Being Kafka #4 with Marianne Kolb

02/07/24 • 16 min

What does it look like when Franz Kafka changes your life? Artist Marianne Kolb from California – who is Swiss by birth – had this experience. She tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about the grey days of her education and apprenticeship in a strict Switzerland during the 1960s and 70s. Her salvation: reading the works of Kafka, which were recommended to her by a colleague. In all her life, Kolb had never before felt so moved as she did by this Czech author. Kolb’s subsequent life shows how identification with the bug in “The Metamorphosis” can motivate someone to turn their own world around.

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Being Kafka #3 with Hernán D. Caro

Why is there so much love for Franz Kafka in Latin America? Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson interviews Hernán D. Caro to find out. Hernán is a Colombian author and editor. He lives in Berlin. One reason for Kafka’s popularity in Latin America, in his view, is that Kafka’s clear language can be translated into other languages like Spanish without much detriment. Furthermore, Hernán believes that Kafka has given other authors an incredibly great gift: by showing them how to write about the weirdest things as if they were more normal than anything else in the world.

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Being Kafka #5 with Gerald Barry

“Without Ohropax day and night, I really couldn’t cope,” wrote Franz Kafka in 1922. The author from Prague struggled with the loudness of the city. The Irish composer Gerald Barry revisited precisely this characteristic in his work “Kafka‘s Earplugs” – and in 2023 he celebrated its world premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in London. In this podcast episode, Barry speaks to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about how Franz Kafka’s auditory sensitivity inspired him. Barry finds it highly appropriate that “Kafka’s Earplugs” has been described as both the most beautiful and the most horrible music in the world. After all, Kafka was said to have been equally contradictory.