MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

KAFKA AND THE KAFKAESQUE PRAGUE Have you ever wondered why Kafka's novels are riddled with strange, inexplicable phenomena? If so, I will give you the answer: Kafka's novels are inextricably linked to the city of Prague and, at least in Kafka’s times, Prague was a mysterious city. Of course, Prague citizens did not usually wake up in the morning turned into a cockroach. That was an exaggeration, a poetic license of the great writer who one day, as a child, was playing with a magnifying glass and, when observing through it his father’s bed, saw a cockroach. That vision traumatized him and largely marked the relationship with his father, whom since then he could not look at without imagining him as a “monstrous vermin”. But apart from the inventiveness of the Prague writers, very numerous at that time (so much so that it is estimated that two out of every three Prague citizens were either writers or illiterate, or both at the same time), in Prague strange things happened:...

FIRST DAY JUDGE: Franz Kafka, you are accused of playing dead in order to steal all the gold watches from the city of Prague. How do you plead: guilty or innocent? KAFKA: Innocent, your Honor. JUDGE: Well, in that case, you can leave. PROSECUTOR: I object! JUDGE: It's okay. Stay. But tell me, how did you come up with that insane plan? KAFKA: I just wanted to know the time, your Honor. JUDGE: So you didn’t steal gold watches because of their economic value? KAFKA: Oh no, your Honor! Why would I want a watch if it wasn’t to know the time? JUDGE: But we are not talking about a single watch. We talk about all the watches in the city. Moreover, all the gold watches. KAFKA: I wanted to check the time of all the watches because I needed to know the exact time. And the most reliable watches are the gold ones. JUDGE: Why did you need to know the exact time? KAFKA: It was a matter of life or death. I can’t give more details. PROSECUTOR: I object! He's ...