Virtual Memories Show 616:
Ken Krimstein
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“Prague was to Einstein as the apple was to Newton. The city is bizarre. It’s got a heritage of art and science crashing into each other, going all the way back to Mad Emperor Rudolf II.”
LIVE from Labyrinth Books, artist and vulgarizer of history (in the French sense) Ken Krimstein returns to the show to celebrate his new book, EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND (Bloomsbury)! We talk about the mystery of the 15 months Einstein & Kafka overlapped in Prague, how the two of them invented the modern world, what Ken has learned about graphic storytelling after 3 books, how the theory of relativity bedeviled him since childhood, and how he managed to make a graphic novel about Jews in Prague and not include a golem. We get into all the research and rabbit-holes of this project, including his monthlong research-stay in Prague, as well as the chapter he had to cut on Kafka’s love of Yiddish theater, the challenges of portraying Einstein’s professional and personal struggles, and his discovery that readers would follow his phantasmagoric flights and surreal episodes. We also discuss Ken’s fixations on Mitteleuropa and scenes & salons, Sam Gross‘ observation about his art, Kenny Werner‘s concept of effortless mastery, why he wants to bring some joy to his next project, and more. Give it a listen! And go read EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND!
(And go listen to our 2018 and 2022 conversations!)
“What comics allow us to do is buy a mouse throwing a brick at a cop over and over and over again, in a landscape that looks like the surface of Mars, and changes every second. And we buy Kafka, too.”
“I thought, ‘I won’t deal with Einstein as a scientist, but I’ll deal with him as a German Expressionist.'”
“Kafka didn’t know he was Kafkaesque.”
SPOTIFY
“Anytime you’re trying to scratch the surface of reality and push it out, you’re doing comics. You don’t know it, but you are.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and has been published in eight countries and in six languages. He is also the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can and, most recently, When I Grow Up, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the Washington Post. A recipient of a Yaddo residency, he lives and writes and draws in Evanston, IL.
Follow Ken on Instagram and go listen to our 2018 and 2022 conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Labyrinth Books in Princeton on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Ken by me. It’s on my instagram.