Jüdische Kulturwochen

FRANZ KAFKA
on the 100th anniversary of his death

"I am in a cage looking for a bird"
"His work should be read as long as it is still thought, spoken,
read in our language." Klaus Mann
For Kafka, writing was a vacation from real life.
The lifelong conflict with his father
His existential angst.
The human being at the mercy of a spider's web
of opaque rules of an absurd bureaucracy,
that seem to make no sense.
Powerless at the mercy of anonymous forces:
"Josef K. bears no guilt, he "is" the guilt ."
The "dark" Kafka we know from school.
But there is also a. "light" Franz. A lover
smiling one.
"I am a laugher - a great laugher ...!
he writes to Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged
and twice disengaged.
Or Müritz on the Baltic Sea, where the seriously ill man fell in love 11 months
with Dora Diamant, 17 years his junior, 11 months before his death.
17 years his junior:
"He had a sense of humor, was a playmate, a storyteller..."
And I would like to read some of these stories among others.
"Isabella the Apple Mold", "The Little Fable" (with the mouse),
but also "DerTraum", "Vor dem Gesetz" and "Das Urteil" and
other texts.
My program is accompanied by the solo cellist
Oliver Krüger.
He will play parts from
"Kol Nidrei" by Max Bruch
"Prayer" by Ernest Bloch
"Hungerik is mei Ketzele"
"Hulet,Hulet Kinderlach"
"Gehabt hab ich ein Heym"
"De Sun is vergangen"
by the wonderful working-class poet and composer
Mordachai Gebirtig, murdered in Birkenau in 1942,
play.

Ernst Konarek