Sarcasm used as a pedagogical tool

Franz Kafka: Brief an den Vater (English title: Letter to his father) ISBN 9-783596-14674-7 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ With this book, Kafka wrote a many, many pages long indictment of his abusive father. He details how much power his father had over him, how this power damaged his soul, perverted his emotions and prevented him from being a happy child and becoming a socially integrated young adult. A powerful book about the destructive power of words thrown at a sensitive child, a brilliant development of the theme Kafka sketched in his short story “The Judgment” and a fine example of Kafka’s very personal, very concise and molto cantabile style – lyrical prose!

While I read this book on a lonely evening I enjoyed Dmitry Shostakovich’s violin concertos and his second concerto in C sharp minor fits well with the overall mood of Kafka:

Paranoid feelings as the sun sets on the countryside

A power struggle between father and son

Franz Kafka: Das Urteil (English title: The Judgment) ISBN 978-3-596-20019-1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another short story with a subject dear to German Romanticists: the longing for death! I truly enjoyed this text about a power struggle between father and son where the balance of forces is quickly  reversed and initial emotions turn into their opposite.

It didn’t take long to come up with an appropriate piece of music, a piece flirting with death, Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in A minor, D.784:

Sadness transfigured with sublime delicacy

From man to bug – a surreal portrait

Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung (English title: The Metarmorphosis) ISBN 80-85938-46-4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A classic of German literature, the first book by Kafka that I read, a bizarre experience. It took me some time to identify the lack of self-esteem of the main character, Gregor Samsa, a man transformed without any apparent reason into a bug, as the central theme along with the sudden change of relationships within a family triggered by an singular and surreal event. Throughout his entire life, Kafka was  totured by a feeling of inferiority, unsure  about his talent, his choices in life, even unsure about his own right to live. This novel, like most of his works, has strong autobiographic traits.

The brutal change of the status of Samsa – from active to helpless, from respected to perceived as a nuisance – and the fact that Samsa gradually resignates, accepts his own decline and becomes indifferent towards others is for me a useful reminder to periodically check how I perceive others: as a means or as an end in itself. The human psyche becomes easily unhinged, man quickly looses his inhibition and disregards accepted norms of social behaviour.

A violin piece, played by Samsa’s sister is one of the few things that triggers a positive emotion in Samsa, and the surreal character of the plot fits well with Arnold Schönberg’s music, his String Quartet No. 3 Op. 30:

A democratic revolution – all notes are equal

Sailing south with a mysterious woman

Allard Schröder: Der Hyrograf ISBN 978-3-86648-262-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This novel from a Dutch author gave me a lot of pleasure! 24 hours and I was done, but I would have read on for a few hundred additional pages. The setting of the novel and Schröder’s dry, detached descriptive style reminds me of Thomas Mann and his early novels. A German marine scientist in his late twenties sails to Valparaiso shortly before World War I. On board he meets a woman with a mysterious past and an even more mysterious future. He falls in love. At the same time the longer the voyage takes the more his faith in his former convictions and the merit of his noble descent give way to a certain nihilsm. Both transformations drive the story forward, and the end is a reverence to the main character of Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain”. Beautiful!

Speaking about Thomas Mann, this is the time and place to point you toward’s Franz Schubert’s piano cycle “Winter Journey”, philosophy set to music, echoed by Schröder’s novel:

Wandering to the point of no return


Jihad and the disenchanted youth

Fikry el Azzouzi: Wir da draussen ISBN 978-3-8321-9829-9 ⭐️ The plot is rather straightforward: A Moroccan immigrant living in Belgium and experiencing social exclusion turns to drugs, sex, violence, crime and finally jihadism. All would have been well if the author had explored the deeper emotions of the main character or gone to the roots of the young man’s disenchantment. Instead he delivers a honest description of a human condition as it has been described many times before – nothing new there. The story remains superficial, predictable and without much interest. The best one can say is that el Azzouzi’s vulgar language is appropriate to the brutality of the subject. It remains nevertheless a 100 percent disappointment.

Since this book did not inspire me at all, I cannot provide a link to any appropiate classical music. I have no such music.