"Komplett Kafka" von Nicolas Mahler

In the organizer's words:

"You, me, was once a great draughtsman," Franz Kafka wrote to his long-term fiancée Felice Bauer in 1913 about his artistic ambitions. His drawing had once "satisfied him more than anything else." At the same time, however, Kafka was also suspicious of other people's illustrations of his books. When it came to designing the cover of his story The Metamorphosis, he suspected that the commissioned illustrator might intend to draw the beetle.
And now the Austrian comic artist Nicolas Mahler has done just that. He has reduced the crawling dung beetle Gregor, the scrawny hunger artist, the singing mouse Josephine and other Kafka characters to stick figures. And Kafka himself, his fiancée Felice and his friend Max Brod do not escape unscathed.

Prints and originals from his drawn biography of Franz Kafka, published by Suhrkamp, are on display. And how would Kafka have reacted to this? Perhaps this undertaking would have amused him, as he wrote to Felice in another letter: "I can laugh too, Felice, don't doubt it. I am even known as a great laugher."

Nicolas Mahler, born in Vienna in 1969, leads a dual existence as a comic artist and literary editor. His comics and cartoons appear in numerous newspapers and magazines, such as Die Zeit, NZZ am Sonntag, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Titanic. His drawn adaptations of classic literature (based on Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Elfriede Jelinek, among others) are usually published by Suhrkamp Verlag.

A joint event with the Verein der Bibliophilen und Graphikfreunde Magdeburg und Sachsen-Anhalt e.V. "Willibald Pirckheimer"

With the kind support of the Stiftung Kunst und Kultur der Stadtsparkasse Magdeburg and the Stiftung Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen.