Franz Kafka’s literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a fresh look not only at what Kafka has meant to the past ten decades but also at what challenges his writings offer to the decades ahead. Many questions will arise as we confront those challenges, and among the most important will be these:  What have we learned about the context surrounding Kafka’s literary production, and what more can we hope to learn? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories? What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer the general reader unprecedented access to Kafka’s works in their original manuscript form? How does our view of Kafka change in response to changes in the priorities and fashions of literary scholarship? What are the elements in Kafka’s fiction that are likely to find resonance in the altered historical context of a new millennium? How do we compose a complete and coherent account of a personality with so many often contradictory aspects: the writer, the Bohemian Jew, the bachelor son, the would-be celibate, the lover of many women, the lawyer, the frustrated bureaucrat, the successful business executive, the German, the Austrian, the Czech, and the failed novelist who is perhaps the most influential novelist of the twentieth century?

  To answer these questions, the organizers of the Kafka at 125 International Scholarly Conference bring to the Research Triangle of North Carolina a group of distinguished Kafka scholars from North America and Europe. We will celebrate Kafka’s 125th birthday by exploring together the ways in which this extraordinary writer, who so decisively shaped our conception of the twentieth century, might suggest fruitful strategies for coping with the twenty-first.

   The conference will be held in April of 2009 in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, home of three major research universities and of the National Humanities Center. Meetings will take place on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which is easily accessible from Duke, NC State, and the Raleigh-Durham International airport. The campus will be at the peak of its renowned springtime beauty.

Kafka at 125 is sponsored by: Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; North Carolina State University; Duke University; Institute for the Arts and Humanities; UNC Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; NC State Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures; Duke Department of Germanic Languages and Literature