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London Review of Books

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David Trotter

  • Kafka Goes to the Movies by Hanns Zischler, translated by Susan Gillespie

His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up the hill. According to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on the cinema. To be sure, there are scattered remarks in diaries and letters from the period 1908-13. But that’s about it. The challenge, for Hanns Zischler, is how to say no more than that Kafka quite often went to the movies, and make it worth saying.

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David Trotter is a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of The English Novel in History, The Making of the Reader and, most recently, Cinema and Modernism.