Zeitgeister On Air

Dina Elsayed’s guest on the Kafka-Podcast is Polish philosopher and translator Grzegorz Jankowicz. Grzegorz hosts a reading circle in Kraków under the banner “How to survive with Kafka,” in which participants work as a group to navigate the disorientating words of Franz Kafka. His tip for anyone reading Kafka for the first time: relax, forget about the clichés, and have fun. And we hope you have fun listening to this episode too!

This time, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson’s guest in our Kafka podcast is Ross Benjamin. Ross lives in New York and translates German literature into English. He has received awards including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his work. His latest project is a translation of the diaries of Franz Kafka. He spent eight years on this, and came to know the author from Prague like a close friend in the process. What does Ross admire most about Kafka? He tells you that in the podcast – listen in and find out.

Czech author and musician Jaroslav Rudiš is touring Europe with his group, the Kafka Band. These concerts attract audiences young and old, as he tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in the podcast. What particularly fascinates the musician about Kafka is the mixture of tragedy and comedy in his works. Jaroslav sings these works in German, Czech and English, against a backdrop of alternative rock … it’s tricky to describe, you need to listen!

“Without Ohropax day and night, I really couldn’t cope,” wrote Franz Kafka in 1922. The author from Prague struggled with the loudness of the city. The Irish composer Gerald Barry revisited precisely this characteristic in his work “Kafka‘s Earplugs” – and in 2023 he celebrated its world premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in London. In this podcast episode, Barry speaks to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about how Franz Kafka’s auditory sensitivity inspired him. Barry finds it highly appropriate that “Kafka’s Earplugs” has been described as both the most beautiful and the most horrible music in the world. After all, Kafka was said to have been equally contradictory.

What does it look like when Franz Kafka changes your life? Artist Marianne Kolb from California – who is Swiss by birth – had this experience. She tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about the grey days of her education and apprenticeship in a strict Switzerland during the 1960s and 70s. Her salvation: reading the works of Kafka, which were recommended to her by a colleague. In all her life, Kolb had never before felt so moved as she did by this Czech author. Kolb’s subsequent life shows how identification with the bug in “The Metamorphosis” can motivate someone to turn their own world around.

Why is there so much love for Franz Kafka in Latin America? Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson interviews Hernán D. Caro to find out. Hernán is a Colombian author and editor. He lives in Berlin. One reason for Kafka’s popularity in Latin America, in his view, is that Kafka’s clear language can be translated into other languages like Spanish without much detriment. Furthermore, Hernán believes that Kafka has given other authors an incredibly great gift: by showing them how to write about the weirdest things as if they were more normal than anything else in the world.

Stefan Litt from the National Library of Israel talks to our host Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about the adventurous travels of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts after his death. It was Kafka’s friend Max Brod who played the crucial role in salvaging them. First he saved them from Kafka’s last wish and did not burn them. Later he rescued them from the turmoil of World War Two: when he had to flee Prague in 1939 to escape the Nazis, he had a suitcase full of Kafka in tow. It was difficult to find a safe place to store the papers after that. In the end there followed decades of court cases on the grounds of illegal gifts and auctions at Sotheby’s. A crime thriller with … watch out for the spoiler … a happy ending.

Kathi Diamant is founder and director of the “Kafka Project” at San Diego State University in the USA. She talks to Dina Elsayed about her special relationship with the last woman in Franz Kafka’s life: Dora Diamant (are Kathi and Dora perhaps related?). Kathi has spent decades searching for letters and notebooks belonging to Franz Kafka, which were confiscated from Dora Diamant by the Gestapo in 1933. It is believed that these documents travelled from Berlin via Silesia and Moscow to Israel, where the trail goes cold – but the search continues!

TV producer Anna Winger recently released her miniseries “Transatlantic” on Netflix. Before her TV career, Anna was a photographer and radio broadcaster. She was born in the United States but made her home in Berlin, where she produced around 200 of her “Berlin Stories”. The stories were aired on National Public Radio of the USA (NPR) and were about odd happenings during the Cold War, encoded Secret Service messages transmitted over the radio, and a young clubber from Berlin who swam across the Spree one night to visit her favourite club. In this podcast episode, Anna also tells the story of her childhood – which she spent listening to the radio in places like Kenya and Mexico – and talks about her favourite podcasts.

Kamal Nasir Hamyar takes us through the turbulent history of radio in Afghanistan: during Kamal’s childhood in the 1980s there was only one radio station in the entire country. On reaching adulthood, Kamal made it his mission as a radio journalist to provide even the most remote provinces in the country with an up-to-date broadcast schedule, in which he consistently campaigned for education, cultural dialogue and civil society values. As a former employee of NATO and the Presidential Palace, Kamal had to flee from Kabul to Munich with his family after the Taliban seized power in 2021, and he is now in the process of creating a new life for himself there.

Since the 1980s, Rik De Lisle has been on Berlin Radio so frequently that his young son used to think every kid could listen to their dad live on air all the time, they just had to turn on the radio to hear his voice. Rik is now 76 – and still broadcasting. He’s known as “Der alte Ami”, and in this episode he tells Dina Elsayed about his journey from Texas via Thailand to Berlin, a journalism crash course in the US armed forces, doo-wop music, and how he experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Have you ever had a driveway moment? After spending your commute listening to the radio, a story takes you in its grasp. The radio is no longer a means to fill the quiet, but an entryway into a captivating world unbeknownst to you. This is the enchanting power of good radio storytelling. In this podcast episode Mary Louise Kelly, host of NPR’s beloved show “All Things Considered”, recounts her first driveway moment and how it forever changed the course of her career.

Theo Greenly had never heard of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands until he read the job description. Over a thousand miles of snow-capped volcanoes stretching from Alaska to Russia, across the Bering Sea. And the single radio station covering the archipelago was hiring a reporter. Here’s Theo telling the story of how he wound up living on a volcano in the Bering Sea. And about getting more than what he bargained for.

Keri Jones, founder of the smallest radio station in the world, Radio Scilly, found his passion for radio when he volunteered at a local station so he could get out of taking gym classes. It was there when Jones discovered the communing powers of radio. He has since spent his career using the platform to foster community engagement, discourse, and education. Keri speaks with Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson of Common Ground Berlin about his experience developing community radio stations, growing his audiences, and providing listeners with reliable access to local news.

Longtime NPR presenter Lulu Garcia-Navarro now produces the New York Times Opinion podcast “First Person”. In this interview she tells Dina Elsayed how she ended up in radio, and what challenges are currently faced by the 100-year-old medium in her view – for example competition with TikTok, or the fact that consumer habits have shifted to on-demand media consumption.

John Masuku has been a radio broadcaster in Zimbabwe since 1980. And he has experienced many changes in his country’s radio scene over the decades. He talks to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about the turbulent times during Zimbabwe’s independence movement, and about the huge importance radio came to have in his country.

It is hard to imagine public radio in the USA without NPR’s “Morning Edition” – a show that Steve Inskeep has been presenting for nearly two decades. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson talks to him about his favourite radio anecdotes, his most influential experience as an NPR host, and more.