Overcoming Kafka: navigating the habilitation process in Poland and Germany

The article employs a strategy of thinking as dialogue that permeates various levels: reflexive thinking (internal dialogue), face-to-face conversation, and email correspondence. Navigating the complex experiential-discursive fabric, the authors move between the spheres of lived experience, memory, contemplation, analysis, and interpretation of what is connected with the habilitation process (becoming professors) in Polish and German academic contexts. Harnessed to the dialogical universe, autoethnographic theory, existential philosophy, and Kafka’s literary work serve here as a means to demonstrate the transformative power of shared suffering, pain, and vulnerability. The goal is to launch the process of forming new Academia, based on the idea of humanizing academic practices, taking into account the subjectivity of those who participate in them. On another level, the presented article demonstrates the “power of weakness” by “overcoming Kafka” together, leading towards activity as a form of positive autoethnography that aims at resistance and healing, in both personal and collective dimensions.