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“... the crisis of man discourse resonated in America in such diverse forms as the postwar cults of Kafka, existentialism and human rights, and in the writings of Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag. Thomist theologians were as much a part of it as New York’s Jewish intellectuals. ‘Man,’ Greif writes, ‘became at mid-century the figure everyone insisted ...”

“... the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This came out in 1945 and did much to establish a mystique of the concentration camp in the Paris of the Existentialists. Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka is far more impressive, by virtue of its convincing detail: but it also ...”

“... in such films as Five Days One Summer (1982). The first grand photograph in the book shows Franz Josef in 1907, the year of Zinnemann’s birth (‘people were trained, from childhood, to adore him’). The Emperor is parading his troops. A similar photograph in the Julia chapter is sternly captioned: ‘Vienna 1936. The Austrian fascist militia on ...”

“... her father and mother, aunts and great-aunts, and the vanished, interwoven Jewish world to which Kafka belonged when, living in Prague, he chose to write in German. During the 1960s, Gansel began going to Vietnam to study the language: she combined her renderings of its poets (Nguyen Khac Vien, To Huu, and others known only in oral form) with learning to ...”

“... and allegory, the force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, ‘desk-murderers’. The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent ...”

“... publishing house, with an outrageously self-praising blurb comparing the author with Rilke and Kafka. ‘The plain fact is that Mr Harris cannot write,’ A.D. Hope observed, before going on to charge the young firebrand with plagiarism: ‘We have a Zombie, a composite corpse, assembled from the undigested fragments of authors Mr Harris has swallowed ...”

“... in the frequent flights of high-literary pastiche: The Magic Mountain, the search for Corvo, Kafka (Francis Jay temporarily becomes Franz Kay) and Borges are alluded to. Magic and dirty realism are invoked. There is much virtuoso play with modern critical theory, in which Bradbury exhibits prodigious expertise while at ...”

“... A Jew becomes central in Ulysses, Thomas Mann becomes preoccupied with these themes; and Kafka makes his enormous posthumous impact on the century. Conversely, moved by the general American – perhaps global – meanings of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we barely notice, as David Mamet has reminded us, how recognisably Jewish is the ...”

“... main ‘personae of the system’, who are Hegel and Kierkegaard, with smaller parts for Freud, Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig. Hegel, we know, is famous for his totalising system, Kierkegaard for the ironic personae with which he pseudonymously signed his books; Hegel’s speculative dialectic is one thing, Kierkegaard’s leap ...”