Kafka Meets Orwell

2024

The prelude to a dystopian novel about the absurdity of surveillance in everyday life four years after the outbreak of the great pandemic.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., because he had done nothing wrong, but one day he was quarantined. He was still in bed when the official message appeared in his health app. Until the authorities arrived, he was not allowed to leave his apartment for the protection of the public, it said. Anyway, he didn’t feel like getting up, probably he had one or two glasses of wine too many at his little birthday party yesterday.

Perhaps the conversation with a neighbor he had met yesterday on his way home had been too loud or too critical or just too long because of his exuberant mood. After all, the neighbor was known to the authorities and had already been interrogated several times because of his critical attitude. Once he had even disappeared for 10 days.

Certainly the old woman from the house opposite had something to do with the decree of his quarantine. Nothing escaped her watchful eyes when she leaned against the open kitchen window, as she did just now, and watched suspiciously what was happening on the street. In reporting violations to contact restrictions or the obligation to wear…