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31 results

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  • Chapter 6 - Religion in German Modernism 1900–1945

  • Edited by Ian Cooper, University of Kent, Canterbury, John Walker, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book:
    Literature and Religion in the German-Speaking World
    Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    26 September 2019, pp 204-243

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the presence of religious narratives and traditions in Modernist literature, arguing that it shapes both what authors write about and how they write. Drawing on texts by Trakl, Rilke, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann, Wolfenstein, Kafka and Sachs, the chapter explores the wide range of attitudes both towards established religion (Christianity and Judaism) and alternative forms of spirituality (occultism and spiritualism). For all their differences, Modernist authors focus on a set of recurring concerns: the tension between tradition and modernity; the relationship between self and God, and between self and other; the changing role of community; and existential experiences such as suffering, persecution and death. In times of war, social change and political upheaval, the relationship between literature and religion remains mutually productive. Modernist texts reflect the crisis of established religious traditions, but literature is also an active agent, a site where old and new attitudes towards spiritual matters can be explored.

Franz Kafka in Context
  • Edited by Carolin Duttlinger
  • Published online:
    08 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017
  • Franz Kafka (1883–1924) lived through one of the most turbulent periods in modern history, witnessing a world war, the dissolution of an empire and the foundation of a new nation state. But the early twentieth century was also a time of social progress and aesthetic experimentation. Kafka's novels and short stories reflect their author's keen but critical engagement with the big questions of his time, and yet often Kafka is still cast as a solitary figure with little or no connection to his age. Franz Kafka in Context aims to redress this perception. In thirty-five short, accessible essays, leading international scholars explore Kafka's personal and working life, his reception of art and culture, his engagement with political and social issues, and his ongoing reception and influence. Together they offer a nuanced and historically grounded image of a writer whose work continues to fascinate readers from all backgrounds.

  • 4 - Scholarship and adaptations

  • Carolin Duttlinger, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka
    Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    27 June 2013, pp 122-136

  • Summary

    The size of Kafka scholarship is so vast, his influence on the arts and literature so pervasive, that both by far exceed the scope of any overview. By necessity, this chapter will therefore pursue a more selective approach. The first part outlines the main strands of Kafka scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while the second part explores the challenges of ‘translating’ Kafka’s texts into other media through three film adaptations of his novels: Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Class Relations (1984, based on The Man who Disappeared) and Michael Haneke’s The Castle (1997).

    Editions and translations

    Any survey of Kafka scholarship is tied up with the complex history of Kafka editions, for the question of what does or does not constitute the ‘original’ Kafka text remains a thorny one, both for readers of German and, even more so, for those relying on translations.

    Only a fraction of Kafka’s works appeared during his lifetime, but less than two months after his death, in July 1924, Max Brod signed an agreement to publish a posthumous edition of Kafka’s works. In doing so, Brod ignored Kafka’s own explicit instructions, which he had spelled out twice, that all his unpublished manuscripts should be destroyed after his death. Kafka readers thus find themselves in the moral dilemma that by reading Kafka’s texts – and particularly his private diaries and letters – they violate the author’s own express wishes.

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