The Literature Network - Dark tale of torture

Dark tale of torture

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From: Chicago Sun-Times
Date: 20001113
Author:HEDY WEISS

Franz Kafka's horrific short story, "In the Penal Colony," is the quintessential holocaust drama, and the use of a small "h" here is deliberate. This chilling 1919 tale of a journey into the heart of darkness predated the Nazi Holocaust, as did Kafka's life. Yet the work of this middle European Jew, who died in 1924, might easily have been scrawled in the midst of those terrors.

Of course the impulse to do evil, and the obsession with death and destruction, power and pain, existed long before the 20th century, and continue in full force into the 21st. And as Kafka saw it, not only were these ...

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