Kafka’s 100th anniversary of his death: Lost in the Borzeln

Almost all readers ask themselves after reading the novel fragment “The Trial”: Why did the “country man” just sit in front of the gate? Why didn’t he enter, walk past the guard? Especially since access to the law was only intended for him alone. Was he perhaps lonely and looking to be close to the guardian? Was he perhaps carrying a guilt that could not be forgiven by any judge? Or did he simply lack courage and self-confidence? The so-called doorkeeper parable radiates into all the texts of Franz Kafka, who was born in Prague in 1883. They always deal with exclusion, power and powerlessness, and the subject of modernity who has lost all certainties.

Hardly any other author has been researched so thoroughly, even beyond all measure, because of his mysterious nature. Approaching it through new interpretations seems arduous. This is probably why the writer Thomas Lehr relied on the power of his own texts in his homage to the jubilarian. Although they do not directly take up the surrealist’s stories, they are closely linked to them in terms of content, motifs and style.

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The first story in the volume, “Kafka’s Scissors,” could well have come from the pen of the admired man: a group of headless people rushes through a landscape, always pursued by a pack of dogs. If the former go slower, the latter adapt, or vice versa. The longer you read, the more you realize that in a certain way people obviously need dangerous animals. And then somehow he is back in the room, this doorkeeper, who would probably never have been in this place if it weren’t for the petitioner who ultimately perished at his feet. Why? Because with Kafka and with Lehr we are never dealing with stories from life, based on logic and reason. Instead, we are thrown into inner worlds, nightmare scenes that are as threatening as they are sometimes grotesque.

This makes us see ordinary or well-known things differently, such as the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Lehr allows the heads of the dead floating side by side in the river of forgetfulness to ponder why the demigod looked around for his lover as he emerged from the underworld and why it was perhaps even better for him in the end to have lost her. In the Styx, some believe that the singer was spared the disillusionment caused by the aging of his beloved. Ultimately, the unredeemed continue to explain things to themselves until, in the end, the story of misfortune has turned into a story of happiness. There are countless of these inversions in Kafka’s comic cosmos. Think of the Statue of Liberty, which in “America” ​​carries a sword instead of a torch and thus signals fight instead of peace; think of all the poor characters like the stoker, some of whom are even content with their lot.

In this series of allusions, Lehr’s miniature “Attack” particularly stands out. Here, an intangible creature reminiscent of Kafka’s abstract Odradek awaits his rebirth in a distant galaxy. There people “fleZZiert” and think about the “Samurian ethics” or sometimes “get lost in the borzels”. What exactly do you mean by all of this? It is certainly a triumph of crypticism, albeit a very entertaining one, which Kafka – “Weißgrott” – would certainly have been very amused by.

Some may now ask: And do I even understand the whole thing? The answer is: no. Thomas Lehr’s work is so clever that it fully exposes us to the Kafkaesque meaninglessness of the world. But there are no explanations, so we look for them even more. And perhaps it is precisely in this instability that the narrow window of hope opens up. How wide we open it, whether we dare to go through it – these two great authors leave this decision entirely to us.

Thomas Lehr: Kafka’s Scissors. Wallstein, 83 p., hardcover, €18.