125 years of Kafka

The writer Franz Kafka was born in Prague 125 years ago, on July 3 1883. The leftist weekly Freitag remembers the significance of Kafka's work for the freedom movement in socialist countries: "In Prague and in the entire East Bloc, Kafka was once the acid test for the intelligentsia of the socialist cultural life. Who can imagine that today? ... It should not be forgotten that the dispute over Kafka had much to do with the concept of socialism with a human face. ... The guardians of socialist realism feared that readers would interpret Kafka's novel 'The Trial' as a foresighted criticism of totalitarian socialism. And that is exactly what they did."

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