For the premiere of Oliver Frljić’s Kafka adaptation Prozess on 21/September, the Gorki invites various experts to debate the K-question – What does the character of Josef K. stand for? Who or what could be »K.« in our present day?
Vivian Liska (Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium) will start with her lecture Kafka's The Trial: Before the Law, followed by a discussion with Oliver Frljić.
Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925) stands as one of the most iconic and debated literary works of the twentieth century, often associated with a suffocating sense of oppression, disorientation, and Angst. The novel poignantly captures the individual's experience of modernity, presenting a chilling confrontation with enigmatic and omnipresent powers that are both realistic and uncanny. Interpretations of these forces span historical, political, sociological, psychological, and metaphysical realms, from reflections on bureaucratic mass society and forebodings of totalitarian regimes to existential and theological crises. How has this obscure, fragmentary novel by a young Jewish author from Prague, largely unknown in his lifetime, achieved such enduring relevance one hundred years after his death? A close reading of the parable Before the Law and its relation to the novel sheds light on the many ways to understand the relevance of Kafka’s approach to the law for our times, among them as a critique of the moralistic tendencies in today’s literature and art, contrasting Kafka’s refusal to provide moral clarity with modern trends that often impose prescriptive judgments on artistic expression.
