Thread of Max Brod Hate

brb, jackin'

otoh "The Trial" rules

woah

In most respects, Brod and Kafka could not have been more different. An extrovert, Zionist, womanizer, novelist, poet, critic, composer and constitutional optimist, Brod had a tremendous capacity for survival. In his biography of Kafka, Ernst Pawel recounts how Brod, having been given a diagnosis at age 4 of a life-threatening spinal curvature, was sent to a miracle healer in the Black Forest, “a shoemaker by trade, who built him a monstrous harness into which he was strapped day and night.” Brod spent an entire year in the care of this shoemaker, emerging with a permanent hunchbacklike deformity, which did not impede him in a lifelong series of overlapping relationships with attractive blondes.

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

the ideal situation is to make the one work that cures you of the desire to create, destroy it, and go back to being aline cookn insurance adjustor

Yet he singularly failed to do this and referred to contemptuously to his Brotberuf.

two things seem pretty obvious to me:

1. leaving aside kafka's wishes for the moment, we are all extremely fortunate to have kafka's work to read
2. max brod is a steaming pile of human shit. blatantly betraying the written wishes of the dead, particularly a dear friend, is about as shitty as it gets.

dead people are dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

good news

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-must-relinquish-kafka-papers-judge-says.html?_r=0

i know ppl itt calling kafka a crybaby are just trolling but seriously, it was the man's dying wish that his own work be destroyed. this shit wasn't published - that would be a different story - but denying an artist that finality he so desperately wants is pretty gross i think

no, he had that finality

lol @ dead people

now he's dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

― iatee, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:14 AM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idunno, brod got lucky that kafka happened to be so good. the act itself is the shitty thing imo

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

― I loves you, PORGI (DJP), Friday, November 9, 2012 11:06 AM

*forwards post to FBI*

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

I was getting into it in high school like most people and then as I got into it I started reading the supplementary stuff in the anthologies about how he wanted it destroyed and I thought about it some and thought "you know what, fuck this, this shouldn't have been published." It seems personally kinda shitty to me to read stuff that the guy who wrote it explicitly did not want to exist, so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka.

i like how we've arrived at the 'it is impossible to have moral obligations to the dead' defense quicker than anyone bothered to articulate the 'but ... but ... GREAT ART' defense

not impossible, just dumb

cool, i dig that xpost to aero

dead people are dead

past isn't even past iirc

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

*kakfa in addition to being a medical doctor in this counterfactual is also a soothsayer

thomp are u talking about what americuns did with nazi and japanese ww2 medical experiments

that's kind of a facile comparison

no i don't know anything about that, i'm talking about a hypothetical world in which franz kafka was a virologist who could see into the future

i'm happy to have kafka's novels and the aeneid and whatever other stuff, but the kind of reverse causality defence of brod makes a mess of what seems to me to be a pretty simple ethical question. yeah the world is a better (and maybe more notably, ~different~) place for having these works in it, but even as much as brod liked the works that's not something he could have reasonably foreseen, so ultimately his act was the act of a douche.

I don't think its fair on people who like to read to be told they are entitled consumers or whatever -- that is drama queen behaviour there.

Its fine if you'd like your work destroyed, but people who make works need to be better at destroying them. Not showing them to anyone and building people's enthusiasms for them in the first place would be a start..

Kafka never did anything of substance to get his wishes carried out (never mind "his best"). That was a pathetic note.

the correct thing to do would be to copy the cure to smallpox, burn the original, then anonymously mail the copy to contemporary author-doctor Herman Hesse

i am not as extremist as aero in that i will totally read his work though, i mean if there's this amazing literature that everyone else gets to read i'm gonna read it too, my own morals be damned. similarly i hope to god salinger kept like 20 glass stories lying around

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

no sale man, sorry. I know, I know - Kafka's work has been meaningful to many, and who's to say it hasn't "saved their lives"*, but it's not really analogous in any way to the theoretical situation you propose. medical science is not self-expression.

*me

what if the cure to smallpox was a short story about a dude turning into a box elder bug

artists can be the worst stewards of their own work, the ideal situation is to hide all of their works from them until they are dead

what if my dying wish is to have all my organs burned untransplanted but my license says 'organ donor'

I got arrested trying to burn down the Salinger compound the day after he died :(

cool story brod

Salinger probably has a contract as part of his estate detailing exactly what to do with all that stuff he was writing over the years, dude was not afraid to use lawyers

I was going to make a joke about EII giving us a great plan for putting artists into veal pens and having them pump out work but then I went "... oh right, Disney"

maybe anne frank didn't want you reading her diary did you ever think of that nosy parker

p. shocking to me that Mordy's in the pro-Brod camp though - don't you do work in ethics, Mord?

sorry, kafka's work was worth the ethical breach to preserve

tbh i think dr kafka has every bit as much right to burn his smallpox research as novelist kafka has to burn 'the trial' but enh ethics

"artists can be the worst stewards of their own work"

I'd go further by saying they really only make it. They can't judge it, or actually know very much about it, its a mystery to them - its not only that they are too close to it. Something more...fundamentally clueless about people that write.

Not knowing much about Brod I would say he was Kafka's best friend by preserving his work. An act of love, really..

tbh i think dr kafka has every bit as much right to burn his smallpox research as novelist kafka has to burn 'the trial'

people often have the right to be dicks but it's often better if they weren't or if their dickish desires were frustrated.

I'd go further by saying they really only make it. They can't judge it, or actually know very much about it, its a mystery to them - its not only that they are too close to it. Something more...fundamentally clueless about people that write.

in deference to your position, Blanchot, one of my favorite theorists, believes this, and making this contention is kind of his life's work: that the work remains forever obscure to the artist. OTOH literally the only defense one can make of this contention is "well, that's how it seems to me, anyhow" - your reading of an artist's work is a better judgement of it..how, exactly? Because you say so? Because that's how it seems to you? Nonsense. Artists may be poor judges of which works of theirs the public will like best, or which will seem most perfect to critics; they're still the only real judges of which of it's any good or worth preserving.

aero i feel like you and me have been arguing about this for like a decade now, but my basic take it: brod was a dick, but on the other hand, kafka's dead, i can't imagine wherever he is right now he gives a shit since he was more than happy to be gone from this wretched place, plus also i'm alive, capable of reading, and these frozen seas inside myself aren't going to axe themselves all on their own.

so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka

You can't escape the influence of the Brod published (and edited) works on the culture generally, however much you try.

are parents allowed to kill their own children? ; )

yes.

i believe ol' franz would say parents are slowly and unconsciously attempting to kill their children from birth until one of them croaks.

but then he was a whimsical dude.

the only real judge of any work is the person experiencing it, if a single person in the whole human continuum ever receives pleasure from a work then it's worth preserving.

He didn't mean "burn them" burn them, he meant save them to a dvd-rw

i'm bleak tho

It wasn't very conciously done as a result of my stance in this thread -- more part of me reading/re-reading/trying to find more German Lit this year -- but I got around re-reading/more Kafka than I had in the past. I re-read The Trial (in a diff translation from the Muir), and then the letters to Felice and Milena, as well as the Diary, fo the first time.

All pretty incredible, anything this guy committed to paper was literature. Amazing to think of the conditions -- mental and physical at which much of this must've been written -- he transmit those to you, its the source of its power, but only one of many. The Diary is of such rigour. I only got to understand the points aero was making after reading it. He was incredibly hard on himself -- like an insight to what an artist with a capital A is really thinking. Its not so much whether Brod was his friend or not, its whether Brod understod him or not. If he had then you could see a burning. He didn't though = he did not understand his friend. And of course we all have friends we often don't understand.

There is a volume that collects the writing that Kafka published in his lifetime, tr. on Penguin by Michael Hofmann, and I suppose that + the letters to Felice - which he left no instructions for I suppose - would've been enough. I've been reading Buchner, and its about 300 pages worth of material there. I suppose my fear was that Kafka would've been wiped from history had Brod carried out his wish. It was silly to think so.

But in the end, no, you could never burn The Trial.

Probably fine to burn America as its first chapter was published during his lifetime.

Will get round to reading The Castle before the end of the year so I'll pass sentence then.

(slightly dull response to that post but)
how do you rate other translations vs the Muirs? (Me, I like them, but have spent very little time with other versions. )

(at least someone has read my post thanks)
The answer to that is I don't know (must've read the Muir a decade ago). According to J.P.Stern (in the intro to the Scott/Waller translation) the Muirs broke up some of Kafka's sentence structures, at times.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/terry-pratchetts-unpublished-work-has-been-destroyed-j-1798633413

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-owns-kafka/

New Directions is bringing out a volume of "lost" works, though they weren't lost, just untranslated -- here's an interview with their EIC about them, and one of the stories is in this month's NYer.

Was thinking about this thread while reading all that yesterday.