this professor is, and just how thoroughly the byzantine corridors of Franz Kafka’s The Castle have found their real-life counterpart in the Brussels of Robert Menasse’s sly satire, The Capital.īut Menasse is too humane a writer to see the world in such bleak terms as the Czech stylist. To step into a coffee house called Café Kafka is to highlight, fleetingly, just how much like hapless Josef K. This prospect has been harshly tempered by his knowledge that those who hear him are all too likely to shrug off his passionate call to arms with the cold, obfuscating neutrality of immense bureaucracy. The task, which should be fairly routine and perfunctory for him, has become fraught with emotion: a heartfelt address harking back to the days of the European Union’s founding, and proposing a site where the sprawling system could erect an official, permanent capital, building a new future out of the past’s ashes. He had always liked a drink, but usually to celebrate, not out of frustration.” The man in question, Alois Erhart, is a Viennese professor who has traveled to the city serving as the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council in order to give a keynote speech to many of the technocrats there. How apt, he thought, and went in for a glass of wine. “Entering rue des Poissonniers he noticed a coffee house on the corner, Café Kafka. On a hot summer evening, one of the many men peopling Brussels meanders down the city’s streets.
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