#saul friedlander

[franzkavkas]

happy 100 year anniversary of kafka having such a homoerotic time at a ski-jumping tournament that max brod had to censor it

[franzkavkas]

The life of Alexander the Great and his battles came up on several occasions in the diaries and the blue octavo notebooks, but Kafka's true hero was Napoleon. As a child Franz had already "wished to be brought face to face with the Emperor to show him how little effect he had. And that was not courage, it was just coolness." 

Later, Kafka's idolization of Napoleon grew. Thus in November 1911, Franz attended a lecture and recitation by the French poet and dramatist Jean Richepin: "La Légende de Napoléon”: “I felt that Richepin had an effect upon me such as Solomon must have felt when he took young girls into his bed.I even had a slight vision of Napoleon who, in a connected fantasy, also stepped through the little entrance door...He overwhelmed the entire hall, which was tightly packed at that moment. Near as I actually was to him, I had and would have had even reality never a doubt of his effect...”

Saul Friedlander, Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt

[bestoffates]

At times, he speaks as if preserving the ghetto was an end in itself, never considering, as Hannah Arendt had suggested, that less efficiency might have meant fewer deaths overall. In the judgment of Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer, “objectively the Judenrat was probably an instrument in the destruction of European Jewry.” “But,” he added, “subjectively the actors were not aware of this function.” Arendt never considered that a healthy capacity for self-delusion may have been necessary for survival in the camps, and that Jewish elders especially would have needed it to continue helping others and not just themselves.

The Defense of a Jewish Collaborator by Mark Lilla