Primo levi

Rainer Maria Rilke’s claim that fame is the ‘sum of all misunderstandings’ is certainly true of Franz Kafka, whose life, work and reception have long been plagued by myriad misunderstandings. Despite publishing comparatively little in his all-too-short lifetime (1883-1924), Kafka gained a reputation as a writer’s writer, whose work was met with keen appreciation by, among others, Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. In Kafkaesque, which first appeared in French under the title Dix versions de Kafka, Maïa Hruska charts Kafka’s afterlife through the perspective of ten ‘first’ writer-translators.

Israel would not have been born when it was – 1948 – without Hitler’s genocidal war on European Jewry. Dispossessed Jews had to be provided with a home. In the rush to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, safeguarding Arab nationalism was not the most pressing concern. Israel’s foundation thus marked a turning point in the fortunes of the world more grievous than anyone could have anticipated. Most European nations supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when President Nasser of Egypt moved his troops into Sinai on the Israeli border and, as part of a violent pan-Arabist ideology, vowed to eliminate Jews (and Christians).

Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart of Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 novel The Glass Pearls, was devoted to the furtherance of so-called ‘science’ under the Führer. In the interests of research he cut up the brains of a number of concentration camp inmates. His chosen victims – Jews and other ‘useless mouths’ – were crematorium fodder. Yet Braun sees himself as a decent, God-fearing family man. Undoubtedly he had to carry out unpleasant work, but does that mean he has no conscience? Pressburger, a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré, had reason to dislike the Germans: his mother and other close relatives were murdered at Auschwitz.