K. -A Talmudic Vaudeville Show inspired by Kafka's Trial

No Escape! What appeals to musical theater director Barrie Kosky about the linguistic artist Franz Kafka? KOSKY Kafka has been with me my whole life. At the age of 13, The Metamorphosis opened up a whole new world for me. Themes and text fragments from Kafka's artistic universe played a role in my first productions in Australia. It was Kafka's enthusiasm for Yiddish theater and vaudeville that first sparked my great love for these genres! His lifelong, highly ambivalent engagement with Judaism, all the irresolvable contradictions he was entangled in as an assimilated Jew and German-writing author in Prague, his obsessive insistence on solitude on the one hand, his deep desire for belonging on the other, his nervous, almost compulsive search for truth, his resistance, his imagination, his paranoia... Kafka touches something very fundamental in me, something deeply personal at the same time. During my time at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, I created a Kafka trilogy, and when we discussed a new production here at the Berliner Ensemble in 2021 after The Threepenny Opera, I saw an opportunity to revisit Kafka and, together with this fantastic ensemble, which can also sing and dance fabulously, to invent a new musical theater piece based on Kafka and Kafka's The Trial. What kind of music? Most of the songs come from the Yiddish theater of early 20th-century Warsaw, where the actor Jizchak Löwy, whom Kafka met in 1911 at performances in Prague, also came from. And in contrast to that: Bach. I don't think there is any music further removed from Yiddish songs than Bach's Lutheran Protestant church and domestic music from the German Baroque period. We hear it here in a swing version arranged by Adam Benzwi. And for Kafka's last months with his partner Dora Diamant, we chose Robert Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe with texts by Heinrich Heine, translated into Yiddish by Anna Rozenfeld. Kafka achieved for the 20th century the same significance that Heine had for 19th-century German culture as an assimilated Jew. An evening about Kafka's life? I can no longer easily separate his art, everything he wrote, from what I know about his life, and vice versa. It is not a biographical evening, but writing was not a matter of course for Kafka, but a deeply personal matter, a struggle with himself, a prayer, as he once called it; a life insurance policy, a way of securing his life, protection from and coping with the world that oppressed him, curse and blessing, torture and intoxication, limitation and boundlessness, simply everything. The seemingly endless interpretability of Kafka's texts is reminiscent in form and style of Talmudic writings, which contain so many, sometimes contradictory references that they require or challenge an almost infinite number of commentaries. In research, the discovery of Kafka as a Jewish author is hugely controversial. It cannot be otherwise, because this contradiction in Kafka is precisely the point and is firmly anchored in his texts. Kafka was an assimilated Jewish writer with unmistakable influences from Jewish culture, a deeply religious desire for redemption paired with a dose of Jewish self-hatred and wit. Walter Benjamin wrote: "I think the key to Kafka would fall into the hands of someone who could wean Jewish theology of its comical aspects." Perhaps. In my opinion, the comedy has to do with Kafka's encounter with Yiddish theater and its folksy, burlesque-comedic vaudeville aesthetic, which is reflected in Kafka's texts in the grotesque-absurd situations, metaphors, and gestures. Kafka had an extremely ambivalent relationship with Jewish theology, with its inscrutable, cruelly punishing God, its 613—not just 10!—commandments and prohibitions that regulate everyday life down to the smallest and most intimate details. The parables, on the other hand, which appear in the Talmud, for example, fascinated him. I was interested in how Kafka's ambivalent engagement with Jewish tradition is reflected in his texts – and his struggle against it. He hated it all. He sought it out. He celebrated it. The rejection of feelings of guilt was a recurring theme – towards his family, his partners, Jewish tradition, himself, his art... Some of Kafka's close friends were involved in the Zionist movement. Zionism played an ambivalent role for Kafka. He was interested in the cultural aspects of Judaism, not the political ones. But at the end of his life, he studied Hebrew intensively and dreamed of emigrating with Dora Diamant to open a restaurant where she would cook and he would wait tables. For a long time, Hebrew was mainly the language used in synagogues for the Bible and the numerous – 613! – laws in the Torah. It was not until the end of the 19th century that it was revived as a spoken language. In everyday life, two Jewish languages in particular developed. In Central and Eastern Europe, it was Yiddish, which led to a veritable explosion of Yiddish literature, drama, music, films, and so on in the 19th century until World War II. Yiddish was and is more than just a language; it is full of culture, but is viewed very differently among Jews. My assimilated, educated grandmother from Budapest, for example, hated Yiddish. "You have to learn German," she always said to me, "that is the language of culture." Yiddish, and with it the folk culture and way of life associated with it, were devalued out of fear that they would throw one back into the poverty-stricken, dirty shtetls of Eastern Europe. My Polish grandmother, on the other hand, loved it. For her, Yiddish culture was the soul of Judaism. And in my work, it has always been important to me to show the richness, the contradictions, and the traditions of this culture. Kafka discovered this Yiddish culture in the fall of 1911 in the middle of Prague, at Café Savoy, during performances by Yitzhak Löwy's Eastern European traveling theater troupe. Kafka saw a great deal of Yiddish theater over a period of two years and was close friends with Löwy and the ensemble. With simple stage sets and cheap costumes, they acted, sang, and danced, sometimes performing Yiddish operettas, sometimes biblical plays, comedies with Yiddish songs. For Kafka, this experience was life-changing. He saw a kind of truth in the artificiality of their performance, something that felt more real and alive than anything else he knew of Jewish traditions, something that was hard to grasp, something old, almost mystical. In her book Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, Evelyn Thornton Beck meticulously documented which productions Kafka had seen and how they influenced his writing, which ultimately led to the distinctive Kafka style and Kafka's literary breakthrough in 1912 with the story The Judgment. There are many other theories about this, no question. But I found it interesting to explore. In Yiddish culture, Kafka found a form of emotionality, freedom, and comedy that he did not know from German high culture. This whole tradition of Yiddish vaudeville later continued in Hollywood comedies and the entertainment film industry of the 1930s and 1940s. Many of Hollywood's filmmakers and studio founders were Jewish artists with ties to vaudeville. But that's another story... Dora Diamant also spoke Yiddish. Who was this woman? She was the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family from Poland who, against her father's resistance, not only became interested in theater and later became an actress, but also separated from her family as a young woman and moved to Berlin in 1920 to work as a kindergarten teacher. Dora Diamant's biography is a breathtaking story in its own right. She was much more than just Kafka's happiest love in the last year of his life. For Kafka, whom she met in July 1923 in the Baltic resort of Müritz, she was the accomplice with whom he believed he could finally resolve his lifelong conflict with Judaism and assimilation. Dora had experienced the same conflict and achieved what he could never do alone: separation from her family, her father, moving to Berlin, a self-determined life that combined a vibrant Jewish tradition with Western culture and secular freedoms, without paying the price of abstraction and social coldness. She embodied a kind of coexistence of both ways of life that Kafka could suddenly imagine for himself. After the summer, he moved to Berlin to be with her. Six months later, in the spring, she accompanied him to Austria to the sanatorium where he died shortly afterwards, on June 3, 1924, of pulmonary tuberculosis. So no redemption? There is no redemption in Kafka's world – neither in the lived nor in the imagined. There is no escape from the various cages and constraints that life holds in store for us, no escape from the unfathomable, no answer to the question of meaning, guilt, and atonement. Perhaps there is a hint of it in art, in literature, in music. And in the loving or friendly bonds between people. But it always remains an art of death, a life toward death: on the day of his death, weakened and emaciated, unable to speak or drink, Kafka still corrected the galley proofs of his story The Hunger Artist, the story of an artist who reaches the pinnacle of his art in physical disappearance, unnoticed, without an audience. Completely meaningless. Or the reader in the story The Penal Colony, who literally lives through a text by means of a typewriter that tattoos every word into his skin, onto his body, with sharp needles, and at the end, with the final stab in the forehead, i.e., in death, promises Kabbalistic enlightenment—but then unfortunately falls apart and only kills, without redemption. Or the death of Josef K. in The Trial, a murder, unfounded, carried out by two actors whose profession is to stage a play. A game to the death. But perhaps that is not the redeeming ending either, since a game can start all over again. There is no escape – so let's make the best of it. The interview was conducted by Sibylle Baschung.