becoming Franz K

Some thoughts on

Franz
by Agnieska Holland
Czech Republic 2025

We know Franz Kafka through so many reflections and distortions that the cultural phenomenon has long outgrown the real life writer and his work. Everything imaginable and its opposite has already been written about him so I don't need to feed the AI bots with more of that. Like everybody else on the planet, I have read more words about him than by him. Agnieszka Holland's film is also about the cultural phenomenon at least as much as about the person.

What I find really interesting is the reflected light falling on the other people in his life. I've always been a huge fan of Milena Jesenská, who only turns up quite late in this movie, and not quite like I had imagined her. I do recommend her journalism work,a selection of which I read a couple of years ago and forgot to review. I just saw that a new German version has been published (after the copyright expired) with a hefty 400 pages and a new title (see the cover below) - my copy only had 300. It's such a shame her letters to Kafka went missing. After seeing the movie, I've started reading his letters to her (in an edition I remember seeing on my parents' shelves when I was a child).

It was interesting to discover Felice Bauer, of whom I only knew the name, as well as Kafka's favourite sister, Ottla, who steals the show throughout the movie. The last lover, Dora Diamant is missing here, but she had a whole movie for herself (Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (The glory of life)), which I sadly missed when it came out last year.

The other fascinating character in this story is the city of Prague. Luckily the city hasn't changed much since he was alive. All the important buildings in Kafka's life are still standing, enabling the director to jump back and forth in time effortlessly. Interestingly, the small and isolated German language community of Prague had an amazing run at producing writers in that generation, including Rilke, born 1875, Kafka, 1883, Egon Erwin Kisch, 1885 and Franz Werfel, 1890.

The movie poster used in Germany. Is the hand-written K part of the title or just a decorative element? Some sources cite the title as Franz, others as Franz K. Note that the sliced head echoes a metal sculpture of his head on display in Prague outside one of the (at least two) Kafka museums there. That sculpture also makes a brief appearance in the film.

The other important question is: will it get a UK release? Given Kafka's unbeatable brand recognition, I would expect it does, but I'll slap on my "films not shown" tag until that release is confirmed. Come to think of it, The glory of life, which came out in time for the centenary of Kafka's death, hasn't had a UK release yet. So maybe even the name Kafka doesn't guarantee a release these days ...

Heck, I even have a kafka tag, due to the fact that I visited Prague a couple of times when this blog was young and still had illusions ...

Review in epd-film

The new(ish) edition of Milena's journalism work (from 2020). I'm finding it rather hard not to buy the book when she looks at me like that, but I'm trying to establish whether there is anything in there that I don't have in my older collection of her writings (Alles ist Leben, published 1984 and republished several times with the same photo on the cover).

5 languages in search of an author

review of

Elena Lappin
What language do I dream in?
Virago 2016

Elena Lappin (nee Biller) was born in Russia, grew up in Prague speaking Russian at home, emigrated to Germany as a teenager after the suppression of the Prague Spring, then went to Israel to study, lived in Canada, Israel again, and the US, before ending up in London. This book is not so much about what language she dreams in, but about how she could become a writer after having to leave the country of the language she felt most connected to, which was Czech. After many wanderings, she decided that English was the one.

Only after she was already settled in London and in English as her writing language, she found out that she was not related to the man she believed to be her father. Her biological father – the son of a minor Soviet agent in the US who had to flee to Moscow – was a native English speaker, giving her language settlement a kind of retrospective biological justification.

Another intriguing aspect of her story is mentioned only in passing: her younger brother, Maxim Biller, facing the same problem, came to a different solution – he stayed in Germany and is now a fairly well-known German writer.

Along with her own quest for the right language to write (and dream) in, Lappin also discusses some of the famous examples of émigré writers adapting to new languages, including Vladimir Nabokov (and his memoir, Speak, Memory, which also deals with this issue), Joseph Conrad, and Milan Kundera. She forgets to mention Kurt Tucholsky, who fell silent during his exile in Sweden and died from an overdose of sleeping pills in a presumed suicide after realising he couldn’t continue to be a writer after being separated from his native language.

Thus, in a mixed-up world, everybody has to find their language for themselves, and some may fail to do so. In Lappin’s case, each of the languages not only stands for a specific culture and geographic area, but also for a subset of her extended family – there is no language that all her relatives share, so with her five languages she is the only link that connects the family network fragmented by migrations and language changes.

As a fellow writer also juggling half a dozen languages I found her memoir very relatable. Failing that, readers will also discover an intriguing and warm-hearted account of the global migrations of Jewish families from Eastern Europe, reminding me that most people have migration background of some kind.

Prague slide show

I spent a rather lovely week at Prague, checking out the EuCheMS conference and also spending a lot of time roaming the city in the footsteps of Kafka, Dvorak, Jacopo Strada, Tycho Brahe, Kepler ...

Here's a slideshow of a small selection of my photos: