Don’t come to Barrie Kosky’s K. at the Berliner Ensemble looking for sick-boy melancholy or Holocaust melodrama. The famed musical theatre director and former intendant of the Komische Oper is offering a more multifaceted, human version of Kafka in his “Talmudic music hall show”, inspired by Kafka’s The Trial.
An unashamedly and unrepentantly Jewish diasporic work of theatre from the Jewish, Australian-born, Berlin-based Kosky, the tingeltangel draws its inspiration from the polyglottic, code-switching and cross-dressing Yiddish theatre that deeply affected Kafka more than 100 years ago. “This may be a tricky piece for a German audience,” Kosky says, “because comedy and tragedy exist in the same sentence, in the same moment, and with the sprinkling of irony always there.” Kosky sat down with The Berliner to discuss his longtime fascination with the writer, how Kafka experienced Yiddish vaudeville, and why Jewish art today can’t let itself be defined by death.
Why did you decide to turn to Kafka at this particular moment in time?
I’ve always been drawn to Kafka. He is, without doubt, my favourite writer – has been since school. Like most people, I really discovered Kafka through Metamorphosis because that’s the most accessible book or story for a teenage mind. And then when I was at uni, I read everything else. At that stage, I was starting to do theatre and opera anyway, but I hadn’t really made a jump into how one could use Kafka for the theatre. And I certainly didn’t know what I know now. So I left him for a while. I did other things.
It was only when I moved to Vienna in 2000 to run the Schauspielhaus theatre that suddenly it made sense to me to think about how I might bring Kafka to stage. I did a trilogy of musical theatre shows, which the Viennese critics hated and the audience didn’t understand, but were very important for me to try and find a language [for Kafka]. It was the first time I had really investigated the connection between Kafka and his love for the Yiddish theatre. And recently [Berliner Ensemble intendant] Oliver Reese said to me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ And I said, ‘I feel some sort of pull from Franz Kafka again.’ I started to go back into the material.
By this stage, there were some interesting new books that had been written. And I thought, if I go back into Kafka again, I want to do a text that I haven’t worked on before. So it seemed completely logical that I would look at either The Trial or The Castle. The Castle is almost impossible to put on stage. I would have loved Tarkovsky to do a film on The Castle because it’s snowing all the time, and you somehow need to get that white. It’s something not right for a theatre show. But The Trial seems to be right, because this is the work where you can see the first and largest influence of the Yiddish theatre.
So much of The Trial is performative. What Josef K does is performative. I’ve always been a little bit suspect of the idea that Kafka – and The Trial in particular – is prophetic of totalitarianism. I’ve always been interested in him as a person. I’ve always been interested in how his illness is connected to his artistic process. And I’ve always been incredibly interested in his relationship with Judaism, which mirrors a lot of the questions I have – which is not to say that we have exactly the same questions. I feel a connection to him and his very complex relationship with Jewishness and Judaism. So when I read The Trial again, I thought about the Kafka scholars who write about the trial being a Jewish trial, and about the idea of law being biblical law, and the idea that what Kafka cannot escape from is his Judaism. And I thought, well, rather than make that a flavour, let’s make that the show.
How do you think about staging this piece about Kafka’s relationship to Jewishness in front of audiences that are, despite Berlin’s diversity, still primarily white and Christian?
Let me put a card on the table very early on. I have spent my life in Europe, and I have tried with the work I did in Vienna and the work I did at the Komische Oper to try to enlighten the non-Jewish German audiences as best I could that Jewish culture cannot be defined by the Shoah, that we cannot be in a situation where Judaism or Jewish culture is seen only from the telescope of death.
If you think about it, if we’re very brutal, it’s still the case that in Germany, there are two associations when you say the word Jew: it’s either the Holocaust and the Gestapo and Auschwitz, and the whole panopticon around that, or it’s an Israeli soldier in Gaza. That’s it. And for Jewish culture, that’s a catastrophe. Because it means that the German problem, which is antisemitism going back from before Luther, defines what Jewish culture is – which is offensive to me.
It’s up to Jewish artists to stop doing work about Auschwitz and the Gestapo, because it’s very rare for something to say anything new about it. It’s not to say we don’t remember it; we don’t forget it, but I just feel that I don’t want to define my work through that. And by the same token, I’m a diaspora Jew. I’m not an Israeli Jew. So my concerns and likes and dislikes and background [are] not an Israeli background.
We cannot be in a situation where Judaism or Jewish culture is seen only from the telescope of death
I am a grandchild of Central Europe. The concerns that Kafka had in his life are still the concerns for diaspora Jews. What is assimilation? Can you escape from being Jewish? No, the answer is no. There is no escape. I think it’s important that non-Jewish German audiences get to leave their guilt in the dressing room for the evening, because it’s got nothing to do with the Gestapo, and there’s nothing about the trains to Auschwitz, nothing about Holocaust Überlebender, and nothing about making them own up to their past. This is about Franz Kafka and the world of ideas, of theology and of theatre and love and death and huge existential themes mixed in with very banal domestic themes.
But it’s not only the lens of the Holocaust through which people look at Kafka. Many people think of Kafka only through his early death, and envision him as a kind of sickly melancholic…
Most Germans don’t understand him at all. It’s the visual and associative clichés that accompany Kafka, mainly from people who either haven’t really read the stuff or don’t know much about him – or people that I think misinterpret or misunderstand.
There’s a whole series of scholars who disagree with everything I’m putting on stage, who will say that the Jewishness is not the major concern of it. They tend to be non-Jews, by the way, which is always hilarious. So, for me, it’s a way not only to free The Trial from that, but also, as you said, to free Kafka from that. There’s this very famous anecdote where he read Metamorphosis and the first chapter of The Trial to his friends in literary cafés in Prague, and he couldn’t finish because he was laughing so much because he thought it was hilarious. Now, it’s not hilarious, but there is so much dark comedy in Kafka, and all of this sprang from his discovery of Yiddish theatre – which is an extraordinary moment in literary history.
I can’t think of another writer who went to see a performance, or a number of performances, of a shabby provincial theatre troupe in a café in Prague, and incorporated not just the performative style but also the meaning of what he was experiencing into his writing very subtly and very interestingly. It changed him completely, and what he experienced at the Yiddish theatre in terms of the music and the dance and the combination of being able to cry and laugh, and it being somehow a non-realistic presentation of what actually was more real than reality – something about that music and the performance tugged at him, and he wrote about this extensively.
What do you mean when you talk about Yiddish theatre? There’s obviously vaudeville and variety shows, but there’s a much wider theatrical tradition too. How does this Yiddish theatre make its way into Kafka’s fiction and your show?
He saw this shabby cardboard-cutout scenery, the bad costumes, bad lighting. He felt the finger of God there.
Yiddish theatre is lots of things. It had its absolute high point just after the revolution in Moscow, and then later in Warsaw, where it collided with the revolutions and radical works of Russian directors and Polish directors. But what Kafka saw was not that. Kafka saw this shabby Yiddish touring troupe. What he saw in the back room of the Café Savoy was cheap scenery, a vaudeville revue format of short sketches. It was The Muppet Show, and he was intoxicated by it.
And in a way, you could say that the format of The Trial, with its small scenes, is a sort of revue structure. It’s [musical] numbers. It’s very clear that the dialogues between all the characters (particularly between the sort of people that had come to arrest him in that very first scene, Franz and Wilhelm) sound like stand-up comedy routines from some musical. Particularly when they’re translated into Yiddish, they sound even more like that.
But I think for Kafka there was also something wonderful about the sort of shabbiness of it. He saw this shabby cardboard-cutout scenery, the bad costumes, bad lighting. He felt the finger of God there. There was something spiritual about it.
It’s clear why there’s so much Yiddish in your show. But how does Hebrew fit into this piece?
What we ultimately will see in the production is that Kafka becomes gradually trapped inside the synagogue, which is based a little bit on the Krakow synagogue, but sort of a generic dream synagogue. It’s actually made out of cheap Yiddish theatre material, which you discover in the second act.
What’s very interesting about that is that a synagogue is being formed to imprison him, like one of those many cages in Kafka, whether it’s A Report to an Academy or The Penal Colony. So if that synagogue becomes a cage from which there is eventually no escape, then it makes sense that, for example, when he goes to speak to Huld (which is the sort of central part of the story, when he goes to Advocate Huld) that he is talking to one of the highest people in the court he can about his case. It seemed to me perfect that that is a voice coming from the Aron Hakodesh [the spot in a synagogue where the Torah is held] in Hebrew, which you don’t see, Wizard of Oz-like. And it’s not the voice of God. It’s the rabbi. In the temple, the story goes that on one day of the year, on Yom Kippur, the high priest used to be allowed to go into the Aron Hakodesh to hear the word of God. So that’s who Huld is.
And of course, you’re hearing the whole text in Hebrew, which will be simultaneously translated for the audience. Poor Josef K is standing in front of the Aron Hakodesh being spoken to in Hebrew, but he’s speaking in German and trying to understand the Hebrew, which is what Kafka did all his life. And so the Hebrew is used only sparingly in this particular context. The Yiddish is used a lot more, but the Hebrew is used like this. Hebrew was for Kafka many things: it was a doorway into a mystical world, but it’s also the language of the law and it’s also the language of punishment and it’s also the language of the crime.
- K, Oct 25, Berliner Ensemble, German, Yiddish and Hebrew with English surtitles (Oct 11, 12, 26 without surtitles)
