of its authenticity.

“ I could live and not live ” wrote Kafka in a letter to Max Brod in 1922, expressing his unease about the alienation and reification of his surroundings in his time.

It is true that several literary scholars such as Endre Kiss have strongly politicized Kafka's effect by seeing Kafka as a forward-looking “expose of the inhumanity and opacity of real socialism”. This interpretation also played a central role during the Prague Spring as in the Kafka reception in the West. According to contemporary witnesses, Kafka also moved in left-wing intellectual circles (closeness to social revolutionary movements and openness to the socialist idea), but Kafka never expressed himself theoretically or politically in his works.

Franz Kafka's work with its nightmarish hierarchical-bureaucratic systems of power was for a long time ostracized and little known in the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe after 1945, while it quickly gained high recognition in Western Europe and the USA. This official rejection lasted the longest in the Soviet Union and the GDR. Kafka was seen as bourgeois, decadent and pessimistic, and also unspoken as politically dangerous because of the similarity of the structures he described to those of real socialism .

The 1963 conference

Liblice Castle, conference venue 1963 and 2008

The idea of ​​an international conference about Kafka on the occasion of his 80th birthday came from the ranks of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences , among others from the Germanist and later President of the Czechoslovak Writers' Association Eduard Goldstücker . It took place on May 27 and 28, 1963, in Liblice Castle, which had come into the possession of the Academy after its expropriation in 1945. Goldstücker asked eighteen Czechoslovak and nine foreign participants to give presentations. Soviet Germanists did not take part. It was about the main topics of an upgrading of Kafka's work from a Marxist-Leninist point of view and about the integration of Kafka into German-Jewish Prague as well as the Czech cultural tradition.

A key point of discussion was the question of “ alienation ” , which Kafka had addressed . The six GDR participants, including Werner Mittenzwei , saw the phenomenon of alienation historically limited to bourgeois society. Mittenzwei, Paul Reimann , and the Kafka expert Klaus Hermsdorf emphasized that Kafka embodied the surrender and the insurmountable alienation of man and thus “could no longer contribute anything to the development of socialism”. Eduard Goldstücker, on the other hand, stated that the alienation described in Kafka's works is not limited to capitalist societies, but could be even more intense “in times of transition to socialism”. Roger Garaudy and the Austrian writer Ernst Fischer were also undogmatic . Kafka's actuality results from the real everyday experience of an alienated society. Replacing reality with ideology and negating Kafka with his “representation of the contradictions of life” is un-Marxist. Goldstücker said that while Kafka led his readers to the edge of nihilism, at the same time he opened a “window of hope”. Ernst Fischer coined the sentence:

"Kafka means the fight against dogmatism and bureaucratism and at the same time the fight for social democracy, initiative and responsibility."

The question of decadence was also discussed in detail.

Beginning of the Prague Spring

The Kafka Conference in Liblice had a significant impact on the intellectual debates in the ČSSR, the GDR and the Soviet Union. It became the first in a short period of intellectual and social upheaval, which in August 1968 with the invasion of the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia came to an end.

Reception from 2008

The task of the 1963 conference was to interpret Kafka; The plan to explain the conference itself turned out to be even more difficult, which was the self-imposed task of the conference "Kafka and Power", which 45 years later, on October 24th and 25th, 2008 also took place in Liblice. The question arose as to whether a literary colloquium was being held in Liblice in 1963 or a political event, a myth and forerunner of the Prague Spring of 1968.

The 2008 conference was a joint event between the Institute for Textual Criticism in Heidelberg and the Ústav pro soudobé dějiny (Institute for Contemporary History) Prague. The predominantly Czech and German participants not only shared divergent opinions, but the 1963 conference participants also came up against each other emotionally. On the one hand, the impression arose that the 1963 conference was a “hidden debate on Stalinism”, while others ( Klaus Theweleit , citing Henri Bergson) talked about “history that we change backwards simply by dealing with it " languages. In response to the ambivalence of Kafka's trial , Roland Reuss judged how political texts can be, perhaps also because they have nothing to do with politics - at least not directly. It is rather the subversiveness of a “pessimist and pessimist [...] that made it particularly suspect to the orthodox communists. [...] In truth, however, there was fear in the reception of conclusions about the omnipresence of the State Security Service and the KGB, as well as conclusions by analogy to the ruling arbitrariness of the bureaucracy. "

literature

  • Ernst Fischer : Kafka Conference . In: Heinz Politzer (Ed.): Franz Kafka . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1973, ISBN 3-534-05401-6 , pp. 366–377.
  • Jan Gerber : Class and Ethnicity. Franz Kafka's return to Prague. In: Arndt Engelhardt, Susanne Zepp (Ed.), Language, Knowledge and Meaning. German in the Jewish culture of knowledge, Leipzig 2015, pp. 221–243.
  • Michael Pullmann: Franz Kafka . Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (a very extensive website for Kafka reception), online kafka.uni-bonn.de
  • Vladimír V. Kusín: The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring. The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956-1967 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2002 (first edition 1971), ISBN 978-0-521-52652-4 .
  • Ines Koeltzsch: Liblice. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 511-515.
Conference reports
  • Franz Kafka from a Prague perspective 1963 . Voltaire, Berlin 1966 ( DNB 456652353 ), edited by Eduard Goldstücker , František Kautmann, Paul Reimann and Leoš Houska (Abridged version from the Czech at Academia, Prague, 1965 ( DNB 452289645 )).
  • Alexej Kusák: Tance kolem Kafky: Liblická konference 1963: vzpomínky a dokumenty po 40 letech ( Dances around Kafka: Conference in Liblice 1963: Memories and Documents after 40 Years ), Akropolis, Praha 2003, ISBN 80-7304-038-7 (Czech ).
Fiction

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Greiner: Kafka came to Liblice . In: DIE ZEIT 45/2008 of October 30, 2008, p. 70
  2. ^ Efim Etkind : Kafka in a Soviet perspective. In: Claude David (Ed.): Franz Kafka. Issues and problems . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1980, p. 230f.
  3. ^ Franz Kafka: GW, Briefe 1902-1924 . Edited by Max Brod, Frankfurt a. M. 1983, p. 385, cit. according to Hawel, The Enlightened World ... ( Memento of the original from June 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed July 19, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sopos.org
  4. ↑ Endre Kiss: Kafkaesk . In: Franz Kafka in the communist world . Edited by the Austrian Franz Kafka Society, Böhlau, Weimar 1993, pp. 46-61, quoted here. from geo.uni-bonn.de ( Memento from August 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed July 19, 2009
  5. ↑ Interpretationsansätze / geo.uni-bonn.de ( Memento of August 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed July 19, 2009
  6. ^ A b Franz Krahberger: Franz Kafka - The drilling sense . Electronic Journal Literature Primary ISSN  1026-0293 , online: ejournal.thing.at , accessed July 19, 2009
  7. ↑ a b Susanne Götze : A window of hope. Kafka receptions in the surroundings of the Prague Spring . online: linksnet.de , accessed July 19, 2009
  8. ↑ Program and overview: textkritik.de , accessed July 19, 2009
  9. ↑ Ehrhard Bahr: Kafka and the Prague Spring . In: Heinz Politzer (Ed.): Franz Kafka . 2nd, unchanged edition. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1980, p. 518, quoted in. According to kafka.uni-bonn.de/Liblice 1963 ( Memento from August 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed July 19, 2009
  10. ↑ a b c Gerrit Bartels: Franz and the spring . In: Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), October 27, 2008, online: tegesspiegel.de , accessed July 19, 2009
  11. ↑ Note on the author “Vladimír Kusín” by Jaroslav Dresler (1925–1999), editor of Svobodná Evropa , Munich
  12. ↑ Burkhard Scherer: The noise of the masses in the living room . Review, in: FAZ , March 24, 1998