Novelists From Austria

"Believe flatterers and you’re lost; believe your enemies—and you despair."

"None are so inconsiderate as those who demand nothing of life other than their own personal comfort."

"Do not consider yourself deprived because your dreams were not fulfilled; the truly deprived have never dreamed."

"However much you paid for a beautiful illusion, you got a bargain."

"Misanthropy is a suit of armor lined with thorns."

"Indifference of every kind is reprehensible, even indifference towards one’s self."

"Nothing makes us more cowardly and unconscionable than the desire to be loved by everyone."

"Public opinion is the whore among opinions."

"A defeat borne with pride is also a victory."

"The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children."

"Translation: Nothing conveys the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity does."

"The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God."

"Kafka's Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: "With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground." Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ("What have I in common with Jews?") has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now."

"The impersonality of the communist state is not easy to understand. The huge dangers with which its subjects are daily confronted seem to come from nowhere, while threatening everyone who accepts responsibility for his own existence and so dares to be a man. Franz Kafka described the workings of this machine in a prophetic book, the moral of which many of our statesmen, including Mr Powell, have yet to learn. When they have learnt it, they will also know why The Castle, along with every other work by Prague's greatest writer, is now banned in the country of his birth."

"Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic”...Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces. And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young."

"Franz Kafka has become emblematic of the horrors of our century; the word "Kafkaesque" has entered the language in a way that "Proustian" and "Joycean" have not. In popularity and adaptability, The Trial beats all its rivals among the classic exposés of totalitarianism — Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs, Levi's The Periodic Table and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

"It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick someone, well, happier? — but rather a matter of Kafka’s work itself. Jewish readers cannot help but hear the echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in “In the Penal Colony,” or those of the blood libel in “The Trial”; such readers see in Kafka’s famous cockroach a horrifying caricature of the way others have so often seen them — and worse, the way they sometimes see themselves. Nor is this awareness mere suspicion. Though none of his published works mention it explicitly, Kafka’s private letters and diaries reveal an interest in Jewish identity verging on obsession. But Kafka’s broader fame comes from the point where this obsession merges with more ordinary fears, making non-Jewish readers see his work as expressing an abstract “existential” dread, rather than the very real dread that defined European Jewish existence."

"When I first read Kafka, I constantly had the feeling that I was writing it myself. It was as if I'd had a similar basic experience of the world."

"[Reverence for Kafka has been] the ideological origin of all the theories and tendencies of the "third way to socialism" in Czechoslovakia, especially the non-recognition of the power of the working class and its leading role... [This has been] the mental preparation for those events which have plunged our neighbour-nation into the deep crisis exploited by counter-revolutionaries."

"He writes about his father, but he is actually writing a diatribe against the fascist state, against a Germanized Prague. It is minor literature because he is Jewish and a Czech writing in German; he is writing the reverse side of history. And that is what literature gives you: the reverse side of history."

"The way in which he experienced estrangement was literature, with an intensity greater than that of any other writer of this century, more inexorably than Joyce or Proust or Mann. From this experience flows the power of Kafka’s works to comprehend all forms of alienation, and to suggest a response to political estrangement different from political counterterror: the effort to illuminate this condition by grasping through literature that play is the reward for the courage of accepting death."

"The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread."

"Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat."

"Metamorphosis is an unnerving account of a humble commercial traveller who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. At first nurtured and protected by his sister and mother, he eventually becomes loathsome in the eyes of his family and so voluntarily expires before he can be killed. Treat a man as sub-human, Kafka implies, and we make it easier for ourselves to eliminate him with an unstained conscience. The strength of the story is that Kafka starts with a fantastic premise and then develops it with impassioned logic and a rigorous attention to prosaic detail."

"He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth."

"But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story."

"Kafka was a Jew in his heart and soul. He learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He attended a beit midrash in Frankfurt and he wanted to settle in Palestine. He had lots of women, but most of them were Jewish. I don't mean that he proclaimed his Jewishness every morning, but that he was connected with Jewishness in every sense of the word. For example, the pounding at the castle — the desire to enter and understand this mystery — is a very Jewish longing. For good reason, authors such as his colleague Max Brod tried to find kabbalistic meaning in his works. Consider, for example, his two greatest works, The Trial and The Castle. He felt that he was a defendant who had done no wrong. A man is sitting at home or in a pension, looking forward to breakfast, and suddenly someone comes in and says, “You're under arrest! You are accused!” for no reason and no purpose. That's the classic Jewish situation, manifested most acutely during the Holocaust. It was a situation of total guilt with no sin. People were accused, taken from their homes, shut up in ghettos, led to railroad stations and from there to extermination camps — not because they had done anything wrong but because Jewish blood flowed in their veins. Kafka illustrated the absurdity of Jewish life in Europe even before the Holocaust. In this sense Kafka grasped the lowly position Jews held in European civilization...Kafka performed a psychic analysis of the defendant. Although he refrained from mentioning the Jew explicitly in order to give this absurd situation a much broader meaning, this, in essence, is Jewish psychology. A Jewish fate, if you will. Interestingly, this analysis led him indirectly to Zionism, and he even wanted to settle in Palestine."

"It’s strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literature. They say that if Kafka had been born in Mexico he would have been a realistic writer. So much depends on where you were born."

"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

"By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

"We met a large group of workmen who were marching with flags and banners to a meeting. Kafka said, "These people are so self-possessed, so self-confident and good humoured. They rule the streets, and therefore think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken. Behind them already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, all the modern satraps for whom they are preparing the way to power." "You do not believe in the power of the masses?" "It is before my eyes, this power of the masses, formless and apparently chaotic, which then seeks to be given a form and a discipline. At the end of every truly revolutionary development there appears a Napoleon Bonaparte." "You don"t believe in a wider expansion of the Russian Revolution?" Kafka was silent for a moment, then he said: "As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.""

""You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter."

"So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being."

"Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations."

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!"

"How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate; more, that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair."

""I always wanted you to admire my fasting," said the hunger artist. "We do admire it," said the overseer, affably. "But you shouldn't admire it," said the hunger artist. "Well then we don't admire it," said the overseer, "but why shouldn't we admire it?" "Because I have to fast, I can't help it," said the hunger artist. "What a fellow you are," said the overseer, "and why can't you help it?" "Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast."

"To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible."

"When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward."

"Oh well, memories,” said I. “Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don’t let yourself in for things like that, it’s not for you and it’s not for me. It only weakens one’s present position without strengthening the former one — nothing is more obvious — quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn’t need strengthening."

"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true."

"A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

"What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people."

"it seems that Kafka is even more famous in Prague than President Havel. An entire Kafka industry has blossomed here. He is sold in every store: Kafka shirts, Kafka toys; beer mugs and pots with Kafka's picture. There are Kafka restaurants, cafeterias, theatres. He looks down at us from everywhere. Kafka, the sickly, alienated individualist, the Jew who never completely felt himself to be a citizen of the Jewish, the Czech, or the German worlds, has risen from the dead in the vulgarized form of a sort of Czech rock star."

"The only way Kafka could envisage of creating his in every respect impossible writing possible was to demarcate the area of impossibility by making a language without a particular color, without a local tone, without qualities, as it were."

"One night [at college] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories."

"I’m interested in how power works … Franz Kafka just knows, man. He knows how power works. In terms of lessons for young writers, they should read all of Kafka’s journals. They’re so depressing yet so relatable at the same time. It seems like he had no faith in his work, and then you look at the work he produced … I don’t know. Maybe talking down to yourself is a way of keeping the faith."

"Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore."

"Das Böse weiß vom Guten, aber das Gute vom Bösen nicht. Selbsterkenntnis hat nur das Böse. - Die Acht Oktavhefte; published by BookRix, 9-8-2014."