[HN Gopher] Franz Kafka: Manuscripts, drawings and personal lett...
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       Franz Kafka: Manuscripts, drawings and personal letters go online
        
       Author : keiferski
       Score  : 98 points
       Date   : 2021-05-29 08:15 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
        
       | quijoteuniv wrote:
       | Kafta gave his personal diary to his publisher just before he
       | died. He made him promise he would destroy it. Guess what
       | happened :)
        
         | xenocyon wrote:
         | 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.)
        
           | flotzam wrote:
           | 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...
        
       | codeulike wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ngold wrote:
         | Soooo The Castle?
        
         | bschne wrote:
         | 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
        
         | pestatije wrote:
         | You dance like Frank Zappa
        
       | samch93 wrote:
       | 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!
        
         | cjpearson wrote:
         | I'll have to check those out. For Schulz would you recommend
         | the Wieniewska or Levine translation?
        
       | sneak wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | leephillips wrote:
         | 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...
        
           | 5tefan wrote:
           | In German we got the word "kafkeask" to capture that
           | sensation. That also says something about his impact as an
           | author.
        
             | leephillips wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | 5tefan wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | thorin wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | leephillips wrote:
             | I general I wish people would think about search engines
             | when naming new things.
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-29 23:01 UTC)