Hurriedly:
At 1:50 PM +1100 31/1/2002, ccjones wrote:
>Kafta understood it only too well when dealing with the problems of writing
>in German: the impossibility of writing in such a language after the Jewish
>experience in World War Two and the impossibility of not writing in German.
Well, yes, as has been pointed out, Kafka died well before WW2.
Also, he lived in Czechoslovakia, where German speakers were
anathemetised by Czech speakers; German-speaking schoolboys were
regularly beaten up by Czech-speaking schoolboys (and vice versa):
quite apart from the question of anti-Semitism. Coming from an
assimilated bourgeois family, he didn't investigate his own
Jewishness or Judaeism until relatively late in his life. The
questions of speaking and writing German (or writing at all) were for
him quite specifically vexed and (to my mind) psychological as much
as social.
Language can be used despotically; that doesn't mean it is inherently
despotic. It is also a powerful instrument for freedom.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
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