Throughout my German Studies education, I was fascinated with the strange paradoxes found in Kafka's life and his works, which I encountered over and over again. It is said, for instance, that Franz Kafka found humour in some of his darkest and strangest works, and that, when he would read the first chapter of "The Trial" aloud, he would find it so funny that he could hardly stop laughing. He had to stop reading his story to collect himself. The power of Kafka's stories seemed to grab hold of me and not let me go. Kafka's writing is uniquely simple, direct, and easy to read in German, yet his stories are strangely challenging to comprehend and interpret. So many biographical and bibliographical works written about Kafka have tried to explain the complex character of Kafka and his work, often coming up with vastly differing opinions about the man and the nature of his work. The ambiguity in Kafka's works is what both strongly attracted and spoke to me. I was moved by his biography, his stories, and the power they have to speak to different readers in different ways. This power in his storytelling appears to be what has kept his works alive through time and space, and what has kept them relevant for such a range of audiences.
The more I read and studied the writings of Kafka, the more inspired I became to begin to craft and tell my own complex stories. First, I wrote some fairy tales about my heroes and my family history, and then I started sharing them as oral tales to small storytelling groups. I found that through storytelling, I was able to connect with people in ways I wasn't able to before -- I witnessed the power of the story firsthand. Inspired by Kafka, my family history, and the correlation I found between storytelling and connecting with others, I studied the history of storytelling and its place in the present, as well as in the future. My study of Kafka, his stories, and the history and nature of storytelling led me to my own journey of discovering four main elements that are vital to the power of stories and storytelling, which include that stories are platforms that carry the personal, familial, and ethnic (hi)stories; storytelling -- either oral or written -- enables the unique expression of oneself; stories allow thought and memory to be shared with a larger audience across time and space; and finally storytelling allow an uncommon narrative to thrive and survive the test of time.
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