With Kafka Goes to the Movies, Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide the first account of Kafka’s moviegoing life. This innovative history of early cinema offers an absorbing look at a witty, passionate, and indulgently curious writer, one who discovered and used the cinema as a place of enjoyment and escape, as a medium for the ambivalent encounter with modern life, and as a filter for the world around him.

Hanns Zischler, born in 1947 in Nuremburg, is an actor and publicist. He has directed TV movies and live theater and has appeared in films by Chabrol, Godard, and Wim Wenders. He is a cofounder of Merve and Alpheus Publishers. His most recent publications are Day Trips (1993) and You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover (1995). He has lived in Berlin since 1968.

A Winterhouse Book.
Published by the University of Chicago Press.