Karolina Watroba

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Karolina Watroba |Barbara Heldt |Eric Naiman |Piotr Gwiazda

Thomas Mann’s modernist magnum opus The Magic Mountain, a landmark novel of ideas-cum-comedy of manners set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, was published on November 28, 1924. On the German literary scene that year, its publication dramatically overshadowed an event that had taken place six months earlier in another TB sanatorium: the death of Franz Kafka.

Oct 17, 2024 | telegraphindia.com | Karolina Watroba

What the book understands by Kafka’s life, then, is really his afterlife among his readers.

Jun 25, 2024 | thefederal.com | Karolina Watroba

But Franz was uninterested in the family business and, despite his prestigious law degree and an attractive new job as a civil servant in the field of accident insurance, by 1912 — when he wrote The Judgement — he had found neither personal fulfilment nor, he felt, his father’s acceptance. Hermann did not understand or approve of his son’s literary ambitions and their attendant emotional torment. A letter to his father By all accounts, Kafka’s father was brawny, coarse and domineering.

May 4, 2024 | theguardian.com | Karolina Watroba

Kafka has become such a cultural icon that even the most private, obscure, or fragmentary of his writings have reached huge audiences: diaries, letters, unpublished notes, mystifying aphorisms, or conversation slips he made while dying.

Feb 7, 2023 | the-tls.co.uk | European Literature |Ian Ellison |Karolina Watroba |Barbara Heldt

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain can get under your skin. I first read it in intense bursts during a period of ill health shortly after moving to Germany. Its account of dislocation and realignment thrilled and disturbed me. The inhabitants of the Berghof sanatorium seemed hardly to be characters at all, let alone people; they were ideas and intensities, the novel they populated disorienting, stimulating and weirdly funny. When I finished it, I was left in a state of dreamlike intoxication.