ARD media library: Kafka series: “I’m not sure I understand you, Franz”

Anyone who wants to tell their audience about the life of a genius must use special means to convince them that this person’s special gift is a fact that can be experienced through the senses and not just a self-important statement.

In his script for the ARD mini-series “Kafka,” the writer Daniel Kehlmann came up with a particularly clever, even daring trick, a process that one could perhaps call “literary autologous blood doping”: he puts the genius at the same time as his own To raise the level of non-brilliant people around you, simply put their own brilliant sentences in their mouths. Unfortunately, Kehlmann seems to have liked his idea so much that he made the even more daring decision to have Kafka (Joel Basman) do almost every single dialogue in the six episodes in this way. He has him recite a never-ending series of invariably astonishing, profound, masterfully polished passages from his own estate, from his own diaries and letters.

The remaining characters – legitimate victims of their own ordinariness, so to speak – have to make do with standard sentences written not by Kafka, but by Kehlmann, which also specifically emphasize the profanity of their speakers. Accordingly, they have little to counter Kafka’s incessant genius, even when they feel too harassed by it. At most they say: “I’m not sure I understand you, Franz!” Or there are astonishing exchanges like this: “You are my human judgment, Felice!” – “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

The unintentionally comic effect that Kehlmann’s trick usually creates is – as you can imagine – most reliably achieved when it is used in particularly serious moments. For example, when Kafka says to the Czech writer Milena Polak at the height of a heated argument: “Sometimes I feel as if I have such lead weights that I am dragged down into the depths of the sea – and everyone who catches me wants to save them. lets it go again, not out of weakness, nor out of hopelessness, but simply out of anger.” Or when he announces to Milena in an intimate moment with tender intentions, but precisely because of that also with maximum misplaced literary grandeur: “Like the sea on a pebble If your foundation is flooded, my love will flood you.”

What causes massive damage here and in numerous other places, apart from the general credibility of what is shown, is ironically nothing other than Kafka’s genius himself, which is so vehemently invoked. Because one wonders: Should we be talking about a literary genius whose novels are the greatest Partly made up of masterfully designed dialogue scenes, don’t you assume that you should be able to use a linguistic register that is halfway adequate for the respective occasion? Instead of just always the same? And if we were to meet him in reality, how brilliant would we actually consider a writer who seems unwaveringly convinced that ingenious and brilliant things, presented in large quantities and in particularly rapid succession, actually become even more ingenious and brilliant?

So at some point you begin to ask yourself, when the genius is brought so close to the idiotic again and again, whether there might not even be a little unconscious intention and a little revenge against him.

Yes, Kafka actually once wrote: “I have no literary interest, but consist of literature, I am nothing else and can be nothing else.” Daniel Kehlmann has this sentence, as if it actually contained an empirical description of Kafka’s everyday persona, simply direct taken literally. If Kafka in Kehlmann’s script, in a dizzyingly tautological, almost sly way, remains completely identical to what he writes, if he is completely absorbed by the sometimes precise, sometimes approximate wording of his own work – then Kehlmann ultimately even suspends it the whole actual meaning of biographical storytelling itself.

Then his “Kafka” himself becomes a radically absurd figure, one that completely contradicts Kafka’s character as far as we know it. What Kehlmann shows us here is less a writer with an unrivaledly complicated inner life than a kind of high-modern Christ who tirelessly proclaims the word of God, i.e. his own, to people in general and to his sometimes touching, sometimes annoyingly obtuse disciples in particular : »There is endless hope, Max, just not for us!«

Legend has it that Kafka actually said the latter. We just dare to assume that this famous aphorism was not surrounded by ten others.

Available in the ARD media library.