"Abfälle in das eigene Bewusstsein zurücknehmen". Entsorgen und Recyceln bei Franz Kafka und Yoko Tawada

Kafka staged his own work as a literary landfill, namely because he asked for his fragments to be burnt and because he did not really want to burn them, because the truth lay precisely where the opposite was meant. The term ‘landfill’ in relation to Kafka should therefore not be understood in either a concrete or literal sense; rather, it should be understood as an anti-archive, i.e. as an image turned into a negative. In addition, Kafka uses the practice of dumping for his narrative, so that dumping becomes an aesthetic process in his work. In the process, the concept of recycling gains significance: literary material (disintegrated into fragments), which the author stages as rubbish destined for incineration, is instead stored, archived, titled - as Max Brod did -, published (and thus saved, if the act of publishing is to be understood as saving) and finally recycled through reception. Furthermore, the literary material is reused to create something new, as is usually the case in art and by means of intertextual references in literature. Yoko Tawada, as an important reader of Kafka's work, is one of those writers of posterity who have taken up Kafka's thematic and stylistic features, above all the problem of waste, and updated them from an ecocritical perspective.