Gustav Janouch (1903–1968)

In Kafka there is a perfect synthesis of form and meaning that indisputably continues to powerfully inform our world of expression and feeling. It is a VERY complex art, mindboggling in its enigmatic complexity and unity of execution. In The Trial (really you should read it). Joseph K is still a person, a living breathing 4 dimensional human being (actually so is K in The Castle) who must confront the shadowy nightmarish Court and its endless minions. I would (although maybe I am feeling particularly enthusiastic right now) go so far as to call Kafka's Court one of the finest literary constructs ever, and equally as well executed as it was conceived. It is unreal and deadly real at the same time and perfectly symbolizes all those processes we group under the umbrella concept of bureaucracy. It possesses a newly conceived literary symbol of the "soul" of a real human, i.e., that human's case file, and forces the genuine human to interact with its fatal machinery that is yet all too human (and perverse). And that interaction is also brilliantly executed by Kafka. The human drama, however it plays its symbolic role is completely convincing, completely, overpoweringly, dramatic and engaging as, if you will, storytelling. It is actually an age old story, and yet Kafka made it new in the early 20th century and he did so with both blinding insight into the emerging world and with dazzling literary genius to give it new forms and expression that have not aged a 21st century nanosecond.

So for me it is the art. If you want the message without the art you can read reams of social/political/economic theories about rational decision making (the human being as a similar residual data construct: the consumer) or alienated workers, and so on endlessly, but I want the art.… (meer)

In 1920 his father introduced the young 17-year old Janouch to Kafka then 37-year old. They met frequently in that year and perhaps in the next one or two years. Janouch made notes of their conversations. Twenty-five years later, after being engaged in the resistance, the war and imprisonment - so he writes in his short introduction to this edition - Janouch remembers these notes. Limiting himself, he writes, to sifting, ordering and translating them they were first published in 1951 by Fischer. In 1968 an extended edition was brought out. I refer to the first and shorter edition.

After reading with interest Kafka’s views as recorded by Janouch on a wide variety of subjects and writers I found out that their authenticity may be questionable, in particular those of the later enlarged edition. Alena Wagnerová (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4. 11. 2006 https://www.nzz.ch/articleE5VPZ-1.73133 ) goes as far as naming these ‘falsifications around an authentic core’. I should critically re-read this book but will perhaps never do so.

Both editions, the first and the later extended one of 1968, and their respective translations are here on LT mixed up but should be separated. (VII-20)… (meer)