Rethinking Franz Kafka’s legacy: testament, identity, and the ethics of literary survival in Burhan Sönmez’s Lovers of Franz K.

OpenAlex · İngilizce

This article analyzes the novel Franz K. Âşıkları (2024) [Lovers of Franz K.] by Burhan Sönmez—an author currently serving as the president of PEN International—by drawing upon the scholarship in world literature, legal ethics, and memory studies. Re-contextualizing the tension between Kafka’s instruction to burn his manuscripts and Max Brod’s refusal, the study situates this “betrayal” within the Cold War geopolitics, stretching across a Berlin-Istanbul-Paris-Tel Aviv axis. Crucially, this analysis demonstrates how Sönmez's textual “re-orientation” strategy liberates Kafka from Eurocentric readings and nation-state-based institutional appropriations, thereby allowing us to read Kafka in a new light and repositioning Kafkaesque alienation as a vital vocabulary of resistance for the modern Middle Eastern subaltern subject. Ultimately, the article argues that Sönmez reimagines Kafka’s legacy as a resource through which displaced and marginalized subjects negotiate questions of memory, identity, and survival. In doing so, it challenges conventional concepts of literary ownership.