Oxford Kafka 2024: campaign to celebrate the life and legacy of Franz Kafka

Professor Carolin Duttlinger, Professor Katrin M. Kohl and Professor Barry Murnane, Co-Directors of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, Dr Meindert Peters, Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and Dr Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, share details of the Oxford Kafka 2024 programme, touch on Kafka’s literary importance and invite staff to get involved. 

What is Oxford Kafka 2024? 

Oxford Kafka 2024 commemorates the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death and has been created to remind our University community of his profound literary and global impact. 

It centres around a major new Bodleian Libraries exhibition, Kafka: Making of an Icon, which will begin on 30 May at the Weston Library, focusing on Kafka’s life, work and afterlife. Other exciting cultural events will be happening around Oxford, including dance and song performances, reading and activities for families. Staff activities will also take place in some departments.  

OUP, helped by Professor Karen Leeder, Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature, is supplying all University students with a free copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as part of Oxford Reads Kafka, encouraging awareness of the text.

The Oxford Kafka 2024 programme also includes a major research project: Kafka’s Transformative Communities. The project looks at the communities that have formed around Kafka and his work, as well as rethinking his image as a loner.

The campaign is University-wide with elements for students, staff and the general public. Why is it so important to the University? 

Thanks to the Kafka family, the Bodleian owns the majority of Kafka’s manuscripts.The University has a responsibility to keep his work safe, and to keep Kafka research alive for new generations. Kafka’s work has much to say about the struggles between individual freedom and state power. He knows the annoying and illogical bureaucracy we all run into, his characters can be a great source of recognition for the socially awkward beings we often are and he is hilariously funny and absurd – there are plenty of reasons to keep reading him! 

Can you tell us about the exhibition, Kafka: Making of an Icon. What are your favourite items on display? 

Many of the manuscripts of his most famous works – like The Metamorphosis and The Castle – will be on display, but we will also look at the cultural impact of Kafka worldwide and the translators and editors who have made this happen.  

One of the most exciting items is a portrait of Kafka by Andy Warhol. It shows how Kafka was turned – quite literally, given Warhol’s interest in Orthodox Christianity – into an icon. Carolin and Karolina curated the case and explain how photography and images more generally play an important role in both Kafka’s life and writing and in his afterlife. They show how, after his death, Kafka’s photos have been edited in such a way as to make him look ever more like the loner we now think of him as. 

The exhibition will travel to New York once it closes at the Bodleian in October. It will move to the Morgan Library and Museum from 22 November. 

What are your roles in the Kafka’s Transformative Communities research project? 

Carolin, Barry and Katrin, together with Professor Lucia Ruprecht from the Free University in Berlin, run the Kafka’s Transformative Communities project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Carolin is Principal Investigator on the project. She also runs the first of three themes underpinning the project: Community. This theme explores how Kafka’s literary depiction of groups and collectives is shaped by, and in turn responds to, the central role of community in his immediate Jewish and wider Austro-Hungarian context. 

Barry leads the Wordliness theme, which focuses on Kafka’s role as a world author. Wordliness explores Kafka’s reception in different times and places, while relating this status back to his own writings and engagement with the power dynamics of a globalising world in an age of colonialism, war and empire. 

Katrin and Lucia lead the Transformation theme, which assesses Kafka’s posthumous legacy in different art forms and media and their respective audiences.

How long has Oxford Kafka 2024 been in the pipeline and how is it funded? 

It feels like we have been preparing for this centenary for about a century! Some of us started working on the exhibition as early as 2021. Now the research project has received a £1m AHRC grant, and we have received further support from TORCH, the Cultural Programme and the New College Ludwig Fund as well as other partners. It’s great to see all the enthusiasm around Oxford and beyond to make this the biggest celebration of Kafka’s work possible. 

Why do you think Franz Kafka continues to captivate and fascinate audiences today compared to other literary greats perhaps? 

Many of Kafka’s stories are extremely short and thus very accessible, and Kafka can be very funny, often tragicomically. Take a story like ‘Up in the Gallery’. In just two long sentences, Kafka paints a little drama about a young man up in a circus gallery imagining himself a hero to a girl riding a horse down in the ring, who is being maltreated by the ringleader. But: if only she were such a damsel in distress. Turns out she isn’t and so he can’t be a hero and he “cries without knowing it”.

How can staff get involved and find out more? 

First, they should all come to the exhibition, which is free and will run from the end of May until late October. Colleagues should also check out the Oxford Reads Kafka event in the Sheldonian on 3 June, the actual centenary of Kafka’s death. 

Thanks to the help of the Cultural Programme and various other partners, there will be many other exciting cultural events, including family-friendly activities, happening throughout the year. A new song cycle will premiere in October at the Oxford International Song Festival, and two new radio adaptations by playwright Ed Harris will premiere on BBC Radio. Additional activities and projects are still in the works, so keep an eye on the Kafka’s Transformative Communities website, the Young Kafka Scholars’ Network – which is run by Meindert – and the Cultural Programme website for updates. 

Karolina has an exciting new book coming out on 2 May called Metamorphoses: In Search in Franz Kafka (Profile, 2024), which tells Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space. It travels from the Prague of Kafka's birth through to the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to Kafka's work.