Interview with Karolina Watroba, author of 'Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka'

You have written a wonderful book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka, to coincide with the centenary of Kafka’s death in 2024. What made you want to write about Kafka?

In my first book, I wrote about non-academic readers of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which made me think a lot about real and imagined boundaries between readers inside and outside of academia. And it also made me think of centenaries. Mann’s novel came out in 1924: a classic novel of tuberculosis, published mere months after another master of the German language died of that very disease – Franz Kafka. Today Kafka’s fame surpasses Mann’s, but his path into the German literary canon was very different from Mann’s, who had become the most famous German novelist in the 1920s. How did Kafka come to ultimately find more resonance than Mann, in Germany and beyond? And how could I tell this story – the story of Kafka and his readers – to a broad audience today? That’s how the idea for my book was born.

The chapters revolve around different cities – Oxford, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, and Seoul – despite Kafka hardly ever travelling outside of Bohemia. Why this emphasis on various places around the world?

In my research, I kept coming back to certain places that were either very important in Kafka’s life or to which Kafka became particularly important after his death. Seen from each of these places, a different kind of Kafka seemed to take contours, and that intrigued me. He was also quite a passionate traveller himself. Even though he was not able to travel very far during his lifetime, he often imagined journeys and worlds far removed from his native Prague in his writings. On one real-life trip to Paris, Kafka also enthusiastically followed in the footsteps of one of his favourite writers, Flaubert. So I thought the idea of following in his footsteps, both in places he’d visited and ones he could only imagine, was quite fitting.

One part of the book had you go to Korea to explore Kafka’s reception and to learn Korean. What did you think Korea could add to the story? Was there anything about your trip to Korea that changed your image of Kafka and reception?

I’d been learning Korean for about 5 years when I began working on the book, and I started noticing that more and more Korean novels translated into English were being advertised as ‘Kafkaesque’ – including Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, the winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. This made me wonder: is Kafka particularly important to Korean writers? And how do literary brands, such as the ‘Kafkaesque’ and the ‘Korean Wave’, interact? Is this just a marketing trick, or is there more to it? I had a wonderful opportunity to explore these questions with support from a British Academy Talent Development Award, and last autumn I spent a couple of months in Seoul, working to improve my Korean and discussing my ideas on Kafka and Korea with scholars and students of German at various Korean universities. I hope the chapter about Korea captures some of that creative energy and exchange, and shows how cultures interact and enrich each other – almost in real time!

Your book is a journey through Kafka’s life as well as through the reception of his work. Where does your interest in his life come from and how did you weave it together with his reception?

With Kafka, his reception is so often about his life: readers are fascinated by this enigmatic man, by his double life as a lawyer by day and writer by night, by his relationship with his father, by his relationships with women, and by how, in hindsight, he seems to encapsulate the rich multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual Central European universe which would be destroyed within two decades of his early death. I also find this last aspect of Kafka’s legacy particularly poignant because, had I been born in his time, we would have been compatriots – like Prague, my hometown of Cracow, Poland, lay on the north-eastern edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some of Kafka’s closest friends were Polish Jews, and learning about them through Kafka’s work is a reminder of the kind of Poland that I never got to experience, or really learn much about growing up.

The coda to your book thinks about our present engagement with Kafka in digital and virtual spaces. Having looked back at the last 100+ years of Kafka’s reception, what do you think the future might bring?

Since finishing the manuscript of the book, I keep seeing new references to Kafka in discussions about AI and other cutting-edge digital technologies. He is often cast as a sort of prophet of their dark side – mass surveillance, no individual agency, and so on. But looking at Kafka’s engagement with technological innovations in his own time shows a much more nuanced picture – of anxiety, but also fascination. As I write in the book, I suspect he might have enjoyed experimenting with ChatGPT! Now that others begin experimenting with his works via ChatGPT and other similar tools, I’m expecting more attempts at finishing Kafka’s unfinished novels using these technologies. More generally, I hope much more creative experimentation with Kafka as both a critic and aficionado of modernity is to come – from all around the world.

You’ve mentioned that your last book was about the afterlife of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and now you’ve written about Kafka. What’s next for you in terms of research?

Having worked on two very canonical modernists writing in German, I am now looking at the broader literary and cultural landscape of the Weimar Republic. I am interested in forgotten transnational books, writers, and literary institutions that had close links to figurers such as Mann and Kafka, were widely known, and often critically acclaimed in the 1920s and 1930s, but have since been excluded from national canons. Examples of authors included in this project are the Azeri-German Jewish-Muslim novelist and cultural critic Lev Nussimbaum (also known as Essad Bey and Kurban Said), the Polish-German poet and dramatist Eleonora Kalkowska, and the Korean-German essayist and journalist Mirok Li. They all navigated their complex social identities in their writing in creative and imaginative ways. My research also investigates their direct and indirect ties to prominent but understudied Weimar-era literary institutions, including the journal Die literarische Welt (The Literary World) and the book series Romane der Welt (Novels of the World). The aim is to understand the possibilities – and limitations – of imagining a transnational literary ‘world’ from the vantage point of major cultural centres in Weimar Germany, such as Berlin and Munich.

Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka is out on 2 May in the UK and 4 June in the US, available as hardback, ebook, and audiobook. There will be a public event at Blackwell’s in Oxford on 25 June to celebrate its publication.

Dr Karolina Watroba is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She works on modern literature, film, and culture across several languages, with a focus on German, English, Polish, and more recently Korean. She is the author of Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford: OUP, 2022). Her new book Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (London: Profile, 2024) is an unconventional biography which tells Kafka’s story through the stories of his readers around the world, focusing on Oxford, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, and Seoul. She developed one strand of this project, ‘Kafka in Korea: A Case Study for Diversifying Modern Languages’, as a recipient of a British Academy Talent Development Award 2022-23 (TDA22\220037).