Round table discussion on Kafka, his dens, refuges and hiding places with Esther Ramón (poet, writer and professor at UC3M and the Escuela SUR, among others), Paz Olivares (independent editor and professor of the Escuela SUR) and the moderation of David Sánchez-Usanos (professor of Philosophy at the UAM and professor of the Escuela SUR). 

"Franz Kafka, under the protection of writing," Paz Olivares.

In November 1917, the third year of the Great War and three months after coughing up blood in the frigid apartment of Schönborn Palace, Franz scribbled a riddle: "To understand the luck that the ground you stand on cannot be larger than the two feet that cover it." What we know today as "Aphorism 24" calls us to outline the limits of what sustained Kafka, the only thing that seemed to him like solid ground: the exact measure of his footprints, which he tried unsuccessfully to erase before leaving, but which now comprise one of the most important works of world literature.

"The Little Inhabitant of the Ruins. In Kafka's Burrow," Esther Ramón 

In Kafka's diary, a character emerges amidst agile, ironically charged prose, bathed in a light that is either too intense or too wholesome: "...I would have liked and would have preferred to be that little inhabitant of some ruins, tanned by the sun, which, among the rubble, upon the warm ivy, would have illuminated me from all sides." Like a compensatory reverie, the little inhabitant of the ruins contrasts sharply with the claustrophobia, the uncomfortable, violated houses, and the inability to inhabit that we find in his work. A prime example is the burrow in The Building [ Der Bau ], perhaps his last work, which remained unfinished or deliberately left as open as the ruins he longed for.

Illustrations by Miquel Barceló for The Transformation, by Franz Kafka.