Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...legislatures by forcing 63 liberals out of the Czech National Council, the parliamentary body for the Czech-speaking part of the country. Previously, liberals in the federal Parliament had been replaced by hardliners. Among those expelled in absentia from the Czech Council last week were Economist Ota Sik and Kafka Expert Eduard Goldstücker, former president of the Writers' Union, both of whom have gained refuge in the West. Said Dubček's onetime Culture and Education Minister, Ćestmír Císaŕ, as he resigned from his post as Council president...
Court Exchange. The trial was something out of Kafka. The prosecutor ridiculed him for having said that "Jews are oppressed here," yet there was ample evidence of that in the province court at Kiev, where Ukrainian antiSemitism runs deep. When Kochubiyevsky's brother tried to get in, a guard barred him, shouting "You're no brother, you're a kike, a kike, a kike!" The judge made no effort to discourage hooting and mocking among the spectators, many of them KGB men and local party hacks. He chided Kochubiyevsky's wife, who was nine months pregnant...
That trial is traced with disturbing impact in a new book, The Prosecutor, by James Mills (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $5.95). The plot is Kafka in reverse. The prosecutor is a lonely man fighting impossible odds. His key witnesses are afraid to testify. The opposition's maneuvers force him to present his case to the jury like "a movie run too fast, with a lamp too dim and half the frames chopped out." According to Mosley, the case marked the first time in 20 years that Mafia defendants had been brought to trial for murder in New York City...
...neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works to a testament and a valedictory. The plasticity of musical idioms was clearly responding to a mellower comprehension of what had happened to man as a result of the conflagration. Composers were succeeding in speaking in the distorted world of Kafka and Wilfred Owen. Berg's works, directly descended from Mahler's Ninth Symphoney, perhaps the supreme symphonic masterpiece of the century, formed a melancholy Agnus Dei. A most moving expression of this mood of lachrymose serenity is found in "The Drinking Song of Earth's Sorrow" set by Mahler...
...febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story of the apocalypse as some sort of cautionary tall tale...