franz-kafka

Back again from Extraneous, with Kafka and a Daydream!

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When my brother, Al, was in the hospital to undergo surgery to remove a tumour from his brain, one of the professors told him that we humans know almost nothing ( just ten per cent) about how our brains work – The rest is still a puzzle! Therefore, unexplained phenomena, such as strange things like seeing ghosts, daydreams, or schizophrenia, are always fascinating topics for inquisitive minds.

According to Dr Carl Jung: 
in schizophrenia, the complexes have become disconnected and autonomous fragments, which either do not reintegrate back to the psychic totality, or, in the case of remission, are unexpectedly joined together again as if nothing happened” (1939).

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Franz Kafka Dreams >Wrestling matches every night<

During our trip to Serbia (I will write a post about it soon), I brought along some books as I do on any trip. This time, I discovered some surprises. While renovating the apartment, I found a book I couldn’t remember owning. Upon picking it up, I found a shopping receipt in the book dating back to 1995. It was clear that the book belonged to Al. Apart from a few novels, Franz Kafka wrote thousands of letters about his thoughts, dreams, and daydreams, and I was excited to have this particular book. The book is in German, and I translated a description and one of his letters about his dreams. I often considered the similarities between Kafka and Dostoevsky, as the latter frequently had daydreams like a schizophrenic. In this dream, Dostoevsky is interestingly present! I hope you will enjoy it.

The New Yorker

According to Jean-Paul, dreams substantially affect a poet because he is used to fantasy. In contrast, Kafka’s dreams intensified his daytime fears. Taken out of context, his dreams form an interesting “storybook” of events and changes involving real people and places from his life. Kafka’s descriptive notes allow the reader to relive each dream-like episode as if watching a film vividly. This collection also serves as a documentary, presenting the dreams chronologically and reproducing Kafka’s comments on the phenomenon of dreams and dreaming.

Frank Kortan – THE METAMORPHOSiS

Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin. Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” challenges readers to accept this transformation as real, denying the possibility of dismissing it as merely a dream. This may frustrate those who rely on reason to understand the world and expect literature to assist them in this endeavour. In 1916, Franz Herwig criticized the rejection of realism and its associated positive aspects in an essay about the authors of the series “The Judgement Day,” in which Kafka’s story appeared. Gregor Samsa’s story “The Metamorphosis” challenges our understanding of reality and urges us to see the world in a new light. Kafka emphasizes that incomprehensible forces are shaping our lives, which may be more influential than we can rationally explain. According to his commentary on the story “The Judgement,” which he wrote in one go from ten o’clock in the evening to six o’clock in the morning, this is the only way to write in such a context—with a complete openness of body and soul! In this type of writing, the usual censorship of the mind is primarily eliminated. Everything can be risked, and a great fire is prepared for everyone for the strangest ideas, in which they perish and rise again.

Dream!
[To Milena Jesenska, August 1920; M 170-172]

Today, I think I dreamt of you for the first time since I’ve been in Prague. A dream towards morning, short and heavy, still caught up in sleep after a bad night. I know little about it. You were in Prague; we were walking along Ferdinand Street, a little opposite Vilimek, in the direction of the quay; some acquaintances of yours were walking past on the other side; we turned to look at them; you spoke of them, perhaps there was also talk of Krasa [I know he is not in Prague, I will find out his address]. You said as usual, but there was something incomprehensible, indescribable about rejection in it; I didn’t mention it but cursed myself, thereby only expressing the curse that was on me. Because we were in the coffee house, probably in the Kaffee Union (it was on the way, and it was also the coffee house from Reiner’s last evening), a man and a girl were sitting at our table, but I couldn’t remember them. Then, there was a man who looked very similar to Dostoyevsky but young, with a deep black beard and hair. Everything, for example, the eyebrows and the bulges over the eyes, were incredibly strong. Then you were there, and I. Again, nothing betrayed your aloof manner, but the rejection was there.

Painting: Jorge Ignacio Nazabal

Your face was – I could not look away from the tormenting oddity – powdered, and it was overly obvious, clumsy, bad; it was probably hot, and so whole powder lines had formed on your cheeks; I can still see them in front of me. Again and again, I leaned forward to ask why you were powdered; when you noticed that I wanted to ask, you asked obligingly – the rejection was simply not noticeable – >What do you want?< But I could not ask, I did not dare, and yet I somehow suspected that being powdered was a test for me, a crucial test, that I should ask, and I wanted to but did not dare. And so the sad dream rolled over me. At the same time, the Dostoyevsky man tormented me. His behaviour towards me was similar to yours but still a little different. When I asked him something, he was very friendly, sympathetic, leaned over, and open-hearted. Still, when I didn’t know what to ask or say – this happened every moment – he would withdraw with a jerk, sink into a book, know nothing more about the world and especially not about me, disappear into his beard and hair. I don’t know why I found this unbearable, again and again – I couldn’t do anything else – I had to pull him over to me with a question and again and again, I lost him through my own fault! đŸ’–đŸ™đŸ€—

The Imagen at top:  Youri Ivanov – Artiste Russe (Russian)

Whoever Searches Finds Nothing, but Whoever does not Search will be Found.

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Franz Kafka wrote that line up there and then continued; this is how it works when searching for God, and on love, it is no different.

A writer as a pioneer: Franz Kafka’s literature established a unique style.
© picture alliance/akg/Archiv K. Wagenbach

This year is the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about my impressions of him and his works. Of course, I must mention that it does not have to be his specific birthday or the day he died; I never search the web to find out about an event and write about it, as some are doing on WordPress!
The main reason is that I have known him and his works since I was young and always appreciated his solitude before society. Second, I see and hear many documentaries and TV series here in Germany for his anniversary, as the Germans always welcome a genius who writes in their language into their art world. Therefore, to put it bluntly, I had to write this article first in German and translate it into English. Because these days, I hear and read his works all in that language.

Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924), a German-language Bohemian writer, was born in Prague as the son of a middle-class Jewish merchant family.

As per literary scholar Reiner Stach, who studied Franz Kafka for over two decades and published a three-volume Kafka biography with S. Fischer Verlag, Kafka himself was uncertain about his historical classification. Stach quotes Kafka’s famous saying, “I am the end or the beginning.” Kafka intended to express that he may represent the end of a long tradition of classical literature, coming from Goethe, Kleist, and perhaps Flaubert, who was already modern and is an endpoint here. Alternatively, he may start something completely new from the fragments he inherited from tradition instead of falling apart.

Max Brod once said that Kafka was more ambitious than his talent. Maybe he’s right! He helped him, believed in him, and encouraged him to write his thoughts as books.

Franz Kafka and Max Brod

As one of his numerous lovers, Milena JesenskĂĄ, a Czech journalist and writer who was non-Jewish and married, once said to him: I have never met a person like you, and I assume it that’s because there has never existed anyone like you.

He explained it himself:

The enormous world that I have in my head. But how to free me and free them without tearing? And I would rather tear it up a thousand times than hold it back or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here; that’s very clear to me. (Sokel, Walter H. 2001).
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed. (Gray, Ronald 1973)

The drama (on stage) is more exhausting than the novel because we see everything that we otherwise only read about. (Source: Kafka, diaries. October 28, 1911)

The fortune that flatters you most is most likely to deceive you.

Franz Kafka was convinced that his writing was inadequate, although he had much more to say. In his short story collection, A Hunger Artist, he wrote:
“Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, pressing his ear against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his forehead with his finger to indicate to the staff the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist.

Writer Franz Kafka in front of the family home; the Oppelt House on the Old Town Square in Prague. Czech Republic. Photograph. 1922.
Kafka stands in front of the Oppelt House on Old Town Square in Prague, the family’s residence, in 1922. At this time, he wrote “Research of a Dog”, among other things.
© picture alliance / IMAGNO/Votava

He died of Tuberculosis, or better to say, the cause of death seemed to be starvation: the condition of Kafka’s throat made eating too painful for him. By the way, Kafka’s mental health was a topic of debate. Marino PĂ©rez-Álvarez suggests schizophrenia based on his diaries and “The Metamorphosis”. Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante diagnosed borderline personality disorder, worsened by Kafka’s insomnia complaints. Joan Lachkar developed a model describing Kafka’s fears of abandonment, anxiety, depression, and parasitic dependency needs in “The Metamorphosis“. Meanwhile, Manfred M. Fichter believes Kafka was anorexic.

But in my opinion, it’s all doctors prattling! Kafka had (like a few other known artists and geniuses like Dostoevsky, Mozart, Carl Jung, Van Gogh and
) a sensitive mind and soul who looked immense, broader and more profound in human society and the man itself, so deep that the artist himself cannot discern it. He was a Mozart in the matter of literature! Kafka’s writing, whether a letter or a book, had a wealth of words and topics to recount. In his book  Der Process (The Trial), he doesn’t criticize only the political system; K, the main character, is a victim of not being understood by his population. He writes about the trial of his own solitude, his isolation in society and his strangeness towards others.

He even asked Dora Diamant, his faithful companion in his last days in his dying bed, and wanted her to burn all his works after his death!

He died shortly before his 41st birthday in a private sanatorium outside Vienna. A week later, on June 11, 1924, he was buried in a simple ceremony at Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery.

How profoundly Dr Jung interpret the death;

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

In his final days, he asked his doctor for a lethal dose of morphine. When the doctor refused, he told his doctor: if you don’t do it, you will be my murderer!