Kafka: The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time | Hacker News Reader

Kafka: The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time

newyorker.com

207 pointsmitchbob81 comments

These are four short stories from an upcoming publication of previously untranslated works of Franz Kafka. The stories are a good read if you like short pieces.

Ah, The Castle has been a favorite of mine since I was in high school despite it being unfinished. The shorter works are something I only started to enjoy about ten years ago. I have really enjoyed rediscovering the magic of Kafka through his shorter works so I’m really interested in these!

I’m also a big “streaming Kafka” fan, so this post was win-win for me

For anyone that doesn’t quite ‘get’ Kafka: I recommend his short stories and aphorisms over his novels. Metamorphosis and The Castle never quite did much for me, whereas The Great Wall of China or In the Penal Colony are some of my favorites.

In the Penal Colony is brilliant. I read it when young and many years later cannot forget it.

http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf

Those are two of my favorites also, especially "In the Penal Colony." For anyone looking for more, I would add "The Burrow" as great introduction to the weirdness of Kafka as well.

I'll toss "A Hunger Artist" on there, too.

this is the one I think about the most

I've read Metamorphosis many times over the years, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a very subtle dark comedy. But of all the punchlines, including the ending, are (for lack of a better term) situational. I can't explain further without spoilers, so HN might not be the right format for it.

Before the Law is my top favorite short story of all time.

I absolutely did not enjoy reading Kafka, but I get the importance of the work, and I think about it constantly.

After 40 years, I can't forget the image of the felt gag in The Penal Colony.

Outline link: https://outline.com/pBvgHC

Hacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and Kafka, the data streaming platform.

I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.

It’s no coincidence! Apache Kafka is named after Franz Kafka. From Wikipedia:

> Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka

Jay Kreps is an extremely well read man; the reference is surely ironic. Enterprise middleware, after all, is and always has been a bureaucratic rigmarole.

The nightmare has existed since the first ETL job was written, but by democratizing pub/sub access throughout companies, we can't help but be horrified by what we see going on in the dataplane. Apache Kafka, rather than creating this nightmare, brings light to it, just as Franz Kafka's literature brought light to the absurdity of life under evil bureaucracies.

Now he can't quite say this outright lest he offend some set of his customers who have to live in this reality, so we have that vague quote about "he's one of my favorite writers", but surely we can take a direct literary reference as a wink and a nod and read between the lines?

> evil bureaucracies

I think Kafka's point is that those bureaucracies are not evil, just uncaring. Which makes the end results even more sinister, as you get crushed through no clear malicious act.

This is a great description. Sums up well my thoughts about Kafka but that I hadn't verbalised.

But, but, the irony! https://qr.ae/pNKM3k

> Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime ... Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works ... but Brod ignored these instructions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

Damn, I thought did his friend execute him?! That is very Kafka-esque. But no, his friend was the executor of Kafkas' last will.

In my experience Apache Kafka is indeed a real world incarnation of that Kafkaesque bureaucratic rigmarole that he described in his novel 'The Castle'.

The domain name is a clue

my first reaction was to assume kafka-the-technology exectly because of the domain name. Then i realized that the one i meant was the "New York Times", and not the "New Yorker". NYT is one of the case studies from a kafka provider [0] skimming is a double-edged sword

[0]: https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...

You’re right. I should have examined more carefully.

“Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable for the whole business of software engineering.

Or Life

I was trying to figure out why the New Yorker would care about data streams

I saw the domain name and thought it was some journalist using Kafka as a pseudonym, to comment on current world events.

I was feeling lucky... either way

I thought it was about resque, the ruby queuing library, switching from redis to kafka.

One could look at the website name. Usually it helps to guess before you open it. For example, the likelihood of Newyorker writing an article on an open-source stream-processing software is low.

And line 3 in the article mentions Prometheus

Same here. I was wondering if the New Yorker had a new tech section.

The source is the world famous The New Yorker.

That alone will tell you which one.

Confused, why is new Yorker publishing an old story by kafka? Or is this something newly discovered?

New Directions is publishing a collection that has some ‘fragments’ that slipped through the cracks in English anthologies - this is one of them. Hard to believe it could happen, given how many of his novels are painstakingly assembled fragments.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/franz-k...

Really hard to read Kafka, frankly, but I love the major stories of his ("The Trial", "Metamorphosis", etc) and his many short stories so much that I've been trying to learn German (and French, though not necessarily at the same time) over the last year and a half. What I've learned is that I can quite easily pick up meaning and basically understand German when I hear it, about the same when I read it, but I still can't speak it at all - at least not conversationally. I could get around Germany in an emergency if I ran into any Germans that don't actually speak English, which I understand to be a rare occurrence, but that's not really the point.

I think I've discovered I need to be way, way more fluent in German than I expected to be able to read and enjoy (such as you can) Kafka, and I've decided I probably need to live abroad for several years to achieve this goal. Of course, it would be kind of crazy (but not necessarily Kafkaesque) to live in a foreign country for several years just so you could understand one of its authors in his original language. German was of course not his real original language, but you get my point.

I pretty much did this.

Don't forget, there are tons of other amazing German authors, just to name a few: Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schiller, Goethe...

I think German literature is to this day still probably the best in the world.

I also find Math in German way easier and more beautiful than in English. If "clean code" was a thing for languages, German grammar would seem to me to be one of the cleanest.

>> If "clean code" was a thing for languages, German grammar would seem to me to be one of the cleanest.

Java was born to be written in German given the exceptionally long words that appear in both :)

>I also find Math in German way easier and more beautiful than in English.

Can you expand on this?

>If "clean code" was a thing for languages, German grammar would seem to me to be one of the cleanest.

Can't agree more here.

Style, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.

I can't encourage you to move to another country and learn its language for the sake of a single author, enough.

Such life experiences always produce a significant effect on ones life.

Have done it a couple times, by the way ..

As a near-native English speaker, I took German in various degrees from middle school to college. Along the way, I peppered it with French and Spanish.

I was terrible with the romance languages, like nearly failed. Oral, written, reading, you name it. Just terrible all around. Couldn't get it. I'd freeze when trying to construct a sentence orally.

German, on the other hand, I found to be pretty easy. Being the parent of English, the grammar is essentially the same. I'm the kind of person that needs to know the rules before I jump in, so nailing the grammar is essential. Immersion programs like Rosetta Stone requires a leap of faith, which frankly scares me.

The vocabulary and verb conjugations were hard, but that was mainly a matter of straight memorization. The pronunciation is very consistent - way more consistent than English. Learning German actually helped me understand English more.

German was his real original language, as much as standardized German is anyone's real original language.

Edit: Also, if you want to check out something short, engaging, relevant and easier on the German, give Ödön von Horvát's Jugend ohne Gott a whirl.

Toll! Jugend ohne Gott even got a "+" review here: https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/periodical/pagevie...

reviewer's coding scheme explained on: https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/periodical/pagevie...

An organisation has really "made it" when they get a special font dingbat. Not even Prince Rogers Nelson managed that...

I was under the impression his original language was closer to Yiddish, but if I'm wrong in that regard I'll recant.

Like hindi and urdu, the biggest difference between yiddish and other german dialects is the script[1]. I have "Velo" and "Poulet", so my loan words are not as exotic as the hebrew/aramaic ("tukhes") and eastern european ("ну") influences on yiddish, but all the dialects[2] have loan words ("Homeoffice") and most have their own unique terms ("Rundumeli").

https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט is interesting if you can read hebrew script.

https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte_(Schwyzer... will give you some idea why I recommended starting with the NZZ, which almost writes in standardised german.

[1] it was yiddish that got me into russian, because it's easier to find more than just Andrews Sisters on YouTube in cyrillic: eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeqbs9OFX0

also recommended, for any germanophone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 (or anglophones who don't mind subtitles)

[2] in tourist hiking areas, a popular past-time is to guess where people are from by how they greet on the trail.

The difference between High German and Yiddish is much larger than between Urdu and Hindi.

He grew up in a multilingual environment, 'his original language' is not a very specific thing. He was educated in German, his family was of a social standing in which German was essential. They also spoke a variant of Yiddish - itself a (give or take) German dialect.

He was also totally fluent in Czech.

I'm glad, though, that he wrote in German. It's always nice to read authors in their original language.

Why does the Metamorphosis spend all that time talking about furniture? I just don't get it.

There used to be a few books, aimed at academics reading the literature, eg Jannach, "German for Reading Knowledge."

(on reading vs speaking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582262 )

Not to discourage you from a Sprachaufenthalt (ganz im gegenteil), but you can prepare for one by following germanophone papers. (which have the advantage that you've probably read many stories in your native tongue beforehand ... also one can start small by just picking out nouns at first, which won't the case for latin-1, but is very useful when learning a new script)

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/

https://www.nzz.ch (in Schrifttüütsch, conveniently for you)

I don't normally follow AT, maybe https://kurier.at ?

Hals und Beinbruch!

====

Edit: there are a couple of amusing anecdotes on german culture in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm which I find stereotypical to this day:

> Germans liked things done in an official and formal manner, even in the midst of chaos, catastrophe and defeat. The Allies obliged, and gave the Germans various forms of very official-looking "surrender passes," ... http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/images/p4.jpg

> The Americans and British dropped leaflets on Berlin ... [with] key numbers in the corners, showing to which series they belonged ... Nazi authorities [sent] Hitlerjugend and Hitlermädel out to pick up the leaflets and turn them in for destruction. ... What the Nazis discovered—too late, too late—was that the schoolchildren had begun collecting the leaflets, using the key numbers to make up perfect sets. Some numbers were rarer than others, so that the Hitlerite children swapped Allied leaflets all over Berlin, trying to make up attractive albums. Mother and Father—who did not dare pick the leaflets up off the street for fear the Gestapo might be watching—found a convenient file, reasonably complete, in the room of little Fritzl or Ermintrude!

Undoubtedly not just a loose file, but neatly punched in a two-ring binder. When Oceania starts to always have been at war with Eurasia (that is, if they read their own books, which Dr. Linebarger doubts), they'll have to make up propaganda sets in the form of Panini cards.

I'd suggest https://derstandard.at, which hasn't only the biggest German speaking forum annexed to it, but the comments are also in the Austrian flavor of the language (with significant opportunity to familiarize with frequent typos and typical failures in grammar.)

This is totally offtopic, but if you don't mind me asking - are you the owner of https://www.masswerk.at/? If so, I just wanted to say thank you for hosting the ALGOL 60 papers there.

Incidentially, yes. :-) You're welcome!

For the latter, there's always old Heiteres Bezirksgericht columns from the Krone. But that's probably a lot harder than reading straight Kafka. Albeit much funnier.

Danke! (auch für https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ und auch an die Landsleute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW2sr3j-VoQ )

Does anyone know if the story is available online in German or what the original German title is. Weiß einer ob die Kurzgeschichte im deutschen Originell online erhæltlich ist oder wie die Titel auf deutsch heißt?

A few of his books are public domain, found them for free on Apple Books.

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run."

"But you’ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it.

Das ist komisch.

Kafka is a comic writer, of course. I think Brod (his friend and editor, and the man who refused his wish to burn his writings after he died) says somewhere that when Kafka used to read his pieces out loud to friends he would sometimes laugh so hard he couldn't continue.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-... is always worth a read. And it's where i got this little snippet, of course.

Ahh I thought it was a quote from the OP.

Since we're way in the German Kaninchenbau:

https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning-of-komisch/

Does anyone know whether this short story is available online in German, or what the German title is?

Does anybody know the German name of this story?

Does anyone know the title in German?

Social proof: The reason you’ll tolerate the first 1000 unintelligible words in The New Yorker before the author’s idea starts congealing.

I thought your comment was pretty funny. :-) And I'll happily admit that if there is a single idea here it hasn't congealed for me yet.

"I in turn was astonished that he was astonished. Did he suppose I could fix in a couple of hours what two people had done wrong over the course of their entire lives"

"Sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way—the rescue will begin in its own time"

From what I see, the farmer/captain in question has two hammers (one with a head too big for its handle, and the other with a head too small), and is currently banging them against each other, having yet to start on the wall.

Okay, I'll bite. Except for the farmer story, I didn't understand any of the other stories.

What do you expect to understand exactly? In the first one he progressively sucks the drama out of a myth by taking the concept of eternity seriously. The second one is about being in possession of something that you can't have. The third one is a joke about a man talking to a dog about his family problems. The last one is about two approaches to take when there's nothing you can do, not that it makes a difference.

Do i understand these stories? I don't know. They're interesting. I just read them tonight though. Maybe in a year i will have forgotten them, or maybe i'll bump into them in my thoughts every so often, be reminded of them, draw parallels between them and other things.

Each story has one thing following another in a logical progression that i'm sure you can discern, so what more understanding are you asking for? I could tell you all about the movie Toy Story, but do i understand it? I don't know. It's interesting, and i bump into it every so often in my thoughts and all that.

If i understood it, i guess i wouldn't ever need to think of it again. Which reminds me of Twin Peaks, which i definitely don't understand.

I think the last is actually about a prisoner and his interrogator / torturer.

The introductory sentences of Prometheus - "A legend is [...] to end in the inexplicable." - actually belong to the story's end[1]. Maybe that makes it a little more clear? But TBH, I don't find the original easy to understand. I mean, I /understand/ the words and everything, but I couldn't say for sure if I really understood what Kafka wanted to say, hence it's probably pointless trying to explain it (maybe as pointless as an eternal punishment by gods long forgotten) ;-)

[1] German original: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Prometheus_(Kafka)

I thought it was going to be a post about a service outage.

It's about the service outage being the service, or, rather, outage as a service, which had arguably some of a success story in the last century.

"The rescue will begin in its own time" sounds like they deployed Cruise Control[1] to monitor their cluster.

[1]: https://github.com/linkedin/cruise-control

You're not alone! And well, I'm not alone! I really did think that this was going to be a rant about message recovery in Kafka.

Lol a very bad one

and the mention of Prometheus in the first 2 paragraphs. you can't make this stuff up :'D

Kafka stands on its own.

Let's make this the most upvoted post in HN's history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com