In a chapter of my doctoral project („Used Modernism. Reprinting and Rereading in West Germany after 1945“) I investigate the material recirculation and cultural reuses of texts by Franz Kafka in the early German post-war years. For most readers during those years, when Max Brod’s impactful edition of Kafka’s works had not even reached the German book market, texts by Kafka were only available in bits and pieces, appearing here and there in a newspaper, a little magazine, an anthology, or a cheaply-produced brochure. Combining approaches from material philology and cultural poetics, my chapter-in-progress asks how Kafka’s texts were re-contextualised and re-interpreted in these ephemeral formats: How, for instance, could post-war Germans find their own questions of guilt and shame brought up in Kafka’s texts, but how would they also seek identification, or even consolation, when reading Kafka?
