Metamorphosen des „Hohen Gerichts“: Robert Flinkers Fegefeuer als literarisches Pendant zu Franz Kafkas Der Prozeß
“High Court” Metamorphoses: Robert Flinker’s Purgatory as a Literary Pendant to Franz Kafka’s The Trial

Summary/Abstract: Robert FLINKER is one of the few prose writers in the German-speaking literature of Bukovina. His novel Purgatory demonstrates an obvious similarity with Franz KAFKA’s novel The Trial. It concerns the topic (the motive of court), typology of the protagonist’s image (Josef K. – Gregor Gusum), and plot development. Despite these obvious analogies, as well as some biographical parallels, which are crucial for both authors, their novels are profoundly different. In his The Trial, KAFKA proceeds from an Old Testamental and Hebrew-Cabbalistic tradition, portraying an exhausting, but hopeless struggle of his novel’s hero against pervasive and brutal power, whereas FLINKER roots his concept of individual’s existential guilt in New Testamental Christian ideas inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. The difference of intentions conveys, in the first place, a different ethical message of the analyzed works.

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