Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz: What Would Kafka Have Said?

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05/22/2018 Added

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Introduced by Stephen Burnett, Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz presents "What Would Kafka Have Said?" at Prague Spring 50. Saturday, April 7, 2018 - 1:00 - 2:15 pm https://praguespring50.unl.edu

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[99:59:59.999]Well in case anyone missed it I'm Stephen Burnett from the department of classics and religious studies And I'm pleased this afternoon to introduce our next speaker Marketa Goetz- Stankiewicz She grew up in a small Czech town in Moravia And she experienced the savagery and injustice of the Nazi occupation of her country her Jewish father was imprisoned in Terezin concentration camp during 1945 In 1948 Marketa and her family emigrated to Canada She earned an MA and PhD degree from the University of Toronto and became a professor at the University of British Columbia She devoted her career to the study of German Polish and Czech literature Sam stopped literature and the contributions to Czech playwrights such as Vaclav Havel Joseph Topol and even clima She what a number of works including the silence theater Czech playwrights without a staged 1979 and Several edited works the filter of translation 1980 Levon ik plays four authors one character 1987 goodbye samizdat 20 years of Czech underground writing 1992 and critical essays on vat Slav Havel 1999 she's received numerous awards and recognitions. Most recently the the Giratina Award for her work in the promotion of Czech literature in 2016 She'll be speaking today on what would Kafka have said? Given that Kafka was both a witty and a very dark writer I expect he would have had some choice words to describe the Prague Spring and it's aftermath Let's welcome Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz Thank you so much You know I’m going to talk partly about the absurd turning into reality And that's exactly what happened to me. Just now. I didn't bring my notes. I had them. Yes I’m sitting on them Thank you so much for being here. (audience laughs) And I'm thanking, I'm thanking this magnificent man who has led us through this week, not quite a week yet, of an amazing conference. I have learned so much. How is it with the, is it alright? Shall I hold it a bit higher? Little bit? Yeah, okay. You see, I said I will disappear behind the desk and faint with embarrassment, so I thought I'll sit here, and of course I was told, "Whatever you say will do," and here I sit. Now, I am much richer now than I was about five days ago. What I've experienced, I only say a few words about that. I've watched fascinating videos of Stalinism. I've traveled the world with a brave woman dissident. I have watched brilliant photos. I have listened to magnificent movies, music I mean. I went back to the hotel tapping my heels. And I now think about liberal democracy, that it has defeated the brute force of Nazism. I look at it in a new way. I've thought about it a lot. And I think about why the symmetry posed by people on Havel is sometimes false. Havel can't be put into symmetry, doesn't fit Havel. But we can all think about it by ourselves. And I have heard the passionate plea by young novelist for more justice as well as the amazing story of someone who has experienced everything and much more. As I collect the survey of the talks, I realize that I arrived almost as a different person. I've become a different person, little bit. One doesn't really become a different person, but somehow that is the dimension edit, and that's what I received here. And there is more to come this afternoon, after my little talk. So it will be some important things are coming later, and I'm happy to tell you about them. You will hear them. There's no need to tell now, but they are coming this afternoon. Some of my comments will be personal. Some of them related to Kafka, who looms large in my title. And Kafka, you know, you have read him yourselves. The world has responded to him in thousands, literally thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages, including hundreds of books, none of which really do him justice. We have, we went through Kafkaesque, and you did all through Kafkaesque experiences, and for better or for worse, he has told us about them in his own life, which interested Havel greatly too, but I'll say a few words about that. Now, Kafka has not experienced the Prague Spring as you know, and still,he lingers in, I would go as far as saying the awareness of the world, because there's a writer who wrote in German, lived in Prague, was Jewish, and was banned by two opposite political regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets, or the Communists, was banned by both those regimes, which is quite a feat for a writer, I think. (audience laughs) And here in Prague, if you go there, there are two images, artistic, I would say, how will I put it? Artistic reproductions of him, one near the Staromestske Nameski, and the other very new one, strange, where he changes large, shiny, sort of consisting of pieces of metal, and as you look at him you think, "Wait a minute what is he doing? "Is it me or is it him?" He's turning his head. Go and see it when you are in Prague. Make sure to see it. It is home city of Prague that has honored him, I think, with these works of art. The city of Prague, which he called my mother, my little mother. (speaking in foreign language) My little mother with claws. Now I have the, I'm sorry to say, dubious honor, that I have experienced the eight number almost all of the number eights that we have been concerned with, not the first one, I assure you. 1918, I don't go as far back as that but all the others. Now permit me to a quick personal glance into the past. It was mid March, 1939, and I was standing at the large window in our apartment, which I loved. I like to look out at the sunset. It was spring, a different spring from the spring we are all talking about now. And I looked out and enjoyed the scenery. It was right at the corner, the building was right at the corner of Masaryk Street, and that street has changed its name in the next 50 years, quite a few times. As I looked out, observing the view in the spring, I saw something that totally, it didn't upset me yet, but I thought what is this around the corner by Brokops Delicatessen, came a number of soldiers with bayonets stuck on their guns. Would you say stuck on their guns? It's a wrong way, no, maybe. And they walked slowly around the corner. I thought, "what is this? "Who is this?" I called my father, I said, "Look, daddy. "What is going on here?" And then everything went dark. Why did it go dark? Not because of the terrible event that I was seeing, but my father put his hand over my eyes and led me away from the window because he knew what was coming was very dark for all of us, the whole family. So after this moment of darkness, I will just say the rest is history, which the saying, the cliche gives us lightheartedly and sometimes callously. So the rest is history. Now, just a few dates, this was 15 years after Franz Kafka had died and seven years before Vaclav Havel was born. Their names, in a way, indicate or give an idea of their stories, the atmosphere in which they lived. Kafka was called after Franz Joseph of, well Kaiser Franz Joseph of the Austrian emperor for many years, Franz. And Havel was called after the saintly duke of Bohemia who was born in 901 and murdered almost exactly a thousand years before Havel was born. So if you look at those names, they already seem to tell a story that we can fulfill or continue ourselves. Today, with many of the weaknesses of many of you have witnessed more than I. We have to become aware of the two figures that each in his own way, Kafka and Havel, have conquered the world's imagination, the political and the artistic or literally imagination. Vaclav Havel's writings, stacked in the Zerenachra Bitze, The Green Box where all his writings have been collected. It's called The Green Box with a half ironic, half loving name for his collected works. And he signs it on top with his heart that we all know well. Next to him stands Kafka's story, well more books but the one that is next to and leans on Havel, or Havel's books lean on him, Die Verwandlung, The Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis. Yeah, is it all right? Am I doing something? Tell me, show me if I do something wrong here with the, yes, are you showing your hand? I'm just saying it's good. It's good! Thank you. I didn't see your nice thumb. I see. (audience laughing) So Die Verwandlung is translated The Metamorphosis, which doesn't quite do justice but it's understandable, because Verwandlung is sort of a strange echo in the German language, so we'll go for Metamorphosis. And who is between them? George Orwell, standing between Havel and Kafka on my shelf there. So, the Czech, German, English tree-um-vee-ae-rat, tree-um-vi-rat? I'm not pronouncing this properly, yeah? Triumvirate rules my little study at the Pacific. Now you will say, and I'm saying myself, where am I aiming with these obviously scattered remarks? What I would like to do is extract a few scenes from the Central European cultural map. The scenes will be past, present, and future, but with a question mark behind the word future. And I want to show you a little bit, just a little bit how the above mentioned writers reflect and were reflected in the, in the anni mirabiles. I've taken the title from somebody who had spoken here before. The anni mirabiles of the Prague Spring, and they're embedded in the annals of the 20th and, indeed, the 21st century. As you better know than I, there have been many discussions. When did the Prague Spring start? We know when it finished, don't we? But when did it really start? Was it earlier, when they start writing? So I will just give you an even further look into the past and tell you that when I went to Prague after the war, right after the war my father, who survived, thank God, sent me there. It was in '45, '46, and I didn't grasp the political scene. I had not been in school. I was clueless about everything. But I experienced, for the first time in my life, a vast city, a metropolis. I jump over to glimpses of my father sweeping the sidewalk in the 1940s in Hagibor, and the second one when I was tested for racial body signs by the Gestapo. But we jump over there, that is not so interesting but it's part of an absurd life, I suppose. But it doesn't belong here. The point I want to make is that the harbinger sign of the Prague Spring came to me in, came about 15 years earlier than it really began and the discussions are touching on when it began, when the first literature was, when the first words were spoken, when the first literature was published. Well, in my case, it is sort of funny moment or little scene. When I went to Prague, as I said, I was out to lunch, as they say nowadays, not knowing what really was going on, and there was a nice friend also who became my friend from Estec. I yearned to have a friend. I didn't have many except, I didn't have many in my teenage when I grew up, and she came to me in tears. I said, "Hanka, what happened?" She said, "My boyfriend." I don't like the word boyfriend, I must say. I'd rather say manfriend, but it was a boyfriend. We were half kids. And she said, "He left me, he abandoned me." So I, gathering my very scant knowledge of erotic problems, I said, "With another girl?" She said, "Oh, no. With a man. "And a man who isn't alive anymore. "And a book, he just walks around with this book, "doesn't even look at me anymore." And it was Kafka. So this was very early on. I won't claim that Prague Spring started then, but there were signs moving about, and because the Czech people are extremely intelligent and sensitive, and they sense what is in the air, and somewhere in this crazy time, '45, '46, it was in the air. As you know, World War II was hardly over, but there were young people who read Kafka. His stories circulated in Czech, somebody had translated, we won't go into that. Translation is also a big, a possible thesis topic for students to discuss the histories of translations in strange times, in absurd times. So there are quite a few possibilities to write thesis here. But we won't go into that either. But if you want, I can give you all kinds of topics. Havel was only a kid of 10 then, and he did not read Kafka, obviously, but he plowed through whole five volumes of Jirasek's historical novel, F.L. Vek. And within further 60 years, in 1952, he read as he writes with feverish excitement, Jan Patocka's The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem. And strangely enough, Patocka's work, this one here, was published in 1936, and it was Havel's birthday. He didn't know, of course, what was coming. Here we might remind ourselves that Stephen Spender, living in England but traveling on the continent, wrote about the students' protests in 1950s and '60s, you know, what happened there in France, in Germany, the Baader-Meinhof Group which ended in an alleged half mysterious suicide in prison. And Steven argues that, I should not call him Steven, should I? Spender, sorry. Steven Spender argues that one should analyze always, when there are rebellions or mass protests going on. One should always look at the assumptions and the circumstances that cause their disagreements and try to understand that very different things as in France, in Germany, all over, also in Czechoslovakia then. In the subtext, they have something in common. And I really appreciate that Spender made early on, made this comment. So despite having not necessarily having read Kafka at the time, he lived in a scene throbbing with yet undisclosed excitement and rejection of automatic responses, which are very important. And any regime that is trying to control its people, automatic responses are very important. If I started to run a society, a totalitarian society, I would look at the language first and I would check automatic responses and impose them on people. Well, luckily this is not the case. Havel knew about that. And living in this is yet undisclosed but throbbing scene, he knew about absurdity and wrote the delightful Anatomy Of The Gag in 1963 when he was about 37. And if you put up with me, I can show you an example. You may not want it of the Anatomy Of The Gag. Which is, what's the difference between a joke and a gag? Very important. There were other voices as well. Timothy Snyder worked with Tony Chad on big assessment of Europe. And Chad calls it Thinking the 20th century. And he says at one point, the foresight into the, let's see, just a look here. "Those who get the 20th century right," he says, like Kafka He mentions Kafka there. Or his contemporary observers to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent. And the precedent the world, the world without a precedent, was the world where the absurd becomes reality, and where the absurd is, where you have language coming in, normalized. What a nice word normalized, yeah? A terrible word when it was invented. Havel realized this and must have found this type of world in Kafka. Later he writes about this in Letters To Olga, for example, translated by Paul Wilson. What would we do without Paul's translations? Of many books, may Czech books. What would we do without them? And that's where, Havel says in his letters to Olga, how easily absurdity becomes legitimate. So, again to Kafka. And he says that because he wrote these letters from prison. And of course, they were all read. But people said now, the people who controlled what was going in and out of prison in writing said, "What is that? The absurd?" (speaking in foreign language) But then, these are just Czech words now. But they thought, "Well, Kafka. "That was long ago." And they let it go. And the letter got out and Olga received it and we have it now to be read. I can't resist from reading to you, but I have to ask to the bosses that are here. How am I doing on time? You have about half an hour, probably. That won't be, I won't. And then leave time for questions. Yes. Okay, I won't talk that long. Don't worry. (a few audience members laugh) But I will give you, I can't resist from giving you a quotation of a speech by then president Havel, 38 years later when receiving an honorary degree, one of many as you know, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on April 4th 1990. Now what's the date today? April. Yeah, just three days later. This was April 4th. I was surprised it was almost, it was 1990 but the month was right. And he was giving a moving, for some in the audience, quite surprising speech. The speech was relating to Kafka mostly, about 80%. I'm not very good at percentages. But about that. About 80% of the speech was dwelling on Kafka. "I'm not a Kafka log," he said. "But I feel I'm one who understands "and I'm even secretly," now hold your hats. It's not in his speech, that were my words. "And I'm even secretly convinced that if Kafka didn't exist, "and I would be a better writer that I am," And I would say don't worry Vaclav, you are a great writer. "I could write his whole oeuvre. "I could write it. "I hear already," still his speech, "that many of you want to counter me here "and claim that I could only adopt "a style or design myself "into this Kafkaesque patterns. "Yes, I agree of course, that on the surface, on the outside "I seem to be the very different, "the very opposite of Joseph K." Who was woken up when he was asleep by two policemen, men in uniform not in uniform actually, and told he is arrested and he didn't know what was going on. Great scene, of course. That also Havel, he mentioned it once, experienced in his own life. And many of the dissidents experienced this scene themselves. So, I go back, if you put up with my, with my changing topic. It's not change of topic, I only interrupt myself. "I agree," I read that again, halfway decently. "I agree of course, that on the outside I seem "to be the very opposite of Joseph K, the land surveyor, but nevertheless, I keep to my point. "It is just what I told you about myself." Also, there is the aspect of shame and guilt that is at the heart of all of Kafka's figures. And it seems to have given Havel, I maybe overstating things here now. But in a way, it seems to have given him a sort of key to his own character. Because he was a very shy man. "According to my opinion," and this is Havel again. In his speech, he says it openly to the audience there in Jerusalem. "According to my opinion, it is precisely "my inwardly sense of being an outsider "and impossible to relate to any type of system "that is hidden so that I would somehow conceal "my almost metaphysical sense of guilt." That's pure Kafka. Almost metaphysical sense of guilt. And maybe the key to this, is metaphysical. Guilt as well, but metaphysical is the real deep key under the surface. I ask you now have I strayed too far from the Prague Spring in which Havel, at least in people's imagination, played a major role. If he did play a role, it was with his plays and the chore in a way that no other playwright managed to create the atmosphere in which the absurd, and it's a repetition but it bears repeating. The absurd becomes normal. And it is his interest in language. That is another thesis to be written. Havel, Kafka and language. It is in his interest, I'm not talking to the people who have written more than I ever have, I'm talking just to some students that might be interested in topics. So, if the others heard this, I apologize to them. Language to Havel was something that fashions life. The cliche organizes life. It expropriates people's identity. And identity is a big theme in Havel, as you know. At the same time, it uses, the cliche, uses and abuses language, and at the same time, it creates an ambivalence that should disquiet the audience because that's what Havel wanted to do. And he did it in 1963 and 1965, later as well. But to do it in those days was courage and enormous foresight. That's what he wanted to do. The audience should not leave the theater, and I thought we talked about Milton, the other day, over a glass or two of wine in the evening. And I thought of Milton. And Milton said, "You leave the theater in peace of mind, "in calm of mind. "All passion spent." It's very opposite of what Havel wanted to do. He wanted you to leave the theater nervous, wondering, not knowing quite what it meant, what you have listened to, whether it relates to your own life. And that was a great thing to do in the '60s. And that's how the Prague Spring started dawning or continued dawning. I'll give you, just quickly, three examples of amusing yet dangerous language. I won't read them. I brought the books here and if somebody wants to read bit of it you can. But, we may not have the time to do that and you may buy one or two books at the end of the lovely hall there and get it. Now, The Garden Party. The Garden Party you say, oh, what kind of a title is that? That's interesting, The Garden Party? Havel, The Garden Party? But you could also give it another title. You could call it How To Be Successful By Learning How To Talk. So it is The Garden Party is, I would claim the first, and others probably have claimed, the first critical study of language, not as means of communication but as a teleological weapon. The protagonist here makes a steep career by imitating to perfection professional language. In the process, he loses his identity and when his puzzled parents ask him at the end of the play, "You are our son but who are you really?" he gives them a long answer which is a conglomeration of phrases. And they are stunned. So, The Garden Party has become a party of losing your identity by learning a language that as a speak, and you guys said to me, "Oh well, this is going on in a liberal democracy as well. "In fact, it goes on everywhere. "How can you relate it just to the Prague Spring?" When people want a job with Apple or, give me, somebody give me a big, a big concern here. I haven't got the word. If you want a job, a big. Pardon? Corporation? A big corporation. There it is, thank you. A big corporation, where you look for a job. They will, maybe, tell you how to speak. When you want to become the vice president, the right way you start at the bottom. But you will still be taught how to speak. So you will say these things are also going on in our society. Not as drastically. And not as related to to danger possibly. You might lose your job but not end up in prison. But I don't know. You can think about it. Or else. Another, The Memorandum. Which Paul will translate it as The Memo. Much better. The Memorandum is such a heavy bureaucratic word but The Memo, I write a memo tomorrow. It's much better and fits into our society in his time in 2012. Is that right, 2012? A new translation. The Memorandum was written by Havel in 1965. In The Memo, artificial language is used to, it's invented and used to assure the betterment of communication. And it is hilarious. The language is Ptydepe. And completely meaningless language which was invented, by the way, by Havel's brother. And he always gives him a, says, "My brother invented this language." It is a language that nobody understands. And when the, I just give you a little bit, a little bit of the first theme of the play. Somebody comes, hangs up his coat, the director of a corporation. We never know what corporation, yeah, all kinds of corporations in Havel's plays, but we never know what it is. But we can catch on. It's somewhere. It's a bureaucratic, bureaucratic. How would I say? Community. The word is falsely used by me. But they imply that it's a community. So he comes, the director, Gross, comes to the office, hangs up his coat, says hi to his secretary, who doesn't do much. She just combs her hair and puts on her lipstick and makes some, which is lovely on stage. And he says, "Oh, what's that? "I see, a new memo." He picks it up. (audience laughs) "What's that?" he says to his secretary. And she says, "But that's Ptydepe , of course. "It's our new language." And off it goes. The play goes into delightful analysis of a language that nobody understands and then to have the Ptydepe teacher, who teaches a class, which is delightful. So, The Memorandum is a great play. And has been performed all over the world. Although there are problems with the translation, too. You don't have to translate Ptydepe but translations in other languages like French or German, it becomes much more serious in German. Anyway, that's The Memorandum. (audience laughs) Just as another wonderful play, if I may, may I? Another wonderful play by Havel, which he wrote much later. The Temptation. I think it's number, I hold my thumb today, right now. Because I think it's his best play yet. Temptation, which was put on, which is being played, but people are not quite sure what to do with it, and the German audience, in a very good translation, in Vienna, well, the Austrian audience, put it on. And they made, because it's the Faust theme. What happens to Faust? He wants to be younger and sells his soul, you know, I don't need to tell you, to some kind of devil, some kind, and in Vienna they played it, and they made Faust play out of it. And they phoned Havel to, and I had the enormous honor to be there and watch the play, and they phoned him and said, "It's playing in Vienna, look." And he said, "You made Faust play out of it. "A serious play. "It's funny, all my plays are." So that's Temptation. Read Temptation, by all means. There is another play. And you have seen, I suppose, the three one-act plays, that were written later. And Havel wrote them, its Audience, Unveiling and Protest. The three one-act plays that were put on, Protest was written a bit later but doesn't matter. We don't worry too much about dates, do we? They were put on in his home in the country, Harad, Czech which is called Harad, Czech, the little castle that people called when Havel became president. The motto of the people who were in the street called (speaking in foreign language). From the Harad, Czech, from the little castle to the big castle. And that's what happened. Anyway, there he put on with friends, dissident friends, these plays. And he just thought they were just for his friends and they were really nothing much. And these plays conquered the world. They were played all over the world. I can say it without hesitation and the plays are still magnificent plays. and they always, it's not, they're about a man who's Vanek, and people have said it's the alter ego of Havel. Not quite, and he has said several times, it's not my alter ego, it's a character whom I have invented. And he goes and visits somebody at the brewer in the brewery where he worked, and then some friends. The other characters, the interesting thing, one of the interesting things of those short plays are, that the other people talk. And Vanek doesn't talk much. It's very hard. I'm not an actress but the the people who act, actor, because it's man, a couple of times it's a woman too, it's very difficult to do this, to act this because all Vanek, the main character says, "Okay, yes. Oh, I don't know. "Thank you." Or, in the end he says, "Goodbye," in a very sad moment. And now I would just like to say something else which is close to my heart, because Havel. People say, "Oh, yes. "Vanek is the wonderful dissident character." It's the Havel character. And the others are just, they talk and they are barking up their own tree, I would say. And they talk and they reveal themselves as the nasty people, the stupid people. People who have been manipulated by the regime. Havel now, does something interesting. At the end, he repeats the first scene. And this is a moment, as I mentioned before, where you say, "Now what is all this about? "I thought I had a nice guy here "and I had the stupid people. "What is he doing to me?" He sends, the nice guy comes in at the end and changes. Totally changes. He said only the few words. He's, what we thought was his character. And this is what Havel meant by not letting you go home in calm of mind or passion spent. Because you think, "What was that all about? "I had it all straight, and now I don't." I had to tell you that because I feel so strongly about it. So, with Kafka's and Havel's help, we have arrived at the point where Prague Spring was forced to make room for one of the basic features of normalization, again, another word. The word itself proves that language is the greatest and most successful manipulator of thought. And the people were manipulated with this word. The web, I looked up normalization on the web. You know what I found? I suppose maybe you looked it up too. But I found that it is a refinement process of data that will make it conduce that will make a conductive, sorry, conducive, sorry, conducive to business activity. I thought, "Yes "I see. I didn't know that." I thought of normalization as something very dark and sinister. But there it is in the web. Look in the web, you get another piece of information. So, what if I may conclude with a rather awkward question of my title, "What would Kafka and Havel, both artists of the mystery of language, have said to all this?" And I close and thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening to me. You're such a wonderful audience. And you put up with my stuttering up and down. Thank you. (audience applauds) I'm going to start with the microphone person. So, those of you who'd like to ask questions. I also have been texting with David, talk about absurd. I've been texting with David Cerny so I have to go outside and get the computer set up. So I'm gonna hand over the microphone in a few minutes. But let me, yes, yes. Thank you so much. I think it is our honor, actually. If we're going to have to have a tug of war about it. I just have a comment, and wanna just share a story with you. And I think you might appreciate its absurdity or maybe you'll comment on it. When I was in Prague in the summer, I went to the Kafka Society, the Czech Kafka Society. They were responsible for the first publication in Czech translation of Kafka's works and they have a replica of his library. And they have a bookstore and there is a David Cerny outside, as everybody knows. But in the bookstore, there I spoke to the person who was behind, the cashier, essentially. And I was looking at some books and just kind of soaking it all in. And he spoke English and realized that I was American and one of the stories he told me was that many American visitors come to this bookstore and they engage him in conversation, and they are convinced that Kafka died in the Holocaust. And it was, it was not made in any kind of judgemental way that Americans don't know our history and I think there is a way in which we don't, but there is a way in which there is a kind of fundamental understanding of Kafka's work as prophetic, perhaps. And there is a kind of truth in that American misinterpretation. I just wondered if you had ever encountered that opinion and maybe if you have any opinion about this. Thank you. Maybe I can talk loud. Thanks. I haven't actually. Although I have great sympathy for the idea. I might mention that Havel's favorite sister, Otla, died in Auschwitz. But somehow, the way he writes, Kafka, we can see a horrible situation arising, like smoke from some chimney, from his work, as if he had foreseen. We would not have his, as you know, we would not have his works, only some early stories, because he said, maybe he new in his heart of hearts, that the Holocaust was somewhere on the horizon, on the unspeakable horizon. And he didn't want his works to reach people, to reach an audience, a reader. So he said to his good friend, Max Brod, "I want you to burn," he was already very ill and he wanted Brod to burn the later works and Brod did not do this. Although it was the wish of his dear friend, he didn't do it and took the works in a suitcase, in 1930, he just made it over the border to Switzerland, 1939, and he took his works. So we have this works. And perhaps somehow I could relate it to the American visitors who have some conviction, or they think that this has happened. Didn't happen to him, to his dear, their beloved sister who also organized for him to go up to the Prague castle. The small, the golden little alley where she rented one tiny little house for Kafka. He was very tall, he always had to bend to walk into, and that's where he said end of road, and continued writing. Which he couldn't quite do in the office, an insurance office, which is very, also an absurd thing. And in his parents' home. I need to hug you first. Okay. I apologize because I'll probably talk more than I should. But, I'm here actually just to thank you for coming here. I've had my own spiritual journey with being a Czech. And I have to say right now, I have a 100 year old grandma right now who's in the hospice dying. So I'm here for her too. This woman (sobbing), she got me all started with learning Czech and she pushed me so hard. And when the Velvet, when the Velvet Revolution started happening, this woman said, "Here's this school "in Czech Republic, why not go? "Go, learn" And I thought, "I can't do that, no." You don't tell this woman no. She's a strong, hard Czech. And, I did it. And I was there. And, one of the things that I did a lot with my cousin, is we used to go bar hopping and, that's probably my cell phone being rude too, I'm sorry, we used to go bar hopping together, me and Petr. And he would always take me to the underground punk bars and we would always be on the lookout for Vaclav Havel. Never caught him, never caught him. But, I did catch him at the Velvet Revolution Concert. I was sitting, clear up in the nose bleeds for what I thought, but little did I know the old balkanese that come out like this. I literally sat, maybe five feet, away from one of my biggest heroes ever. And it is very spiritual and it's very metaphysical because Czechs don't really like to say spiritual. So we'll go with metaphysical. But I thank you so much. I am back here crying with the words and it's opened my eyes back again that I need to read more. Havel and Kafka shaped my world and there are a million Czech women writers out there as well. And the literature and language of Russian and Czech, every Slavic country, I am a Slavophile. I'm not gonna lie, but I'm also a Czech. And it's thanks to this woman and women like you. Thank you so much for this. Thank you for that. That word, normalization, it's used all the time in the public discourse today in America, in the United States. It's in the press, it's in the commentary, it's on Facebook when I do some snooping through my wife's Facebook, sorry folks, I'm not a Facebook person. People use it all the time, the fear that certain behaviors are becoming normalized. And we use it constantly, we're aware of it. That's something is going on in terms of what's acceptable and not acceptable. So for us, it's a certain sense that relates to a sense of way of doing things, a certain civility and politeness that's eroding badly. But it's also a bureaucratic agenda, the reason I've paid attention to Kafka over the years is that he talks about bureaucracies, he talks about absurdity of bureaucracy, bureaucracies are on the lose, trying to reduce people to numbers, trying to reduce people to categories, et cetera. And that's common to all systems. But of course, you can do things in one system, I agree with you in the notion that in one system, the consequences of your behavior backing the system are more consequential than they are in another system. Like the corporate teamwork, the admin speak, the team playing aspect of corporate America. You can walk out the door, or you probably get a pink slip before you walk out the door, right? And so you have to agree to that kind of a thing. So I'm always struck by how, when you think about people who aren't Czech scholars, who aren't Czech Americans, they go back and look at things that are Czech, because the Czechs have always been talking about the absurdity of bureaucracies in systems and how they work. And I guess they saw that most intensely. Have you ever thought of connecting that and trying to connect it to the way that the Czech literature speaks to the broader sense of the modern condition of people living in the modern world and how we constantly have to resist being turned into the impersonal automaton who's a number and are ranked the number in the system or something like that? Well, I think, having lived for 300 years, the Czechs having lived for 300 years under the, I say it with hesitation, the benevolent dictatorship, that doesn't fit together, does it? Of Austria, Hungary. Which was heavy with corporate, one didn't use that word much then, but with bureaucracy, they learned to, that they lived a different life from what was going on in Vienna at that point. And so they were used to bureaucracy but at a distance. And they are in a way, a people, I would say, and correct me if you think I'm quite wrong, they are not a bureaucratic people. When they, bureaucracy, the Nazi bureaucracy was imposed on them by '39. But that was the enemy, they could distance themselves from it. But when the Soviet, the Russian bureaucracy was imposed on them, they were the Slavic brothers and sisters, et cetera. So they were faced with this bureaucracy. They also resisted it in their own way because they're not a bureaucratic people, I would say. And what did they do? They made fun of it. Sometimes, well I've read you some examples. But they laughed about it. And laughter cures. What does it cure laughter? It cures, I suppose fear, it cures the feeling that you're caught in a trap, it cures a lot. Laughter cures a lot. It can also hurt. Laughter can hurt. But if we take it as a sort of a weapon, a personal weapon against what is oppressing you, it is of enormous help. I don't think I answer your question or I comment halfway intelligently on your question. I don't think so. Yes, I was really intrigued by your statement about the metaphysical guilt, seeing the metaphysical guilt. And, the Czech republic is a very small country. So you have Kafka, you have Havel writing. One could, in the most narrow sense say, "Well, it's just something being said "by somebody in little dinky country, "doesn't have anything to do with the rest "of us or with the rest of the world." But, the metaphysical guilt, and I wanted to get your comment on this, the metaphysical guilt that's in Kafka and somewhat in Havel, is something that's shared by all humanity. I think that's really the point. I think that's where the power come from. And yet both of them, in a way, and I think more in Kafka's, Kafka's saying think of the torment that comes from not reacting to the metaphysical guilt. The enormous destruction that comes from simply being passive towards it. And then Havel is, maybe if you would comment on this, saying to the contrary, in a real sense we all have the metaphysical guilt. So he puts the humor in his plays so that you'll realize you have it. Now the thing is to decide what to do in response to a metaphysical guilt. Well, the two important words in your comment now. Very interesting comment. The word guilt and metaphysical. Because you can, there would be people say, "Well, I feel guilty about this and that, "and this and that." but they would not add the word metaphysical which somehow deepens the concept of guilt and which makes it beyond, in a way, beyond to human life. It goes into the area of metaphysics. So, this is a, this is a very big question, which humanity, when they sense the guilt, they see the guilt in someone else, has to, I was going to say has to solve. It will not be solved. You can't really solve very profound feelings of guilt, which you may feel when you walk along in Vancouver and somebody would like to have a couple of dollars or pennies from me and I go to a concert and he's there, and I worry about him and I feel guilt. Now, is that guilt metaphysical guilt, that I feel that the world is just wrong. That one little person goes to a concert and another person is there and begs for a piece of bread. There you can almost say yes, maybe that is metaphysical guilt in the sense that it refers to the human condition. The human condition as, as Sartre would say and others would say. So there is a little bit of an answer. Not an answer but just sort of opening up, even more, a question. Perhaps this also relates to, Kafka gave us the basic sense of guilt almost through all of his books, his stories. And what did he do? He read it to his friends at the cafe and he roared with laughter. He thought it was all very funny. And I've never come, I must say openly, I've never come to terms with that. I thought, "Kafka, don't you know "that your stuff is pretty," pretty not only dangerous but sad, black, terrible and it takes away hope. You have this one guy who is woken up and you always think he will get an answer to his problems, at the end he's shot. You read that, but this was from the longer novel. And he did not read this bit anymore to his friends because it was already in Brod's suitcase, moving to Switzerland. But the shorter things, he laughed. What did he think? Then we'll have to ask, maybe we have another question, what is Kafka's laughter? Does it emerge from guilt? Can laughter emerge from guilt? Or can guilt follow laughter? More likely, probably. Well, these are very simple and non, how would I say? They don't hold together. The answers or the, the way I try to speak about them. But I try. As you were speaking, I was thinking of another Czech great artist, who also seems to me reminiscent of Kafka, and that's Leos Janacek. And not just his opera about Mr Broucek trip to the moon where you have the fantastical extraterrestrial adventures, but I'm thinking of that's Makropulos, The Makropulos Affair. Where you not only have a woman who has metamorphosis, Elina Makropulos becomes Ellian MacGregor, she lives 300 years but as the metropolitan opera performed it several years ago with Karita Mattila as Makropulos, you have that wonderful opening scene where it looks like something right out of the process, the trial. You have this huge, these book stacks that go up endlessly, never come to an end. And you have this trial that proceeds through the centuries, also with different metamorphosis. I'm not sure anymore whether Janacek had any contact with Kafka, or if he knew much about him, but it certainly seems the flavor is there. I'm very glad that you said that. This is very interesting. I don't know. He lived in the little village of Hukvaldy, I mean Janacek that is. And it's amazing that this incredible operas emerge from the small village where he was born, in a house that was a brewery and next to it was a church. And you can go there and see it. This, in a way, is a very Czech thing, that this great (says foreign word) in people in literature, philosophy, music, come out of small, a small context. so you know, this is just great. Yes Macropolos. And he did from the house of the dead where he writes, he composes, writes about group of prisoners that come, you see them emerge from darkness into light. I only have seen one performance of it. Yes. And then Jenufa and earlier on, yes. Well, Janacek and his music has now. His music was not that appreciated for a long time. But it has now come, the mat has put a new Jenufa, the village girl, problem there too. To explore Janacek's attempts at attempts at seeing life, seeing potential in life that doesn't really exist, For example, lived 300 years, and she didn't like it at the end anymore. If you have eternal life, you go ahead for a while but after that, you say, "I don't want it really. "Now what am I going to do? "How am I going to get out of this?" Well, to study the relation to Kafka, yes, there is another thesis there. One last question. Okay. Marketa, thank you very much for this talk. I'm really intrigued by the image on your bookshelf of Orwell sitting in between Kafka and Havel. I think it's a good place for him. I just wanted to comment on one of the may slippery words that exist in that period. The first time I came across the word normalization, used not in a sense of restoring order after 1968, but in the early 1960s, there was critic, I think he's much undervalued, Joseph Rizak, who described the whole process of kinda renewal of Czech literature and the reestablishment of connections with pre-communist literature as normalization. That's what he called it. And so the Kafka Conference in 1963, when Kafka was once again allowed to be published in Czech translation and to be talked about more less in public, he saw it as a kind of normalization. He saw it as a normalization that works of literature that had lain foul in writers' drawers for 10 years, 15 years, were now being published. And so the original use of that word in the Czech modern context is getting back to normal, meaning reconnecting with our cultural past. And then suddenly it gets flipped around and turns into its exact opposite. And that's the Orwell connection there. Oh, thanks Paul. Yes, yes. In 1963, it was the first, and it took place in a castle. And it was the first conference on Kafka. And it was done by Prof. Goldstucker at Charles University. The reaction to Kafka, there were papers given. And the reaction were very different from the people from the West and from East, East Germany. It was partly done in German but, because they used Kafka's German text, that were born in '63. Well, thank you, Paul. This is great. They were trying, yes, to connect the normalization, and maybe that also relates to your question, or rather comment, that normalization was used here in a very positive way to connect with our past. And then it was twisted around and flipped around, and it became a dark reminder of what was going on in an absurd and unacceptable, they would say nowadays, they use that word very often. But it had to be accepted because of the danger. But in such a way, the word has molded people to awareness. Thanks, Paul. Thank you very much. I'm sorry, I'm will hold it at the right distance. Thank you very much. This is the, that was the last question. If you want to ask our wonderful speaker other questions, you can approach her during the break. And I understand that we will have some coffee and cookies. (audience applauds)
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Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz: What Would Kafka Have Said?

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