Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Act One: Berlin and Prague Immanuelkirchstrasse 29 is a short walk from my house in Berlin. The five-story corner apartment went up in the early years of the twentieth century, when Prenzlauer Berg was a mixed-class district of workers and upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, the façade suffered damage in the Second World War and was neglected during the four decades it stood in the capital of the German Democratic Republic. It has since been immaculately restored, with a fresh coat of cream paint and a new set of angel-faced mascarons above the turquoise window sills. There is a decent trattoria on the ground floor as well as a wine bar with outside seating where it is pleasant to sip Silvaner and wile away an endless July afternoon, yet there is no plaque near the entrance that would inform passersby that the building was once the site of one of the more remarkable episodes in the history of the German postal service. It was here that Fraulein Felice Bauer, a valued employee of Carl Lindström Inc., received or read hundreds of letters, postcards, and telegrams sent to her by Dr. Franz Kafka, a civil servant at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia and a partner in the asbestos factory owned by his family. The two met on August 13, 1912 at the home of their mutual acquaintance, the novelist Max Brod. Bauer was on the first leg of a vacation through the Austro-Hungarian empire, and decided to pay a call on her distant relative in Prague. An anxious and vacillating Kafka was there to get some advice from his successful literary friend about the selection and arrangement of short stories for his debut collection, Meditation. That evening Kafka and Bauer spoke