Franz Kafka in Central European Cultures of Memory

The presentation reconstructs the main strains of the reception of Franz Kafka within the historiography of literature in Central Europe and traces them to Central European cultures of memory. The lecture deals both with forgetting and functionalizing Franz Kafka in the memory of literature, as it occurred in Czech and German historiography of literature, as well as the obscuring and the focusing on details concerning his biography, networks, readings and text production during their way from the “storage” to the “functional memory”, as practiced within the paradigm of national historiography of literature. The lecture also focuses particularly on the invention of Franz Kafka as a “Czech” and/or Central European author in the Czechoslovakia of the 1960s and the transnational reinvention of Franz Kafka within the Central European context after 1989.