Franz Kafka in front of his family's home in Prague, 1922
Image: picture alliance / akg-images / Archive K. Wagenbach
2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka's death. The author is particularly remembered in Oxford, where many of his manuscripts are kept.
Dhe complicated circumstances that made Oxford the most important center for text-critical research into Frank Kafka's writings and thus also a focus of the events marking the centenary of his death next year would provide material for a novel. Against the background of the shocks of the twentieth century, the path of the largest part of Kafka's literary legacy, guided not only by determination and willpower, but sometimes also by the hand of fate, leads with detours from his hometown of Prague to Tel Aviv, Zurich, Marbach and Oxford New York. This story is marked by war, inheritance disputes and questions about the cultural affiliation of a Czech-Jewish German-language writer born under Habsburg rule, whose work belongs to the canon of world literature and who has now even become an idol of Generation Z thanks to the video portal TikTok has become.
His afterlife begins with the decision of the writer Max Brod to ignore his close friend's order to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts, diaries and letters. Already in the year after Kafka's death on June 3, 1924, Brod published the first of several different editions of the unfinished novel “The Trial” from his estate. It brought international attention to the writer, who was little noticed during his lifetime.
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