Austria: The wrong way to teach Kafka

Oliver Jungen

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)

Some metamorphosis, said Oliver Jungen. An Austrian publisher has turned Franz Kafka, a giant of German literature, into an illiterate and incoherent babbler. The publishing house of Gehlen and Schulz put out a new edition of Kafka’s The Castle that is riddled with spelling errors and sent it merrily off to schools in German-speaking countries. On the very first page, nine words are misspelled; on the next page, 10 are. And so it goes. The publisher claims that a software glitch caused the typos. But it reads as if someone “scanned in xeroxed sheets of an old edition, ran it through word-recognition software, and then printed it” without subjecting it to a pair of human eyes.

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The worst part? These books were printed with a hefty subsidy from the European Union—and Gehlen and Schulz is keeping the money. When confronted by an Austrian newspaper, the publisher had this to say: “True, we have allowed errors to stand...but then literature is not a spelling contest.” Such a counterintuitive response is almost Kafkaesque. Unfortunately, schoolchildren who are taught with materials like these will not be able to appreciate the irony.