About Franz Kafka's self-image as an author
Kafka perceived life and writing as a unity. His literary work was governed by the law of cycles in which ecstatic concentration and distraction, success and failure alternated. His ideal remained automatic writing, which could not be planned and, ‚as a form of prayer‘, involved the highest spiritual immersion. Literary work could only be successful if Kafka consistently shut himself off from external reality and, preferably at night, found extreme concentration in an equally religious and erotic intensity. - The lecture describes Kafka's work processes, his happiness and unhappiness in writing, the existential dimension of his texts and the associated consequences of his life plan, which was focused solely on literary production. The continuing discussion will provide an opportunity to shed more light on Kafka's self-image as an eternal son, as a city observer and traveler, as a flaneur and lover.
Peter-André Alt is Professor of Modern German Literature, initially at the Universities of Bochum (1995-2002) and Würzburg (2002-2005), and since 2005 at the Free University of Berlin. His academic oeuvre includes 21 monographs and over 100 essays on early modern literature, Weimar Classicism and modernism, poetics and aesthetics, the relationship between literature and the history of knowledge, and 17th and 18th century drama and theater. He also became known to a wider audience through his biographies of Friedrich Schiller (2000), Franz Kafka (2005) and Sigmund Freud (2016), published by C.H.Beck (Munich). In 2005 he was awarded the Schiller Prize of the City of Marbach, and in 2009 the Opus Magnum Scholarship of the Volkswagen and Thyssen Foundations. He was President of Freie Universität from 2010-2018 and President of the German Schiller Society from 2012-2020. From 2018-2023, he served two terms as President of the German Rectors' Conference. Since April 1, 2023, Alt has been spokesman for the management of the Wübben Science Foundation in Berlin.
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