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On 9 March 1902 she married Gustav Mahler, who was nineteen years her senior and the director of the Vienna Court Opera. With him she had two daughters, Maria Anna (1902–1907), who died of scarlet fever or diphtheria, and Anna (1904–1988), who later became a sculptor. The terms of Alma's marriage with Gustav were that she would forgo her own interest in composing. Artistically stifled herself, she embraced her role as a loving wife and supporter of Gustav's music. However, later in their marriage, after becoming severely depressed in the wake of Maria's death, she began an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius (later head of the Bauhaus), whom she met during a rest at a spa. Following the emotional crisis in their marriage after Gustav's discovery of the affair, Gustav began to take a serious interest in Alma's musical compositions, regretting his earlier dismissive attitude. Upon his urging, and under his guidance, she prepared five of her songs for publication (they were issued in 1910, by Gustav's own publisher, Universal Edition). After this turbulent period in their marriage, Alma and Gustav traveled to New York, where Gustav was seasonally engaged as a conductor. In February, 1911, he fell severely ill with an infection related to a heart defect that had been diagnosed several years earlier. He died in May, shortly after their return to Vienna.
After Mahler's death, Alma did not immediately resume contact with Gropius. Between 1912 and 1914 she had a tumultuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who created many works inspired by his relationship with her, including, perhaps most famously, his painting Bride of the Wind. Kokoschka's intense possessiveness wore on Alma, and the emotional vicissitudes of the relationship tired them both. With the coming of World War I, Kokoschka enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Alma subsequently distanced herself from him and resumed contact with Gropius, who was also serving in combat at that time. She and Gropius married in 1915 during one of his military leaves. They had a daughter together, Manon Gropius (1916–1935), who died of polio at the age of 18. (Composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her.) While Gropius's military duties were still keeping him absent, Alma met and began an affair with Prague-born poet and writer Franz Werfel in the fall of 1917. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Martin Carl Johannes Gropius (1918–1919). Gropius at first believed that the child was his, but Alma's ongoing affair with Werfel was soon exposed.
Within a year, they agreed to a divorce. In the meantime, Martin, who had been born prematurely, developed hydrocephalus and died at the age of ten months. Alma's divorce from Gropius became final in 1920. She and Werfel began openly living together from that point on. However, she postponed marrying Werfel until 1929, after which she styled herself "Alma Mahler-Werfel".
In 1938, following the Anschluss, Alma and Werfel, who was Jewish, were forced to flee Austria for France; they maintained a household in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, from summer 1938 until spring 1940. With the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II, and the deportation of Jews and political adversaries to Nazi concentration camps, the couple were no longer safe in France and frantically sought to secure their emigration to the United States. In Marseille they were contacted by Varian Fry, an American journalist and emissary of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization that came to the aid of many refugee intellectuals and artists at that time. Since exit visas could not be obtained, Fry arranged for the Werfels to journey on foot across the Pyrenees into Spain, in order to evade the Vichy French border officials. From Spain, Alma and Franz traveled on to Portugal and then boarded a ship for New York City. Eventually they settled in Los Angeles, where Werfel, who had already enjoyed moderate renown in the U.S. as an author, achieved a huge popular success with his novel The Song of Bernadette, which was made into a 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones, and the science fiction novel, Star of the Unborn, published after his death. Werfel, who had experienced serious heart problems throughout their exile, died of a heart attack in California in 1945.
In 1946 Mahler-Werfel became a U.S. citizen. Several years later she moved to New York City, where she remained a major cultural figure. Leonard Bernstein, who was a great champion of Gustav Mahler's music, stated in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1973 that Alma had attended some of his rehearsals. Bernstein considered her to be a "living" link to both Mahler and Alban Berg, having not had the chance to meet either man since he was of a later generation.
Alma Mahler-Werfel died in 1964.
In Mahler (1974) by director Ken Russell, Gustav Mahler while on his last train journey, remembers the important events of his life - his relationship with his wife, the death of his brother and of his young daughter, his trouble with the muses, and more. In the film, Alma was played by Georgina Hale, and Gustav was played by Robert Powell.
In 1996, Israeli writer Joshua Sobol and Austrian director Paulus Manker created the polydrama Alma. It played in Vienna for six successive seasons, and toured to Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Petronell, Berlin and Semmering — all places where Mahler-Werfel had lived. The scenes of Mahler-Werfel's life were performed simultaneously on all floors and in all rooms of a special building. The guests were invited to abandon the immobilized position of a spectator in a conventional drama, replace it with the mobile activity of a traveller, and watch a "theatrical journey". Each audience member chose the events, the path, and the person to follow after each event, thus constructing her or his personal version of the "Polydrama."
A treatment of Mahler-Werfel's life is presented in the 2001 Bruce Beresford film Bride of the Wind. In the film, Alma was played by Australian actress Sarah Wynter. Gustav Mahler was portrayed by British actor Jonathan Pryce. French actor Vincent Perez portrayed Oskar Kokoschka.
Martin Chervin wrote a one-woman play about her first marriage called Myself, Alma Mahler. In 1998 extracts from her diaries were published, covering the years from 1898 to 1902, up until the point she married Mahler. The 2001 novel The Artist's Wife by Max Phillips has her tell her own story from the afterlife, concentrating on her complicated relationships.
In 2010 the German filmmaker Percy Adlon and his son Felix Adlon released their film Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on the Couch), which relates Gustav Mahler's tormented relationship with his wife Alma and his meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1910. In the film's introduction, the directors stated, "That it happened is fact. How it happened is fiction." In fact, the only source for the Mahler-Freud meeting is a one-page account in Ernest Jones' biography of Freud (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, three volumes, 1953–1957, vol. 2, pp. 88–89, Basic Books, 1955; also in the abridged, one-volume edition, pp. 358–359, Basic Books, 1961).
Less amusing is the story of her two books on Mahler and their impact on 'Mahler studies'. As an articulate, well-connected and influential woman who outlived her first husband by more than 50 years, Mahler-Werfel was for decades the main authority on the mature Mahler's values, character and day-to-day behaviour, and her various publications quickly became the central source material for Mahler scholars and music-lovers alike. Unfortunately, as scholars investigated the picture she painted of Mahler and her relationship with him, her accounts have increasingly been revealed as unreliable, false and misleading. Nevertheless, the deliberate distortions have had a significant influence upon several generations of scholars, interpreters and music-lovers. Citing the serious contradictions between Alma's accounts and other evidence, including her own diaries, several historians and biographers have begun to speak of the "Alma Problem". According to Hugh Wood,
"Often she is the only witness, and the biographer has to depend on her while doubting with every sentence her capacity for telling the truth. Everything that passed through her hands must be regarded as tainted"
Alma played the piano from childhood and in her memoirs reports that she first attempted composing at age 9. She studied composition with Josef Labor beginning in 1895. She met Alexander von Zemlinsky in early 1900, began composition lessons with him that fall, and continued as his student until her engagement with Gustav Mahler (December 1901), after which she ceased composing. Up until that time, she had composed/sketched many Lieder, and also worked on instrumental pieces as well as a segment of an opera. She may have resumed composing after 1910, at least sporadically, but the chronology of her songs is difficult to establish because she did not date her manuscripts.
Only a total of 17 songs by her survive. Fourteen were published during her lifetime, in three publications dated 1910, 1915, and 1924; it is unclear whether she continued composing at all after her last publication. The works appeared under the name 'Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler'; the cover of the 1915 set was illustrated by Oskar Kokoschka. Three additional songs were discovered in manuscript posthumously; two of them were published in the year 2000, and one remains unpublished. Her personal papers, including music manuscripts, are held at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
These songs are regularly performed and recorded. Orchestral versions of the accompaniments have been produced by David and Colin Matthews, and Jorma Panula.
Four Songs for voice & piano (published 1915): (i) Licht in der Nacht ('Light in the Night'; Bierbaum) (ii) Waldseligkeit ('Woodland Bliss'; Dehmel) (iii) Ansturm ('Storm'; Dehmel) (iv) Erntelied ('Harvest Song'; Falke)
Five Songs for voice and piano (published 1924): (i) Hymne ('Hymn'; Novalis) (ii) Ekstase ('Ecstasy'; Otto Julius Bierbaum) (iii) Der Erkennende ('The Recognizer'; Franz Werfel) (iv) Lobgesang ('Song of Praise'; Dehmel ) (v) Hymne an die Nacht ('Hymn to the Night'; Novalis)
Posthumously published (2000): Leise weht ein erstes Blühn ('Softly Drifts a First Blossom'; Rilke ), for voice & piano Kennst du meine Nächte? ('Do You Know My Nights?'; unknown author), for voice & piano
[one further unpublished song apparently exists]
Category:1879 births Category:1964 deaths Category:Austrian artists' models Category:Austrian painters Category:Austrian composers Category:Women classical composers Category:Austrian diarists Category:Austrian immigrants to the United States Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:People from Vienna
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| Coordinates | 47°33′22.57″N18°48′9.61″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Tom Lehrer |
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Thomas Andrew Lehrer |
| Born | April 09, 1928New York, New York |
| Instrument | VocalsPiano |
| Occupation | Mathematician, teacher, lyricist, pianist, composer, singer/songwriter |
| Years active | 1945–1971, 1998 |
| Label | Reprise/Warner Bros. RecordsRhino/Atlantic RecordsShout! Factory |
| Associated acts | Joe Raposo |
His work often parodies popular song forms, such as in "The Elements", where he sets the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Lehrer's earlier work typically dealt with non-topical subject matter and was noted for its black humor, seen in songs such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs dealing with social and political issues of the day, particularly when he wrote for the U.S. version of the television show That Was The Week That Was.
In the early 1970s he retired from public performances to devote his time to teaching mathematics and music theatre at UCSC. He did two additional performances in 1998 at a London gala show celebrating the career of impresario Cameron Mackintosh.
Lehrer graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. He attended Camp Androscoggin both as a camper and a counselor. While studying mathematics as an undergraduate student at Harvard University, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" (1945). Those songs later were named The Physical Revue, a joking reference to a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review.
He remained in Harvard's doctoral program for several years, taking time out for his musical career and to work as a researcher at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He served in the Army from 1955 to 1957, working at the National Security Agency. (Lehrer has stated that he invented the during this time, as a means of circumventing liquor restrictions.) All of these experiences eventually became fodder for songs, viz. "Fight Fiercely, Harvard", "The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be" and "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier". Despite holding a master's degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked a high school diploma, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of Specialist Four, which he described as being a "Corporal without portfolio". In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time studies at Harvard, but he never completed his doctoral studies in mathematics.
From 1962, he taught in the political science department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching an introductory course entitled "The Nature of Mathematics" to liberal arts majors—"Math for Tenors", according to Lehrer. He also taught a class in musical theater. He occasionally performed songs in his lectures, primarily those relating to the topic.
In 2001, Lehrer taught his last mathematics class (on the topic of infinity) and retired from academia. He has remained in the area, and still "hangs out" around the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Inspired by the success of his performances of his own songs, he paid for some studio time to record Songs by Tom Lehrer. At the time radio stations would not give Lehrer air time because of his controversial subjects. Instead, he sold his album on campus at Harvard for three dollars, while "supportive record merchants and dorm newsstands bought copies…and marked them up fifty cents." After one summer, he also started to receive mail orders from all parts of the country (as far away as San Francisco after The Chronicle wrote an article on the record). Interest in his recordings was spread by word of mouth; friends and supporters brought their records home and played them for their friends, who then also wanted a copy.
Self-published and without promotion, the album—which included the macabre "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", the mildly risqué "Be Prepared", and "Lobachevsky" (regarding plagiarizing mathematicians)—became a cult success via word of mouth. Lehrer then embarked on a series of concert tours and recorded a second album, which was released in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded, while An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert.
Lehrer's major breakthrough in the United Kingdom came as a result of the citation accompanying an honorary degree given to Princess Margaret, where she cited musical tastes as "catholic, ranging from Mozart to Tom Lehrer". This prompted significant interest in his works and helped secure distributors for his material in the U.K. It was there that his music achieved real popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and the willingness of the BBC to play his songs on the radio (something that was a rarity in the United States).
By the early 1960s, Lehrer had retired from touring (which he intensely disliked) and was employed as the resident songwriter for the U.S. edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical television show. An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as education ("New Math"), the Second Vatican Council ("The Vatican Rag"), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"), air and water pollution ("Pollution"), American militarism ("Send the Marines"), World War III "pre-nostalgia" ("So Long, Mom", premiered by Steve Allen), and nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?" and "MLF Lullaby"). He also wrote a song that famously satirized the alleged amorality of the rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, who previously had worked for Nazi Germany before working for the United States. ("'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun.") Lehrer did not appear on the television show; his songs were performed by a female vocalist and his lyrics often were altered by the network censors. Lehrer later performed the songs on the album, That Was The Year That Was, so that, in his words, people could hear the songs the way they were intended to be heard.
In 1967, Lehrer was persuaded to make a short tour in Norway and Denmark, where he performed some of the songs from the television program. The performance in Oslo, Norway, on September 10 was recorded on video tape and aired locally later that autumn; this program was released on DVD some 40 years later.
Also around 1967, Lehrer composed and performed on piano original songs in a Dodge automobile "industrial" film that was distributed primarily to Dodge automobile dealers. It was also shown at promotional events organized by Dodge. Set in a fictional American wild west town, the full proper title of the film appears to be "The Dodge Rebellion Theatre presents Ballads For '67" Since the film is introducing 1967 model automobiles, it was possibly produced in late 1966.
The record deal with Reprise Records for the That Was The Year That Was album also gave Reprise distribution rights for Lehrer's earlier recordings, as Lehrer wanted to wind up his own record imprint. The Reprise issue of Songs by Tom Lehrer was a stereo re-recording. This version was not issued on CD, but the songs were issued on the live Tom Lehrer Revisited CD instead. The [live] recording also included bonus tracks "L-Y" and "Silent E", which Lehrer wrote for the PBS children's educational series The Electric Company. Lehrer later commented that worldwide sales of the recordings under Reprise surpassed 1.8 million units in 1996. That same year, the album That Was The Year That Was went gold. Another mistaken belief is that he was sued for libel by the estate of Wernher Von Braun, the subject of one of his songs, and forced to relinquish all of his royalty income to Von Braun. Lehrer firmly denied this in a 2003 interview.
When asked about his reasons for abandoning his musical career, in an interview in the book accompanying his CD box set (released in 2000), he cited a simple lack of interest, a distaste for touring, and boredom with performing the same songs repeatedly. He observed that when he was moved to write and perform songs, he did, and when he was not, he did not, and that after a while he simply lost interest. Although many of Lehrer's songs satirized the Cold War political establishment of the era, he stopped writing and performing just as the 1960s counterculture movement gained momentum.
Lehrer's musical career was brief; in an interview in the late 1990s, he pointed out that he had performed a mere 109 shows and written 37 songs over 20 years. Nevertheless, he developed a significant cult following both in the United States and abroad.
In the 1970s, Lehrer concentrated on teaching mathematics and musical theater, although he also wrote ten songs for the children's television show The Electric Company—Lehrer's Harvard schoolmate Joe Raposo was the show's musical director for its first three seasons.
In conjunction with the Tom Foolery premiere in 1980 at Criterion Theatre in London, Lehrer made a rare TV appearance on BBCs Parkinson show, where he sang "I Got It From Agnes".
On June 7 and 8, 1998, Lehrer performed in public for the first time in 25 years at the Lyceum Theatre, London as part of the gala show Hey, Mr. Producer! celebrating the career of impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who had been the producer of Tom Foolery. The June 8 show was his only performance before Queen Elizabeth II. Lehrer sang "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" and an updated version of the nuclear proliferation song "Who's Next?". The DVD of the event includes the former song.
In 2000, a boxed set of CDs, The Remains of Tom Lehrer, was released by Rhino Entertainment. It included live and studio versions of his first two albums, That Was The Year That Was, the songs he wrote for The Electric Company, and some previously unreleased material. It was accompanied by a small hardbound book containing an introduction by Dr. Demento and lyrics to all the songs.
In 2010, Shout! Factory launched a reissue campaign, making his long out-of-press albums available digitally. They also issued a CD/DVD combo called The Tom Lehrer Collection, which includes his best-loved songs, plus a DVD featuring an Oslo concert.
A play, Letters from Lehrer, written by Canadian Richard Greenblatt, was performed by him at CanStage, from January 16 to February 25, 2006. It followed Lehrer's musical career, the meaning of several songs, the politics of the time, and Greenblatt's own experiences with Lehrer's music, while playing some of Lehrer's songs. There are currently no plans for more performances, although low-quality audio recordings have begun to circulate around the internet.
Lehrer was praised by Dr. Demento as "the best musical satirist of the twentieth century". Other artists who cite Lehrer as an influence include "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose work generally addresses more popular and less technical or political subjects, and educator and scientist H. Paul Shuch, who tours under the stage name Dr. SETI and calls himself "a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lehrer: he sings like Sagan and lectures like Lehrer." More stylistically influenced performers include American political satirist Mark Russell, and the British duo Kit and The Widow. British medical satirists Amateur Transplants acknowledge the debt they owe to Tom Lehrer on the back of their first album, Fitness to Practice. Their songs "The Menstrual Rag" and "The Drugs Song" are to the tunes of Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" and "The Elements" respectively. Their second album, Unfit to Practise, opens with an update of Lehrer's "The Masochism Tango" and is called simply "Masochism Tango 2008". Syndicated conservative morning-radio talk show host Jim Quinn sings with piano backing in a Lehrer-like tribute in a song on how political correctness has destroyed so many Christmas traditions with the song "A Politically Correct Christmas".
Lehrer has said of his musical career, "If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while."
Many Lehrer songs also are performed (but not by Lehrer) in That Was The Week That Was (Radiola LP, 1981)
The sheet music to many of Lehrer's songs is published in The Tom Lehrer Song Book (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954) Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 54-12068 and (Pantheon, 1981, ISBN 0-394-74930-8).
Category:1928 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:American male singers Category:American mathematicians Category:American novelty song performers Category:American satirists Category:American singer-songwriters Category:American pianists Category:American comedy musicians Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Reprise Records artists Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Category:Parody musicians Category:University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Category:Horace Mann School alumni Category:United States Army soldiers Category:Jewish songwriters Category:Wellesley College faculty Category:Jewish comedians Category:Jewish American military personnel
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| Coordinates | 47°33′22.57″N18°48′9.61″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Sylvester Stallone |
| Caption | Sylvester Stallone at the San Diego Comic-Con International on July 22, 2010. |
| Birth date | July 06, 1946 |
| Birth place | New York City, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Actor, director, screenwriter |
| Years active | 1970–present |
| Spouse | |
| Website | http://www.sylvesterstallone.com}} |
Sylvester Stallone () (born July 6, 1946) nicknamed Sly Stallone, is an American actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, and film director. Stallone is known for his machismo and Hollywood action roles. Two of the notable characters he has portrayed include boxer Rocky Balboa and soldier John Rambo. The Rocky and Rambo franchises, along with several other films, strengthened his reputation as an actor and his box office earnings.
Stallone's film Rocky was inducted into the National Film Registry as well as having its film props placed in the Smithsonian Museum. Stallone's use of the front entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Rocky series led the area to be nicknamed the Rocky Steps. Philadelphia has a statue of his Rocky character placed permanently near the museum, on the right side before the steps. It was announced on December 7, 2010 that Stallone was voted into boxing's Hall of Fame.
Complications his mother suffered during labor forced her obstetricians to use two pairs of forceps during his birth; misuse of these accidentally severed a nerve and caused paralysis in parts of Stallone's face. As a result, the lower left side of his face is paralyzed, including parts of his lip, tongue, and chin, an accident which has given Stallone his trademark snarling look and slightly slurred speech. Stallone was baptized and raised Catholic. He spent his first five years in Hell's Kitchen, bouncing between foster homes while his parents endured a loud, troubled marriage. Eventually reunited with them, Stallone's odd face made him an outcast in school, where he was often suspended for fighting, other behavior problems, and poor grades. His father, a beautician, moved the family to Washington DC, where he opened a beauty school. His mother opened a women's gymnasium called Barbella's in 1954. They divorced when Stallone was 11.
He enrolled in the Theater Arts Department at University of Miami for three years. He came within a few credit hours of graduation before he decided to drop out and pursue a career writing screenplays under the pen names Q. Moonblood and J.J. Deadlock (under neither of which names he sold any scripts) while at the same time taking bit parts in movies.
An "uncut" version of the film was released in 2007, purporting to show actual hardcore footage of Stallone, but according to trade journal AVN, the hardcore scenes were inserts not involving the actor. It was played by a different actor because Stallone thought it would not be good for his career if he had done those hardcore scenes. In 2008, scenes from Party at Kitty and Stud's surfaced in a German version of Roger Colmont's hardcore-film White Fire (1976).
Stallone also starred in the erotic off-Broadway stage play Score which ran for 23 performances at the Martinique Theatre from October 28 - November 15, 1971 and was later made into a film by Radley Metzger.
Stallone's other first few film roles were minor, and included brief uncredited appearances in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971) as a subway thug, in the psychological thriller Klute (1971) as an extra dancing in a club, and in the Jack Lemmon film The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) as a youth. In the Lemmon film, Jack Lemmon chases, tackles and mugs Stallone, thinking that Stallone's character is a pickpocket. He had his second starring role in The Lords of Flatbush, in 1974. In 1975, he played supporting roles in Farewell, My Lovely; Capone; and Death Race 2000. He made guest appearances on the TV series Police Story and Kojak.
The sequel Rocky II, which Stallone had also written and directed (replacing John G. Avildsen, who won an Academy Award for directing the first film) was released in 1979 and also became a major success, grossing $200 million.
Apart from the Rocky films, Stallone did many other films in the late 1970s and early 1980s which were critically acclaimed but were not successful at the box office. He received critical praise for films such as F.I.S.T. (1978), a social, epic styled drama in which he plays a warehouse worker, very loosely modeled on James Hoffa, who becomes involved in the labor union leadership, and Paradise Alley (1978), a family drama in which he plays one of three brothers who is a con artist and who helps his other brother who is involved in wrestling. Stallone made his directorial debut directing Paradise Alley.
In the early 1980s, he starred alongside British veteran Michael Caine in Escape to Victory (1981), a sports drama in which he plays a prisoner of war involved in a Nazi propaganda soccer game. Stallone then made the action thriller film Nighthawks (1981), in which he plays a New York city cop who plays a cat and mouse game with a foreign terrorist, played by Rutger Hauer.
, Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan at the White House, 1985]]
Stallone had another major franchise success as Vietnam veteran John Rambo, a former Green Beret, in the action-war film First Blood (1982). The first installment of Rambo was both a critical and box office success. The critics praised Stallone's performance, saying he made Rambo seem human, as opposed to the way he is portrayed in the book of the same name, in First Blood and in the other films. Three Rambo sequels (1985), Rambo III (1988) and Rambo followed. Although box office hits, they met with much less critical praise than the original. He also continued his box office success with the Rocky franchise and wrote, directed and starred in two more sequels to the series: Rocky III (1982) and Rocky IV (1985). Stallone has portrayed these two characters in a total of ten films. In preparation for these roles, Stallone embarked upon a vigorous training regimen which often meant six days a week in the gym and further sit ups in the evenings. Stallone claims to have gotten his body fat percentage down to his all time low of 2.8% for Rocky III.
It was during this time period that Stallone's work cultivated a strong overseas following. He also attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, roles in different genres when he co-wrote and starred in the comedy film Rhinestone (1984) where he played a wannabe country music singer and the drama film Over the Top (1987) where he played a struggling trucker who, after the death of his wife, tries to make amends with his son who he left behind years earlier. His son doesn't think too highly of him until he sees him compete in a nation-wide arm wrestling competition. For the Rhinestone soundtrack, he performed a song. These films did not do well at the box office and were poorly received by critics. It was around 1985 that Stallone was signed to a remake of the 1939 James Cagney classic Angels With Dirty Faces. The film would form part of his multi-picture deal with Cannon Pictures and was to co-star Christopher Reeve and be directed by Menahem Golan. The re-making of such a beloved classic was met with disapproval by Variety Magazine and horror by top critic Roger Ebert and so Cannon opted to make Cobra instead. Cobra (1986) and Tango and Cash (1989) did solid business domestically but overseas they did blockbuster business grossing over $100 million in foreign markets and over $160 million worldwide.
After starring in the critical and commercial disasters Oscar (1991) and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) during the early 90s, he made a comeback in 1993 with the hit Cliffhanger which was a success in the U.S. grossing $84 million but even more successful worldwide, grossing $171 million for a total over US$255 million. Later that year he starred with Wesley Snipes in the futuristic action film Demolition Man which grossed in excess of $158 million worldwide. His string of hits continued with 1994's The Specialist (over $170 million worldwide gross).
In 1995, he played the comic book based title character Judge Dredd, who was taken from the British comic book 2000 AD in the film of the same name. His overseas box office appeal saved the domestic box office disappointment of Judge Dredd which cost almost $100 million barely made it's budget back with a worldwide tally of $113 million. He also appeared in the thriller Assassins (1995) with co stars Julianne Moore and Antonio Banderas. In 1996, he starred in the disaster film Daylight which was not very successful in the US but still grossed $126 million overseas.
That same year Stallone, along with an all-star cast of celebrities, appeared in the Trey Parker and Matt Stone short comedy film Your Studio and You commissioned by the Seagram Company for a party celebrating their acquisition of Universal Studios and the MCA Corporation. Stallone speaks in his Rocky Balboa voice with subtitles translating what he was saying. At one point, Stallone starts yelling about how can they use his Balboa character, that he left it in the past; the narrator calms him with a wine cooler and calling him, "brainiac." In response, Stallone says, "Thank you very much." He then looks at the wine cooler and exclaims, "Stupid cheap studio!"
Following his breakthrough performance in Rocky, critic Roger Ebert had once said Stallone could become the next Marlon Brando, though he never quite recaptured the critical acclaim achieved with Rocky. Stallone did, however, go on to receive much acclaim for his role in the low budget crime drama Cop Land (1997) in which he starred alongside Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, but the film was only a minor success at the box office. His performance led him to win the Stockholm International Film Festival Best Actor Award. In 1998 he did voice-over work for the computer-animated film Antz, which was a big hit domestically.
In 2000, Stallone starred in the thriller Get Carter — a remake of the 1971 British Michael Caine film of the same name—but the film was poorly received by both critics and audiences. Stallone's career declined considerably after his subsequent films Driven (2001), Avenging Angelo (2002) and D-Tox (2002) also underachieved expectations to do well at the box office and were poorly received by critics.
Following several poorly reviewed box office flops, Stallone started to regain prominence for his supporting role in the neo-noir crime drama Shade (2003) which was only released in a limited fashion but was praised by critics. He was also attached to star and direct a film tentatively titled Rampart Scandal, which was to be about the murder of rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. and the surrounding Los Angeles Police Department corruption scandal. It was later titled Notorious but was shelved.
In 2005, he was the co-presenter, alongside Sugar Ray Leonard, of the NBC Reality television boxing series The Contender. That same year he also made a guest appearance in two episodes of the television series Las Vegas. In 2005, Stallone also inducted wrestling icon Hulk Hogan, who appeared in Rocky III as a wrestler named Thunderlips, into the WWE Hall of Fame; Stallone was also the person who offered Hogan the cameo in Rocky III.
Stallone's fourth installment of his other successful movie franchise, Rambo, with the sequel being titled simply Rambo. The film opened in 2,751 theaters on January 25, 2008, grossing $6,490,000 on its opening day and $18,200,000 over its opening weekend. Its box office was $113,244,290 worldwide with a budget of $50 million.
Asked in February 2008 which of the icons he would rather be remembered for, Stallone said "it's a tough one, but Rocky is my first baby, so Rocky."
In 2007, he was caught in Australia with 48 vials of the synthetic human growth hormone Jintropin.
After Stallone's request that his acting and life experiences be accepted in exchange for his remaining credits, he was granted a Bachelors of Fine Arts (BFA) degree by the President of the University of Miami in 1999.
Stallone stopped going to church as his acting career progressed. He began to rediscover his childhood faith when his daughter was born ill in 1996, and is now a churchgoing Catholic.
Stallone supports The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and is featured prominently on that organization's website along with other celebrities.
Stallone is a longtime Republican supporter who publicly endorsed Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
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After the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, he went to the ravaged areas to help the people build a medical unit and two schools and to help the hit population in general.
Furthermore he is committed to the cultural safeguard of the Armenian people, thanks to the "Memory is the Future" Committee which he founded and to Yerevan's Genocide Museum which he works with also, for instance, by going to Armenia every year to bury the ashes or tomb earth of the Righteous for the Armenians, i.e. those who opposed the Armenian Genocide and denounced it overtly, in front of the Wall of Remembrance.
With Gabriele Nissim he founded the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide Committee promoting international meetings such as for instance "It is always possible to say Yes or No", Padua 2000, whose documents have been published. He edited the memories of Raffaele Gianighian's, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.
Appointed the Honorary Consul of the Armenian Republic to Italy in 2007, he contributes to the Sunday edition of the Sole 24 ore.
Category:Armenian activists Category:Armenian writers Category:Living people
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Paulus Manker (born January 25, 1958 in Vienna) is an Austrian film director and actor.
Manker made his film debut in Lemminge (Lemmings) (dir. Michael Haneke) in 1979.
As an actor, Manker has performed at the Burgtheater (1980: Arthur Schnitzler's Comedy of Seduction, directed by Horst Zankl, stage design by Hans Hollein, costume design by Karl Lagerfeld), the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, the Munich Kammerspiele, and the Salzburg Festival (2010 with Racine's Phèdre).
Category:Austrian film directors Category:Living people Category:Austrian actors Category:1958 births Category:People from Vienna
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From then on, Brod and Kafka met frequently, often even daily, and remained close friends until Kafka's death. Kafka was a frequent guest in Brod's parents' house. There he met his future girlfriend and fiancée Felice Bauer, cousin of Brod's brother-in-law Max Friedmann. After graduating, Brod worked for a time for the post office. The relatively short working hours gave him time to begin a career as an art critic and freelance writer. For similar reasons, Kafka took a job at an insurance agency involved in workmen's accident insurance. Brod, Kafka and Brod's close friend Felix Weltsch constituted the so-called "Der enge Prager Kreis" or "close Prague circle".
During Kafka's lifetime, Brod tried repeatedly to reassure him of his writing talents, of which Kafka was chronically doubtful. Brod pushed Kafka to publish his work, and it is probably owing to Brod that he began to keep a diary. Brod tried, but failed, to arrange common literary projects. Notwithstanding their inability to write in tandem—which stemmed from clashing literary and personal philosophies—they were able to publish one chapter from an attempted travelogue in May 1912, for which Kafka wrote the introduction. It was published in the journal Herderblätter. Brod prodded his friend to complete the project several years later, but the effort was in vain. Even after Brod's 1913 marriage with Elsa Taussig, he and Kafka remained each other's closest friends and confidants, assisting each other in problems and life crises.
Category:German literature Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Czechoslovak immigrants to Israel Category:Austrian writers Category:Czech expatriates Category:Austrian journalists Category:Austrian composers Category:Franz Kafka Category:Jewish composers and songwriters Category:Austrian Jews Category:Austrian translators Category:Czech Jews Category:Israeli Jews Category:Zionists Category:1884 births Category:1968 deaths Category:People from Prague Category:Charles University alumni Category:Czech Austro-Hungarians Category:Bialik Prize recipients
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| Coordinates | 47°33′22.57″N18°48′9.61″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Jennifer Jones |
| Landscape | yes |
| Caption | in Love Letters (1945) |
| Birth name | Phylis Lee Isley |
| Birth date | March 02, 1919 |
| Birth place | Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Death date | December 17, 2009 |
| Death place | Malibu, California, U.S. |
| Years active | 1939–1974 |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Spouse | divorced his death his death |
Phylis Lee Isley (March 2, 1919December 17, 2009) better known as her stage name Jennifer Jones, was an American actress. A five-time Academy Award nominee, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943).
They returned to Tulsa for a 13-week radio program arranged by her father, and then made their way to Hollywood. Isley landed two small roles, first in a 1939 John Wayne western titled New Frontier, followed by a serial entitled Dick Tracy's G-Men. In these two films, she was billed as 'Phyllis Isley' (Phyllis now spelled with two Ls). However, she failed a screen test for Paramount Pictures and decided to return to New York City.
She was carefully groomed for stardom and given a new name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was impressed by her screen test as Bernadette Soubirous for The Song of Bernadette (1943) and she won the coveted role over hundreds of applicants. In 1944, on her 25th birthday, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Bernadette Soubirous. That year, Jones' friend, Ingrid Bergman, was also a Best Actress nominee for her work in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Jones apologized to Bergman, who replied, "No, Jennifer, your Bernadette was better than my Maria." Jones presented the Best Actress Oscar the following year to Bergman for Gaslight. (1955)]] Over the next two decades, Jones appeared in a wide range of roles selected by Selznick. Her dark beauty and sensitive nature appealed to audiences and she projected a variable range. Her initial saintly image — as shown in her first starring role — was a stark contrast three years later when she was cast as a provocative bi-racial woman in Selznick’s controversial film Duel in the Sun (1946). Other notable films included Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), Cluny Brown (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), We Were Strangers (1949), Gone to Earth (1950), Carrie (1952), Ruby Gentry (also 1952), Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), Beat the Devil (1953), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), Good Morning Miss Dove (also 1955), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) starring opposite Gregory Peck and A Farewell to Arms (1957). Her leading men during this period included Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, John Garfield, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Montgomery Clift, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Robert Stack, John Gielgud, Rock Hudson, and Jason Robards. The portrait of Jones for the film Portrait of Jennie was painted by Robert Brackman. at 6429 Hollywood Blvd.]] Her last big-screen appearance came in the spectacular disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), in which she danced with Fred Astaire before a fire threatened partygoers in a new San Francisco skyscraper who were celebrating its official opening as tallest building in the world. Her exit from the picture was also the most sympathetic when, after helping to assist two children to escape the disaster, her character fell 110 stories to her death from a scenic elevator on the outside of the building which was derailed following an explosion. Her touching performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Scenes from early on in the movie showed paintings lent to the production from the Norton Simon art gallery. Simon was her husband at the time the movie was produced.
Jones married Selznick on July 13, 1949, a union which lasted until his death on June 22, 1965. After his death, she semi-retired from acting. According to media reports, Jones attempted suicide in November 1967 after hearing of the death of close friend Charles Bickford. She was found unconscious at the base of a cliff overlooking Malibu Beach; she was hospitalized in a coma before eventually recovering. Her daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick (1954–1976), committed suicide by jumping from a 20th-floor window in Los Angeles on May 11, 1976. This led to Jones's interest in mental health issues. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health And Education. The Foundation pledged $400,000 to be used exclusively for the world renowned Mary Jennifer Selznick Workshop Program, named in honor of Jones's late daughter.
On May 29, 1971, Jones married multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector and philanthropist Norton Simon, whose son Robert had committed suicide in 1969. Years before, Simon had attempted to buy the portrait of her used in the film Portrait of Jennie. Simon later met Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg. Norton Simon died in June 1993. Four years before his death, Simon resigned as President of Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and Jennifer Jones-Simon was appointed Chairman of the Board of Trustees, President and Executive Officer. In 1996, she began working with architect Frank Gehry and landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power on renovating the museum and gardens. She remained active as the director of the Norton Simon Museum until 2003 when she was given emeritus status.
Jones was a breast cancer survivor. Actress Susan Strasberg, who would die of the disease in 1999, who was then married to actor Christopher Jones, named her own daughter Jennifer Robin Jones in the older actress's honor.
Category:1919 births Category:2009 deaths Category:American Roman Catholics Category:20th-century actors Category:Actors from Oklahoma Category:Actors who attempted suicide Category:American Academy of Dramatic Arts alumni Category:American female models Category:American film actors Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners Category:Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Breast cancer survivors Category:Disease-related deaths in California Category:People from Tulsa, Oklahoma
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| Coordinates | 47°33′22.57″N18°48′9.61″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Franz Kafka |
| Caption | Franz Kafka in 1906 |
| Birthdate | July 03, 1883 |
| Birthplace | Prague, Austria-Hungary |
| Deathdate | June 03, 1924 |
| Deathplace | Kierling near Vienna, Austria |
| Occupation | Insurance officer, factory manager, novelist, short story writer |
| Language | German |
| Nationality | Bohemian (Austria-Hungary) |
| Genre | Fiction, short story |
| Movement | Modernism, existentialism |
| Notableworks | The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis |
| Influences | Hamsun, Schopenhauer, Goethe, von Kleist, Kierkegaard, Altenberg, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Flaubert, Bentham, Walser, Weininger |
| Influenced | Pinter, Nabokov, Roth, Beckett, Camus, Musil, Fellini, Arendt, Benjamin, Singer, Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes, Kundera, Jančar, Rushdie, Murakami, Grass, Park, Vasquez, Filipacchi, J. D. Salinger, Lynch, Bukowski, Canetti, Abe, Sabato |
| Signature | Kafka.gif}} |
Franz Kafka (; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a culturally influential German-language novelist. Contemporary critics and academics regard Kafka as one of the best writers in the 20th century. The term "" has become part of the English vernacular.
Kafka was born to middle class German-speaking Jewish parents in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
Most of Kafka's writing, much of it unfinished at the time of his death, was published .
Franz was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers: Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of fifteen months and six months, respectively, before Franz was seven; and three younger sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1944), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1944) and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943). On business days, both parents were absent from the home. His mother helped to manage her husband's business and worked in it as many as 12 hours a day. The children were largely reared by a series of governesses and servants. Kafka's relationship with his father was severely troubled as explained in the Letter to His Father in which he complained of being profoundly affected by his father's authoritative and demanding character.
During World War II, Kafka's sisters were sent with their families to the Łódź Ghetto and died there or in death camps. Ottla was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then on 7 October 1943 to the death camp at Auschwitz, where 1267 children and 51 guardians, including Ottla, were gassed to death on their arrival.
Admitted to the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. This offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, who would become a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.—as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On 15 July 1908, he resigned, and two weeks later found more congenial employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The job involved investigating personal injury to industrial workers, and assessing compensation. Management professor Peter Drucker credits Kafka with developing the first civilian hard hat while he was employed at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute, but this is not supported by any document from his employer. His father often referred to his son's job as insurance officer as a "Brotberuf", literally "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills. While Kafka often claimed that he despised the job, he was a diligent and capable employee. He was also given the task of compiling and composing the annual report and was reportedly quite proud of the results, sending copies to friends and family. In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work. Together with his close friends Max Brod and Felix Weltsch, these three were called "Der enge Prager Kreis", the close-knit Prague circle, which was part of a broader Prague Circle, "a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague from the 1880s till after World War I."
In 1911, Karl Hermann, spouse of his sister Elli, asked Kafka to collaborate in the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann and Co. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business. During that period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Those performances also served as a starting point for his growing relationship with Judaism.
That same year, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla. Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor.
From 1920 Kafka developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. In July 1923, throughout a vacation to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea, he met Dora Diamant and briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. She became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud.
Kafka's tuberculosis worsened in spite of using naturopathic treatments; he returned to Prague, then went to Dr. Hoffmann's sanatorium in [[Klosterneuburg| Kierling]] near Vienna for treatment, where he died on 3 June 1924, apparently from starvation. The condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him. His body was ultimately brought back to Prague where he was buried on 11 June 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery (sector 21, row 14, plot 33) in Prague-Žižkov.
When Kafka died he requested that his friend Max Brod destroy any of his unpublished works, writing: "Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me to be burned unread." However Brod ignored this and instead published The Trial, Amerika and The Castle.
In his essay, Sadness in Palestine?!, Dan Miron explores Kafka's connection to Zionism. "It seems that those who claim that there was such a connection and that Zionism played a central role in his life and literary work, and those who deny the connection altogether or dismiss its importance, are both wrong. The truth lies in some very elusive place between these two simplistic poles." In the opinion of literary critic Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, however, "Despite all his denials and beautiful evasions, [Kafka's writing] quite simply is Jewish writing." Pavel Eisner, one of Kafka's first translators, interprets the classic, The Trial, as the "triple dimension of Jewish existence in Prague is embodied in Kafka's The Trial: his protagonist Josef K. is (symbolically) arrested by a German (Rabensteiner), a Czech (Kullich) and a Jew (Kaminer). He stands for the "guiltless guilt" that imbues the Jew in the modern world, although there is no evidence that he himself is a Jew."
Livia Rothkirchen calls Kafka the "symbolic figure of his era." His era included numerous other Jewish writers (Czech, German and national Jews) who were sensitive to German, Czech, Austrian and Jewish culture. According to Rothkirchen, "This situation lent their writings a broad cosmopolitan outlook and a quality of exaltation bordering on transcendental metaphysical contemplation. An illustrious example is Franz Kafka." Brod overrode Kafka's wishes, believing that Kafka had given these directions to him specifically because Kafka knew he would not honor them—Brod had told him as much. (His lover, Dora Diamant, also ignored his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers.) Brod, in fact, would oversee the publication of most of Kafka's work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard.
Max Brod encountered significant difficulty in compiling Kafka's notebooks into any chronological order as Kafka was known to start writing in the middle of notebooks, from the last towards the first, etc.
All of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.
Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. One such instance is found in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis. English translators have often sought to render the word Ungeziefer as "insect"; in Middle German, however, Ungeziefer literally means "unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice" and is sometimes used colloquially to mean "bug" – a very general term, unlike the scientific sounding "insect". Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor, the protagonist of the story, as any specific thing, but instead wanted to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. Another example is Kafka's use of the German noun in the final sentence of The Judgment. Literally, Verkehr means intercourse and, as in English, can have either a sexual or non-sexual meaning; in addition, it is used to mean transport or traffic. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge." What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of 'Verkehr' is Kafka's confession to Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation".
Themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, and the emphasis on this quality, notably in the work of Marthe Robert, partly inspired the counter-criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who argued in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature that there was much more to Kafka than the stereotype of a lonely figure writing out of anguish, and that his work was more deliberate, subversive and more "joyful" than it appears to be.
Furthermore, an isolated reading of Kafka's work—focusing on the futility of his characters' struggling without the influence of any studies on Kafka's life—reveals the humor of Kafka. Kafka's work, in this sense, is not a written reflection of any of his own struggles, but a reflection of how people invent struggles.
Biographers have said that it was common for Kafka to read chapters of the books he was working on to his closest friends, and that those readings usually concentrated on the humorous side of his prose. Milan Kundera refers to the essentially surrealist humour of Kafka as a main predecessor of later artists such as Federico Fellini, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie. García Márquez said it was the reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis that showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way."
In a recent study which uses Kafka's office writings as its point of departure, Reza Banakar argues that "legal images in Kafka’s fiction are worthy of examination, not only because of their bewildering, enigmatic, bizarre, profane and alienating effects, or because of the deeper theological or existential meaning they suggest, but also as a particular concept of law and legality which operates paradoxically as an integral part of the human condition under modernity. To explore this point Kafka’s conception of law is placed in the context of his overall writing as a search for Heimat which takes us beyond the instrumental understanding of law advocated by various schools of legal positivism and allows us to grasp law as a form of experience" (see Banakar 2010).
According to the publisher's note for The Castle, Malcolm Pasley was able to get most of Kafka's original handwritten work into the Oxford Bodleian Library in 1961. The text for The Trial was later acquired through auction and is stored at the German literary archives at Marbach, Germany.
Subsequently, Pasley headed a team (including Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit and Jürgen Born) in reconstructing the German novels and S. Fischer Verlag republished them. Pasley was the editor for Das Schloß (The Castle), published in 1982, and Der Prozeß (The Trial), published in 1990. Jost Schillemeit was the editor of Der Verschollene (Amerika) published in 1983. These are all called the "Critical Editions" or the "Fischer Editions." The German critical text of these, and Kafka's other works, may be found online at The Kafka Project. This site is continuously building the repository.
There is another Kafka Project based at San Diego State University, which began in 1998 as the official international search for Kafka's last writings. Consisting of 20 notebooks and 35 letters to Kafka's last companion, Dora Diamant (later, Dymant-Lask), this missing literary treasure was confiscated from her by the Gestapo in Berlin 1933. The Kafka Project's four-month search of government archives in Berlin in 1998 uncovered the confiscation order and other significant documents. In 2003, the Kafka Project discovered three original Kafka letters, written in 1923. Building on the search conducted by Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach in the mid-1950s, the Kafka Project at SDSU has an advisory committee of international scholars and researchers, and is calling for volunteers who want to help solve a literary mystery.
In 2008, academic and Kafka expert James Hawes accused scholars of suppressing details of the pornography Kafka subscribed to (published by the same man who was Kafka's own first publisher) in order to preserve his image as a quasi-saintly "outsider".
After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published – The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.
;Novellas
;Novels
;Diaries and notebooks
;Letters
The term "Kafkaesque" is widely used to describe concepts, situations and ideas which are reminiscent of Kafka's works, particularly The Trial and The Metamorphosis.
In Mexico, the phrase "Si Franz Kafka fuera mexicano, sería costumbrista" (If Franz Kafka were Mexican, he would be a Costumbrista writer) is commonly used in newspapers, blogs and online forums to tell how hopeless and absurd the situation in the country is.
It has been noted that "from the Czech point of view, Kafka was German, and from the German point of view he was, above all, Jewish" and that this was a common "fate of much of Western Jewry."
;Short stories Zoetrope : an experimental avant-garde short film by Charlie Deaux, . Adaptation of "In the Penal Colony". : an animated feature by Tom Gibbons Adaptation of "A Country Doctor". Short film by Tobias Frühmorgen Adaptation of "A Country Doctor". Short film by Koji Yamamura Jacob M. Appel's story, "The Vermin Episode," retells The Metamorphosis from the point-of-view of the Samsas' next-door neighbors.
;Metamorphosis , an animated short by Caroline Leaf
Category:1883 births Category:1924 deaths Category:German-language writers Category:19th-century Austrian people Category:20th-century Austrian people Category:19th-century Czech people Category:20th-century Czech people Category:19th-century novelists Category:20th-century novelists Category:Jewish novelists Category:Austrian novelists Category:Czech novelists Category:Austrian socialists Category:Diarists Category:Magic realism writers Category:Jewish existentialists Category:Austrian anarchists Category:Jewish anarchists Category:Fabulists Category:Austro-Hungarian Jews Category:Ashkenazi Jews Category:Charles University alumni Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:Infectious disease deaths in Austria Category:People from Prague
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