ZEITGEISTER ON AIR is a cultural podcast for people with an interest in art, international perspectives, original (and even nerdy) subjects, zines and Germany. We invite international artists and authors to tell us about themselves.
Season 2: Being Kafka
Explore the magical world of Franz Kafka in “Being Kafka”, the second season of ZEITGEISTER ON AIR. Our hosts Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and Dina Elsayed of “Common Ground Berlin” talk to Kafka experts in Israel, India, Columbia, Czechia, Poland, the USA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Their interviews look at the author’s legacy, including the lesser-known aspects, and show how popular he is in all corners of the world – sometimes for entirely contradictory reasons.
Dina Elsayed’s guest on the Kafka-Podcast is Polish philosopher and translator Grzegorz Jankowicz. 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. His latest project is a translation of the diaries of Franz Kafka. 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. What 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.
Can Franz Kafka change your life? Artist Marianne Kolb from California – who is Swiss by birth – had this experience. She tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about how Kafka saved her from the grey days of her education and apprenticeship in a strict Switzerland.
What makes Franz Kafka so popular in Latin America? Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson interviews the Colombian author Hernán D. Caro to find out. They talk about Kafka’s clear language which can be translated into Spanish without much detriment. Hernán says that Kafka showed us 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 about the adventurous travels of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts after his death. It was Max Brod who saved them from Kafka’s last wish and did not burn them. In the end there followed decades of court cases. A crime thriller with … watch out for the spoiler … a happy ending.
Kathi Diamant works with the 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. Kathi has spent decades searching for letters and notebooks belonging to Franz Kafka.
Season 1: Radio Around the World
The first season of ZEITGEISTER ON AIR is a collaboration with “Common Ground Berlin”. To mark its centenary, the whole season will revolve around radio: our hosts Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and Dina Elsayed chat to international radio personalities. From Alaska, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, the Isles of Scilly and the USA, they share their personal radio stories with us. Tune into eight episodes and an extra-long bonus episode from Alaska.
Theo Greenly is a reporter at the single radio station covering Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. 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.
Before her TV career, Anna Winger was a radio broadcaster. She produced around 200 “Berlin Stories” – 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.
Kamal Narsad 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 became a a radio journalist himself.
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.
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.
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.
Longtime NPR presenter Lulu Garcia-Navarro now produces the “New York Times” opinion podcast “First Person”. She talks about how she ended up in radio, and what challenges are currently faced by the 100-year-old medium in her view.
John Masuku has been a radio broadcaster in Zimbabwe for more than 40 years. He talks 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.
