How long has he been here? He doesn't know. All day, that's for sure. Or is it weeks? Months? Years? He waits, waiting for the opportunity to tell his story: the story of an extraordinary humanization. Forcibly abducted from West Africa to Europe, the monkey Rotpeter sought and found his way out in radical assimilation: he trained himself to shake hands with humans, practiced spitting in the face of his counterpart, overcame his aversion to alcohol and developed a complex vocabulary. Little by little he has thus achieved a supposed humanization that now allows him to attest to himself having the "average education of a European". By repressing his origins and past, he has achieved material prosperity and recognition, and as a human impersonator and variety artist he has become a welcome guest at scientific conferences and private parties. Rotpeter had suspected from the beginning that all these privileges would only ever be a way out of captivity and would never again mean true freedom... Kafka's work belongs to the canon of world literature. His story "A Report to an Academy" is one of the few works that was published during his lifetime. It first appeared in the magazine "Der Jude" in 1917 - a contemporary historical reference that provides the basis for numerous interpretations.
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