Robert Klopstock was a doctor and a literature enthusiast. He was at the bedside of Franz Kafka the day of his death. Laurent Seksik is a doctor and writer. He dedicated his doctoral thesis in medicine to Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig.
He has also just signed his latest novel, franz Kafka does not want to die, published by Gallimard. This novel is part of a series of biographical works, entirely based on proven facts, featuring, in particular, Stefan Zweig and Albert Einstein, Jewish luminaries who lived through the rise of Nazism and the Second World War.
This time, it is through the character of Robert Klopstock that Laurent Seksik transports himself alongside the sick Franz Kafka. He will then follow his close friends, who defended his books and his memory after his death, when anti-Semitic fury rumbled over Europe.
In this limited circle of followers, we also find Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last companion, and Ottla Kafka, her sister, into whose skin Seksik also slips in turn.
“Everything is true in this novel. I rely on extremely precise and extremely rich documentation. As a novelist, I put myself in the shoes of the characters. It’s a huge challenge,” said Laurent Seksik in an interview.
“Kafka doesn’t need me or any writer. The goal is to bring a new angle, a new light,” he adds.
Seksik’s search for franz Kafka does not want to die began with the discovery of this sentence, which Kafka said to Klopstock in his last hours: “Kill me, otherwise you are an assassin. »
“That was the starting point,” he says. To find his last words and see to whom they were addressed. I tried to unwind the thread of a life. »
Destroy his work
Died in 1924, Franz Kafka escaped, during his lifetime, the rise of Nazism in Europe. His work was fiercely protected by those close to him, sometimes at the expense of Kafka’s very will. In his last will, Kafka asked that all his writings be destroyed, except for a few titles: The verdict, the trimmer, Metamorphosis, The penal colony, A country doctor And A hunger artist.
In a particularly strong scene from the book, Robert Klopstock goes to a review meeting JudischeRundschau, one of the few Jewish journals still authorized to appear in Berlin in 1934, where the idea of publishing a tribute issue to Franz Kafka was debated. Already at that time books written by Jewish authors were burned. The German people no longer have the right to read books written by Jews.
From the beginning, in my writing, and probably long before, I have had this ambition to describe a loss through my novels. To map the destruction of the Jews of Europe. The subjects of my novels try to constitute this cartography.
All the work of Laurent Seksik is also crossed by this exterminating madness which struck the Jewish people in the middle of the 20th century.e century. Through his characters, he paints the torment of an era, the black wind of the destruction of the Jews of Prague in the case of Kafka, of Vienna for Stefan Zweig, and of Berlin for Albert Einstein.
“From the beginning, in my writing, and probably long before, I have had this ambition to describe a loss through my novels. To map the destruction of the Jews of Europe. The subjects of my novels try to constitute this cartography”, he says.
This cartography often takes shape through the fates of lesser-known characters, peripheral to the main character.
A Kafkaesque destiny
In the case of Stefan Zweig, it could be Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann, known as Lotte, who committed suicide following the writer in Petropolis, Brazil, in 1942. In the case of Einstein, the focus is about his son Eduard Einstein, who ended his days in a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Around Kafka, his last companion, Dora Diamant, will have a Kafkaesque destiny. She fled Berlin to take refuge in Moscow in 1936, after the Gestapo had confiscated Kafka’s writings that she had been carrying with her since his death.
In the USSR, the promised land of certain Jews at the time, the psychodrama continued nonetheless. Accused of not being communist enough to join the Soviet Communist Party, she must flee again to avoid Stalin’s purges. On the way to London, where she must rid herself of her condition as an “enemy alien”, she learns that her entire family has disappeared under the Nazi grip.
“From a romantic point of view, I could not have invented it,” says Laurent Seksik about Dora Diamant. No novelist can invent a life as romantic as the destiny of Dora Diamant. »
As for Robert Klopstock, who was unable to save his friend Franz Kafka from death while he was a student, he will become, in Brooklyn, one of the greatest thoracic surgeons in the world.