{"id":2225,"date":"2025-03-09T01:55:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T01:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2225"},"modified":"2025-03-09T01:55:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T01:55:12","slug":"a-report-for-an-academy-by-franz-kafka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2225","title":{"rendered":"A Report For An Academy by Franz Kafka"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Report For An Academy by <a href=\"https:\/\/quizlit.org\/authors-famous-after-death\">Franz Kafka<\/a> was written and published in 1917. It tells the tale of an ape explaining his slow and painful domestication to the level of a cultured European.<\/p>\n<p><em>This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.<\/em><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">A Report For An Academy by Franz Kafka<\/h2>\n<div class=\"epyt-video-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"__youtube_prefs__ epyt-facade no-lazyload\"><button class=\"epyt-facade-play\"><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">A Report For An Academy by Franz Kafka<\/h3>\n<p>Gentlemen from the Academy!<\/p>\n<p>You do me the honor of requesting that I submit a report to the Academy on my monkey life.<\/p>\n<p>With this in mind, I am\u00a0unfortunately unable to comply with the request.\u00a0Almost five years separate me from monkeyism, a time, briefly measured by the calendar, but endlessly long but galloping through, as I did, accompanied at times by excellent people, advice, applause and orchestral music, but basically alone, because all the accompaniment held to stay in the picture, far in front of the barrier.\u00a0This achievement would have been impossible if I had been stubborn about mineOrigin to which the memories of the youth want to hold onto.\u00a0It was precisely the renunciation of any attachment that was the top priority that I had set myself;\u00a0I, free monkey, submitted to this yoke.\u00a0As a result, however, my memories became more and more closed to me.\u00a0If my return, if people would have wanted, was initially released for me through the whole gate that heaven forms over the earth, it was made at the same time as my development whipped forwardalways lower and narrower;\u00a0I felt more comfortable and more enclosed in the human world;\u00a0the storm that blew after me from my past subsided;\u00a0today it\u2019s just a draft that cools my heels;\u00a0and the hole in the distance through which it comes, and through which I once came, has become so small that, if at all the strength and will would suffice to run back there, I\u00a0would have\u00a0to peel the skin off myself in\u00a0order to to get through.\u00a0Frankly speaking, as much as I like to choose images for these things, frankly speaking: Your apeism, gentlemen, as long as you have something of this kind behind you, cannot be further from you than mine.\u00a0But everyone who walks here on earth is tickled on the heel: the little chimpanzee like the big Achilles.<\/p>\n<p>In the most limited sense, however, I might be able to answer your request, and I actually do it with great pleasure.\u00a0The first thing I learned was: give the handshake;\u00a0A handshake shows openness;\u00a0Now, today, when I am at the height of my career, I would like to add the frankness of that first handshake.\u00a0It will not teach the academy anything fundamentally new and will fall far short of what has been asked of me and what, with the best will in the world, I cannot say \u2013 after all, it is supposed to show the guideline on which a monkey who has been toHas penetrated the human world and has established itself there.\u00a0But I would certainly not be able to say even the insignificant thing that follows if I were not completely sure of myself and my position on all the great variety stages of the civilized world had not been consolidated to the point of unshakability:<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m from the Gold Coast.\u00a0I have to rely on reports from others about how I was captured.\u00a0A hunting expedition from the Hagenbeck company \u2013 by the\u00a0way\u00a0,\u00a0I\u2019ve already emptied many a good bottle of red wine\u00a0with the guide\u00a0\u2013 was lying in the bushes on the banks when I ran to water in the midst of a pack.\u00a0One shot;\u00a0I was the only one who was hit;\u00a0i got two shots.<\/p>\n<p>One in the cheek;\u00a0it was easy;\u00a0but left a large, shaved red scar that gave me the disgusting, utterly inaccurate name\u00a0, Red Peter,\u00a0invented by a monkey, as if I\u00a0only\u00a0differed\u00a0from the recently creaked, well-known, trained monkey animal Peter by the red one Spot on the cheek.\u00a0Incidentally.<\/p>\n<p>The second shot hit me below the hip.\u00a0It was heavy, it was his fault that I still limp a little today.\u00a0Recently I read in an essay by one of the ten thousand greyhounds that the newspapers talk about me: my ape nature has not yet been completely suppressed;\u00a0Proof of this is that when\u00a0visitors come,\u00a0I\u00a0prefer to take off\u00a0my\u00a0pants to show the entry point of that shot.\u00a0Every little finger of his writing hand should be slammed off the guy one by one.\u00a0I, I can take off my pants, in front of whom I please;\u00a0you will find nothing there but a well-groomed fur and the scar after a \u2013 let us choose a certain word for a certain purpose, but not to be misunderstood \u2013 the scar after a wicked oneShot.\u00a0Everything is evident;\u00a0there is nothing to hide;\u00a0when it comes to the truth, every great-minded person throws off the finest of manners.\u00a0If, on the other hand, that clerk were to take off his pants when visitors came, it would certainly have a different reputation, and I want to take it as a sign of reason that he does not do it.\u00a0But then he may stay away from me with his tenderness!<\/p>\n<p>After those shots I woke up \u2013 and this is where\u00a0my own memory\u00a0gradually begins\u00a0\u2013 in a cage in the intermediate deck of the Hagenbeck steamer.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t a four-walled lattice cage;\u00a0rather, only three walls were tied to a box;\u00a0so the box formed the fourth wall.\u00a0The whole thing was too low to stand upright and too narrow to sit down.\u00a0So I crouched with bent knees that trembled forever, and because I probably didn\u2019t want to see anyone at first and always wanted to be in the dark\u00a0, I turned\u00a0to the\u00a0box while the bars cut into my flesh at the back.\u00a0In the very early days it was believed that such custody of wild animals was advantageous, and today, based on my experience, I cannot deny that this is actually the case in the human sense.<\/p>\n<p>But I didn\u2019t think about that at the time.\u00a0For the first time in my life I was without a way out;\u00a0at least it couldn\u2019t go straight ahead;\u00a0straight ahead in front of me was the box, board firmly attached to board.\u00a0It is true that there was a continuous gap between the boards, which when I first discovered it I greeted with the blissful howl of ignorance, but this gap was nowhere near even enough for a tail to stick through and could not be widened with all my monkey power.<\/p>\n<p>I was said to have made unusually little noise, as I was later told, from which it was concluded that either I would soon have\u00a0to cease\u00a0or that, if I manage\u00a0to survive\u00a0the first\u00a0critical period, I would be very capable of dressage.\u00a0I survived that time.\u00a0Dull sobs, painful searching for fleas, wearily licking a coconut, pounding the wall of the box with my skull, banging my tongue when someone came close \u2013 those were the first occupations in my new life.\u00a0In all of this, however, there is only one feeling: no way out.\u00a0Of course I can only trace what I felt like an ape at that time with human words and\u00a0as a result\u00a0record\u00a0it, but even if I can no longer reach the old ape truth, at least it is in the direction of my description, there is no doubt about that.<\/p>\n<p>I had had so many ways out up to now and now none.\u00a0I was stuck.\u00a0Had I been nailed, my freedom of movement would not have diminished.\u00a0Why this?\u00a0Scratch the flesh between your toes, you won\u2019t find the reason.\u00a0Push yourself against\u00a0the bar\u00a0at the back\u00a0until it almost divides you in two, you won\u2019t find the reason.\u00a0I had no way out, but I had to find it, because I couldn\u2019t live without it.\u00a0Always on this box wall \u2013 I would inevitably have died.\u00a0But monkeys belong on the box wall at Hagenbeck \u2013 well, that\u2019s how I stopped being monkeys.\u00a0A clear, beautiful train of thought that I must have hatched with my stomach somehow, because monkeys think with their guts.<\/p>\n<p>I am afraid that you will not understand exactly what I mean by the way out.\u00a0I use the word in its most ordinary and fullest sense.\u00a0I am deliberately not saying freedom.\u00a0I don\u2019t mean that great feeling of freedom on all sides.\u00a0As a monkey, I may have known it and I have met people who long for it.\u00a0As for me, however, I did not ask for freedom then or now.\u00a0By the way: with freedom one cheats too often among people.And just as freedom is one of the most sublime feelings, so too is the corresponding deception one of the most sublime.\u00a0Before I appeared in the variety shows, I often saw some artist couple working on trapezoids up on the ceiling.\u00a0They swung, they rocked, they jumped, they floated into each other\u2019s arms, one carried the other by the hair with the bit.\u00a0\u201cThat too is human freedom,\u201d I thought, \u201can autocratic movement.\u201d\u00a0You derision of sacred nature!\u00a0No building would stand up to the laughter of apeism at the sight.<\/p>\n<p>No, I didn\u2019t want freedom.\u00a0Only one way out;\u00a0right, left, wherever;\u00a0I made no other demands;\u00a0the way out should even be a delusion;\u00a0the demand was small, the deception would not be greater.\u00a0Get on, get on!\u00a0Just don\u2019t stand still with your arms raised, pressed against the wall of a box.<\/p>\n<p>Today I see clearly:\u00a0I could never have escaped\u00a0without the\u00a0greatest inner peace.\u00a0And in fact, perhaps I owe everything that I have become to the calm that overcame me after the first few days there in the ship.\u00a0But I probably owed the rest of the time to the people on the ship.<\/p>\n<p>They are good people, in spite of everything.\u00a0I still fondly remember the sound of her heavy footsteps, which echoed back then in my half-sleep.\u00a0They used\u00a0to take\u00a0everything extremely slowly\u00a0.\u00a0If someone wanted to rub his eyes, he would raise his hand like a hanging weight.\u00a0Their jokes were crude but heartfelt.\u00a0Her laugh was always mixed with a dangerous-sounding but insignificant cough.\u00a0They always had something in their mouths to spit out and they didn\u2019t care where they spit it out to.\u00a0They always complained that my fleas jumped over to them;\u00a0but they were never seriously angry with me because of that;\u00a0they just knew that in my furFleas thrive and that fleas are jumpers;\u00a0they resigned themselves to that.\u00a0Sometimes when they were off duty some would sit in a semicircle around me;\u00a0hardly spoke, just cooed to each other;\u00a0smoked pipes, stretched out on boxes;\u00a0hit their knees as soon as I made the slightest movement;\u00a0and every now and then someone took a stick and tickled me where it was comfortable for me.\u00a0Should I be invited to take a trip on this ship today,\u00a0I would certainly refuse the invitation, but it is just as certain that it is not just ugly memories that I could indulge in there on the tween deck.<\/p>\n<p>The calm that I acquired in the company of these people prevented me from attempting to escape.\u00a0Seen from today it seems to me as if I had at least suspected that I would have to find a way out if I wanted to live, but that this way out could not be reached by fleeing.\u00a0I\u00a0no longer\u00a0know\u00a0whether it was possible to escape, but I believe it;\u00a0a monkey should always be able to escape.\u00a0With my teeth today I have to be careful when cracking nuts, but back then I should have succeeded in biting the door lock in the course of time.\u00a0I did not do it.\u00a0What would have been gained with it?\u00a0As soon as my head was stuck out, I would have been caught again and locked in an even worse cage;\u00a0or I would have myselfto be able to flee unnoticed to other animals, for example to the giant snakes across from me and breathed me out in their hugs;\u00a0or I would have even managed to steal myself to the deck and jump overboard, then I would have rocked for a while on the ocean and would have drowned.\u00a0Acts of desperation.\u00a0I did not calculate very humanely, but under the influence of my surroundings I behaved as if I had calculated.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t do the math, but\u00a0I watched calmly.\u00a0I saw these people walking up and down, always the same faces, the same movements, often it seemed to me as if it were just one.\u00a0So this person or people went unmolested.\u00a0A lofty goal dawned on me.\u00a0Nobody promised me that if I became like them the bars would be opened.\u00a0Such promises for seemingly impossible fulfillments are not made.\u00a0But if you redeem the fulfillments, appearretrospectively also the promises exactly where you previously looked for them in vain.\u00a0Now there was nothing in these people in themselves that attracted me very much.\u00a0Had I been a supporter of the freedom I mentioned, I would certainly have preferred the ocean to the way out, which appeared to me in the gloomy eyes of these people.\u00a0In any case, however, I observed them long before I thought of such things; indeed, the accumulated observations first urged me in a certain direction.<\/p>\n<p>It was so easy to imitate people.\u00a0I was able to spit in the first few days.\u00a0We then spat in each other\u2019s faces;\u00a0the only difference was that afterwards I licked my face, she not hers.\u00a0I soon smoked the pipe like an old man;\u00a0when I also put my thumb into the bowl of the pipe, the whole tween deck cheered;\u00a0only for a long time I did not understand the difference between the empty and the stopped pipe.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the trouble was with the liquor bottle.\u00a0The smell tormented me;\u00a0I forced myself with all my might;\u00a0but weeks passed before I overcame myself.\u00a0Strangely enough, people took these internal struggles more seriously than anything else in me.\u00a0I don\u2019t distinguish people in my memory either, but there was someone who kept coming back, alone or with comrades, by day, by night, at the most varied of hours;\u00a0stood in front of me with the bottleand gave me lessons.\u00a0He didn\u2019t understand me, he wanted to solve the riddle of my being.\u00a0He slowly uncorked the bottle and then looked at me to see if I understood;\u00a0I confess I always watched him with wild, rash attention;\u00a0No human teacher will find such a student on the whole earth;\u00a0when the bottle was uncorked he raised it to his mouth;\u00a0I look after him up to my throat;\u00a0he nods, satisfiedwith me, and put the bottle to his lips;\u00a0I, enraptured by gradual knowledge, scrape myself lengthways and breadths where it meets;\u00a0he is happy, puts the bottle on and takes a sip;\u00a0I, impatient and desperate to emulate him, defile myself in my cage, which again gives him great satisfaction;\u00a0and now, stretching the bottle far away and swinging it up again, he drinks it, leaning back in\u00a0an\u00a0exaggeratedly instructive\u00a0way, empty it in one gulp.\u00a0I, exhausted with too much desire, can no longer follow and hang weakly on the bars while he ends the theoretical lesson by stroking his stomach and grinning.<\/p>\n<p>Only now does the practical exercise begin.\u00a0Am I not already too exhausted by the theoretical?\u00a0Well, too exhausted.\u00a0That is part of my destiny.\u00a0Still, I reach for the bottle that has been handed out as best I can;\u00a0uncork it trembling;\u00a0with success,\u00a0new forces gradually appear;\u00a0I lift the bottle, almost indistinguishable from the original;\u00a0put it on and \u2013 and throw it with disgust, with disgust, in spite of the fact that it is empty and only the smell fills it, throw it on the ground with disgust.\u00a0To the sorrow of my teacher, to the greater sorrow of myself;\u00a0I reconcile neither him nor myself by not forgetting to stroke my stomach excellently and grinning at the same time, even after throwing the bottle away.<\/p>\n<p>All too often this was the only way the lessons went.\u00a0And to the honor of my teacher: he was not angry with me;\u00a0Sometimes he would hold the burning pipe to my skin until it started to glow somewhere where I could hardly reach, but then he put it out himself again with his huge, good hand;\u00a0he wasn\u2019t angry with me, he saw that we were fighting on the same side against ape nature and that I had the harder part.<\/p>\n<p>What a victory then for him as for me when\u00a0I was in front of a large audience one evening \u2013 maybe there was a party, a gramophone was playing, an officer was raging between the people \u2013 when I, just unobserved, one in front of my cage that evening accidentally grabbed a bottle of liquor that had been left standing there, with increasing attention from society, uncorked it, put it to my mouth and without hesitation, without puckering, as a drinker from the compartment, with round eyes, sloshing throat, reallyand really drank empty;\u00a0no longer threw down the bottle as a desperate man, but as an artist;\u00a0forgot to stroke the stomach;\u00a0on the other hand, because I couldn\u2019t help it, because I was pressed for it, because my senses roared, exclaimed \u201cHello!\u201d in a nutshell, broke out in human noises, with this call jumped into the community of people and their echo: \u201cListen, he speaks Felt like a kiss all over my sweaty body.<\/p>\n<p>I repeat:\u00a0I was not tempted to imitate people;\u00a0I imitated because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.\u00a0Also, little was done with that victory.\u00a0The voice failed me again immediately;\u00a0did not come about for months;\u00a0the aversion to the schnapps bottle was even stronger.\u00a0But my direction was given to me once and for all.<\/p>\n<p>When I was handed over to the first trainer in Hamburg, I soon recognized the two options that were open to me:\u00a0zoological garden or vaudeville.\u00a0I didn\u2019t hesitate.\u00a0I said to myself: do all you can to get into the vaudeville;\u00a0this is the way out;\u00a0Zoological garden is just a new lattice cage;\u00a0if you come into it, you are lost.<\/p>\n<p>And I learned, gentlemen.\u00a0Oh, you learn when you have to;\u00a0one learns when one wants a way out;\u00a0one learns ruthlessly.\u00a0One supervises oneself with a whip;\u00a0one tears oneself to pieces at the slightest resistance.\u00a0The monkey nature raced\u00a0out of me and away, rolling over itself, so that my first teacher himself became almost monkey from it and soon had to give up teaching and be taken to a sanatorium.\u00a0Fortunately, he came out again soon.<\/p>\n<p>But I used up many teachers, even several teachers at the same time.\u00a0When I was more confident of my abilities, the public followed my progress, my future began to shine, I took\u00a0on\u00a0teachers myself\u00a0, had them seated in five consecutive rooms, and learned from all of them at the same time by continuously jumping from one room to another.<\/p>\n<p>These advances!\u00a0This penetration of the rays of knowledge from all sides into the awakening brain!\u00a0I do not deny: it made me happy.\u00a0But I also admit: I did not overestimate it, not even then, how much less now.\u00a0Through an effort that has not been repeated on earth,\u00a0I have achieved the average\u00a0education of\u00a0a European.\u00a0Perhaps that wouldn\u2019t be anything in itself, but it is something insofar as it helped me out of the cage and gave me this special way out, this human way out.\u00a0There is an excellent German saying: hit the bushes;\u00a0I did that, I hit the bushes.\u00a0I had no other way, always provided that freedom was not to be chosen.<\/p>\n<p>If I look at my development\u00a0and your previous goal, I neither complain nor am I satisfied.\u00a0With my hands in my trouser pockets, the wine bottle on the table, I\u2019m half lying, half sitting in the rocking chair and looking out the window.\u00a0If there is a visitor, I will receive him as it is due.\u00a0My impresario is sitting in the anteroom;\u00a0I ring the bell, he comes and hears what I have to say.\u00a0In the evening there is almost always a performance, and I hardly have any more successes that can be increased.\u00a0I get by from banquets late at night scientific societies, home from cozy get-togethers, a little half-trained chimpanzee awaits me and I enjoy it with her like a monkey.\u00a0I don\u2019t want to see her during the day;\u00a0for she has in view the madness of the confused, trained animal;\u00a0Only I know that and I can\u2019t stand it.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, I have achieved what I wanted to achieve.\u00a0Don\u2019t say it wasn\u2019t worth the effort.\u00a0Besides, I don\u2019t want anyone\u2019s judgment, I just want to spread knowledge, I just report, I only reported to you, gentlemen from the Academy.<\/p>\n<p>If you enjoyed A Report For An Academy by Franz Kafka check out <a href=\"https:\/\/quizlit.org\/metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka\">Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka<\/a><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Best Franz Kafka Books to Read<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3R8iA8G\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3RnnEre\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/415CK7Z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3NbcXFL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><br \/>\nClick on the image to buy a copy<\/p>\n<p>Narrated by Martin Reyto, courtesy of Librivox<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Report For An Academy by Franz Kafka was written and published in 1917. It tells the tale of an ape explaining his slow and painful domestication to the level of a cultured European. This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. A Report For An [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}