Lovers of Franz K, translated from the Kurdish by Sami Hêzil, is an unusual, labyrinthine tale. An exploration of truth, deception and the malleability of history, it questions how official and personal narratives are warped to fit ideology, and how systems stand between the individual and truth.
Lovers of Franz K is the first novel written by Burhan Sönmez in his mother tongue, Kurdish, after writing five novels in Turkish. In an interview with The Bosphorous Review of Books, he says, “Your mother tongue’s way of storytelling influences your literature . . . When we talked, [Yachar Kemal] told me, you have the chance that I’ve got, we both have our mother tongue but we have to recreate it in another language.”
“According to this file, you are staying in the Steglitz neighbourhood. Your mother is German, your father is Turkish. You appear to live in Istanbul, and you frequently visit Paris. Tell me first when you arrived in Berlin . . .” Kommissar Müller’s interrogation of Ferdy Kaplan about his motives for killing a twenty-year-old student at a bus stop, and seriously injuring an elderly man, evolves as a series of mind games as interrogator and suspect spar in a mental representation of conflict.
Ferdy Kaplan: “But it was your attack on the student demonstrations that led to all this.”
Kommissar Müller: “Our duty is to maintain public order, so that people can go about their daily lives.”
Of Kurdish descent and raised bilingual in Kurdish and Turkish, Burhan Sönmez was born near Ankara, Turkey, studied law in Istanbul, and went on to work as a human-rights lawyer. A pro-democracy activist he was interrogated and injured by police in 1996, came to London for treatment, and stayed on as a political refugee for ten years. Today, he splits his time between Cambridge and Istanbul. Sönmez writes from experience.
Ferdy Kaplan is transferred from Tegel Prison to the Moabit courthouse where he stands before a panel of three judges, and is interrogated yet again. It turns out that the elderly man who was injured by one of his bullets was Max Brod, the Israeli Jewish author — a paradoxical literary figure because of his actions as the literary executor of his friend, Franz Kafka. He disobeyed his friend’s wishes to burn all unpublished manuscripts and, instead, edited and published The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, as well as Kafka’s letters and diaries. Thanks to Brod, Kafka became a pillar of modernist literature.
Brod’s refusal to destroy Kafka’s work and override his last wish raises ethical questions to this day: was it betrayal or literary salvation? An early supporter of Zionism, Brod died in 1968, in Tel Aviv.
The assumption is made by the judges that Ferdy Kaplan is a member of the clandestine group which has as its mission the protection of the spirit of great writers. A key concern being to respect Kafka the man himself, not his works.
“Max Brod did not remain loyal to the truth. He took no notice of human nature and ignored the wishes of his friend. It is a responsibility of life to stay faithful to the truth.”
The police make inquiries in Paris and Tel Aviv and study the books of Max Brod and Franz Kafka. They search for evidence that will help them to frame Ferdy Kaplan in a coherent manner. They want to know if the attack was intended to punish only Brod for disregarding Kafka’s Will and publishing his works, or if there are plans to target other writers.
Prosecutor: “Is it possible that the defendant has links with Palestinian militants? As we know, since Israel defeated the Arab armies last year, violence has been spreading across Europe as well as in the region. We hear of a new incident every other day.”
Ferdy Kaplan: “Unrelated assumptions, irrelevant stories. Supposedly information will come from Turkish police . . . information will come from Israeli police . . . It’s all utterly meaningless . . . You are trying to put your lies in my mouth.”
The absurd, opaque legal proceedings probing the alleged guilt of Ferdy Kaplan echo Kafka’s The Trial which isn’t just a tale of unending bureaucracy, but a metaphor for the cruel absurdity of life itself. In The Trial, Josef K. remains powerless to challenge arbitrary authority. In Lovers of Franz K., Ferdy K. rebels against literary authority as he literally tries to assassinate Max Brod to enforce Kafka’s will. It is a clever twist on the question: who has the right to decide over another person’s fate, be it in court or a writer’s archive? The trial is not just legal — it is a debate on publishing ethics vs. burning Kafka’s archives.
The interrogations are intercut with flashbacks to vignettes about Ferdy K. as a boy growing up in Istanbul; his activism; and memories of his great love, Amalya. She had left for 1960s Paris where student anti-establishment radicals argued about the legacy of Franz K.; wrote and read articles for the magazine Stylo Noir. A darker protest movement had emerged: one that punished not only living Nazis, but those who insulted the memory of the dead.
The account of Oradour-sur-Glane where just four days after D-Day, the Waffen-SS looted and razed the entire village after massacring all the residents, leaving smouldering ruins, serves as a stark example of how historical memory matters. Allegedly executed to root out members of the local Resistance movement, the annihilation was fuelled by a toxic cocktail of paranoia, vengeance and unfettered cruelty. When society refuses to reckon with past genocides — be it the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and others — it sets the stage for history to repeat itself. Denial is fertile ground for future atrocities.
Refusing to face the truth about monstrous acts is an act of complicity because it enables the continuation of injustice. In Lovers of Franz K, the parallels are made clear between the atrocities of the Nazi era, and state violence in more contemporary contexts like the Watts Riots in LA: brutality is not confined to any one time or place.
Ultimately, the book probes the boundaries of good and evil, infused by existential inquiry. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but questions the stories we are told, and the ones we tell ourselves.
With echoes of Borges and Dostoevsky, Lovers of Franz K is more than a literary psychological thriller — it is a creative resurrection; a metafictional kaleidoscope where Poe meets Kafka whose bureaucracy is refracted through a Cold War lens. Literary rebel Sönmez does not just pay homage to Kafka — he enacts it.
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