Film Screening
Goethe-Kino / Kafka + Film - Judith Kaufmann & Gregor Maas: The Glory of Life

Facets of Kafka

Wed, 27.11.2024
7:00 PM Goethe-Institut London

Based on Michael Kumpfmüller acclaimed novel, this portrait of Kafka’s last love in the year before his death shows the author in an unusually refreshing light.

It is very conceivable that the glory of life is available to everyone and always in its fullness, but imposed, deep, invisible, very far. But it lies there, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you call her by the right word, by the right name, she comes. That is the essence of magic, which does not create, but calls.

Kafka wrote these lines into his diary in October 1921, around two years before he met 25-year-old Dora Diamant during a restorative break on the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1923. With her, he experienced his last love and despite of his advanced tuberculosis an often ‘glorious’ and joyous last year before he died in June 1924.

Accordingly, directors Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann portray the relationship between the ailing forty-year-old writer and the twenty-five-year-old Diamant in a light and unpretentious manner. The lovers’ first encounter takes place on a sunny beach. We see Kafka surrounded by children encouraging him to tell them a story. In the evening, Kafka watches Dora dancing against the backdrop of the sea. The young Polish woman from a strict Jewish family wants to become a dancer for which she has to stand up to her family. With equal determination, she enters a relationship with the terminally ill Kafka meaning that she also has to endure the rejection of Kafka's controlling parents. Not all is carefree love, but Kafka seems to draw new energy from the relationship.

Mass and Kaufmann show a Kafka who adds new facets to the long-standing image of the author as a man tormented by self-doubt. Their Kafka is witty, adventurous and romantic. His writing is important to him, but it does not completely possess him. Perhaps they get closer to who Kafka was, perhaps they don’t. But they open up the possibility of a new perspective.