Memories of “Kafka In Taiwan”

The latest reminder of how severely Franz Kafka downplayed his own genius and ability to influence people around the world is the exhibit “Kafka in Taiwan,” which recently concluded a wildly popular extended run under the auspices of the Czech Center Taipei.

Here is an event we could forgive Kafka for not envisioning. In the days before the author succumbed to tuberculosis on June 3, 1924, he surely did not foresee a future in which people in far-flung countries read and discuss his work, adapt it for the screen and stage, or hold conferences and produce exhibits dedicated to it. Or a reality where crop after crop of new books discussing themes in his writing appears every year. If Kafka had had his way, his friend Max Brod would have burned the manuscripts of his unfinished novels, diaries, letters, sketches, and fragments. But Brod did not comply, so the work lived.

At the Taipei exhibit, visitors got the chance to take in photos and sketches of Kafka, watch dances based on his themes, and play virtual-reality games taking them deep into a world of surrealism, irony, and dread. Along with the Czech Center Taipei, its organizing shareholders include the Goethe Institute, the German Institute in Taipei, the Taiwan Literature Base, and the Czech Economic and Cultural Office.

Exhibit-goers especially enjoyed Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company’s performance “The Bug” and Jan Komárek’s dance number “Insectum K,” said Markéta Záhumenská, who heads the Czech Center Taipei. The modernist’s Prague roots were also of particular interest to people who turned out, she said.

The élan of the event drew a lot of notice. But mounting the exhibit at all was an act of bravery, given how much the longstanding tensions between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China have mounted in recent months and the fact that Beijing’s rulers, not the world’s fiercest advocates of free expression at the best of times, might view any public tribute to Kafka on the part of Taiwanese as a provocation.

Why would the Chinese communists object? Consider that the scenario most directly associated with Kafka in the popular mind is that of a citizen, Josef K., struggling to resist the workings of a capricious, brutal, opaque bureaucracy wielding its power so ruthlessly as to squeeze the life out of souls caught in its clutches. The protagonist tries in vain to get at the nature of the charges against him, the forces that have set them in motion, the reasons for his oppression. At the end, his executioners escort him to his place of death, ignoring the last-minute appearance of a stranger in a distant window who, we learn, might well represent humanity, or that part of it that still possesses a conscience.

In Chinese mythology and lore, representations of Hell as a bureaucracy are common. When you visit the British Museum in London, you come upon a striking, fearsome Ming dynasty statue of what looks like a demon in judicial robes, along with a caption informing you that this is an assistant to the judge of Hell’s ten courts.

In seeking to thwart the workings of an impersonal bureaucracy, Josef K. acts in a manner that assumes symbolic significance in the context of Taiwan’s relations with the mainland Chinese regime. He asserts a desire for total independence from the bureaucratic Hell that the widely despised despotism in Beijing has come to represent for so many. His struggle is not just one with universal resonance—the fight to be free—but one with a highly specific geopolitical and strategic meaning. The quest to escape forever from communist territorial aggression.

Of course there is much more in Kafka that might not sit well with rulers who seek to enforce social, cultural, and ideological homogeneity. In certain of his stories, elements of a Czech nationalist impulse are detectable. In one of his letters to Milena Jesenská, a translator with whom he grew obsessed, Kafka bluntly asks why she so rarely writes in him in Czech, preferring German. No doubt Beijing’s rulers don’t want Taiwanese getting the wrong idea and encouraging each other to converse in the local Hokkien dialect rather than in Mandarin, a tendency that would make it significantly harder to assert any form of control.

The Czech Center Taipei is not resting on its laurels. On the heels of the triumph of “Kafka in Taiwan,” the organization plans to release an anthology of contemporary Czech literature, which, Záhumenská says, will explore themes of interest to both Taiwanese and Czechs. She expects it to be ready in time for the Taipei International Book Exhibition in February 2025.

That’s not surprising—Czechs are not less familiar than Taiwanese with what it means to live for decades on end with a larger and powerful neighbor to the north constantly breathing down your neck and threatening your cultural and national sovereignty.