Prof Esra Özyürek discusses the cultural references of this new novel with author and Hughes Hall/Trinity College’s Burhan Sönmez.
West Berlin, 1968. As a youth uprising sweeps over Europe in the shadow of the Cold War, two men face each other across an interrogation table. One, Ferdy Kaplan, has shot and killed a student. Kommissar Müller, the other is trying to find out why.
As his interrogation progresses, Kaplan’s background is revealed piece by piece, including the love story between him and his childhood friend Amalya, their shared passion for Kafka, and the radical youth movement they joined. When it transpires that Kaplan’s intended target was not the student but Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend and the executor of his literary estate, the interrogation of a murderer slowly transforms into a dialogue between a passionate admirer of Kafka’s work, who is attempting to protect the author’s final wish to have his manuscripts burned, and a police commissioner who is learning more about literature than he ever thought possible from a prisoner in his custody.
In this gripping, thought-provoking tribute to Kafka, Burhan Sönmez vividly recreates a key period of history in the 1960s, when the Berlin Wall divided Europe. More than a typical mystery, Lovers of Franz K. is an exploration of the value of books, and the issues of anti-Semitism, immigration, and violence that recur in Kafka’s life and writings.
About the author
Burhan Sönmez, now President of PEN International, was born in Turkey in 1965. His mother tongue is Kurdish, which was stigmatised in Turkey during his youth. While practising law and campaigning for human rights in Istanbul, he was seriously injured during a murder attempt by the Turkish police in 1996 and left the country, receiving treatment in Britain and remaining in exile there for several years. He now splits his time between England and Istanbul. Sönmez a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Lovers of Franz K. is his sixth novel.
About the host
Professor Esra Özyürek is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values at the University of Cambridge and Academic Director of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme. Her published works include three monographs: Subcontractors of guilt: Holocaust memory and Muslim belonging in postwar Germany (Stanford, 2023), Being German, becoming Muslim: race, religion, and conversion in the New Europe (Princeton, 2015), and Nostalgia for the modern: state secularism and everyday politics in Turkey (Duke, 2006).