Kafka's Metamorphosis

Since Benjamin and Brecht in 1934 in Swedish exile Kafka discussed, there is something as an unbridgeable divide between Kafka and Brecht: Here the Marxist that the undogmatic Marxist; here the parable as a Gordian knot that the egg of Columbus; here the solipsistic that the changeable “reality”; here the ontological that the capitalist (self-)alienation; here the autonomous that the engaged art.

Another critic brings the dichotomy on the self-deprecating point: the decadent aesthetist Kafka should have been a “realist” ultimately- so Lukács, when he was carted to his “process” on Soviet military truck from Budapest in 1956. Anyone who expects from Wagner a (reception-historical) reviewof this controversy becomes disappointed

For him she

Prometheus’ and Odysseus’ encounter with the sirens (by both) Poseidon (by Kafka) and Oedipus and Antigone (by Brecht) stand in the foreground at the same time.

Wagner’s tracing of this appropriation is doubtless of the wisest, what the research should offer to that: astute, stringent, and concise.

He turns out as more profound “old philologist” who still can take pleasure in convincing exegetical importance to the smallest

Thus Wagner’s appropriation is nuanced and convincing, so reductive and unconvincing conclusion as it relates to the tricky question about the Kafka-Brecht-relationship.

He does not say it’s about "Dominance" but "difference." However, he reduced Kafka to the nihilist to accomplish this difference.

Indeed, he emphasized (regarding of “sirens”-text) Kafka’s “irrem? joke” through “farewell to the myth” but he already speaks on “Poseideon” from the missing “luck potential” and finally stated that “Prometheus” would end despite of the “sparkling attractions of the inexplicable” in “the eternal cold of nothing”

Wagner’s conclusion is therefore: “Whoever reads Brecht through Kafka’s eyes see the limits of the doable and the changeable more sharply. On the other hand, the view of futility loses its magical allure

In the approach, Wagner’s view is more convincing that Kafka and Brecht are the flip one side and the same coin.

What exactly the diosporic is on the both antipodes, is only hinted at

The repeated statement, Kafka and Brecht would stand “on the same human Earth” approximately concludes that is meant above all the Enlightenment liberation from