Franz Kafka: Manuscripts, drawings and personal letters go online | Hacker News Reader

Franz Kafka: Manuscripts, drawings and personal letters go online

bbc.com

104 pointskeiferski16 comments

To see the Manuscripts, drawings and letters you have to fill in a form and then wait for the form to be passed to another department for approval and then the form gets returned to you and you must get two extra signatories, who must be people who work in the department of co-signatories, but you are likely to find that those people have closed their department for a few months so then it is possible to use an alternative signatory but first that alternative signatory must be approved by the director of signatories, unfortunately that director of signatories has departed on a long voyage. As an alternative you can raise your request with the Controller of Forms but first you must see the clerk to ask for an appointment, the clerk will give you a form to fill in that must be stamped by someone in the aforementioned department of co-signatories.

You dance like Frank Zappa

You could alternatively just go to Prague to sort it out in person, but you will have to pass through a rather tricky to navigate airport :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

Soooo The Castle?

Kafka is one that I thought for some reason I knew enough about his works via cultural references to know about Kafka without actually having read any of him.

The pandemic changed that; he's so much better than his reputation-based assumptions. If you've been putting it off, jump in! His works made me feel things I have only ever rarely or have never felt before. It's uncanny.

When I started reading Kafka as a teenager I invented a term called “Kafka sensation” to signify the unique state of mind, or internal sensation, created only when reading Kafka.

Now my favorite works of his are his short pieces, especially “A Little Fable”:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/cgi-bin/version_printable.pl?sto...

In German we got the word "kafkeask" to capture that sensation. That also says something about his impact as an author.

That may be equivalent to “Kafkaesque” in English. But it’s not the same thing, quite. Among English speakers, the term is used almost exclusively by people who have never read Kafka, and refers vaguely to some situation of bureaucratic morass.

EDIT: My “Kafka sensation” is an eerie feeling that one is confronted with a clinically exact description of a routine reality that, although it surrounds us always, is never spoken of, because it is too terrifying to confront.

Your edit is close to what it means in German. I would expand with strange and absurd and kind of intangible yet clearly present. Well... it is difficult with words. Different meanings for different readers.

I always thought Kafka was the worst possible name for a simple reliable event streaming/ queuing system. I wish I'd listened to my instincts, but it's probably just our implementation.

I general I wish people would think about search engines when naming new things.

One of my favorite writers. Highly recommend to read also his less famous works like "das Schloss", "Amerika", or "in der Strafkolonie". If you dig such books, give also Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz a try!

I'll have to check those out. For Schulz would you recommend the Wieniewska or Levine translation?

Kafta gave his personal diary to his publisher just before he died. He made him promise he would destroy it. Guess what happened :)

It's a little more complicated than that. Brod (who it would be more accurate to characterize as Kafka's close friend than a purely professional publisher) did not promise to destroy the works; on the contrary he made clear that he would do no such thing. It has been suggested that by leaving his works to Brod, Kafka intended that they should not be destroyed, despite his words contradicting this. (Kafka had a complex relationship with his own writing and so this ambivalence was not out of character.)

Not only that, but Kafka's instructions to destroy all of his writings unread were carefully phrased so as to apply to the instructions themselves...

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