Library

Book of the week Wie ein Hund

Every week we present a book from our collection that we find particularly interesting, exciting, instructive or otherwise particularly worth reading. This week, to mark the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death:

Danijel Žeželje, "Wie ein Hund" (Avant Verlag, Berlin 2024)

Croatian-born comic artist Danijel Žeželje has created a graphic masterpiece based on Kafka's story A Hunger Artist: a hunger artist performs his art in front of an attentive audience. After the scheduled 40 days without food, however, he feels so misunderstood that he continues his art – until no one shows any interest in him and he is forgotten in a cage.

The page layout and Danijel Žeželj's high-contrast style are perfect for translating the special atmosphere of Kafka's stories into images. Kafka described unbelievable events in matter-of-fact, sober language. Žeželj reinforces this contradiction by interweaving Kafka's original texts with his realistic and at the same time expressionist images.