Lesung: In der Strafkolonie von Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka liked to travel, but not much - the Prague insurance clerk and international writer travelled to Munich a total of three times. Once, in November 1916, Kafka read his then unpublished story “In the Penal Colony” in public on Odeonsplatz - to the horror of the audience. Over a century later and a few hundred metres further on, Kafka’s words echo and bear witness to a bitter topicality.
Despite the Kafkaesque abstraction, Kafka’s narrative is very clear - cruelly clear.
How do we expose cruelty and not close our eyes to it? The writer Karosh Taha is convinced that Kafka comes from the future, because “only he had the sensitivity to imagine the worst that humans are capable of: Torture as a method of self-knowledge.” In the penal colony, language itself becomes an instrument of torture.
In cooperation with the Goethe Institute Czech Republic as part of the KAFKA2024 project.