Franz Kafka

Hi again Chuck,

RE: your question.
     Franz Kafka was a Jewish, Czech born in Prague, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to German speaking parents in 1883. Kafka wrote in German. His Metamorphosis, is a story about an ordinary guy who wakes up one morning to realize he has turned into a cockroach. He and his family are of course surprised! dismayed! horrified! In another dark work In The Penal Colony the protagonist develops a sophisticated machine for torturing and executing individuals and provides an ethereal justification for its' use.  Happily he gets to experience his invention. Kafka unknowingly anticipates the Nazi, Soviet eras but his work suggests that homo sapiens can do and rationalize anything.
     Kafka is also famous for his novels. In The Castle the protagonist for 300 pages seeks to make an appointment for an unknown reason, with someone high in the bureaucracy. Finally before securing the appointment he dies but receives a memo from the bureaucracy stating that he is permitted to continue living where he is. (Mark Harmon's 1998 translation is brilliant.)  In The Trial an individual is arrested one morning and spends the next 250 pages trying to discover with what he is charged. Never learning he is still convicted and executed. In Amerika (Kafka liked the place - kind of ) the hero experiences a series of surreal adventures (New York and Boston tend to blend together) and ends up in Oklahoma - we think. And there was much more. Kafka died in 1924 at the age of 41. His two sisters were later murdered at Auschwitz.
     You already knew? More than you wanted to know? Forgive me I was a professor.
     Years ago I had a situation develop in the New York State DMV Office in Oneonta.
I was trying to sell an old car of mine to my daughter Jennifer for $1.00. On my fourth trip to the DMV Office trying to complete this task I submitted an important, required, NYS form stamped with a "DO THIS". I pushed it towards the clerk - and she looked and pushed it back. "No, No, you must not do it that way!" I protested "it says "DO THIS"! "That doesn't matter!" she replied. "You must "DO THAT"! Then I kind of lost it - emotional control.
      This kind of situation and the one I believe you are going through are frequently described as Kafkaesque, meaning a bureaucratic situation of the surreal, with excruciating frustration and much insane crap.
     A friend and neighbor of mine Bob ______, also happened to manage the DMV OFFICE heard the commotion and came out.  Bob took me by the hand and led me back to his office. We completed the paperwork for the transfer in ten minutes. Two months later I purchased a vanity license plate KAFKA3. (Three other New Yorkers had the idea before me.) In Florida I have Kafka1. For me it represents a very minor, hopeless protest against the massive, overwhelming and  mostly inevitable intrusion of public and private organizations into our lives. I also want to believe that if Kafka with his rather depressed personality and dark sense of humor could see his name on a license plate it would  perhaps make him smile.

:-) John

                                                   
                                                                         Hardee
                             photo by Emilee Fuss www.emileefuss.com