Reiner Stach, Kafka:The Years of Insight, Trans. by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press, 2013.
Introduction
This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924--a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life and works, draws readers in with a nearly cinematic power, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka's personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world scarred by World War I, disease, and inflation.
In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger Artist to The Castle.
A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight.
Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on this three-volume biography. The second volume, Kafka: The Decisive Years (Princeton), is also available. The first volume, covering Kafka's childhood and youth, is forthcoming. Shelley Frisch's translation of the second volume was awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize. She has translated many other books from German, including biographies of Nietzsche and Einstein, and she holds a PhD in German literature from Princeton University.
This well-researched new biography details the last nine years of Franz Kafka’s life and explores the personal, social, and political events that shaped his writing. In 1915 (the year “The Metamorphosis” was published), the 32-year-old Kafka was afflicted with headaches, insomnia, and loss of appetite, trapped in his grinding job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, and perpetually warring with his tyrannical father. Kafka’s suffering and perfectionism strained his relationship with his fiancé, Felice Bauer, and took its toll on his writing. After threatening to enlist to fight in WWI, Kafka was given time off by his employers in the summer of 1916, and a brief vacation in Marienbad seemed to turn him around. The following year, though, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the year after with the Spanish flu—both of which hastened his death in 1924. Quoting liberally from Kafka’s letters and notebooks, Stach (Kafka: The Decisive Years) presents Kafka in conflict: someone who shared a near marital relationship with his devoted younger sister, Ottla, but who couldn’t commit to the eligible women in his life; a man interested in studying Hebrew but wary of Zionism; an artist whose fortunes were tied to the city, yet who found his greatest peace growing vegetables in the country. Despite the narrow time frame, this insightful book is likely to become a standard by which future biographies are measured. - Publishers Weekly
"Conclusion of a massive, comprehensive life of the famed Czech/German/Jewish writer, chockablock with neuroses, failures and moments of brilliance. . . . An illuminating book built, like its subject's life, on small episodes rather than great, dramatic turning points. Essential for students and serious readers of Kafka."--Kirkus Reviews
"With impressive insight into imaginative artistry, Stach illuminates the way Kafka responds to personal trauma and global firestorm, sometimes incorporating his negative circumstances into his fiction, but sometimes transcending those circumstances in metaphysical creations informed by a profoundly personal myth. This literary-biographical analysis will help scholars penetrate major Kafka works, including The Castle and The Trial, The Hunger Artist and The Burrow. Thanks to a lucid translation, English-speaking readers can now share the German enthusiasm for this masterful portrait."--Bryce Christensen
"[S]uperlative, readable and . . . genuinely gripping. . . . Stach manages to recreate the worlds through which Kafka moved and in which he suffered in a manner that reads . . . like high-quality fiction. . . . Stach on Kafka is more than worthy to be put on a shelf of the magisterial literary biographies of the last few decades. . . . It is quite splendid."--Kevin Jackson
"No one will ever be able to write Kafka's story as well as he could, but Reiner Stach, a first-class German scholar, does remarkably well in Kafka: The Years of Insight."--Robert Fulford
"A definitive biography of a rare writer. . . . [M]asterful. . . . [T]his biography makes for an excellent read. Mr Stach, a German academic, expertly presents Kafka's struggles with his work and health against a wider background of the first world war, the birth of Czechoslovakia and the hyperinflation of the 1920s."--The Economist
"A definitive biography of a writer as transcendent as Franz Kafka might be unattainable, but in his massive trilogy, Stach comes as close as one can."--Robert Legvold
Praise for Kafka: The Years of Insight: "It would be impossible to describe the work and essence of this key artist of the twentieth century in a livelier and more vibrant style. . . . A masterpiece of the art of interpretation and of empathy."--Der Tagesspiegel
Praise for Kafka: The Years of Insight: "Reiner Stach has recounted Kafka's life more vividly than any other biographer. The reader moves through his Kafka biography, which reads like a novel, in breathless anticipation. . . . No one has written about Kafka as suggestively and insightfully, and in such a beautiful and clear language, as Reiner Stach."--Ulrich Greiner
"Stach's plentiful virtues include his vivid social and historical panoramas, especially of the years of war, epidemics, and inflation; his narrative brio (the greatest part of the book is riveting); and his indefatigable scholarship, providing access to unpublished letters of signal importance."--Stanley Corngold
"Enlightening, readable, and convincing, this is a major addition to our understanding of Kafka's life. Stach has a connection to and familiarity with his subject that no other biographer can match. He gives us a real understanding of the ground from which Kafka's writings emerged--what he was reading, which lectures and concerts he was attending, who he was talking with and writing to, and what he was saying to himself when he was writing. Closer we cannot get. And Shelley Frisch's translation is a marvel--accurate, fresh, and elegant."--Mark Anderson
The immense third and final part of Stach’s trilogy is almost too unbearable, too destabilizing, too unnerving, finally, perhaps, too fierce. The uncanny spheres found in Kafka’s writing are not, like Melville’s invisible ones, merely ‘formed in fright’, which is bad enough, but are gathered out of an insinuating dread whose force-field reaches out from the writing into the solitary act of reading itself. As I read about him nearly more than I can bear is at stake. The loneliness, horror, disgust and shame of writing are never more pronounced than in the awful presence of Kafka, even a Kafka mediated by biography. Writing is its own metaphor for that loneliness, horror, disgust, and shame. Kafka is a miracle of dissembling arts, the most dangerous of hunger artists whose writings are unavoidable shameful acts, a writer whose writing is exactly the explanation needed for why he writes, and who, by being shamed, disgusted, horrified and lonely, is justified without remainder.
Kafka played his game of lonely hide and seek with this dread as a kind of chiding, and the conditions for modern literature have been set by his intensity, his crazy frankness, his terrible acts of concentration. To read about it is to marvel at how he managed to almost disappear in front of his own eyes in order to appear elsewhere, for a little while, as a writer resisting annihilation through zealous contortion. Kafka becomes an equal partner with the disaster of being a writer for as long as he could. He was popular, smart, good looking enough to attract women, a joker and a writer with enough fame to feed the ego whilst not so much that would distract from the business. He was capable of acts of kindness but his erotic escapades were pretty dismal. Kafka was a creepy womanizer – at thirty he was stalking with the help of Max Brod some sixteen year old he saw one time at Goethe’s house and he built himself an impervious persona who was cruel, calculating and decisively self-serving when dealing with his never-ending erotic interests. He was also very successful at work, and was therefore a consummate bureaucrat of the Weberian ‘iron-cage’ variety. His fiction’s verisimilitude is provided by his insider’s knowledge and mastery of the hierarchy of authority, of impersonality, of efficiency and achievement driven operationalism, of the specialized division of labour and the written rules regulating all conduct that delivers the implacable power of his fantasies and continues to drive the managerialism of our contemorary workplaces.
His strange obsessions with health and food and his body strike Stach as a species of asceticism. ‘There is little doubt that anxiety about his porous identity and his fear of dissolution, liquifaction and, ultimately, death gradually compelled Kafka to develop an ascetic survival strategy… fear of sex… does not account for the single-mindedness with which he clung to asceticism for the rest of his life or the highly imaginative manner in which he subjugated one area of his after another – eventually even literature – to an ascetic form.’ Stach discusses the ascetic in terms of a purity. ‘Choosing a ‘pure’ life could mean any number of things. It was even possible for someone to be dirty and clean at once; Kafka later considered this combination “characteristic of people who think intensely.” But Stach’s book is good enough to allow for a gulf between his interpretation and a reader’s. Kafka writes letters and diaries that make clear that he has only one subject and that is himself as literature. ‘I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.’ Decisive in this identity, Kafka frees himself from ties that bind those with merely an ‘artistic bent.’ In this Kafka is not an ascetic but rather a Nietzschean hedonist hell bent on following the ‘long logic’ of a life of genius where rules of the non-genius are irrelevant and dedication to his art his only consolation and purpose.
We know more than Kafka did about what happened next and because of that the life, just as the work, becomes treacherous and dangerous to interpret. In his strange, precise writings he rendered life as a catastrophe. This precision takes on an aura of prophecy because of these later events, and as we read it is tempting to fold world history into his singularity. But how much is gained by that is moot.
Nevertheless, Stach writes with a sense of dread attached to his vast undertaking. His test is whether he can write to this subject. ‘Kafka teaches us modesty. Anyone who tackles him has to anticipate failing.’ He fears ‘… the gulf between the explanations offered by the author and the interspersed Kafka citations.’ Stach claims that just as the biographer of a philosopher must be able to think then likewise, the biographer of a writer must be able to write. Stach has a kind of reverence for his subject.
Stach’s weird chapters have weird titles. One he calls ‘Ants of Prague’ and it begins with ‘a frosted region … a poor empty centre.’ The perky Kafka seems at times rather like this too – frosted with an empty centre. But that is because at his centre is the writing and the literary imagination of excessive pityless litigation that is a mysterious hole. At the threshold of the twentieth century European powers edged towards war. Kafka was fit enough for war but the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague protected him. He was ‘excused indefinitely.’ War displays were trenches, zigzagging systems of dugouts, telephones, wire obstacles next to cafes and fancy women and recreation. Prague loved it and drank Pisener beer, ate sausages, wandered the parks, listened to the Imperial Infantry Regiment No 51 Band, watched a film and sent postcards to friends. The coming horror was literally unimaginable for these people. At this time Kafka wanted to get away from the place. He wanted the urbanity of Paris and Berlin. War bonds as a wager on victory interested Kafka. He instructed his mother to invest two thousand kronen and then went to look at the displayed trenches and wrote in an attempt to capture an image; ‘Sight of the people swarming like ants in front and inside the trench.’ A childhood friend had died. His condolences to the family were ‘nearly too late, as always.’ What intrigues is the gulf between what he knew and what he writes. What did Kafka know? He knew what he wrote, and whether that is the same as what we know when we read him now is probably indeterminate. The Nazis brought vivid horror to his personal history, annihilating surviving family members and lovers, exiling others, and this inevitably mutates our understanding . That his writing can contain the enormity of such horrors is why Kafka remains quintessentially contemporary. Our modernity, especially our world of work, seems more than ever like his imagination’s fruition. The disappointment in this biography is how little his worklife is discussed.
Stach quotes Karel Capek: ‘Strange what a feeling of solitude there is in failure’ but it’s not clear whether Kafka thought of himself as a failure. The word ‘impossible’ is Kafka’s signature adjective according to Stach. This was picked up by Cynthis Ozick’s ‘The Impossibility of Being Kafka’ in 1999. ‘One must not prostrate oneself before the minor impossibilities’ says Kafka, ‘… or else the major impossibilities would never come into view.’ But this then changes the way we have to understand Kafka. It isn’t possible to even attempt to do something you know is impossible, let alone fail. Kafka’s relation to his writings is peculiar. There’s no reason to think Kafka knew how it worked. He for sure knew he was a writer, and he could make no concessions to that. But how to understand what it might mean, why should he be expected to know anything over and above the compulsion to write and its content? Max Brod didn’t understand it. Stach tries to hone it and thinks Kafka sought the impossibility of perfection. He cites Kafka: ‘Although striving for perfection is only a small part of my big Gordian knot, in this instance every part is the whole and so what you are saying is correct. But this impossibility actually does exist, this impossibility of eating etc; it is just not as blatantly obvious as the impossibility of marriage.’
By the time Felice Bauer detected Kafka had changed so had she. She lost hope of ever marrying him. Enigmatic misunderstandings defined the relationship. She sensed his rhetoric was a means of maintaining silence and avoiding her. July 12th 1914 was a catastrophe for Kafka. On that day he dissolved their engagement in front of witnesses in the Askanischer Hof. Stach senses he hated Felice on that day. He says she was Grete Bloch in ‘The Trial.’ He hid the manuscript from Felice. ‘Basically the same primitive accusations are always being levelled against me. The highest representative of this form of accusation, which comes right from my father, is of course my father.’ In choosing writing over life, which may be a little too trite a way of seeing it but is nevertheless sort of what we see in Stach’s account, what is strange is how good at life Kafka was. He had many friends, a deep relationship with his sister and his rather adolescent diatribes against his family were largely occasions allowing him to write. And he was good at his job. Even the hundred page letter to his father was never sent. All that mattered was to write, not to crush his dad.
Three weeks after breaking with Felice war broke out. He called them disasters that ‘dug into the same wound.’ He called them ‘… catastrophes of loneliness.’ Kafka remembered Felice’s wounded accusation: ‘a terrible saying… Now you’ve got what you wanted ’ and it would become another site for his writing. Hopes of escape from Prague were dashed. His favourite sister Ottla had a boyfriend and this inconvenient relationship robbed him of their intimate conversations. He was jealous and further isolated. ‘At these times I feel as though I am standing not in front of my house but in front of myself while I am sleeping…’ And again we need to be aware that perhaps all that’s happening in these diary entries and his letters are examples of the writer perfecting his images. Who can know what he actually felt, or even care?
In ‘The Burrow’ the creature defends his deep intricate burrow by standing guard outside of it. ‘It got to the point that at times I was seized by the childish desire never to go back to the burrow at all but to settle in here near the entrance and spend my life watching the entrance and find my happiness in realizing all the time how the burrow would keep me secure if I were inside it.’ Oddly Stach doesn’t drive home the link between this story, the autobiographical crux and the earlier identification of ‘impossibility.’ There’s the hint of the impossible act of sitting outside one’s own life, observing it. But to do so would require another self sitting outside the life of the observer, observing the observer, and then another observer to observe the observer observing … and so on in an infinite regress. From ‘The Burrow’ to ‘The Castle’ and ‘The Trial’ isn’t so far. The same paradoxical nightmares arise and their repecussions either grip you or they don’t.
To Grete, a witness and judge at the catastrophe at the Askanischer Hof he wrote; ‘ Even if everyone were to hate you, I don’t hate you… in reality I was sitting in your place and have not left it to this day.’ Stach sees this letter as a series of defensive gestures. He thinks it is aggressive. He says the central message was ‘Stay away from me.’ But Kafka is just writing and the more you read the life you see that everything he wrote was about getting the writing precise, not the life right. The reality is a pretty funny and banal soap-opera episode: he’d been caught out chatting up two women and then found himself sitting with them both having to explain himself. All that is extraordinary is that he uses it as a platform for producing startling images and narratives of such weirdness that they breech hermeneutic form and settle as opaque allegory.
Hours before he had written that he had contemplated suicide. Stach sees the letter as a new way of dealing with his situation with Felice, ‘living in the trenches.’ Stach notes that his rhetoric no longer fazed Felice. ‘If I were another person observing myself and the course of my life I would have to say that everything must end in futility, consumed by never ending doubt, creative only in self-torment. But as someone involved, I go on hoping.’ Stach writes ‘ He left the burrow, hid nearby, kept watch on the entrance, embraced the entire entrenchment including the naked creature hiding inside, and enjoyed the view from an untouchable distance.’ Kafka reports on himself in the third person: ‘he is frightened. He says he stayed there too long…’ The chapter ends with a trip to Karlsbad and an error.
Karl Kraus writes: ‘ Any sacrifice should be made for art – except from the sacrifice of art itself.’ ‘The Trial’, if completed, would bring him success and he had guaranteed support from well established literary circles. Stach insists he worried about failure but I think Stach identifies failure with non-completion and this is a mistake. Symptoms of exhaustion in 1915 continued. Kafka fell into a kind of silence and he no longer read his diary aloud to friends. For those with an idea that Kafka was Kafkaesque, this fact alone ought to disabuse them of that thought. Who reads their diaries aloud to friends? This is a confident guy, this is one for whom life is merely the ground for what he thinks is serious. Only a few works were published at the start of 1915, ‘Meditation’ and ‘The Stoker’ and scattered stories. Nothing sold well and Stach talks about the paltry interest from promised publishers alongside his lack of work completed. In mid October 1915 he was informed that ‘The Metamorphosis’ had been published in ‘Die Weissen Blatter’ without his seeing the galleys. The publisher Meyer used aggressive advertising campaigns to sell his authors. This was advanced thinking. Authors were asked to contribute to the promotion of their own books. Meyer pushed for the Fontane Prize money to go to Kafka even though the prize was to go to the millionaire writer Sternheim. Kafka insisted that no drawing of the insect was put on the cover: ‘Not that, please not that!… the insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot even be shown from a distance.’ Kafka turned down the offer at first but then accepted it and wrote a strange letter of thanks to Sternheim who never replied. Stach has a brilliant phrase when he writes that all attempts to encourage Kafka went astray ‘ in some strange way’. I like the furtive mystery Stach hangs on it.
The war was misunderstood at the start and its contours of disaster only slowly learned and psychologically mapped. The war moved towards mechanization. The battle of Gorlice-Tarnow was a turning point. Stach thinks Kafka meanwhile ‘integrated the war into his hypochondriac game.’ He wrote to Felice, ‘ it would be my good fortune… to become a soldier… You ought to wish for me to be accepted, the way I want it to work out.’ He spoke of resigning from his job. He had ludicrous plans. He thought Rilke wrote regrettable poetry of ‘lofty, ultimate form’. But the new circumstances were beyond him in life. ‘The disturbing part is not the fact of the war, but rather that it is being used and exploited in a commercialized world that is nothing but profane’ he wrote. ‘Throughout this war, rash lies spread by the newspapers came up with one new fact after another; you get the impression that since there has been this press coverage carried to an extreme, a war cannot stop once it has started. Those disgraceful papers are always one step ahead of the actual events.’ Zweig and Hofmannsthal remained delusional about the war. Rilke was luckily sent to the war archives not the front. Kafka never got to wore uniform but was released for a long vacation by his bosses Pfohl and Marschner. He didn’t think this good fortune.
Stach insists he understood the truth about the war. On top of everything else there was the ‘hellish official channel to the war for Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute staff members.’ On top of the reports and the physically mutilated were the Kriegszitterer whose ‘facial tics, stuttering, muteness, deafness, blindness, and especially “hysterical tremors” accompanied by violent shivering and uncontrolled trembling that could go on for months and years undiminished …’ Stach is of course right. Kafka understood the war in his writing ‘The Penal Colony’ in 1914 and now it had crawled out of his imagination into the streets ‘… right there in the centre of Prague.’ Kafka recognized that the Institute’s ‘Committee on Therapy’ needed ‘fewer regulations and more philanthropy.’ When Kafka was employed to write messages about the war they were platitudinous and patriotic propaganda. No one asked him which sanatorium would be best for returning traumatized soldiers despite his personal experience.
It was in ‘The Penal Colony’ that he knew about the horrors of war. His life story tracks nothing but the usual mix of cowardice and bravery mixed with luck, both good and bad. ‘It would have been half a lie if I had asked for an immediate lengthy leave and for my dismissal if it were refused. It would have been the truth if I had given notice. I didn’t dare to do either, so it was a total lie.’ When he had dreamed of leaving for Berlin longing for an erotic encounter with Felice at the time of writing ‘The Judgment’ in 1912 he had lost his nerve. Here he had stepped away from trenches and the hospital. ‘Captivity, disability, the void.’ By this point he had not the energy to even ‘vizualise a concrete end to his life.’ Writing was stifled by ‘headaches, insomnia and increasing isolation.’ Kafka’s decisions were not determined by considerations, convictions or concepts. ‘He never used deductive reasoning for the mere sake of reasoning.’ He took the war personally. He reacted to gazes not arguments. He read out all pressure from faces. He suspected slanders from all quarters. Everything was processed by his writing. He was taking literally his claim to be literature. Only the art could redeem his life.
Darkness descended on Kafka in the summer of 1915. He read military campaigns of Napoleon, and the Bible. He stopped going to the movies and reading contemporary writers. Relationships making demands on him disintegrated. Kafka made an inventory of suffering that included no people. Heimito von Doderer’s ‘The Strudlhof Steps’ of 1951 deliberately used dry lifeless inadequate language like ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Castle’ where it says ‘Only in an operetta can the happy man be someone who forgets what cannot be changed.’ He rifled through paperwork but refused to see that life is the decision maker. He had a three week break and went by rain to Marienbad. Stach writes: ‘… he sought and found an image that united near and far, the mysterious distance of what appears closest to us and the provocative presence of the unattainable, yet nearly attainable, off in the distance: a dialectical image, a thought image.’
This was ‘the door.’ Doors in his work are open but inaccessible or have peepholes or open by themselves or invite torture and death by touching them or that alter their degrees of accessibility. This last one he invented on his thirty third birthday in Marienbad with Felice. They switched hotels and constant rain fell. ‘I arrived at a human relationship of a kind that I had never known before and that came very near in quality to the relationship we had achieved at our best periods as one letter writer to another.’ Kafka and Felice were turning their backs on their social circles. She would continue to work. They would marry. This was the single most visible consequence of the war. Accusations of accompanying hedonism were misfires: people took whatever was still there. It won’t make any difference now was the frantic, defeated, scared generality. In the proximity of death life becomes livelier. Schloss Balmoral gave him a glimpse of a utopian visual image. And this shattering detail: ” [H]e may have opened his notebook and sought a metaphor, a fitting image for this impossibility, but he did not find it. But then it slipped in on a postcard, in the form of a tiny careless mistake, of the kind he made so often. He intended to write Schloss (castle) Balmoral as the sender’s address, but it nearly came out Schoss (lap).’
Kafka asked ‘What do I have in common with Jews?’ He met the rabbi of Belz in Marienbad after Felice had left. He scrutinised the rabbi to see what features qualified him for the role. He was interested in the mystery of authority. ‘L tries to find the deeper or thinks he finds deeper meaning in everything; I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough. It is absolutely a case of divine right, without the absurdity that an adequate basis would give to it.’ Kafka found something that went beyond sectarian religiosity, ‘deeper than Judaism itself.’ Truth was a force field, untaught and lived. It included ‘vegetarians, eastern Jewish actors, calisthenics devotees, and pietists and other mystics. A true life, dans le vrai.’
He became preachy to Felice. The didactic dodges fail to impress her. He involved himself in Martin Buber’s Zionism but looked for authenticity as a basis of avowals of any sort. He found examples in the Old Testament, Napoleon, Grillparzer, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Rudolph Steiner, Morris Schnitzer, the Pietists of Herrnhut, the rabbi of Belz, Feigl’s married life and Lily Braun’s ‘Memoirs of a Socialist. ’What do I have in common with the Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself.’ He turned Buber down. Reviewers pigeon-holed him as either a German or Jewish writer. Brod saw Kafka in terms of his own fierce Zionism and so they disagreed. Felice was involved in Jewish community work and education though she was no Zionist. For Kafka what was unworkable was not valueless if it was truthful.
He kept his own interpretation to himself. He read ‘The Penal Colony’ in Munich, the only reading he ever gave outside of Prague, in Goltz’s art gallery, and met Rilke. Rilke had read everything. He worked in his sister’s cottage. Wrestling with impossibilities. People started starving as the war dragged on. Stach keeps imagining what his Kafka might have said throughout: ‘Kafka might have replied that this was the age of the ascetics. A dark time, an icy time, to write.’ ‘I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge.’ ‘No one will read what I am writing here.’ ‘We had set up camp in the oasis. My companions were asleep.’ ‘Yesterday a swoon came to me. She lives in the house next door.’ He writes ‘Red Peter’ in a free monologue.
The notebooks are testing grounds. No manipulation of language, no word coinings, no pointless alliteration, no imitation of oral speech, misue of grammar, accumulations of dashes or exclamation points. He tried a play and it remains a fragment. ‘The Warden of the Tomb.’ It has not grown the significance yet of other fragments such as ‘ A Country Doctor’, ‘The Bridge,’ ‘Up in the Gallery,’ ‘The Next Village,’ ‘The Bucket Rider,’ ‘A Fratricide,’ all written in December and January. ‘Jackals and Arabs,’ and ‘The New Attorney’ were written in February. ‘An Old Page,’ ‘Eleven Sons’ were written in March. ‘The Cares of a Family Man,’ ‘A visit to a Mine,’ ‘A Crossbreed,’ and ‘ A report to an Academy,’ in April. The ‘Hunter Gracchus’ project ran from January to April. In March through April ‘My Neighbour,’ ‘The Knock At The Manor Gate,’ and ‘The Great Wall of China’, all these ‘ensured a worldwide exegesis of Kafka, a humble approach to writing to his writing, groping its way with eye and index finger and taking the text as revelation, snatching it away from the realm of mere mortal criticism once and for all. In particular, the mystifying texts from Kafka’s octavo notebooks lured critics, and then general readers, into picking them apart letter by letter in the quest for meaning – an approach that would eventually extend to Kafka’s entire oeuvre.’
These were texts ‘of unreal fullness and perfection’ without ‘trace of genesis’ where their deathly atmosphere was a symbol of his day. Daily nuisances were written as harbingers of epochal catastrophes. This was literature as redemptive art and again supports a Nietzschean undersanding of what he was doing. ‘ This apartment might not restore my inner peace, but it would at least give me a chance to work; the gates of paradise would not fly open again, but I might find two slits for my eyes in the wall.’ The motto of his future work was that, plus the ‘cramped stage, open at the top.’ He called himself ‘the Rat of Palais Schonborn.’ His rhetoric obscures through analytic precision. He grew closer to his sister and supported her rebellions against their family. He met with Felice and reengaged with her before they parted realizing that they would never marry. The famous picture of the two of them is taken then and is full of disillusion.
His publication was slow and ludicrous. He wrote animal stories as dark sayings that accumulate into parables. They are written to keep their secrets and to exclude their readers. He lives in the Alchimistengasse. Alchemists of the crazy Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II lived there in 1600. ‘My life is just monotonous and proceeds within the prison of my innate, threefold misfortune, in a manner of speaking. When I can’t do anything, I am unhappy, when I can do something, there isn’t enough time; and when I look to the future for hope, the next thing I know is that the fear is there, the wide-ranging fear, and then I am less able to work. An exquisitely calculated hell. Yet – and this is the main point – it is not without its good moments.’
Saturday, August 11, 1917, 4 A.M Stach tells us that he wakes coughing blood. ‘You don’t have a long way to go’ says his housekeeper. TB was a disease from outside his social milieu. He avoided the medical diagnosis and instead talked about it as if it were a mental illness, a final defeat, a punishment, a symbol. Brod had no sympathy with this. Many were angry with his attitude where ‘the language is of a distraught piety.’ ‘There is undoubtedly justice in this illness…’ writes Kafka, and again there’s the sense of his working to the pressurized intensity of pure writing. It substitutes for spirituality and psychology and therefore flies around madly. Stach thinks Kafka found TB easier to bear than moral and social pressures. Kafka says ‘It is almost a relief.’ The ‘almost’ should make us defer judgment and at least consider bravado in the teeth of fear. Kafka goes for three months in Zurau. He said he couldn’t get married with TB. ‘Then Kafka pointed to a suitcase and said, ‘Take the coffin.’
Zurau was teeming with animals. Good weather brought the farm to the brink of destruction. He emphasized the unsexualized bliss with his sister because of the impending decision about Felice. When Felice came to him she met a changed man. He was bored with her. He said he was brooding on big ideas. She had come to help. Brutally rejected, she had to fight embarrassment and humiliation. He writes a letter Canetti finds distressing, ‘an unworthy myth and a false one’. He was tormented but not unhappy. Stach thinks Brod and (later) Canetti fail to appreciate that Kafka ‘was struggling for psychological survival.’ They’re probably all right to some extent. But on balance, I think he acted like a coward with most of the women, and was a bullshitter and liar in equal measure. On December 27th he helped Felice onto a train and never saw her again. He cried harder than he had ever done, and was proud of feeling wretched.
His was a solipsistic furtiveness. That in itself raises deadly paradox. He was out to avoid self-judgement. He took courses in Hebrew with a sexy teacher. He reads Dickens, Herzen, the diaries of Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, JMR Lenz, Hans Bluher, Theodor Tagger – and of these only Kierkegaard was explicitly religious. Of the Dane he read ‘The Moment’, ‘Fear and Trembling,’ and ‘Repetition.’ He heard his own questions in them. The Zurau meditations say ‘ the direction is correct; there it is, but your eyes don’t reach far enough to see it, and they never will.’ This is a image that is a gesture to ‘The Trial.’
What is the difference between the last insight and the last attempt at rescue? Happy in his unhappiness he forges a condition of profound dislocation from the world where ‘everything has fallen apart’, where ‘no voice can reach out to him clearly any longer and so he cannot follow it straightforwardly.’ He perfects a calm and laconic tone to express catastrophes. A way in to understanding Beckett is to begin by noting that Beckett hated this tone and expressed his catastrophes in a different register. Beckett’s characters are all wreckages, Kafka’s aren’t.
Returning to Prague he missed his sister. He escalated his Purism, swam in the Moldau river, walked, did Pomology, Viniculture, Horticulture. He wrote another masterpiece and he died horribly. He nearly made it with another woman but it was too late for the kind of games he liked to play. The details of his death seem too intrusive and are a bit ill-judged here. Stach’s book is aptly strange. It is profuse but the lens is jumpy, so the focus is at times a close up and at other times from far off. The volume is staggering, possibly more impressive by dint of its oddness than a more straightforward telling would have been. The connection between it and the previous volume seems a little fragmented, and there is an as yet unwritten first volume. The hold-up has been a law-suit. - Richard Marshall
Someone must have been telling lies about K., for the popular image of him as the great Gloomy Gus of 20th-century letters (close rivals: Beckett, Cioran, maybe Céline) does not bear very much scrutiny. Consider this incident, which took place as he was dying of tuberculosis, and knew it. One day, when he was walking in a Berlin park, Kafka saw a little girl crying. He asked her why she was sad and she told him that she had lost her doll. Oh no, Kafka said, her doll was not lost - the toy was simply off on an exciting adventure. Understandably sceptical, the girl asked for proof. So Kafka went home and wrote a long, detailed letter from the doll, and gave it to the little girl the following day. Then, every day for the next three weeks, he gave her an additional letter. It seems that the doll had met a boy doll, and become engaged, and then married. By the end of the three weeks, the doll was setting up her marital home and the little girl no longer missed her mute companion.
This is hardly the sort of thing you would expect of the fellow who wrote The Trial or The Castle or 'In the Penal Settlement' (one of the most horrific short texts ever to have sneaked its way into the literary canon), and it is poignant as well as charming, not least because in our own climate of nervy erotic suspicion a middle-aged male writer who attempted such kindliness would have the social services or police on him like a shot. But the story of Kafka and the Lost Doll is instructive as well as surprising.
It explains to the neophyte what an unusually kind and thoughtful man he could be, even when he was drawing his shallow breaths in sharp pain. Some of his fans think that - again like Beckett - he bordered on the saintly. But it also hints at Kafka's knowledge of the power that lies in stories, his own stories in particular. Stories can cure the sadness of small girls. They can also frighten, console, give courage. They can help even a sick and dying writer make some sense of what remains of his short life. Kafka seems often to have thought of writing as a curse or (to borrow a term from the literature of shamanism) a sickness vocation. And yet the thing that makes you ill may also, from time to time, make you powerful.
Some of Kafka's greatness is due to the fact that his work belongs as much to the very long history of storytelling as to the relatively short history of Western literature. On the whole it is plain, simple, direct and tantalisingly cryptic. His stories worm their way under your skin and stay there until you itch. They make some people itch so badly that they have to start telling their own stories about K. In the years when his reputation first began to take off, after the Second World War, he was mainly revered as Kafka the prophet, the man who had read the entrails of his age and foreseen, first, the rise of totalitarianism, secondly the cancer-like proliferation of faceless officialdom, thirdly 'alienation' and finally, especially, the death camps in which most of his close family and lots of his friends were murdered.
That story of dark prophecies is still being passed around, despite its many and increasingly evident flaws. In the last few decades, though, it has had no shortage of competition. Despite the curious fact that Kafka's body of fictional work is slender - three unfinished novels, a clutch of short stories, some prose fragments - it has generated such a gigantic industry of comment that only an eternal graduate student could possibly keep up with the output. Among the regiment of Kafkas now stalking the world, we have Kafka the Christian mystic (though he wasn't a Christian), Kafka the Jewish mystic (he had bafflingly complicated views about Jewish identity and religion), Kafka the Zionist, Kafka the sexual inadequate, Kafka the wicked capitalist (he co-ran an asbestos factory), Kafka the vegetarian, Kafka the socialist, Kafka the social butterfly and laugh riot, and, in Saul Friedländer's new essay - a very good and sane little book, which may safely be put into the hands of newcomers - Kafka the poet of shame and guilt. Having noted how often Kafka writes about canine encounters, I am myself tempted to write a monograph entitled Wie ein Hund: Kafka and Dogs. But it's a fair bet that someone will have beaten me to it.
In short, we need more Kafka commentary about as much as we need more asbestos factories. Kafka biography is a different matter, and Reiner Stach's thumping two-volume account of Kafka's life from late adolescence to early death - a third volume, on his childhood, is apparently in the works - is a superlative, readable and occasionally genuinely gripping addition to the giant scrap heap. Stach's achievement is not so much in having turned up new material (though he has), or in making an all too familiar narrative bright and fresh (though he does). What he has achieved is to make you feel, by the end of the book, that Kafka is someone you now know very well, perhaps almost too well.
There are no big surprises here, just hundreds of small ones. The Kafka and the Lost Doll story is well enough known to buffs; Stach pairs it with another story of a little girl in a park and gives it in Kafka's own words. During another walk in the park, Kafka saw another little girl, this one very pretty and coquettish. She smiled at him.
Naturally I smiled back at her in an overly friendly
manner, and continued to do so when she and her girlfriends kept
turning back in my direction. Until I began to realize what she had
actually said to me. 'Jew' is what she had said.
Stach manages to recreate the worlds through which Kafka moved and in which he suffered in a manner that reads more like high-quality fiction than a regurgitation of excessive research. He puts us inside the famously cramped apartment in which Kafka the impossible son scraped against the rough surfaces of his angry father; inside the insurance offices in which Kafka worked, and worked very well; inside the back-biting, log-rolling, blatantly ambitious circles of young Czech writers; inside sanatoria; inside the brothels Kafka patronised when his need for sex overpowered his dread of women.
Stach is a first-rate scholar and, unless his German prose has gained in the translation by Shelley Frisch, a fine writer who can be a little too show-off at times ('the fearless dance over the abysses of life that this golden couple celebrated') but is more often, like his leading character, content to be simple: 'Women appreciated that.' The biographer has entertained the biographee in his mind so long that Stach's summaries command assent where a less devoted writer's words might seem merely impertinent: 'He tried to limit any movement or change, like a wounded man who fears pain so much that he stays in whatever position he is in, no matter how uncomfortable.'
Above all, Stach is brilliant on Kafka's love life, a topic that might seem like a candidate for one of those 'World's Shortest Books' jokes, but is in fact as rich as it is strange. As usual, Kafka does not come out of these amorous scrapes at all well: lots of commentators have found his long and mostly epistolary courtship with Felice Bauer creepy to the point of 'vampirism', and he dumped one of his last girlfriends as summarily as any heartless rakehell. His affair with Milena Jesenská, more than eventful enough for a downbeat date movie, is exceptionally well told here; you can almost feel Stach's hands trembling with exasperation as he is obliged to show how Franz manages to botch his best chances for a few years of common happiness with a vital, passionate girl.
Nor is this a book solely for the Kafka fan club. By filling in the details of Kafka's Prague (and Berlin, and the High Tatras), Stach has created a valuable new account of a world that was about to be destroyed. Anyone interested in the Europe and Middle East of the early 20th century would find it engaging. There are good things in every chapter, including the reactions of Kafka's contemporaries to this polite and curious being in their midst. Here is the satirist Franz Blei, in 1922: 'The Kafka is a very rare magnificent moon-blue mouse that does not eat meat but feeds on herbs. It is a fascinating sight because it has human eyes.'
And here is Kafka on Kafka:
Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for
what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's visual
instruction, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent
to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these
dubious embraces and whatever else may take place down below, which is
unknown to those up above, writing their stories in the sunlight.
Perhaps there are other forms of writing, but I know only this kind; at
night, when fear prevents me from sleeping I know only this kind.
A final note of encomium: Stach on Kafka is more than worthy to be put on a shelf of the magisterial literary biographies of the last few decades, next to, say, Ellmann on Joyce and Wilde, Holmes on Coleridge, Walter Jackson Bate on Johnson, Tomalin on Pepys, Bellos on Perec, Hilton on Ruskin, Steegmuller on Cocteau, Nicholl on Marlowe and Rimbaud and Shakespeare, Morgan on Burroughs, Brotchie on Jarry, Miller on Foucault, Rukeyser on Hariot, Monk on Wittgenstein and Russell, Roudinesco on Lacan... When the third and final volume appears, Stach's work may well come to be seen as one of the very best of this distinguished company. It is quite splendid. - Kevin Jackson
"Dear Sir,” the reader wrote, “You have made me unhappy. I bought your
Metamorphosis as a present for my cousin, but she doesn’t know what to make
of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn’t know what to make
of it either. Her mother gave the book
to my other cousin, and she doesn’t know what to make of it either. Now
they’ve written to me…”
History doesn’t record Franz
Kafka’s reply to this fan letter from 1917, but his
correspondent’s fascinated bemusement echoes down a hundred years of
Kafkaology. What, after all, are any of us to make of this body of work,
with its elusive blend of the mundane, the comic and the purely uncanny?
Generations of readers and scholars have observed it through the telescopes
of mysticism, Judaism, modernism, psychoanalysis, theory and biography, but
the work continues to float like a strange planet in the skies of
literature, enclosed by its unique atmosphere of wide-awake nightmare and
hilarious, lazy unease.
The German scholar Reiner Stach has spent more than 20 years working on
Kafka’s life, and his comprehensive biography is now available in this
country for the first time since the publication in German of its two
volumes in 2002 and 2008. It arrives in a Kafkan bureaucratic tangle all its
own, since these two stout books are, in fact, the final two in a projected
trilogy. To write the first volume, covering the childhood, Stach needs
access to papers from the estate of Kafka’s friend and executor Max Brod,
which have been locked up for years in the possession of their elderly
custodian (Brod’s secretary’s daughter) while a protracted court case
shuttled between judges.
The irony of a Kafka biographer stymied by the depredations of heredity and
the slow revolutions of the law will be lost on no one, though a fortunate
judgment last year finally ordered the papers back into public
hands. As it stands, however, Stach’s biography introduces us to Kafka in
1910 – he is a 27-year-old insurance clerk living with his mother, father
and three sisters in their flat in Prague – and follows him through to his
death at the age of 40 from complications of tuberculosis.
This coincides, broadly speaking, with the period in which Kafka became a
writer. Although he had written several prose pieces since 1904 and
subsequently begun the novel that would become Amerika, it was only with The
Judgment, dashed off in a single night of sleepless composition in 1912,
that he felt he had made his breakthrough. Writing that story, in which a
young man is condemned to death by his father, taught Kafka “how everything
can be hazarded,” as he wrote in his diary; “how for everything, even for
the strangest idea, a great fire is ready in which it expires and rises up
again”.
Stach’s book succeeds brilliantly at clearing a path through the thick metaphysical fog that has hung about Kafka’s work almost since his death. As everyone knows, Kafka requested that Max Brod burn his unpublished work; as everyone knows, Brod ignored the instruction, though whether Kafka really expected him to comply remains open to debate. Brod had long complained of Kafka’s perfectionism in life, and, as a selfless promoter of other writers, he was determined that his friend should have his due in death. His opinion of Kafka as “the greatest poet of our time” and his barrage of stitched-together publications and commentaries managed to cast Kafka as a kind of writerly sage, inaugurating a long tradition of critical blindness to anything but the most serious, poetic and religious aspects of the work. Such interpretations were given further plausibility by the ominous metaphors of the totalitarian era in which Kafka studies came of age.
Stach’s book succeeds brilliantly at clearing a path through the thick metaphysical fog that has hung about Kafka’s work almost since his death. As everyone knows, Kafka requested that Max Brod burn his unpublished work; as everyone knows, Brod ignored the instruction, though whether Kafka really expected him to comply remains open to debate. Brod had long complained of Kafka’s perfectionism in life, and, as a selfless promoter of other writers, he was determined that his friend should have his due in death. His opinion of Kafka as “the greatest poet of our time” and his barrage of stitched-together publications and commentaries managed to cast Kafka as a kind of writerly sage, inaugurating a long tradition of critical blindness to anything but the most serious, poetic and religious aspects of the work. Such interpretations were given further plausibility by the ominous metaphors of the totalitarian era in which Kafka studies came of age.
Stach sets himself to redress this balance. In addition to Doktor Kafka the
doom-ridden poète maudit of Prague, he gives us Dr Jackdaw (Kavka in Czech),
the charming young writer, fond of slapstick humour, who, reading the first
chapter of The Trial to his friends, became so convulsed with laughter that
“he could not continue reading at times” while they howled “uncontrollably”.
To add to Kafka the endless clerk, plagued by the job he hated, he gives us
Kafka the lawyer and invaluable insurance expert, throwing his considerable
organisational weight behind campaigns for hospitals for shell-shocked
veterans of the trenches.
The point is not that Kafka was one and not the other. He was both. But this account seems correspondingly more fresh for the years of leaden interpretation that precede it. We encounter Kafka convalescing from tuberculosis on his sister’s farm: “He picked rosehips, set up a vegetable garden, got down on all fours and dug potatoes from the ground, fed the cattle, drove the horse and cart, and even chopped wood and tried his hand — rather clumsily — at the plough.” We see him with his girlfriend Julie Wohryzek: “They trudged together through short paths in the snow, launched into stories, switching back and forth between German and Czech, punctuated by laughter. And when they ran into one another, they burst into laughter before they even spoke.”
Other lingering misapprehensions — particles of what James Hawes, in his satirical 2008 study Excavating Kafka, called “the K-myth” — are exploded with equal good cheer. Was Kafka unknown in his lifetime? Not at all: his publishers printed his books and begged him for more, his pieces were added to the repertoire of a famous elocutionist and reciter and he belonged to an influential band of writers, none of whom was averse to rolling a log for a friend.
But anyone tempted to discard the other point of view too quickly need only run an eye down one of the harrowing processions of nouns in the index: “selfishness; shame; suffering; suicidal thoughts; unhappiness; unspecified declines; weeping”. We become grimly familiar with Kafka’s health-freakery and hypochondria: his faddish eating and exercise regimes, his ghastly fantasies of penetration and dismemberment and his habit of worrying so hard over nebulous illnesses that tuberculosis eventually came, he wrote, “almost as a relief”.
Stach is also good on Kafka’s doomed love life, beginning with his strange epistolary courtship of the unfortunate Felice Bauer, with whom he exchanged 500 wrangling, confessional letters over five years while seemingly making every effort not to see her in person. When he eventually felt compelled to propose marriage, he did so in an 18-page document containing such inducements as “You would lose Berlin, the office you enjoy, your girlfriends, the small pleasures of life, the prospect of marrying a decent, cheerful, healthy man, of having beautiful healthy children”; and once they were married, he concluded, she would probably have to bring him his meals in a special writing cell underground.
This is a fearsome demonstration of Kafka’s splinter of writerly ice in the soul, the blend of sensitivity and iron selfishness that Felice and his other intimates eventually recognised to their cost. It could manifest as masochistic self-laceration — “You are my human tribunal,” he told Felice, while his later lover Milena was asked to go through his notebooks for anything “against him” — or simply as a chilly distance from the world. “Kafka once wept after reading a news report of a woman who murdered a child,” Stach tells us, “but noted at the same time, 'A well-plotted story’.”
Such observations are valuable because the texts themselves manifest just this kind of doubleness. By enshrining their cryptic personal symbols in a German whose purity was much remarked on in Kafka’s lifetime, they became polished for public display while remaining deeply and woundingly private. “He wanted his texts to see the light of day,” Stach observes, “but to remain in the dark himself.” The remark helps explain Kafka’s lifelong concerns over publication.
This biography is illuminating on Kafka’s literary influences, including Dickens, Flaubert and Robert Walser, and particularly on his vexed relationship with Jewishness, another topic long overshadowed by history and interpretation. Brod’s own ardent Zionism informed his conviction that Kafka wrote some of “the most Jewish documents of our time”, a perspective much amplified by academic exegetes in the wake of the Holocaust. But such suggestions bemused Kafka, who once frustratedly wondered to his diary: “What do I have in common with Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself.”
Even while Brod was praising his work for its Jewishness, Kafka wrote to Felice, another critic was simultaneously examining its “fundamental Germanness”. “Won’t you tell me what I really am?” he implored. In later life he learnt fluent Hebrew, read avidly in the Hasidic tales and dreamt of emigrating to Palestine; yet the word “Jewish” appears nowhere in his work. Again, Kafka seems to float obstinately free of interpretation, slipping from the hands of those who would claim him for a cause.
It is common to say of biography that it sends you back to the work. Stach’s book does this in spades, but, importantly for English readers, it also presents new aspects of the work in Shelley Frisch’s superb and lucid translations. Many English admirers of Kafka are likely to have read him in dated and occasionally problematic Thirties versions by Willa and Edwin Muir. In her afterword to this book, however, Frisch writes that she has retranslated all the quoted excerpts herself since no standard Kafka edition exists in English. If this constitutes a job application, she would be an excellent candidate for the post. Between them, she and Stach have produced a superbly fresh imaginative guide to the strange, clear, metaphor-free world of Kafka’s prose: a prose which, just like the court in The Trial, “wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.” - Tim Martin
The point is not that Kafka was one and not the other. He was both. But this account seems correspondingly more fresh for the years of leaden interpretation that precede it. We encounter Kafka convalescing from tuberculosis on his sister’s farm: “He picked rosehips, set up a vegetable garden, got down on all fours and dug potatoes from the ground, fed the cattle, drove the horse and cart, and even chopped wood and tried his hand — rather clumsily — at the plough.” We see him with his girlfriend Julie Wohryzek: “They trudged together through short paths in the snow, launched into stories, switching back and forth between German and Czech, punctuated by laughter. And when they ran into one another, they burst into laughter before they even spoke.”
Other lingering misapprehensions — particles of what James Hawes, in his satirical 2008 study Excavating Kafka, called “the K-myth” — are exploded with equal good cheer. Was Kafka unknown in his lifetime? Not at all: his publishers printed his books and begged him for more, his pieces were added to the repertoire of a famous elocutionist and reciter and he belonged to an influential band of writers, none of whom was averse to rolling a log for a friend.
But anyone tempted to discard the other point of view too quickly need only run an eye down one of the harrowing processions of nouns in the index: “selfishness; shame; suffering; suicidal thoughts; unhappiness; unspecified declines; weeping”. We become grimly familiar with Kafka’s health-freakery and hypochondria: his faddish eating and exercise regimes, his ghastly fantasies of penetration and dismemberment and his habit of worrying so hard over nebulous illnesses that tuberculosis eventually came, he wrote, “almost as a relief”.
Stach is also good on Kafka’s doomed love life, beginning with his strange epistolary courtship of the unfortunate Felice Bauer, with whom he exchanged 500 wrangling, confessional letters over five years while seemingly making every effort not to see her in person. When he eventually felt compelled to propose marriage, he did so in an 18-page document containing such inducements as “You would lose Berlin, the office you enjoy, your girlfriends, the small pleasures of life, the prospect of marrying a decent, cheerful, healthy man, of having beautiful healthy children”; and once they were married, he concluded, she would probably have to bring him his meals in a special writing cell underground.
This is a fearsome demonstration of Kafka’s splinter of writerly ice in the soul, the blend of sensitivity and iron selfishness that Felice and his other intimates eventually recognised to their cost. It could manifest as masochistic self-laceration — “You are my human tribunal,” he told Felice, while his later lover Milena was asked to go through his notebooks for anything “against him” — or simply as a chilly distance from the world. “Kafka once wept after reading a news report of a woman who murdered a child,” Stach tells us, “but noted at the same time, 'A well-plotted story’.”
Such observations are valuable because the texts themselves manifest just this kind of doubleness. By enshrining their cryptic personal symbols in a German whose purity was much remarked on in Kafka’s lifetime, they became polished for public display while remaining deeply and woundingly private. “He wanted his texts to see the light of day,” Stach observes, “but to remain in the dark himself.” The remark helps explain Kafka’s lifelong concerns over publication.
This biography is illuminating on Kafka’s literary influences, including Dickens, Flaubert and Robert Walser, and particularly on his vexed relationship with Jewishness, another topic long overshadowed by history and interpretation. Brod’s own ardent Zionism informed his conviction that Kafka wrote some of “the most Jewish documents of our time”, a perspective much amplified by academic exegetes in the wake of the Holocaust. But such suggestions bemused Kafka, who once frustratedly wondered to his diary: “What do I have in common with Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself.”
Even while Brod was praising his work for its Jewishness, Kafka wrote to Felice, another critic was simultaneously examining its “fundamental Germanness”. “Won’t you tell me what I really am?” he implored. In later life he learnt fluent Hebrew, read avidly in the Hasidic tales and dreamt of emigrating to Palestine; yet the word “Jewish” appears nowhere in his work. Again, Kafka seems to float obstinately free of interpretation, slipping from the hands of those who would claim him for a cause.
It is common to say of biography that it sends you back to the work. Stach’s book does this in spades, but, importantly for English readers, it also presents new aspects of the work in Shelley Frisch’s superb and lucid translations. Many English admirers of Kafka are likely to have read him in dated and occasionally problematic Thirties versions by Willa and Edwin Muir. In her afterword to this book, however, Frisch writes that she has retranslated all the quoted excerpts herself since no standard Kafka edition exists in English. If this constitutes a job application, she would be an excellent candidate for the post. Between them, she and Stach have produced a superbly fresh imaginative guide to the strange, clear, metaphor-free world of Kafka’s prose: a prose which, just like the court in The Trial, “wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.” - Tim Martin
The second volume of Reiner Stach’s epic biography of Franz Kafka begins in the year 1916 and ends with Kafka’s death in 1924 (in a slightly bizarre – almost Kafkaesque – sequence, the third and final volume will cover its subject’s boyhood and youth) and thus encompasses the two great impersonal upheavals of Kafka’s life: the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the wake of the First World War, and the collapse of Kafka’s health due to tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the summer of 1917. These are years of intense personal upheaval as well, with Kafka shuttling almost frantically from one emotional relationship to another. His tortured dalliances with Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, and Dora Diamant all date from this period, as well as his very strange and almost entirely epistolary passion for Czech journalist Milena Jesenski. And as if all that weren’t enough, these years also mark a deepening of both conviction and confusion in Kafka’s attempts at writing, with works like The Castle and “The Hunger Artist” achieving something like their present forms and a number of other works thinly emerging from sketches and notebooks.
It’s a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach’s magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer – the book has many digressions but no longueurs – but he can only do so much to manage the essentially grim nature of his story: despite a string of health regimens, spas, and clinics, Kafka grows steadily sicker, until we wince whenever he ventures outside:
Four months later [November 1920], the streets of Prague were covered in grayish slush, and Kafka was feeling drained. He had been running a low-grade fever almost all the time, and he alternated between chills and sweating. He was short of breath, and if he fell into conversation with someone outdoors and breathed in too much cold air, a coughing fit was sure to follow. His coughing did not let up even at night, and it sometimes went on for hours on end. Everyone – his friends and family, and especially his youngest sister, Ottla – agreed that something had to be done.
The evaporation of the formal empire in which he’d lived his life deeply underscored Kafka’s sense of his own uprootedness, his feelings of being a stranger in the world. Stach very sensitively explores how this feeling may have intensified Kafka’s interest in his own Jewish heritage – and in the possibility of making a journey to the Holy Land, which Stach describes as a very different place from its 21st century counterpart:
In the fall of 1922, only 11 percent of the three million people living in Palestine were Jews, and the notion that Jews would reclaim Palestine with their hands – namely by acquiring and cultivating land – was no more than a collective myth. Only 3 percent of the landed property was in Jewish hands, and only about a thousand people lived in kibbutzim. The Jewish immigrants who came later crowded into the cities and even misstated their professions so that they would not be sent to the country.
The progress of Kafka’s illness is agonizing – for him thanks to the helpless state of medicine at the time, and for the reader thanks to Stach’s indefatigable research and passionate writing (as in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex – all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch). In the end, the ravages of his throat make eating impossible and one of the seminal authors of the 20th century simply starves to death. But long before that point in his narrative, Stach has subtly shifted his emphases from life to legacy. What, ultimately, does Kafka mean?
It’s both haunting and more than a little funny that Stach seems to come up with an answer with which Kafka might have agreed:
Particularly in the early years of Kafka’s worldwide renown, his work, his achievement as a writer, was insistently categorized as “prophecy.” Kafka, it was said, was one of the first to predict and envision the anonymous violence of the twentieth century, and that was the primary reason for his overwhelming resonance. But this view overlooks the fact that Kafka was himself witness to the devastations of utterly depersonalized, technologically based violence, which was already claiming victims in his day. This lethal alliance of violence and bureaucracy burst onto the scene in August 1914 and was later called the “great seminal catastrophe” of the century. The world war was unthinkable without typewriters, files, index cards, and official seals – he knew that better than any of his writer friends.
Readers who’ve experienced the odd, jumpy, iron-grip spell of Kafka’s work will be nodding at that eloquent mention of “this lethal alliance of violence and bureaucracy.” Kafka himself would probably have smiled knowingly at “typewriters, files, index cards.” - Steve Donoghue
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/kafka-the-years-of-insight-by-reiner-stach-1.1508223
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years. Trans. by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press, 2013.
Introduction[PDF]
read it at Google Books
This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.
Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.
"Most impressive is Stach's recounting of the creation of his subject's writings. . . . Stach's own writing is wonderfully expressive."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[S]uperbly tempered. . . . [T]hrough this robustly determined unearthing he rescues Kafka from the unearthliness of his repute. . . . Shelley Frisch, Stach's heroic American translator, movingly reproduces his intended breadth and pace and tone. . . . In this honest and honorable biography there is no trace of the Kafkaesque; but in it you may find a crystal granule of the Kafka who was."--Cynthia Ozick, New Republic
"A scrupulous, discriminating, and highly instructive account of Kafka's life."--Robert Alter, New Republic
"Stach's is a splendid effort and will be hard to surpass."--William H. Gass, Harper's Magazine
"A masterpiece of inspired biographical writing."--Choice
"Probing. . . . Essential reading."--Booklist (starred review)
"Magnificent."--Die Zeit
"Stach develops the various elements that play a role in Kafka's life brilliantly."--Der Spiegel
"The first great biography of Franz Kafka ... exciting and instructive from the first to the last page."--Tagesanzeiger
"This extraordinary biography fills the empty spaces between Kafka's own writings and the writings of friends, family, and contemporaries with so much empathy and imagination that one can't put it down."--Frankfurter Rundschau
Reiner Stach opens the first volume of his monumental projected three-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka – Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (published in 2002, given a superb English-language translation by Shelley Frisch in 2005 as Kafka: The Decisive Years, and now reprinted in a handsome paperback by Princeton) with a disclaimer so long, so eloquent, and so all-encompassing that the average reader will have the last reaction they’d ever expect to have upon starting a long biography of a very intense young writer: outright laughter. Stach characterizes the whole biographical enterprise as a hopeless muddle, a futile and fraudulent attempt to impose order on chaos:
What is the cause, and what is the effect? The slightest shift of emphasis, and the picture changes. A conclusion can prove false or crumble. How much can a biographer afford to simplify? How far can a biographer go to reconstruct the bits and pieces in order to recount them? The sheer number of interrelations between the thematic honeycomb cells makes any narrative geometry impossible.
And if all those sines and secants of narrative geometry weren’t bad enough, their application to a life like Kafka’s makes things that much worse:
Disillusionment soon follows. Most of this material consists of unsupported speculation or academic verbiage. No theory is too far-fetched to have been advocated somewhere by someone; there is no methodological approach that has not been used to interpret Kafka’s work. Some monographs resemble autistic games; it is impossible to imagine a reader who might reasonably benefit from them … No definitive biography of Franz Kafka exists. Even the number of attempts at a comprehensive biography is unexpectedly limited, and to date there are no more than three or four introductions to Kafka published anywhere in the world that are worth reading.
“No definitive biography of Franz Kafka exists” is brutal if untrue and even more brutal if true; it’s the sort of thing writers only risk saying when they’re engaged in writing a multi-volume biography of their own. Even from a marketing perspective, they have to say it; no reader is going to undertake 1500 pages running the risk that what they’re reading isn’t definitive. This is especially true in Kafka’s case, where whole tranches of pertinent documents – the literary estate of Kafka’s lifelong friend and avid editor Max Brod – have been kept under vindictive lock and key for half a century by Brod’s former secretary and now by her daughters. Stach’s approach to circumventing this villainous obstruction has all the virtues of necessity: he’s saving Kafka’s early youth – about which, presumably, Brod’s diaries would give their best value – for the final volume of his trilogy. The first two volumes concentrate instead on Kafka the grown man, for whom there’s at least some sourcework that isn’t mildewing in a lock-box under somebody’s bed.
That adult life is, to put it mildly, well-studied, and if Stach is brutal to those previous biographies, he’s no less brutal to his subject:
All his literary projects that grew beyond the scope of a story failed Failure plagued his endeavors in other literary genres; the language of poetry was inaccessible to him; his plan to write an autobiography was never realized; and his halfhearted forays into dramatic writing yielded no tangible results. Let us imagine, as a comparison, that the works of a composer comprise just a few finished pieces of chamber music and dozens of fragmentary compositions, including three unfinished symphonies. Is the composer a failure? An incompetent? Brod tried to gloss over this lamentable situation by adopting a tendentious editorial strategy. Today, however, there is nothing left to conceal: the critical edition of Kafka’s oeuvre is available, and it is impossible to escape the impression that Kafka left a heap of rubble for posterity.
In this first volume, Stach sifts through that rubble with huge amounts of energy and discretion (and Frisch follows him without a misstep; it feels like exactly the same book I read ten years ago in its original language). The volume covers the years 1910 to 1915 and includes in-depth looks not only at such works as The Trial and “The Metamorphosis” but at the long and complicated course of Kakfa’s relationship with Felice Bauer and her family. His letters and journals are marshaled with sometimes breathtaking ingenuity, and the sheer scope of the work allows Stach to be expansive when painting his backgrounds. We get, for instance, every detail of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand – and plenty of details about the war that assassination triggered:
But the Great War was different from anything people had been able to imagine up to that point. It went beyond any national or ethnic point of view. During the war, an average of 6,000 soldiers were killed each day, and 13,000 were wounded. The catastrophe of technologically sophisticated carnage that would last longer than four years – and there had been prophecies of that sort – was completely unanticipated by most people. Even those whose profession it was to make the inconceivable conceivable – intellectuals, writers, artists – were at a loss.
Always in these recountings, Stach is searching for his elusive subject, trying – as all previous biographers have tried, though none so well – to hear Kafka’s strange, singular voice in the noise:
Was Kafka immune to the war slogans? We would like to think so. Finding a voice that remained pure and authentic in the midst of this cacophony would be a consolation.
Kafka: The Decisive Years was greeted with a loud chorus of praise when it first appeared in English, and the passage of almost a decade has cast no doubt on that verdict. Princeton has re-issued this classic so that it can stand next to the following volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight, newly published in hardcover. No one interested in Kafka (or, by almost inevitable extension, 20th century literature) should miss either. -Steve Donoghue
Reiner Stach opens the first volume of his monumental projected three-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka – Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (published in 2002, given a superb English-language translation by Shelley Frisch in 2005 as Kafka: The Decisive Years, and now reprinted in a handsome paperback by Princeton) with a disclaimer so long, so eloquent, and so all-encompassing that the average reader will have the last reaction they’d ever expect to have upon starting a long biography of a very intense young writer: outright laughter. Stach characterizes the whole biographical enterprise as a hopeless muddle, a futile and fraudulent attempt to impose order on chaos:
What is the cause, and what is the effect? The slightest shift of emphasis, and the picture changes. A conclusion can prove false or crumble. How much can a biographer afford to simplify? How far can a biographer go to reconstruct the bits and pieces in order to recount them? The sheer number of interrelations between the thematic honeycomb cells makes any narrative geometry impossible.
And if all those sines and secants of narrative geometry weren’t bad enough, their application to a life like Kafka’s makes things that much worse:
Disillusionment soon follows. Most of this material consists of unsupported speculation or academic verbiage. No theory is too far-fetched to have been advocated somewhere by someone; there is no methodological approach that has not been used to interpret Kafka’s work. Some monographs resemble autistic games; it is impossible to imagine a reader who might reasonably benefit from them … No definitive biography of Franz Kafka exists. Even the number of attempts at a comprehensive biography is unexpectedly limited, and to date there are no more than three or four introductions to Kafka published anywhere in the world that are worth reading.
“No definitive biography of Franz Kafka exists” is brutal if untrue and even more brutal if true; it’s the sort of thing writers only risk saying when they’re engaged in writing a multi-volume biography of their own. Even from a marketing perspective, they have to say it; no reader is going to undertake 1500 pages running the risk that what they’re reading isn’t definitive. This is especially true in Kafka’s case, where whole tranches of pertinent documents – the literary estate of Kafka’s lifelong friend and avid editor Max Brod – have been kept under vindictive lock and key for half a century by Brod’s former secretary and now by her daughters. Stach’s approach to circumventing this villainous obstruction has all the virtues of necessity: he’s saving Kafka’s early youth – about which, presumably, Brod’s diaries would give their best value – for the final volume of his trilogy. The first two volumes concentrate instead on Kafka the grown man, for whom there’s at least some sourcework that isn’t mildewing in a lock-box under somebody’s bed.
That adult life is, to put it mildly, well-studied, and if Stach is brutal to those previous biographies, he’s no less brutal to his subject:
All his literary projects that grew beyond the scope of a story failed Failure plagued his endeavors in other literary genres; the language of poetry was inaccessible to him; his plan to write an autobiography was never realized; and his halfhearted forays into dramatic writing yielded no tangible results. Let us imagine, as a comparison, that the works of a composer comprise just a few finished pieces of chamber music and dozens of fragmentary compositions, including three unfinished symphonies. Is the composer a failure? An incompetent? Brod tried to gloss over this lamentable situation by adopting a tendentious editorial strategy. Today, however, there is nothing left to conceal: the critical edition of Kafka’s oeuvre is available, and it is impossible to escape the impression that Kafka left a heap of rubble for posterity.
In this first volume, Stach sifts through that rubble with huge amounts of energy and discretion (and Frisch follows him without a misstep; it feels like exactly the same book I read ten years ago in its original language). The volume covers the years 1910 to 1915 and includes in-depth looks not only at such works as The Trial and “The Metamorphosis” but at the long and complicated course of Kakfa’s relationship with Felice Bauer and her family. His letters and journals are marshaled with sometimes breathtaking ingenuity, and the sheer scope of the work allows Stach to be expansive when painting his backgrounds. We get, for instance, every detail of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand – and plenty of details about the war that assassination triggered:
But the Great War was different from anything people had been able to imagine up to that point. It went beyond any national or ethnic point of view. During the war, an average of 6,000 soldiers were killed each day, and 13,000 were wounded. The catastrophe of technologically sophisticated carnage that would last longer than four years – and there had been prophecies of that sort – was completely unanticipated by most people. Even those whose profession it was to make the inconceivable conceivable – intellectuals, writers, artists – were at a loss.
Always in these recountings, Stach is searching for his elusive subject, trying – as all previous biographers have tried, though none so well – to hear Kafka’s strange, singular voice in the noise:
Was Kafka immune to the war slogans? We would like to think so. Finding a voice that remained pure and authentic in the midst of this cacophony would be a consolation.
Kafka: The Decisive Years was greeted with a loud chorus of praise when it first appeared in English, and the passage of almost a decade has cast no doubt on that verdict. Princeton has re-issued this classic so that it can stand next to the following volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight, newly published in hardcover. No one interested in Kafka (or, by almost inevitable extension, 20th century literature) should miss either.
Kafka's stories are all parables of despair and helplessness, sorrowful emblems of the human condition. The all-important message from the emperor will never reach our ears, the hunger artist must die because he can't find anything he'd like to eat, the mole-like digger will always fail to construct a burrow impregnable to his enemies, the door into the castle isn't ever, ever going to open. Is no redemption possible in this world? Of course it is -- just not for us.
Kafka's work is famously susceptible to interpretations of all kinds. Nonetheless, most readers still tend to see the stories as fundamentally existential or theological, the modern equivalents to Plato's fables about caves and the origins of love or of Kierkegaard's many brief philosophical fictions. But since the death (in 1968) of Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, who pushed a sacerdotal view of his friend's writing, modern scholarship has turned to examining the actual life of this enigmatic artist. Certainly nobody, with one celebrated exception, actually creates ex nihilo . And so we have now seen the careful publication of Kafka's holograph manuscripts, the scholarly editing of his every scrap, commentaries stressing his links to gesture-rich Yiddish theater and to cultural Zionism, speculation about his sexual life -- did he really have a son by Grete Bloch? -- and research into his actual daily work at the insurance office (he was a recognized authority on industrial accidents).
Reiner Stach's Kafka builds on much of this research. By focusing on 1910 through 1915 -- the time in his late twenties and early thirties when Kafka fell in love with Felice Bauer and began to produce his first great stories -- Stach aims to tell us all that can be known about the writer, avoiding the fancies and extrapolations of earlier biographers. The result is an enthralling synthesis, one that reads beautifully, in part thanks to the excellence of Shelley Frisch's English.
Though he avoids invention, Stach knows too much simply to present the facts and just the facts. With the kind of élan we associate with European intellectuals, he actively engages with his material, commenting or reflecting on its meaning. Take the correspondence with Felice Bauer. Stach admits that Kafka would have been appalled by the publication of these letters, but he then reflects on letter-writing as "one of the essential forms of modern individuality," goes on to note that mail posted on a Saturday night in Berlin (where Bauer lived) would be delivered on Sunday morning in Prague, and that Kafka so fetishized this young woman's letters that he carried them along on business trips. All this, and more, then serves to enhance a patient presentation of an agonized epistolary romance, the central thread of these crucial years.
The evening that Kafka met Bauer -- August 13, 1912 -- is, Stach asserts, one of those landmark days in intellectual and literary history, like the October afternoon in 1749 when Rousseau suddenly grasped the corrupting nature of civilization during a walk to Vincennes or the night of Oct. 4, 1892, when Paul Valéry decided to renounce poetry. A few days after that casual meeting, Kafka composed -- in a single night from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. -- his first masterpiece, "The Judgment," in which a father unexpectedly condemns his son to death. Stach aptly summarizes its importance:
"Suddenly -- without guide or precedent, it seemed -- the Kafka cosmos was at hand, fully equipped with the 'Kafkaesque' inventory that now gives his work its distinctive character: the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero."
Many months go by before Kafka again sees Bauer. During this time he confesses in his letters that he lives for literature alone, that he is unsociable, fearful, sickly, unhealthily thin, self-pitying, obsessive, neurotic, without interest in children and probably incapable of sexual intercourse. He has nothing to offer her, except his devotion -- and he's not even sure about that, since it might interfere with his writing.
Meanwhile, Bauer is dealing with problems of her own. Kafka doesn't know that her father once abandoned her mother to live with another woman, that her sister is about to give birth to an illegitimate daughter and that her brother is a swindler (who eventually flees to America to avoid his creditors). Bauer has compensated by becoming a serious career woman, the sales representative for a dictation system called Parlographs. Her family counts on her, expects her to make a good match. So, naturally she falls more and more in love with this loser from Prague.
Whenever the two meet, they are tongue-tied, and yet before long there is uncertain talk of marriage, eventually followed by a painful engagement ceremony. Not surprisingly, Kafka finally realizes that he simply can't face the prospect of a wedding and suddenly calls the whole thing off, at almost the last moment. Though Stach ends his book shortly after this, in 1915, Kafka fans know that Felice and Franz eventually started seeing each other again, and that in 1917 they announced a second engagement. Kafka cancelled a second time, this time for good: By then he was spitting up blood and diagnosed with tuberculosis. Nonetheless, he still had eight years to live and, surprisingly, there would be other women, as well as work on stories like "The Hunter Gracchus" and "A Hunger Artist" and the never-completed masterpiece The Castle .
I can't say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stach's book. Even his chapter epigraphs, while apposite, are delightfully original. When he discusses Kafka's official duties, he heads the chapter with a quotation from the Portuguese writer (and sometime office worker) Fernando Pessoa: "What are desires compared to a promotion?" When he discusses "The Metamorphosis," he opens with a line from the pulp detective Charlie Chan: "Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring." In short, every page of this book feels excited, dynamic, utterly alive. My copy is now covered with pencilings and marginalia. Meanwhile, Bauer is dealing with problems of her own. Kafka doesn't know that her father once abandoned her mother to live with another woman, that her sister is about to give birth to an illegitimate daughter and that her brother is a swindler (who eventually flees to America to avoid his creditors). Bauer has compensated by becoming a serious career woman, the sales representative for a dictation system called Parlographs. Her family counts on her, expects her to make a good match. So, naturally she falls more and more in love with this loser from Prague.
Whenever the two meet, they are tongue-tied, and yet before long there is uncertain talk of marriage, eventually followed by a painful engagement ceremony. Not surprisingly, Kafka finally realizes that he simply can't face the prospect of a wedding and suddenly calls the whole thing off, at almost the last moment. Though Stach ends his book shortly after this, in 1915, Kafka fans know that Felice and Franz eventually started seeing each other again, and that in 1917 they announced a second engagement. Kafka cancelled a second time, this time for good: By then he was spitting up blood and diagnosed with tuberculosis. Nonetheless, he still had eight years to live and, surprisingly, there would be other women, as well as work on stories like "The Hunter Gracchus" and "A Hunger Artist" and the never-completed masterpiece The Castle .
Above all, though, Stach repeatedly underscores that Kafka never valued incompleteness or endorsed a romantic cult of the fragment. "The opposite is true. He greatly admired perfect formal unity and was determined to achieve it, a resolution evident in every one of his endeavors. His pursuit of formal perfection meant that his literary texts had to develop organically from their fictional and visual seed. There could be no arbitrary plot twists." After reminding us of Kafka's need to work in sustained bursts, he zeroes in on the author's creative problem: "Kafka suffered not from a lack of ideas but from a lack of continuations . . . . He demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images, and concepts. . . . Not one detail of Kafka's descriptions, whether the color of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something, and recurs." Little wonder that almost everything fell short in this quest for perfection.
Near the end of these "decisive years" Kafka was working on The Trial . By now he had written a handful of masterpieces -- and important professional reports for his insurance company; he had fallen in and out of love with Bauer while also flirting with (or even succumbing to) her close friend Grete Bloch; he had talked with Martin Buber about Zionism, dealt with the novelist Robert Musil as his editor, and attended a ballet in which Nijinksy danced. Though we must imagine Kafka in his noisy family apartment, living on vegetables and hidden in his room, we shouldn't forget that he also traveled to Venice and once stopped in Trieste, where he could have glimpsed Italo Svevo and James Joyce. (As he had learned Italian for his insurance work, he might have spoken to them.) And even this introspective and solipsistic genius eventually noticed when Europe went to war in 1914, though not for a while. His diary entry for August 2, 1914, reads: "Germany has declared war on Russia. --Swimming in the afternoon."
Could this last, I have long wondered, be an example of Kafka's wit? (He could supposedly set his friends roaring with laughter when he read some of his stories aloud.) Certainly, one suspects a smile behind this passage in a letter to Bauer from 1913: "Are you finding any meaning in 'The Judgment,' I mean some straightforward, coherent meaning that can be followed? I am not finding any and I am also unable to explain anything in it." Many people feel just as puzzled even now when they first finish reading the story.
Such a strange man. But this fine book helps us better understand that apparently inexhaustible strangeness. Right now Kafka even seems a useful counter-example to the ongoing cult of celebrity authors and bright, edgy writing. He destroys more than he publishes, he takes art as serious and life-changing; he views writing as a vocation of dissatisfaction, unhappiness and sacrifice. As he writes to Bauer: "I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else." This certainly sounds grandiose and exaggerated, but in Kafka's case it's also true. - Michael Dirda
The result of a decade of research, this first volume of a trilogy on Kafka, flawlessly translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, covers the period 1910 to 1915. During this time he wrote some of the most hauntingly strange texts in modern literature, including the stories "Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment" and the novel The Trial. It was also a period of intense personal anxiety as Kafka struggled to reconcile his writerly need for solitude with his family's expectation that he should marry. He wrote more than 500 letters and postcards to his fiancee Felice Bauer. But "the cascade of fears that plagued and eventually overwhelmed Kafka" meant marriage was impossible. "I am taciturn, unsociable, glum, self-serving, a hypochondriac," he admitted to her in 1913. But out of the ruins of their engagement emerged The Trial, an "overwhelmingly complex" novel that translated "the accumulated humiliations" of his disastrous personal life into literature. This is a wonderfully intelligent and perceptive portrait of a uniquely powerful writer. - PD Smith
Kafka. K. The letter is his alone. He liked the word “Zweifellosigkeit,” which can be awkwardly translated as “indubitableness.” To be true, a work had to be indubitable. He felt his story “The Judgment” to be so. He wrote it in eight hours, almost in ecstasy. “This is the only way to write,” he said. He dedicated it to Felice Bauer, a woman he had recently met at his friend Max Brod’s house. In his diary he describes her as having an “empty face that wore its emptiness openly.” From 1912 to 1917 he wrote hundreds of letters to her. When he stopped corresponding, he dreamed of her as “someone who was dead and could never live again.” He burned her letters when their long engagement was finally broken off; she saved his. They are one of the great unnerving monuments of literature.
Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. “Frank cannot live,” she wrote to Brod. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.” He was a subject in the playful “Bestiary of Modern Literature,” published in 1922, and was described thus: “The Kafka is a very rare magnificent moon-blue mouse that does not eat meat but feeds on herbs. It is a fascinating sight because it has human eyes.” The famous and vindictive “Letter to His Father,” which was more than 100 pages long, was never sent to his father, Hermann, a purveyor of fancy goods. Kafka gave it to his mother to give to him. She didn’t. He lived with his parents well into his 30s, and according to Reiner Stach’s biography, “on Sunday mornings he was always overcome by slight nausea” when he saw their rumpled bedsheets “only a few steps from his own bed.”
We all know how he ate his food: he “Fletcherized” it, chewing each bite a hundred times before swallowing. He was almost six feet tall, meticulously groomed and preternaturally self-absorbed. He was an executive at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where his associates were lawyers, businessmen and engineers. He was well respected there and considered invaluable, though he was given endless leaves and extended vacations. He felt he was a citizen of another world, a white desert. It could certainly be argued that what he called his “animal stories” — “A Report to an Academy,” “The Burrow,” “Investigations of a Dog” — weren’t about humans at all. There is a beach named after him in the Baltic seaside resort of Müritz. He insisted he wanted to be a soldier, later a waiter in Palestine. He admitted he had “something against needlework.” He liked to read his work aloud to friends and found it terribly funny, sometimes doubling up with laughter. He did not like to read to rooms of strangers, but he did read “In the Penal Colony” at a German Expressionist event in Munich. Rilke was present. A newspaper review opined that the story was “too long, and not captivating enough.” When “The Metamorphosis” was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka was afraid the cover illustrator would want to draw the insect. “Not that, please not that!” he wrote to the publisher. “The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.”
The ever industrious Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, collected these conversation slips and published them. He published “The Trial” in 1925, “The Castle” the following year and Kafka’s first effort, “Amerika,” in 1927. He arranged and edited, ordered the chapters, numbered the fragments, restored the deletions. He wrote forewords and afterwords and postscripts. He titled the random pieces. He wrote a biography of Kafka. He published the octavo notebooks and the Zürau reflections. In 1948 he published the diaries. Brod seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of Kafka matter, a magic suitcase. And there’s more to come. An Israeli court recently ruled that further scraps, drawings, letters and Brod’s own diaries belong to the National Library of Israel and not to the aged daughters of Esther Hoffe, his secretary, who died in 2007 at the age of 101. Hoffe’s daughters had hoped to sell the papers here and there but principally to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany, which has the manuscript of “The Trial.”
Kafka scholars are making no attempt to contain their excitement. This new material will become available soon. Sometime. Soon. Discoveries will be made. New translations will appear. (The translations into English of Kafka’s writings by the Scottish couple Willa and Edwin Muir, to which a generation is deeply indebted, have been considered old-fashioned and not definitive for some time now — too elegant and smoothly readable, too much arising from a Kierkegaardian Calvinism and not enough from a Talmudic Judaism.) Massive biographies might at last be completed. For we must know Kafka. It is not enough to know, to live, to be intimate with the Kafkaesque.
Reiner Stach’s “Kafka: The Years of Insight,” translated by Shelley Frisch, covers the years from 1916 to his death in 1924. An earlier book, “Kafka: The Decisive Years” (1910-15), was published in 2002 and translated into English in 2005. A volume dealing with K.’s childhood and youth is forthcoming. (Stach seems reluctant to address this period. Without verifiable accounting, there are those dreadful gaps. Speculation can run riot. Kafka as a baby! Who would believe it?) The whole package will comprise some 2,000 pages.
Stach explains that his somewhat unusual manner of transmittal over the years has to do with the availability of biographical materials. He is eager to gain access to Brod’s final suitcase, the contents of which are actually in a number of bank vaults and even a cat-ridden apartment. This is what he’s been waiting for, a “first-rate resource” that will fill out Kafka’s young manhood, that will “contribute valuable insights to our understanding of the literary and historical issues concerning Kafka and the period as a whole.” This might not make your blood race, but Stach is very much a relentless historian. He would disagree with Hannah Arendt’s assertion that Kafka’s “uniqueness,” his “absolute originality . . . can be traced to no predecessor and suffers no followers.” Or he might not. His rhetoric can be shrewd. He interprets much of Kafka according to “the isolation of the Western European Jew who is cut off from his own tradition” and views “Jackals and Arabs” and “A Report to an Academy,” both of which appeared in Martin Buber’s publication Der Jude (the magazine was, after all, concerned strictly with Judaica), as lending themselves to a Jewish interpretation. With Red Peter, the ape in the latter story, Kafka chose “an inferior species with negative connotations as the symbol of the Jewish people, and it is not surprising that most of his Zionist-minded readers blocked out the logic of this image to keep the text enjoyable.” However, Stach states that such a reading is not “compelling,” for though he can be reiterative and circumlocutory, he can also (and frequently does) nimbly dissociate himself from arguments he has relentlessly constructed. Thus, Kafka in 1922 was intent on finding “images that were both simple and unfathomable, images to be engraved in cultural memory,” at the same time making notes that were “utterly incomprehensible without knowing their biographical genesis.”
Throughout, Stach emphasizes Kafka’s Jewishness (rather than, as some might consider, his almost other-species strangeness): “Clearly under the influence of his Zionist readings, physical activity had become a moral aim for him, a question of existential style.” (Kafka! Existential style?) At the same time he objects to the view of Kafka as a Zionist or a religious writer, and claims nothing of his was pure invention. This allows him to trace the iconic story “A Country Doctor,” with its dream horses, to material found in a collection called “Legends of Polish Jews.”
If Kafka liked the word “indubitable” (he was also fond of “gaze”), Stach likes “extant.” Unfortunately, little is extant concerning Kafka’s socioeconomic and political views. He didn’t seem to have any. The best Stach can claim is that “a world that was falling apart appeared to offer him boundless new resources.” Kafka was sick in bed when the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and the founding of the Czechoslovak state happened in the great square — the Altstädter Ring — directly outside the window of his family’s apartment. As well, his social behavior in general was “oddly ‘unenlightened.’ ” Scanty source material (or obvious disengagement on the part of the subject) is the bane of the biographer, of course, and Stach, as meticulous and exhaustive as he might wish to be, is forever saying “surely” . . . “presumably” . . . “we can only speculate” . . . “it is highly doubtful” . . . “apparently” . . . “we know little” . . . and so on. In fact, speculation can lead him into some pretty zany territory:
Many years and a few generations of Kafka biographers later, Reiner Stach promises a biography that will finally give a complete portrait of one of the 20th century's great failures, a man whose works could make events out of non-events and non-events out of events. He notes early that Kafka, in his writing, "left a heap of rubble for posterity," yet he doesn't manage to catch the "peculiar beauty" and purity that Benjamin found in these ruins. Rather, Stach does Kafka the odd homage of flagrantly failing to do so in a manner that only proves Kafka's enduring influence.
Indeed, this book, the first of a projected three volumes, seems to be written not by a scholar and editor named Reiner Stach but by a Kafka character called, to borrow the words of the book's promotional materials, "the definitive biographer." This character shares a purpose with the lost-seeming land surveyor, K., from "The Castle," who shows up for an undefined assignment with a compass he uses to map an infinite and ever-changing space. As the futility of his task weighs on him, his mood and voice swing from pedantry into wild resentment and veiled self-accusation as though in dialogue with a hidden adversary, much the way Kafka depicted minor officials, waiters and the various assistants in "The Trial," "The Penal Colony," and "Amerika." At one moment, Stach yearns for the old days when Kafka could be read as literature and not "as an accumulation of autobiographical codes," yet he argues that a suppressed family quarrel provides the linchpin of "The Metamorphosis." He chides other writers for imagining scenes from Kafka's life without evidence, but he often slips into awkward scene-making of his own: For example, Jews at a Zionist conference are described, as if from Kafka's point of view, "huddling" and "gesticulating" without any footnote or testimony from Kafka's diaries or letters to tell us that his highly ambivalent relationship to Jews and Judaism expressed itself in the popular cartoonish stereotypes of his age (or this one). The relative lack of pertinent quotations from Kafka himself is a persistent flaw. A chapter on the Yiddish theater scarcely quotes from Kafka's long diary entries on the subject. At other times, Darwin, Robert Musil and the pop star Bjork are all cited when the reader most wants to know what Kafka was thinking, in his own words.
But there's a pathos to Stach's situation. The entire book, beginning with its ironic-seeming subtitle, shakes with despair similar to that of the grandfather in "The Next Village": "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that - not to mention accidents - even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey." No biography can ever reproduce a life. The space allotted is too short, the medium insufficient. Someone who undertakes a biography might find the best years of his life consumed by writing about somebody else's. According to his acknowledgments, Stach took about 10 years to produce nearly 600 pages, heroically translated by Shelley Frisch, which account for only a few years of Kafka's 40.
Apparently, Max Brod's estate hangs on to some documents about the early years of the friendship between the two men, who first met in Prague in 1902. While waiting for the estate, Stach has decided to focus on the years between 1910, when Kafka's diaries begin, and 1915, when he once again reverted to " 'being nothing' for months at a time," as Kafka had put it in an earlier letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer. It's an active period in a life marked by bouts of depression and lethargy. Kafka became part owner of a small asbestos factory in Prague (where his lungs were perhaps fatally weakened), and traveled to sanitariums and cities and towns in Germany, Austria and Italy. He wrote "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "The Penal Colony," and two manuscript drafts of "Amerika." He considered it a meager output. And he began his habit of intense epistolary affairs with women. Stach gives us the details of these events, but he is amazingly reluctant to avail himself of a biographer's privilege to shape the fragments of life laid out on his desk. There's information, no end of information, but not enough for Stach. He often ably challenges Kafka's ironic versions of events, especially when he writes about office life in Prague and Berlin. But as for his subtitle, he hesitates to tell us what exactly this apparently indecisive man, still living with his parents at 28, decided or what was decided for him in these years.
Stach's own indecisiveness turns this book into a choose-your-own biography which is more fun to read if you know something about Kafka already. It's one thing to learn that Kafka and Brod went to visit Goethe's house in Weimar, where Kafka developed a crush on Margarethe, the hopelessly ignorant daughter of the caretaker. These things could happen to anybody. But Stach never tells us that Margarethe - usually shortened to Grete or Gretchen - is also the name of the naïve girl seduced by Faust after he makes his pact with Mephistopheles in Goethe's play. For Kafka, who once declared "my way of life is geared solely to writing" and dreamed of a fusion between literature and life, for whom all kinds of literary experience were matters of life and death, the coincidence might have been one reason for his crush. Successful seduction would have made him a Faust. Pursuing her in a way that was doomed to leave him alienated and humiliated would put him in the company of Goethe. All this is speculative interpretation, of course, but biographers have earned the right to play and to indulge their readers' yearning to have other lives made sense of, as well as their own.
One could credit Stach with a bold anti-interpretative stance if he weren't so aware of having missed the figure of Kafka among all the ruins of his life. Here is a definitive biographer who at least has the odd grace to acknowledge his own predicament. "A profusion of data can obscure our view, have a mind-numbing effect and stifle new ideas," he writes. "Consider that Walter Benjamin's extraordinary sketches about Kafka were written without any knowledge of the particulars of Kafka's life." Sometimes it's better to love a writer than to know him. - Marco Roth
Hans-Gerd Koch, Hagen
Franz Kafka (right) with, from right, his secretary Julie Kaiser, his sister Ottla, their cousin Irma, and the maid Mařenka, near Zürau, Bohemia, 1917 What are we to make of Kafka? Not, surely, what he made of himself, or at least what he would have us believe he made of himself. In a letter to his long-suffering fiancée Felice Bauer he declared: “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.” This was a constant theme of his mature years, and one that he expanded on in a highly significant diary entry from August 1916: “My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying.”
Of course, Kafka is not the first writer, nor will he be the last, to figure himself as a martyr to his art—think of Flaubert, think of Joyce—but he is remarkable for the single-mindedness with which he conceived of his role. Who else could have invented the torture machine at the center of his frightful story “In the Penal Colony,” which executes miscreants by graving their sentence—le mot juste!—with a metal stylus into their very flesh?
His conception of himself as tormented artist is allied closely to his view of his predicament as a man struggling to maintain his health and sanity in the face of an unrelentingly inhospitable world. In the annals of lamentation, from Job and Jeremiah to Beckett’s Unnamable, surely no one has devoted himself to the sustained moan with such dedication, energy, and exquisite finesse as the author of the “The Judgment” and the “Letter to His Father,” of the diaries, and of the correspondence with Felice Bauer and his lover Milena Jesenská, as well as his friend Max Brod.1
There are moments, numerous moments, when this supreme ironist seemed to recognize the comical aspect of his endless complaining, and the wintry, self-mocking smile that flashes out at us on these occasions is peculiarly irresistible. We think too of that famous incident when Kafka was reading aloud the opening pages of The Trial before a group of Prague friends but laughed so much that he had to stop at intervals, while his listeners also laughed “uncontrollably,” despite what Brod described as “the terrible gravity of this chapter.” That must have been quite an evening.
a neurotic Jew, a religious one, a mystic, a self-hating Jew, a crypto-Christian, a Gnostic, the messenger of an antipatriarchal brand of Freudianism, a Marxist, the quintessential existentialist, a prophet of totalitarianism or of the Holocaust, an iconic voice of High Modernism, and much more….
It is notable how few critics and commentators have seen Kafka as essentially a product of his time and milieu—early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa—and it is to Friedländer’s credit that he notes “the ongoing influence of Expressionism” and contemporary works of fantastic literature such as Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem on Kafka’s literary sensibility. The fact is, Kafka was a son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips. As a young man he remarked ruefully that the city had claws, and would not let go. He knew well both himself and his birthplace.
On the evidence of the two volumes that we already have, this is one of the great literary biographies, to be set up there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, George Painter’s Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel’s Henry James. Indeed, in this work Stach has achieved something truly original.2 By a combination of tireless scholarship, uncanny empathy, and writing that might best be described as passionately fluent,3 he does truly give a sense of “what it was like to be Franz Kafka.” He has set himself the Proustian task of summoning up, and summing up, an entire world, and has performed that task with remarkable success. The result is an eerily immediate portrait of one of literature’s most enduring and enigmatic masters.
Part of Stach’s method is a point-by-point mapping of the biographical evidence against the autobiographical evidence within the work—and Kafka is everywhere autobiographical, though he seeks to cover his tracks with finical care. Stach is in sympathy with Kafka’s dismissal of psychology, and maintains an epistemological approach to his task, cleaving to the facts as he knows them—and he knows a great many—and never indulging in the kind of fanciful speculation that so many biographers permit themselves.4
On occasion he will take a deliberate step back in order to present a broad view of this or that aspect of Kafka’s life and work. See, for instance, in volume three, his brilliant exegesis on the prose fragment “The Great Wall of China.” The piece focuses not on the emperor on whose orders the wall was constructed, but on the construction itself, which was built “not as a single entity but rather in individual sections far apart from one another,” the same method, Stach points out, that Kafka brought to the assembling of his novels, The Trial in particular. Of the Great Wall, Stach writes:
no one apart from those in the top command can say with any certainty how far the construction has progressed; it is not even clear whether the wall will really have all the gaps filled in when the work is done. It is never completed, and remains a fragment made up of fragments.
In this way the Wall matches the “meta-structure that has been characterized as ‘Kafka’s world’ or ‘Kafka’s universe.’”
Much of his energy, physical and spiritual, was bent to the task of insulating himself against the world’s affronts. In the process, Stach writes, he
established a system of obsessions that would enhance his life on a narcissistic level but consume all his vitality. His story “The Burrow” presents a vivid symbol of this: A creature who walls himself in to remain self-sufficient, in a permanent state of siege, is therefore condemned to permanent vigilance. Everything is threatening; every spot is vulnerable. One cannot let down one’s guard anywhere, every act of carelessness is punished, and a single leak will sink the ship. If nothing can enter, and all cracks are sealed, nothing can exit either. He noted laconically in his diary, “My prison cell—my fortress.” It is hard to imagine a more precise analogy.
But what is it, exactly, that drives him down into the burrow of himself, there to cower in Kierkegaardian fear and loathing? He saw himself as alien, hardly human, a creature who, as one of Nietzsche’s friends said of the philosopher, seemed to come from a place where no one else lived. Why? In seeking an answer, one returns to Erich Heller’s elegant characterization of Kafka’s prose style as at once lucid and obscure. Native speakers assure us of the limpid beauty of Kafka’s German, of its unrivaled purity and conciseness. Yet his language, like Freud’s, gives a distinct sense of shroudedness. His sentences move like Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers in Yeats’s poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” who “enwound/A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,” inside which the dancers themselves seemed no more than flickering shadows. In Kafka, something is always not being said. What is it?
In one of the more heated passages during the course of Lolita, Humbert Humbert pauses to surmise that by now his respectable reader’s eyebrows will have traveled to somewhere near the back of his balding head. No doubt there will be many Kafka admirers on whom Friedländer’s thesis will have a similar effect. It is important to stress, therefore, that Friedländer is no firebrand young academic thirsting for tenure and bent on making a scandalous name for himself. He is emeritus professor of history and holds the Club 39 Endowed Chair of Holocaust Studies at UCLA; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.
He was born in Prague, and a number of aspects of his life chime with Kafka’s: his father studied law at Charles University and became, like Kafka, legal adviser to a Prague insurance firm; and, tragically, “like those of Kafka’s three sisters, my parents’ lives ended in German camps.” However, these echoes from long ago
would not have convinced me of writing on a topic so far removed from my field, history, but for very specific and hardly mentioned issues that I considered important enough to be brought up in a small biographical essay.
One is reminded of the boy who cannot but speak out as the emperor swishes past in his invisible new clothes—except that in this case the royal personage is only too eager that no one should see the fancy outfit he is secretly wearing.
Friedländer bases his case mostly on internal evidence from the fictional writings, but he also follows up some excisions that Max Brod made in the published versions of the letters and the diaries. There is for instance an entry for February 2, 1922, which, Friedländer writes, Brod “censored in the English translation” but left unaltered in the German. Here is what Kafka wrote, with the “censored” passages in square brackets:
Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.
There are also some admiring glances thrown in the direction of a couple of handsome Swedish youths. It is hardly a damning testament. What is perhaps most significant is the fact that Brod felt it necessary to make these quiet elisions, since it suggests he had definite suspicions about his friend’s sexual inclination.
Friedländer follows the Kafka scholar Mark Anderson in thinking it “highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.”5 Nor does he for a moment seek to suggest that the “imagined sexual possibilities” Kafka may have entertained are a key to unlock the enigmas at the heart of the Kafka canon. All the same, once this particular genie is out of the bottle there is no forcing it back inside. Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of Kafka’s darker preoccupations, including the disgust toward women that he so frequently displays,6 his fascination with torture and evisceration, and most of all, perhaps, his lifelong obsession with his father, or better say, with the Father—the eternal masculine. For surely poor old Hermann Kafka, small-time businessman and purveyor of fancy goods, could not have fitted into the shoes, indeed, the nine-league boots, that Kafka fashioned for him in the story he considered his first real artistic success, “The Judgment,” in which a father condemns a son to drown himself, and in the never-to-be-delivered “Letter to His Father,” during the long toils of which the son declared: “My writing was about you; in it, I merely lamented what I was unable to lament at your breast. It was a deliberately drawn out farewell from you.” Here, as so often throughout Kafka’s writings, we see, in one of Friedländer’s rare lapses into near psychobabble,
an evolution in the symbolic significance of paternal authority from its most fundamental psychosexual function (in a Freudian sense) to its preeminent social function as representing tradition and the law.
The unedited version of the novel was begun in the first person, but part-way along Kafka changed his mind and went back through the pages and switched from “I” to “K.”8 K’s character and motivations are spelled out quite openly, too much so for the author, who in revising the manuscript, Harman writes, “consistently crossed out sentences and passages that reveal a high degree of self-awareness on his hero’s part.” Reiner Stach, following Harman’s lead, points out that
Kafka would surely have undermined the mysterious, parabolic, or allegorical structure of The Castle if he had had his protagonist appear explicitly as a Jew or a writer, although this double experience of exclusion clearly underlay his dogged battle for village and castle.
As Harman writes, we can attribute many of the deletions “to Kafka’s often-expressed dislike of psychology. However, instead of entirely eliminating psychology, Kafka buried the workings of his hero’s psyche in the interstices of his writing.”
In the end, none of this mattered, as Kafka ventured steadily into a hitherto unknown realm. In March 1922 he wrote in his diary, “Somewhere help is waiting and the beaters are driving me there.” By then, however, fate had him firmly in its sights. Five years previously, in the summer of 1917, Kafka had suffered his first pulmonary hemorrhage. He greeted the onset of illness with relief—death, after all, would solve so many things—describing it to a friend as “special…you might say an illness bestowed upon me.”
There is undoubtedly justice in this illness; it is a just blow, which, incidentally, I do not feel at all as a blow, but as something quite sweet in comparison with the average course of the past years, so it is just, but so coarse, so earthly, so simple, so well aimed at the most convenient slot.
Sickness was to free him at last, from the demands of life, from himself, and even from literature. He told Max Brod, “What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate things.” He had much to write, in the short time left to him, yet his endeavor now would not be purely literary but, in the deepest sense, moral. In “At Night,” one of his late fragments, he wrote—and repeated, word for word, in a letter to Felice Bauer—“Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.” From now on he would be both sentinel and witness, and his achievement would be transcendent. In the last story that he completed, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” he describes Josephine’s piping song, which here “is in its right place, as nowhere else,” and which despite the thinness of the music expresses essentials:
Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. - John Banville
“If Kafka had been destined to live his life to the age we project nowadays, he would surely have come across this famous definition of happiness, which an Austrian senior administrative officer declares on the closing page of Heimito von Doderer’s novel ‘The Strudlhof Steps’ (1951).”
Stach plumps up “The Years of Insight” with digressions on the new role of women in society, the severe crisis in the book trade, currency manipulation, a school for children in Berlin called the Jewish Home and the art of elocution, and employs a number of strategies to involve the reader, some extraordinarily awkward. For example, there are the questioning asides throughout:
“So why was he experiencing these fluctuations and this horrid nervousness?” “Where could they get a doctor now, on Christmas Eve?” “She had spent 30 hours in the train for this?” “Was he really facing the same task as every other person?” “Where did Kafka have the opportunity to meet six girls?” “Could things get any worse?”
Kafka is a perplexing figure, of that there is no doubt, but readers could be excused, could they not, for saying: Answer your own questions! We have other questions!
Stach embraces other stylistic idiosyncrasies. Each chapter has a heading: “The Country Doctor Ventures Out,” “Zürau’s Ark,” “Spanish Influenza, Czech Revolt, Jewish Angst” and so on, followed by an epigram (“When I die, just keep playing the records — Jimi Hendrix” being a particularly curious example), followed by a jarring initial paragraph that is intended to put us mise-en-scène by employing minor characters but that can simply be seen as comic.
“Fräulein Olga Stüdl was tickled pink when a familiar guest arrived,” begins one.
“The elocutionist Ludwig Hardt was a busy man,” begins another.
“Director Bedrich Odstrcil was aghast” is an unfortunate third.
But perhaps the most unsettling is Stach’s stagy start to Chapter 10, in which the onset of Kafka’s tuberculosis is introduced: “Saturday, Aug. 11, 1917, 4 a.m. Kafka wakes up.”
Stach confesses in the foreword to the first volume that “biographers have a dream. . . . They wish to go beyond what was.” Then in typical fashion he continues: “This is impossible.” He has much to say about biography’s methods and challenges, the “pressing . . . question of the hermeneutic horizon,” the difficulties caused by “considerable lacunae.” He believes the time has come to grant biography the status of an independent form of literary art. Yet Stach’s intellectual gifts are not literary ones. He has empathy for Kafka but little imaginative insight. The critic Walter Benjamin (who did) noted in a 1934 essay: “Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. . . . Though apparently reduced to submission” to transmissible truth, “they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.”
There are few such pleasurable flashes of phrasing or discernment in “The Years of Insight.” It lacks the power and intuitiveness of real apprehension of its remarkable subject. Still, it’s likely that the scholars and specialists lost and absorbed in the many rooms of the Kafka factory will find much to discuss in the labors of Reiner Stach. - Joy Williams
"To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure," wrote Walter Benjamin to his friend Gershom Scholem. It was 1938 and Benjamin had fled to Paris and had just been reading Max Brod's biography of Kafka, published 13 years after his death. Benjamin hated the way the book turned the author of self-consuming parables and fragmented novels into just another neglected saint and genius like Mozart. He thought it one of the signs of Kafka's enormous will to fail that he could have picked this optimistic Zionist, philistine and journalist to be his closest friend. Brod was just the right person to ignore Kafka's last wish to have all his papers burned.
To love the particular futility of "The Metamorphosis" and fragments like "The Cares of a Family Man" as intensely as Benjamin did, you have to be infatuated with the idea of total failure, as Benjamin also was. To be a failure in this way, you have to do more than merely fall short of a goal you set yourself. All of life must be lived as if to prove the impossibility of harmonious reconciliation between love, work, art and the duties to yourself, to your family, to others. Your very existence is evidence that you are guilty of being alive, and there are plenty of people around to remind you of it.Many years and a few generations of Kafka biographers later, Reiner Stach promises a biography that will finally give a complete portrait of one of the 20th century's great failures, a man whose works could make events out of non-events and non-events out of events. He notes early that Kafka, in his writing, "left a heap of rubble for posterity," yet he doesn't manage to catch the "peculiar beauty" and purity that Benjamin found in these ruins. Rather, Stach does Kafka the odd homage of flagrantly failing to do so in a manner that only proves Kafka's enduring influence.
Indeed, this book, the first of a projected three volumes, seems to be written not by a scholar and editor named Reiner Stach but by a Kafka character called, to borrow the words of the book's promotional materials, "the definitive biographer." This character shares a purpose with the lost-seeming land surveyor, K., from "The Castle," who shows up for an undefined assignment with a compass he uses to map an infinite and ever-changing space. As the futility of his task weighs on him, his mood and voice swing from pedantry into wild resentment and veiled self-accusation as though in dialogue with a hidden adversary, much the way Kafka depicted minor officials, waiters and the various assistants in "The Trial," "The Penal Colony," and "Amerika." At one moment, Stach yearns for the old days when Kafka could be read as literature and not "as an accumulation of autobiographical codes," yet he argues that a suppressed family quarrel provides the linchpin of "The Metamorphosis." He chides other writers for imagining scenes from Kafka's life without evidence, but he often slips into awkward scene-making of his own: For example, Jews at a Zionist conference are described, as if from Kafka's point of view, "huddling" and "gesticulating" without any footnote or testimony from Kafka's diaries or letters to tell us that his highly ambivalent relationship to Jews and Judaism expressed itself in the popular cartoonish stereotypes of his age (or this one). The relative lack of pertinent quotations from Kafka himself is a persistent flaw. A chapter on the Yiddish theater scarcely quotes from Kafka's long diary entries on the subject. At other times, Darwin, Robert Musil and the pop star Bjork are all cited when the reader most wants to know what Kafka was thinking, in his own words.
But there's a pathos to Stach's situation. The entire book, beginning with its ironic-seeming subtitle, shakes with despair similar to that of the grandfather in "The Next Village": "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that - not to mention accidents - even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey." No biography can ever reproduce a life. The space allotted is too short, the medium insufficient. Someone who undertakes a biography might find the best years of his life consumed by writing about somebody else's. According to his acknowledgments, Stach took about 10 years to produce nearly 600 pages, heroically translated by Shelley Frisch, which account for only a few years of Kafka's 40.
Apparently, Max Brod's estate hangs on to some documents about the early years of the friendship between the two men, who first met in Prague in 1902. While waiting for the estate, Stach has decided to focus on the years between 1910, when Kafka's diaries begin, and 1915, when he once again reverted to " 'being nothing' for months at a time," as Kafka had put it in an earlier letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer. It's an active period in a life marked by bouts of depression and lethargy. Kafka became part owner of a small asbestos factory in Prague (where his lungs were perhaps fatally weakened), and traveled to sanitariums and cities and towns in Germany, Austria and Italy. He wrote "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "The Penal Colony," and two manuscript drafts of "Amerika." He considered it a meager output. And he began his habit of intense epistolary affairs with women. Stach gives us the details of these events, but he is amazingly reluctant to avail himself of a biographer's privilege to shape the fragments of life laid out on his desk. There's information, no end of information, but not enough for Stach. He often ably challenges Kafka's ironic versions of events, especially when he writes about office life in Prague and Berlin. But as for his subtitle, he hesitates to tell us what exactly this apparently indecisive man, still living with his parents at 28, decided or what was decided for him in these years.
Stach's own indecisiveness turns this book into a choose-your-own biography which is more fun to read if you know something about Kafka already. It's one thing to learn that Kafka and Brod went to visit Goethe's house in Weimar, where Kafka developed a crush on Margarethe, the hopelessly ignorant daughter of the caretaker. These things could happen to anybody. But Stach never tells us that Margarethe - usually shortened to Grete or Gretchen - is also the name of the naïve girl seduced by Faust after he makes his pact with Mephistopheles in Goethe's play. For Kafka, who once declared "my way of life is geared solely to writing" and dreamed of a fusion between literature and life, for whom all kinds of literary experience were matters of life and death, the coincidence might have been one reason for his crush. Successful seduction would have made him a Faust. Pursuing her in a way that was doomed to leave him alienated and humiliated would put him in the company of Goethe. All this is speculative interpretation, of course, but biographers have earned the right to play and to indulge their readers' yearning to have other lives made sense of, as well as their own.
One could credit Stach with a bold anti-interpretative stance if he weren't so aware of having missed the figure of Kafka among all the ruins of his life. Here is a definitive biographer who at least has the odd grace to acknowledge his own predicament. "A profusion of data can obscure our view, have a mind-numbing effect and stifle new ideas," he writes. "Consider that Walter Benjamin's extraordinary sketches about Kafka were written without any knowledge of the particulars of Kafka's life." Sometimes it's better to love a writer than to know him. - Marco Roth
Of course, Kafka is not the first writer, nor will he be the last, to figure himself as a martyr to his art—think of Flaubert, think of Joyce—but he is remarkable for the single-mindedness with which he conceived of his role. Who else could have invented the torture machine at the center of his frightful story “In the Penal Colony,” which executes miscreants by graving their sentence—le mot juste!—with a metal stylus into their very flesh?
His conception of himself as tormented artist is allied closely to his view of his predicament as a man struggling to maintain his health and sanity in the face of an unrelentingly inhospitable world. In the annals of lamentation, from Job and Jeremiah to Beckett’s Unnamable, surely no one has devoted himself to the sustained moan with such dedication, energy, and exquisite finesse as the author of the “The Judgment” and the “Letter to His Father,” of the diaries, and of the correspondence with Felice Bauer and his lover Milena Jesenská, as well as his friend Max Brod.1
There are moments, numerous moments, when this supreme ironist seemed to recognize the comical aspect of his endless complaining, and the wintry, self-mocking smile that flashes out at us on these occasions is peculiarly irresistible. We think too of that famous incident when Kafka was reading aloud the opening pages of The Trial before a group of Prague friends but laughed so much that he had to stop at intervals, while his listeners also laughed “uncontrollably,” despite what Brod described as “the terrible gravity of this chapter.” That must have been quite an evening.
Despite the particularity of Kafka’s work—and what other writer has fashioned a literary landscape as instantly recognizable as his?—as an artist he is generally taken for a tabula rasa. In his short study, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, Saul Friedländer quotes the German-American critic Erich Heller’s description of Kafka as “the creator of the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature,” and goes on to note how the opacity of Kafka’s texts has allowed him to be regarded as
It is notable how few critics and commentators have seen Kafka as essentially a product of his time and milieu—early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa—and it is to Friedländer’s credit that he notes “the ongoing influence of Expressionism” and contemporary works of fantastic literature such as Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem on Kafka’s literary sensibility. The fact is, Kafka was a son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips. As a young man he remarked ruefully that the city had claws, and would not let go. He knew well both himself and his birthplace.
Reiner Stach, in his ongoing biography of Kafka, strives for a similarly intimate knowledge of his subject, and of the time and place in which he lived and worked. Stach is at once highly ambitious and admirably unassuming. He wishes, he tells us, to experience “what it was like to be Franz Kafka,” yet suggests that the effort even to get “just a little bit closer” is illusory:
Methodological snares are of no use; the cages of knowledge remain empty. So what do we achieve for all our efforts? The real life of Franz Kafka? Certainly not. But a fleeting glance at it, or an extended look, yes, perhaps that is possible.
This modesty is not false, but it is misplaced. So far, two volumes of this latest Kafka biography have been published. The Decisive Years and The Years of Insight are volumes two and three; volume one, dealing with the life up to 1910, was held up while Stach waited in hope—vain hope, it would seem—that an important archive of Max Brod’s papers, at present held in Israel, would be released; however, the book is now due for publication in 2014.On the evidence of the two volumes that we already have, this is one of the great literary biographies, to be set up there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, George Painter’s Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel’s Henry James. Indeed, in this work Stach has achieved something truly original.2 By a combination of tireless scholarship, uncanny empathy, and writing that might best be described as passionately fluent,3 he does truly give a sense of “what it was like to be Franz Kafka.” He has set himself the Proustian task of summoning up, and summing up, an entire world, and has performed that task with remarkable success. The result is an eerily immediate portrait of one of literature’s most enduring and enigmatic masters.
Part of Stach’s method is a point-by-point mapping of the biographical evidence against the autobiographical evidence within the work—and Kafka is everywhere autobiographical, though he seeks to cover his tracks with finical care. Stach is in sympathy with Kafka’s dismissal of psychology, and maintains an epistemological approach to his task, cleaving to the facts as he knows them—and he knows a great many—and never indulging in the kind of fanciful speculation that so many biographers permit themselves.4
On occasion he will take a deliberate step back in order to present a broad view of this or that aspect of Kafka’s life and work. See, for instance, in volume three, his brilliant exegesis on the prose fragment “The Great Wall of China.” The piece focuses not on the emperor on whose orders the wall was constructed, but on the construction itself, which was built “not as a single entity but rather in individual sections far apart from one another,” the same method, Stach points out, that Kafka brought to the assembling of his novels, The Trial in particular. Of the Great Wall, Stach writes:
no one apart from those in the top command can say with any certainty how far the construction has progressed; it is not even clear whether the wall will really have all the gaps filled in when the work is done. It is never completed, and remains a fragment made up of fragments.
In this way the Wall matches the “meta-structure that has been characterized as ‘Kafka’s world’ or ‘Kafka’s universe.’”
Volume two, The Decisive Years, begins, excitingly, in May 1910, with the approach of Halley’s Comet. “For months, newspaper reports had been warning of a possible collision, gigantic explosions, firestorm, and tidal waves, the end of the world.” On May 18, the day when the comet would either smash into the earth or miss it, excited crowds thronged the streets and cafés of Prague, among them “a thin, sinewy man…a head taller than everyone around him.” One wonders how much heed Kafka paid to the threatened celestial collision. If we are to take the diaries and the letters at face value, he regarded the momentous events of his time with weary indifference. Consider his infamous diary entry for August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon.” In this matter Stach takes a characteristically subtle approach:
One of the primary reasons that Kafka has come to be regarded as oblivious to reality and politically remote is that he focused less on great losses themselves—even when they were catastrophic—than on the larger significance of these losses, and the way they laid bare the essence of the era as a whole. The decline of a great symbol, the end of a tradition, the tip of the pyramid chopped off [e.g., the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the subsequent destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire]—like most of his contemporaries, he experienced these events as signs of an irreversible dissolution.
Kafka was twenty-seven the year of Halley’s Comet, and as Stach notes, with muted wryness, “the fifteen pages he had published already showed every indication that he would go far.” This was not apparent to everyone, and the long litany of Kafka’s publishing woes makes for dispiriting reading—however, it should be said in defense of his publishers that Kafka must have been impossible to deal with. Yet although he was both diffident and difficult, this does not mean he was also indifferent. “The notion that he was not concerned about public resonance,” Stach writes, “that he was immune to both praise and criticism, is false.” Indeed, it seems that during World War I he engaged a clippings agency so that he would not miss even the most fleeting public reference to his work. All the same, he had no illusions about the possibility of worldly success and fame. He remarked with melancholy humor of his first book, a slim volume entitled Meditation, “Eleven books were sold at André’s store. I bought ten of them myself. I would love to know who has the eleventh.”Much of his energy, physical and spiritual, was bent to the task of insulating himself against the world’s affronts. In the process, Stach writes, he
established a system of obsessions that would enhance his life on a narcissistic level but consume all his vitality. His story “The Burrow” presents a vivid symbol of this: A creature who walls himself in to remain self-sufficient, in a permanent state of siege, is therefore condemned to permanent vigilance. Everything is threatening; every spot is vulnerable. One cannot let down one’s guard anywhere, every act of carelessness is punished, and a single leak will sink the ship. If nothing can enter, and all cracks are sealed, nothing can exit either. He noted laconically in his diary, “My prison cell—my fortress.” It is hard to imagine a more precise analogy.
But what is it, exactly, that drives him down into the burrow of himself, there to cower in Kierkegaardian fear and loathing? He saw himself as alien, hardly human, a creature who, as one of Nietzsche’s friends said of the philosopher, seemed to come from a place where no one else lived. Why? In seeking an answer, one returns to Erich Heller’s elegant characterization of Kafka’s prose style as at once lucid and obscure. Native speakers assure us of the limpid beauty of Kafka’s German, of its unrivaled purity and conciseness. Yet his language, like Freud’s, gives a distinct sense of shroudedness. His sentences move like Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers in Yeats’s poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” who “enwound/A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,” inside which the dancers themselves seemed no more than flickering shadows. In Kafka, something is always not being said. What is it?
Saul Friedländer has a strong suspicion about what the answer might be. Describing Kafka, beautifully, as “the poet of his own disorder,” Friedländer states his case baldly:
These Diaries and the Letters indicate clearly enough that—except for the constant pondering about his writing, the quintessence of his being—the issues torturing Kafka most of his life were of a sexual nature.
Later he reinforces this view, insisting that “aside from the total primacy of writing, sexual issues turned into the most obsessive preoccupation of Kafka’s life.” Of what variety were these sexual issues? “All the sources indicate…that his feelings of guilt were related not to some concrete initiatives on his part but to fantasies, to imagined sexual possibilities.” And these possibilities, Friedländer suggests, were homoerotic in origin.In one of the more heated passages during the course of Lolita, Humbert Humbert pauses to surmise that by now his respectable reader’s eyebrows will have traveled to somewhere near the back of his balding head. No doubt there will be many Kafka admirers on whom Friedländer’s thesis will have a similar effect. It is important to stress, therefore, that Friedländer is no firebrand young academic thirsting for tenure and bent on making a scandalous name for himself. He is emeritus professor of history and holds the Club 39 Endowed Chair of Holocaust Studies at UCLA; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.
He was born in Prague, and a number of aspects of his life chime with Kafka’s: his father studied law at Charles University and became, like Kafka, legal adviser to a Prague insurance firm; and, tragically, “like those of Kafka’s three sisters, my parents’ lives ended in German camps.” However, these echoes from long ago
would not have convinced me of writing on a topic so far removed from my field, history, but for very specific and hardly mentioned issues that I considered important enough to be brought up in a small biographical essay.
One is reminded of the boy who cannot but speak out as the emperor swishes past in his invisible new clothes—except that in this case the royal personage is only too eager that no one should see the fancy outfit he is secretly wearing.
Friedländer bases his case mostly on internal evidence from the fictional writings, but he also follows up some excisions that Max Brod made in the published versions of the letters and the diaries. There is for instance an entry for February 2, 1922, which, Friedländer writes, Brod “censored in the English translation” but left unaltered in the German. Here is what Kafka wrote, with the “censored” passages in square brackets:
Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.
There are also some admiring glances thrown in the direction of a couple of handsome Swedish youths. It is hardly a damning testament. What is perhaps most significant is the fact that Brod felt it necessary to make these quiet elisions, since it suggests he had definite suspicions about his friend’s sexual inclination.
Friedländer follows the Kafka scholar Mark Anderson in thinking it “highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.”5 Nor does he for a moment seek to suggest that the “imagined sexual possibilities” Kafka may have entertained are a key to unlock the enigmas at the heart of the Kafka canon. All the same, once this particular genie is out of the bottle there is no forcing it back inside. Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of Kafka’s darker preoccupations, including the disgust toward women that he so frequently displays,6 his fascination with torture and evisceration, and most of all, perhaps, his lifelong obsession with his father, or better say, with the Father—the eternal masculine. For surely poor old Hermann Kafka, small-time businessman and purveyor of fancy goods, could not have fitted into the shoes, indeed, the nine-league boots, that Kafka fashioned for him in the story he considered his first real artistic success, “The Judgment,” in which a father condemns a son to drown himself, and in the never-to-be-delivered “Letter to His Father,” during the long toils of which the son declared: “My writing was about you; in it, I merely lamented what I was unable to lament at your breast. It was a deliberately drawn out farewell from you.” Here, as so often throughout Kafka’s writings, we see, in one of Friedländer’s rare lapses into near psychobabble,
an evolution in the symbolic significance of paternal authority from its most fundamental psychosexual function (in a Freudian sense) to its preeminent social function as representing tradition and the law.
Kafka’s repeated cries of self-disgust are striking, and frequently border on the hysterical. Writing to Milena Jesenská he offers one of his loveliest and most terrifying metaphors—“No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—what we take to be the song of angels is their song”—but precedes it with a tortured admission—or is it a warped form of boasting?—“I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity.” And this from an obsessively fastidious teetotaler and semivegetarian whose elegant blue suits and spotless linen were so often commented upon by friends and acquaintances. Kafka certainly carried some dark trouble deep inside him.
His secretiveness, his drive toward an “obscure lucidity,” are evident not only in his life but also in his work and in his working methods. In a fascinating study of the original manuscript of Das Schloss (The Castle), the Kafka translator and scholar Mark Harman has traced the process by which Kafka cut and edited the work so as “to preserve an aura of ineffable mystery by making everything sound [as Kafka wrote] ‘ein wenig unheimlich’ [a little uncanny].”7The unedited version of the novel was begun in the first person, but part-way along Kafka changed his mind and went back through the pages and switched from “I” to “K.”8 K’s character and motivations are spelled out quite openly, too much so for the author, who in revising the manuscript, Harman writes, “consistently crossed out sentences and passages that reveal a high degree of self-awareness on his hero’s part.” Reiner Stach, following Harman’s lead, points out that
Kafka would surely have undermined the mysterious, parabolic, or allegorical structure of The Castle if he had had his protagonist appear explicitly as a Jew or a writer, although this double experience of exclusion clearly underlay his dogged battle for village and castle.
As Harman writes, we can attribute many of the deletions “to Kafka’s often-expressed dislike of psychology. However, instead of entirely eliminating psychology, Kafka buried the workings of his hero’s psyche in the interstices of his writing.”
In the end, none of this mattered, as Kafka ventured steadily into a hitherto unknown realm. In March 1922 he wrote in his diary, “Somewhere help is waiting and the beaters are driving me there.” By then, however, fate had him firmly in its sights. Five years previously, in the summer of 1917, Kafka had suffered his first pulmonary hemorrhage. He greeted the onset of illness with relief—death, after all, would solve so many things—describing it to a friend as “special…you might say an illness bestowed upon me.”
There is undoubtedly justice in this illness; it is a just blow, which, incidentally, I do not feel at all as a blow, but as something quite sweet in comparison with the average course of the past years, so it is just, but so coarse, so earthly, so simple, so well aimed at the most convenient slot.
Sickness was to free him at last, from the demands of life, from himself, and even from literature. He told Max Brod, “What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate things.” He had much to write, in the short time left to him, yet his endeavor now would not be purely literary but, in the deepest sense, moral. In “At Night,” one of his late fragments, he wrote—and repeated, word for word, in a letter to Felice Bauer—“Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.” From now on he would be both sentinel and witness, and his achievement would be transcendent. In the last story that he completed, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” he describes Josephine’s piping song, which here “is in its right place, as nowhere else,” and which despite the thinness of the music expresses essentials:
Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. - John Banville
I have come to the conclusion that anyone who thinks about Kafka for long enough inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of Franz Kafka reads like a truly great comedy. I mean this (of course) in large part because of the tragedies in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines.
What constitutes the life of Kafka, at least the enduringly legible parts of it? Reiner Stach has written a chronological biography of nearly two thousand pages, all three volumes of which are out in German, with the second and third already translated into English by Shelley Frisch. (The first volume, covering Kafka’s youth, was written last in the hope that the papers in the Max Brod estate – a mysterious suitcase full of documents – would exit the apartment of the septuagenarian daughter of Max Brod’s presumed lover, but the destiny of those papers remains in legal dispute.) Part of what is so compelling about Stach’s biography is that, although he has inevitably developed many well-substantiated convictions of his own, he mostly keeps them to himself. Resisting extended speculation, judgment and interpretation, he has chosen instead to be a conservative detailer of the unusually well-documented life of his subject. In addition to three novels, numerous stories and fragments and shorts, Kafka wrote diaries, letters to friends and family, lectures on accident prevention and fundraising appeals for injured soldiers. At the very end of his life, while undertaking a ‘silence cure’, he even wrote down basic communications on small slips of paper: ‘Do you have a moment? Then please spray the peonies a little.’ On another slip, addressing the woman, Dora Diamant, who loved and cared for him: ‘How many years will you be able to stand it? How long will I be able to stand your standing it?’
Juxtapositions of the minor and practical with the emotive, impossible and profound emerge repeatedly in this biography, so much so that often they swap emotional valences. Here is the young writer and insurance worker reliably showing up to work every morning at 8.15; here he is getting on his best friend Brod’s nerves over whether or not to keep the window open when they share a room at a hotel (Kafka prevails); here he is at a nudist sanatorium admiring the bodies of two young Swedish men. Here is young Kafka asking to be released from his job so he can be a soldier; here he is encouraging his father to invest in an asbestos factory and then disappointing his father terribly by not helping to run the asbestos factory, which loses money and goes under; here he is writing about the women who work at the asbestos factory; here he is annoyed that his father and mother stay up late playing the card game franzefuss. Here is his publisher referring to his story ‘In the Penal Colony’ as ‘In the Gangster Colony’ because ‘gangster’ is the more marketable word. Here our man asks his sister, Ottla, to go out and please buy twenty copies of the magazine that has run a Czech translation of his story ‘The Stoker’; here he is writing to the married translator, whom he has wooed; here he is writing a 16-page letter asking for a promotion at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute; here he is giving a reading in Munich with Rilke, and being reviewed in the paper the next day as ‘quite an inadequate presenter’; here he is, desperate to write his fiction but setting aside his two-week holiday period to write a very long letter to his father (which he never gives him) in which he explains that his father eats too loudly and too messily and that his father’s large body made Kafka, as a child, feel small and weak when they would go together to the city pool. Here he is getting engaged and not getting married; here he is getting engaged and not getting married again; here he is getting into a similar tangle one more time; here he is relieved by his mortal diagnosis of TB. Here he is reading a letter from the tax office asking about capital contributions to the First Prague Asbestos Works, here he is writing back explaining that the factory had ceased to exist five years earlier, and here he is receiving another letter asking what his reply meant as no record could be found of the referenced original letter, and then here he is a few months later receiving a third letter threatening him with charges and a fine if he persists in not accounting for the capital accumulation on the First Prague Asbestos Works; here are 350 pages of Kafka’s study notes on conversational Hebrew; here he is at the end of his life, making hand shadow-puppets in the evenings with Diamant; here he is in 1924, the day before he dies, unable to eat, doing a last round of edits on his short story ‘The Hunger Artist’.
Stach makes clear the very humble limits of what he believes his biographical project can yield in terms of actually ‘knowing’ Kafka. ‘The life of a human being,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘draws back, comes into view like an animal at the edge of the forest, and disappears again.’ He also recognises concordances between Kafka’s life and work as illuminating only in a minor way. Kafka often spent half the day lying down, daydreaming, and Stach believes these inaccessible parts of Kafka are the most important. Yet despite all this Stach pursues what can be known of Kafka so far and so exhaustively that I was reminded at some moments of the ending of A Handful of Dust, when we meet the illiterate man in the Brazilian jungle who loves Charles Dickens’s writing so much he holds the protagonist, Tony Last, captive so that he can read Dickens to him until the end of his days. Sometimes I thought of Stach as the captive and Kafka as the captor in this analogy, and sometimes the other way around. It is a very long biography and so sometimes I had all sorts of thoughts I not long afterwards wanted to upend, or undermine. In that way, though by different means, prolonged exposure to Stach’s work does have an effect-overlap with prolonged exposure to the work of Kafka.
It has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends, and though that sounds more like anxiety than hilarity to me, the funny point endures. But what kind of funny is he? Borges described Hawthorne’s story ‘Wakefield’ as a prefiguration of Kafka, noting ‘the protagonist’s profound triviality, which contrasts with the magnitude of his perdition’. Part of the point here is an incongruity of scale – a natural structure of the comic, a way of relating to the cosmic. We might think here of Metamorphosis but also of the petitioner in The Trial who spends his whole life waiting at the Door of the Law, a door that is just for him, but through which he is never allowed entry. Or we might think of Kafka’s dog (or his ape, or mouse, or burrowing animal), who takes his life as seriously, and thinks it over as analytically, as a human.
Or we might think of the humans who take their lives seriously, as if they, too, were, well, human. ‘Often I doubt that I am a human being,’ Kafka writes in a note to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer, as he is trying to get out of the engagement but doesn’t want to break it off himself and instead wants her to take the action. ‘You can marry if you put on sufficient weight,’ a doctor later tells a tuberculous Kafka, who doesn’t want to marry anyhow, or even really to eat. The comedy of scale is always simultaneously a tragedy of scale, if viewed from the proper angle, and as articulated in the famous words Kafka wrote on a postcard: ‘The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.’
And one element of the comedy of Kafka’s biography is the way his life, at whatever moment, is dwarfed by his work. Whether or not the reasonably capable writer and insurance official living in Prague through the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into the 1920s resembles the Kafka of your imagination depends in part on how attentively you’ve followed each succession of corrective articles and introductions, but also on your ability to assimilate dissonant information, and on how substantial external life seems to you.
If for many years, much of the reading public saw Kafka as a kind of cousin of Bartleby – if we were most swayed, say, by his never finishing his novels, or by his talk of ghosts and the unbearability of everything – it now seems hard not to see that although Kafka truly was a Bartleby-kin, he was at the same time just as much Bartleby’s well-intentioned, overwhelmed, frustrated boss. Kafka himself found Kafka difficult. In an entry in his diary, in which he writes of himself, as he often did, in the third person, he says:
He could have resigned himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner – that could be a life’s ambition. But it was a barred cage. Casually and imperiously, as if at home, the racket of the world streamed out and in through the bars, the prisoner was really free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.
Later, in a letter to Brod, in which Kafka is explaining his enormous dread over a pretty insignificant decision about whether to take a trip to Georgental, he writes:
He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived. By this I do not mean that wife and child, fields and cattle are essential to living. The only essential thing for life is forgoing smugness, moving into the house instead of admiring it and hanging garlands around it. One might argue that this is a matter of fate and is not given to anyone’s hand. But then why this sense of remorse; why does the remorse never stop? To become finer and more savoury? That, too. But why do such nights always end on this note: I could live and I do not live. The second major reason – perhaps it is all really one, I don’t seem to be able to sort them apart now – is the idea: ‘What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’
At times he seems to be living in a situation comedy. When he goes to the countryside to write, he finds it ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ at first, but by the second day he can’t work because he’s troubled by a child practising the French horn, by the din from a sawmill and by happy children playing outside, whom he eventually yells at: ‘Why don’t you go and pick mushrooms?’ He then discovers that the children belong to his neighbour, a sleep-deprived shift worker at the local mill who sends his seven children out so that he can get some sleep. At a sanatorium for his TB, Kafka and his friend Klopstock play a practical joke on another resident, a high-ranking Czech officer who conspicuously practises the flute and sketches and paints outdoors. The officer puts on a show of his work; Klopstock and Kafka write up pseudonymous reviews of it, one published in Czech, the other in Hungarian; the mocked officer then comes to Klopstock (in his room with a fever and kept company by Kafka) for a translation of the review. After this successful prank, Kafka sends his sister a spoof article about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is pointing the way to a cure for TB; his whole family celebrates the good news, of which he then has to disabuse them.
Both these anecdotes from Kafka’s life, of which there are many of a similar genre, are at once antic and death-haunted, illuminating and opaque. We might ask ourselves why we would read a biography of Kafka when we could instead just read Kafka. Why make breakfast, when you can just read Kafka? Why watch television or trim your fingernails when you could just read Kafka?
His astute offhand descriptions accumulate. He succinctly describes ‘the Kafkaesque’ as consisting in part of a ‘peculiar form of rhetoric, which obscures the situation with analytical precision’. On the evolution of the Kafka fragment on the Olympic swimming champion who doesn’t know how to swim: ‘Kafka does not seek out an image; he follows it, and would rather lose sight of his subject matter than the logic of his image, as even some of his early readers noted.’ Stach notes that guilt and punishment are less present as themes in Kafka’s later writings. Of the later passages in Kafka’s diary, when he returns to writing of himself in the first rather than the third person, Stach observes that ‘he struck a tone that sounds almost serene in comparison with the many laments with which he had always accompanied even the most easily foreseeable disturbances and disappointments.’ (An example: ‘No matter how wretched a constitution I may have … I must do the best I can with it, even in my sense, and it is hollow sophistry to argue that there is only one thing to be done with it, and this one thing is thus the best, and is despair.’) Discussing ‘The Burrow’, written towards the end of Kafka’s life, Stach observes the mysterious noise that disturbs the animal’s serenity: ‘A hissing and piping with regular pauses that the animal hears is its own sound of life, its own breath; the animal itself is the ultimate source of the disquiet that continually disturbs the perfect silence of its creation.’ These are soft observations, not strictly defensible, not particularly biographical. But the softness, and the way Stach mostly but not entirely withholds it, is essential to the book’s effect.
In great comic novels, say Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the element that generates the comedy – often social norms, whether norms of class or war – also generates the tragedy. But in Kafka’s life, we see this structure in the more ahistorical aspects, in the situations generated by Kafka’s way of going through the world, by his character.
Another element of many great comic novels is the extended set of minor characters, who by being funny, make a disproportionately deep claim on our emotions, however brief their appearances. Stach has brought to life so many fantastic minor ‘characters’ in this biography; they are what makes the way the biography ends so brilliant and so sad – or more precisely, it’s through them that we feel the sadness of the endings, since of course we already know how it ends. I am not speaking only, or even mainly, of the ‘major’ minor characters, like Kafka’s fiancées or family members, though Stach offers particularly vivid and valuable portraits of Kafka’s sister, Ottla, and of his translator and romantic friend, Milena Jesenskà. Some characters come in only for a paragraph, or even just a line or two. Consider the 22-year-old Karl Müller, who publishes a piece in his local newspaper titled ‘The Re-Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa’, in which Samsa comes back to life and things improve for him; shortly after publication of that piece, the very poor and very young Müller dies of TB. Or the writer Oskar Baum, blind since the age of 11 and supporting his family by giving piano lessons, who gets a letter from Kafka’s mother in which she implores him, as the one married man in young Kafka’s circle of friends, to help set Kafka’s ‘head straight’. In his lifetime, we learn in a footnote, Baum had trouble being seen by publishers as more than just a chronicler of specialist literature on being blind; his most but barely enduring work is called The Door to the Impossible. We see the once celebrated writer Johannes Schlaf at the age of fifty, having gone mad and giving cosmological lectures that make no sense, but make him (in Kafka’s eyes) happy. We see Kafka’s boss at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, who writes poetry himself, and who elegantly handles his employee’s petitions to enlist and die as a soldier at the front. It turns out that several of the employees at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute wrote poems and stories. We meet the cheerful Czech man at the sanatorium who wants to show Kafka his throat abscesses with a mirror, and whose family never visits him. A young woman, Puah, just 18 years old, comes through Prague on a visit from Jerusalem and gives Kafka Hebrew lessons. The innkeeper Fraulein Olga Stüdl tells the modest, polite young Kafka staying at her boarding-house about her failed engagement, and he gives her a galley proof of his manuscript. Kafka’s hapless brother-in-law can’t keep a business going. The writer Ernst Weiss passionately hates Kafka for not writing him a blurb. A cute schoolgirl in the botanical gardens catches Kafka’s attention as she calls something out to him; he smiles and waves to her, repeatedly, then realises what she had said: ‘Jew.’
Comedy makes us feel safe, maybe because the form once implied a happy ending. It’s difficult to claim the endings of Catch-22 or Memento Mori or Blackadder are happy. It turns out we had all along been reading about ghosts – which we had already known, but the comedy had allowed us to forget it for just long enough to be able again to remember. Stach’s three-page epilogue to his three-volume biography moves swiftly through the final fates of many of those whose lives overlapped with Kafka’s. Kafka is still with us; the most moving part of this biography is the absence of everyone else. - Rivka Galchen
1.
On April 10, 1917, Dr. Siegfried Wolff of Berlin-Charlottenburg wrote to an unprolific but well-connected author about his recently republished story. The story had been originally rushed to publication under difficult wartime circumstances, but its author did have the opportunity to edit the galleys for a subsequent stand-alone volume. Anyway, Dr. Wolff was not interested in airy questions of prose style. He was unhappy:
Dear Sir,
You have made me unhappy.
I bought your “Metamorphosis” as a present for my cousin, but she doesn’t know what to make of this story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn’t know what to make of it either. Her mother gave the book to my other cousin, and she doesn’t know what to make of it either. Now they’ve written to me. They want me to explain the story to them because I am the one with a doctorate in the family. But I am baffled.
Sir! I spent months fighting it out with the Russians in the trenches without flinching, but if my reputation among my cousins went to hell, I would not be able to bear it.
Only you can help me. You have to, because you are the one who landed me in this situation. So please tell me what my cousin ought to make of “The Metamorphosis.”
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Siegfried Wolff
Though we have no record of Franz Kafka’s response, his biographer Reiner Stach points out that Dr. Wolff’s letter would be “a harmless harbringer of the enormous discursive surge that would descend upon [Kafka’s] posthumous writings a generation later.”
Several generations later, every student assigned to read “The Metamorphosis” is introduced to the myth: the quest to write a book that would serve as “an axe to break the frozen sea within us,” his unrecognized genius, the overbearing father, and the friend who refused to carry out his wish to have the unfinished work burned. Scholars and biographers have complicated that image without really challenging the myth. Kafka and friend and literary executor Max Brod, understandably, haven’t made their work easy. When he prepared Kafka’s work for publication, Brod excised passages from Kafka’s work that contained anti-Semitic material or details about brothel visits.
Even 40 years after Max Brod’s death, papers important to Kafka’s biographers were still mired in a long, complicated legal case. Towards the end of his life, Brod entrusted documents to his longtime lover Esther Hoffe. Instead of making them publicly available, she held onto almost all of the material until her death in 2008. Hoffe’s daughters inherited them and stated their intention to sell them to the German Literature Archive, which had bought The Trial from Esther Hoffe in 1988, rather than the National Library of Israel, to which Brod had ambiguously promised to donate them. The public debate about the papers has touched on Nazi history, Brod and Hoffe’s possible sexual debauchery, the “best interests of the scholars,” and the Hoffe daughters’ cat-lady reputations. Which is all to say, the Kafka trial was improbably Dickensian.
In 2012, the lawsuit was resolved, with the National Library of Israel being awarded the Kafka archives. Quoted in The New York Times, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret put it nicely, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”
Biographer Reiner Stach held off on writing the first volume covering Kafka’s childhood until the lawsuit was resolved. That volume will draw on letters from Kafka’s childhood friends and Brod’s notebooks and diary that were held by the Hoffes. What Stach has given us so far are two-thirds of a brilliant, authoritative portrait: translated into English by Shelley Frisch, Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight begin in 1910 and end with Kafka’s death in 1924.
Stach’s Kafka belonged to his contemporary world and stood estranged from it. In many of his stories, he masterfully reworked the Symbolist and Expressionist tropes that featured in his contemporaries’ writings — surreal transformations, enigmatic dialogue, alienated protagonists — as well as those of Jewish myth, Enlightenment philosophy, and the picaresque novel. Aside from the influence of Franz Grillparzer, Knut Hamsun, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whom Kafka explicitly cited as influences), Stach also draws attention to the non-literary influences on Kafka’s work. He was an early cinephile.
Consider the Chaplin-esque sections in “Lawyer, Manufacturer, Painter,” (usually published as the seventh chapter of The Trial), in which lawyers charge up a flight of stairs only to be thrown down by a bouncer-like official:
On the other hand, any day not spent in court is a day lost for them and it was a matter of some importance to force their way inside. In the end, they agreed that they would try to tire the old man out. One lawyer after another was sent out to run up the steps and let himself be thrown down again, offering what resistance he could as long as it was passive resistance, and his colleagues would catch him at the bottom of the steps. That went on for about an hour until the old gentleman, who was already exhausted from working all night, was very tired and went back to his office.
His satire belies his own genius for legal work. Professionally, he was a diligent, detail-oriented bureaucrat. He spoke convincingly to groups of hostile entrepreneurs about the importance of insuring their employees at a time when the idea was exotic and strange. When he did choose to write prose that baffled Dr. Wolff, he did so with the same precision as he prepared legal memos.
Kafka’s interest in Yiddish theater also nourished his writing. He gave a successful speech before a performance by a group of “Eastern” Jewish theater troupes, pointing out the historical and literary significance of what amounted to “cultural exotica” for Jewish audiences in Prague. His performance, as a reporter described it, was remarkable: At the same time, he grew bored with or disenchanted with Yitzhak Löwy, a writer-actor who tried to bring artistic credibility to Yiddish theater.
Doubtlessly, his own personal mythology was an important source for his fiction. The biography is, of course, an exhausted corner of the vast Kafka industry. We know: in addition to being a zealous bureaucrat and an active member of Prague’s logrolling literati, Franz Kafka was an unusually fastidious craftsman of German prose. To wit, when he was near death, he demanded that his friend and literary executor Max Brod burn unfinished work, including The Trial, that did not meet his impossibly high standards.
But he had worked hard and felt “The Metamorphosis” had fulfilled its potential, if it still was not quite on par with “The Judgment.” Among all the myths surrounding Kafka, perhaps his own self-mythology is the most misleading and misled. Few readers would rate “The Judgment,” a frantic, claustrophobic, and humorless story, better than “The Metamorphosis.” Kafka though considered “The Judgment” a moment of transcendent creation. He wrote it in a single night, in the midst of an anxious, awkward courtship. Contrastingly, on January 19, 1914, he disparaged “The Metamorphosis,” the greater story of the two, which he had written in spurts, in his diary: “Great aversion. Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its core.”
Perhaps he was turning away from what his friends clearly recognized as autobiography. Or he was feinting. About “The Judgment,” he resisted the claim on technical grounds, saying “Then our father would have to be living in the toilet.” His Hebrew teacher recounts how, when speaking with someone who had read “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka “took a step back” and said “as though he were discussing a real occurrence, ‘That was a dreadful thing.’”
2.
One of the successes of Stach’s biography is how well-drawn his friends and family are. Max Brod was a loyal friend and selfless promoter of others’ work. When Brod engaged in an ill-advised public dispute with Karl Kraus, though, you can sense his frustration at his standing in the larger republic of letters — a power-broker in a cultural outpost like Prague is considered a hack in Berlin.
His father, Hermann, who owned a luxury-goods store on Aldstader Ring, is also thoughtfully sketched. Clearly, he was a man who recognized the vulnerability of his social standing; in his lifetime, he was required to maintain his reputation in the community, overcome the financial imprudence of one son-in-law, distinguish himself at a time when anti-Semitism erupted regularly, and navigate the slow decline of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and the sudden emergence of Czech nationalism. To him, his son’s indifference to the family’s financial solvency and his own career advancement seemed like fatal dilettantism.
Kafka’s fiance, Felice Bauer, was a middle-class Berliner, sometimes dismissed by his biographers as unworthy of his devotions. She emerges as a complex figure in The Decisive Years. She was an accomplished office worker, comfortable with the sudden mechanization of the workplace. As Stach puts it, “Pragmatic, straightforward, and always grounded in reality, she oscillated daily between the pressure cooker of her family and the cold rationality of her office with no apparent ill effects. She seems to have adapted well to a professional world in which both maternal behavior and daintiness were scorned.”
She was pragmatic, even mercenary, in romance too. In the correspondence with Kafka, she also kept secrets to maintain an image of bourgeois propriety. From a private detective agency hired by Franz’s parents, she impressively managed to hide both an unstable brother and an unmarried, pregnant sister.
3.
The clubby literary world of early-20th-century Prague, the anxious and unfulfilled courtship, the grinding filial obligations — none of it seems to promise an extraordinary literary career. What distinguished the Prague novelist and short-story writer from his contemporaries, the largely-forgotten Symbolist and Expressionist writers that he shared stage and page with?
He remains singular because his choices are not inevitable. There are no clear lines between his work and his aesthetics, history, biography, and philosophy. His literature is defiant, organic, and idiosyncratic. The ending of “The Metamorphosis” that he disliked so much is one of those singular moments that distilled the difference between Kafka and his peers: the Samsas, having rid themselves of Gregor, enjoy an idyll outside of their cramped apartment. Similarly, in “The Stoker,” the first chapter of Amerika, Kafka re-imagines the Statue of Liberty with a sword in its hand.
Despite setting his fiction in the U.S. or imperial colonies (neither of which he ever saw firsthand), it was Prague that he belonged to. Though Stach amply demonstrates how Kafka fully inhabited the city, its fringe theaters and its literary salons, Prague has had an uneasy relationship with its native son. He was Jewish and wrote highly personal fragments in German, which has not necessarily endeared him to later generations of nationalists. Yet there has been a reconciliation of sorts. Today, the Kafka Museum in Prague displays some of the seminal mementos of his life, including the unposted “Letter to His Father,” and scores of travel-visa requests when he was frantically trying to visit Germany during the war. It is located not far from the Charles Bridge, from which Kafka probably had Georg Bendemann leap to his doom.
That semblance of proximity is illusory though. As Stach points out in his epilogue, in the next 20 years,
The fate of many people he was close to was sealed, and countless traces of Kafka’s life that were left behind in the collective memory were wiped out. Letters, photographs, literary estates, even entire archives were destroyed. The violence that gripped the era often made it impossible to identify what was lost, and even to ascertain that it was lost. […] He would not have recognized anything left after the end of this catastrophic blow to civilization. His world no longer exists. Only his language lives. - John Yargo
How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume? Franz Kafka, named for the fallen crown of a defunct empire, has himself metamorphosed into an empire of boundless discourse, an empire stretched out across a firmament of interpretation: myth, parable, allegory, clairvoyance, divination; theory upon thesis upon theophany; every conceivable incarnation of the sexual, the political, the psychological, the metaphysical. Another biography? Another particle in the deep void of a proliferating cosmos. How, then, does one dare to add so much as a single syllable, even in the secondary exhalation of a book review?
Juxtapositions of the minor and practical with the emotive, impossible and profound emerge repeatedly in this biography, so much so that often they swap emotional valences. Here is the young writer and insurance worker reliably showing up to work every morning at 8.15; here he is getting on his best friend Brod’s nerves over whether or not to keep the window open when they share a room at a hotel (Kafka prevails); here he is at a nudist sanatorium admiring the bodies of two young Swedish men. Here is young Kafka asking to be released from his job so he can be a soldier; here he is encouraging his father to invest in an asbestos factory and then disappointing his father terribly by not helping to run the asbestos factory, which loses money and goes under; here he is writing about the women who work at the asbestos factory; here he is annoyed that his father and mother stay up late playing the card game franzefuss. Here is his publisher referring to his story ‘In the Penal Colony’ as ‘In the Gangster Colony’ because ‘gangster’ is the more marketable word. Here our man asks his sister, Ottla, to go out and please buy twenty copies of the magazine that has run a Czech translation of his story ‘The Stoker’; here he is writing to the married translator, whom he has wooed; here he is writing a 16-page letter asking for a promotion at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute; here he is giving a reading in Munich with Rilke, and being reviewed in the paper the next day as ‘quite an inadequate presenter’; here he is, desperate to write his fiction but setting aside his two-week holiday period to write a very long letter to his father (which he never gives him) in which he explains that his father eats too loudly and too messily and that his father’s large body made Kafka, as a child, feel small and weak when they would go together to the city pool. Here he is getting engaged and not getting married; here he is getting engaged and not getting married again; here he is getting into a similar tangle one more time; here he is relieved by his mortal diagnosis of TB. Here he is reading a letter from the tax office asking about capital contributions to the First Prague Asbestos Works, here he is writing back explaining that the factory had ceased to exist five years earlier, and here he is receiving another letter asking what his reply meant as no record could be found of the referenced original letter, and then here he is a few months later receiving a third letter threatening him with charges and a fine if he persists in not accounting for the capital accumulation on the First Prague Asbestos Works; here are 350 pages of Kafka’s study notes on conversational Hebrew; here he is at the end of his life, making hand shadow-puppets in the evenings with Diamant; here he is in 1924, the day before he dies, unable to eat, doing a last round of edits on his short story ‘The Hunger Artist’.
Stach makes clear the very humble limits of what he believes his biographical project can yield in terms of actually ‘knowing’ Kafka. ‘The life of a human being,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘draws back, comes into view like an animal at the edge of the forest, and disappears again.’ He also recognises concordances between Kafka’s life and work as illuminating only in a minor way. Kafka often spent half the day lying down, daydreaming, and Stach believes these inaccessible parts of Kafka are the most important. Yet despite all this Stach pursues what can be known of Kafka so far and so exhaustively that I was reminded at some moments of the ending of A Handful of Dust, when we meet the illiterate man in the Brazilian jungle who loves Charles Dickens’s writing so much he holds the protagonist, Tony Last, captive so that he can read Dickens to him until the end of his days. Sometimes I thought of Stach as the captive and Kafka as the captor in this analogy, and sometimes the other way around. It is a very long biography and so sometimes I had all sorts of thoughts I not long afterwards wanted to upend, or undermine. In that way, though by different means, prolonged exposure to Stach’s work does have an effect-overlap with prolonged exposure to the work of Kafka.
It has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends, and though that sounds more like anxiety than hilarity to me, the funny point endures. But what kind of funny is he? Borges described Hawthorne’s story ‘Wakefield’ as a prefiguration of Kafka, noting ‘the protagonist’s profound triviality, which contrasts with the magnitude of his perdition’. Part of the point here is an incongruity of scale – a natural structure of the comic, a way of relating to the cosmic. We might think here of Metamorphosis but also of the petitioner in The Trial who spends his whole life waiting at the Door of the Law, a door that is just for him, but through which he is never allowed entry. Or we might think of Kafka’s dog (or his ape, or mouse, or burrowing animal), who takes his life as seriously, and thinks it over as analytically, as a human.
Or we might think of the humans who take their lives seriously, as if they, too, were, well, human. ‘Often I doubt that I am a human being,’ Kafka writes in a note to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer, as he is trying to get out of the engagement but doesn’t want to break it off himself and instead wants her to take the action. ‘You can marry if you put on sufficient weight,’ a doctor later tells a tuberculous Kafka, who doesn’t want to marry anyhow, or even really to eat. The comedy of scale is always simultaneously a tragedy of scale, if viewed from the proper angle, and as articulated in the famous words Kafka wrote on a postcard: ‘The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.’
And one element of the comedy of Kafka’s biography is the way his life, at whatever moment, is dwarfed by his work. Whether or not the reasonably capable writer and insurance official living in Prague through the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into the 1920s resembles the Kafka of your imagination depends in part on how attentively you’ve followed each succession of corrective articles and introductions, but also on your ability to assimilate dissonant information, and on how substantial external life seems to you.
If for many years, much of the reading public saw Kafka as a kind of cousin of Bartleby – if we were most swayed, say, by his never finishing his novels, or by his talk of ghosts and the unbearability of everything – it now seems hard not to see that although Kafka truly was a Bartleby-kin, he was at the same time just as much Bartleby’s well-intentioned, overwhelmed, frustrated boss. Kafka himself found Kafka difficult. In an entry in his diary, in which he writes of himself, as he often did, in the third person, he says:
He could have resigned himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner – that could be a life’s ambition. But it was a barred cage. Casually and imperiously, as if at home, the racket of the world streamed out and in through the bars, the prisoner was really free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.
Later, in a letter to Brod, in which Kafka is explaining his enormous dread over a pretty insignificant decision about whether to take a trip to Georgental, he writes:
He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived. By this I do not mean that wife and child, fields and cattle are essential to living. The only essential thing for life is forgoing smugness, moving into the house instead of admiring it and hanging garlands around it. One might argue that this is a matter of fate and is not given to anyone’s hand. But then why this sense of remorse; why does the remorse never stop? To become finer and more savoury? That, too. But why do such nights always end on this note: I could live and I do not live. The second major reason – perhaps it is all really one, I don’t seem to be able to sort them apart now – is the idea: ‘What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’
Brod replies saying, basically, that he can’t take Kafka’s complaint too seriously. But in all the most important ways Brod took Kafka extremely seriously, both as a friend and as a writer: he was the one primarily responsible for Kafka’s being published in his lifetime, and is almost wholly responsible for our knowing the work today. Kafka’s singular brilliance and annoyingness are perfectly bound.
*
Often his character recalls both Larry David and Bertie Wooster. Many are the plans that Kafka makes in a manner that ensures their eventual unmaking. Over five years he courts, engages, un-engages, re-engages but never marries Felice Bauer, a woman with whom he spends less than 15 scattered and not always happy days, whose dear friend Grete Bloch he also woos in letters, and whom he makes clear he could not be sexually available to in a marriage. Then, in a letter he sends to her in advance of a meeting at which they plan to discuss things (she has even quit her job at his bidding so as to be able to move to Prague), he calls her ‘my human tribunal’. During the First World War, Kafka repeatedly begs his superiors at work to release him from his job so he can become a soldier; but as he later writes in his diary, he doesn’t go too far; he never becomes a soldier. Nor does he marry the next woman he asks to marry him, or the one after that. Nor does he deliver (or destroy) the long letter he wrote to his father. Nor does he, despite extensive plans and study of Hebrew, move to Palestine. Kafka at times causes others to suffer in a manner akin to the way the illimitably charming Don Quixote does, by adhering to an untrue but more ennobling view of the world.
What emerges from this pattern of Kafka’s behaviour is a sense not just of a character who can never commit – the comic character who commits ends the series – but also of how powerful he is, and how ambivalent he is about being powerful. With both women and men, Kafka fairly effortlessly elicits their love. ‘You belong to me,’ he writes to Milena Jesenskà after she has inquired about translating his work; though sceptical at first, Jesenskà quickly responds to him, as nearly everyone does. A Hungarian doctor, Robert Klopstock, whom Kafka meets at a sanatorium, is similarly enamoured, and he seems to move to Prague mostly to be nearer to Kafka, who then disappoints him with his reclusiveness. Kafka seems unable to refrain from inciting affection, which he then finds overwhelming and retreats from. In a letter to Else Bergman, who along with her husband had emigrated to Jerusalem, and who is asking Kafka about his plans to move, Kafka writes: ‘That the voyage would have been undertaken with you would have greatly increased the spiritual criminality of the case. No, I could not go that way, even if I had been able – I repeat, and “all berths are taken,” you add.’ Kafka does not come across as a very sexual person in this biography – not at all, really – but he understands the power involved in sexuality. He pursues positions of seeming inferiority, as he tries to both exercise and abdicate his magnetism.At times he seems to be living in a situation comedy. When he goes to the countryside to write, he finds it ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ at first, but by the second day he can’t work because he’s troubled by a child practising the French horn, by the din from a sawmill and by happy children playing outside, whom he eventually yells at: ‘Why don’t you go and pick mushrooms?’ He then discovers that the children belong to his neighbour, a sleep-deprived shift worker at the local mill who sends his seven children out so that he can get some sleep. At a sanatorium for his TB, Kafka and his friend Klopstock play a practical joke on another resident, a high-ranking Czech officer who conspicuously practises the flute and sketches and paints outdoors. The officer puts on a show of his work; Klopstock and Kafka write up pseudonymous reviews of it, one published in Czech, the other in Hungarian; the mocked officer then comes to Klopstock (in his room with a fever and kept company by Kafka) for a translation of the review. After this successful prank, Kafka sends his sister a spoof article about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is pointing the way to a cure for TB; his whole family celebrates the good news, of which he then has to disabuse them.
Both these anecdotes from Kafka’s life, of which there are many of a similar genre, are at once antic and death-haunted, illuminating and opaque. We might ask ourselves why we would read a biography of Kafka when we could instead just read Kafka. Why make breakfast, when you can just read Kafka? Why watch television or trim your fingernails when you could just read Kafka?
*
I have described Stach’s method as if he were a kind of Joe Friday, which besides suggesting that investigating a life is like investigating a crime, is only approximately true. Though the biography is extensive – we learn about Milena Jesenskà’s boarding school and what her parents’ marriage was like – Stach has also had to leave much out. That even a three-volume biography cannot possibly be exhaustive puts what Stach has included in a different light. Though he’s usually sparing with his own commentary, Stach gives space to counter in detail other writers on Kafka’s famous diary entry ‘August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.’ He also counters some of the more famous commentary on Kafka’s collected letters to Felice Bauer, a document easily readable or misreadable as a monologue totally blind to its purported audience. On the issue of Kafka’s sexuality, he doesn’t directly address suggestions that Kafka might have preferred men, and he chooses to note but not quote from Kafka’s brief mention in his diary of sexual feelings for his sister. Stach makes note of but is not detained by Kafka’s observations of male bodies, his physical distance from the women whom he wooed, and the intensity of his male friendships. (Saul Friedländer’s Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt goes into these issues intelligently, without according them the false weight of bright, definite explanation.) Perhaps Stach has devoted less room to Kafka’s sexuality than another biographer might have – though he doesn’t shy away from it, and too often he seems to be trying to establish Kafka’s heterosexual credibility by mentioning once again that he visited prostitutes – in part because even a line or two about sexuality, especially incest or attraction to children, can cast a misleadingly enormous shadow.
Or maybe he is simply trying to protect Kafka (an allegation I feel confident makes biographers miserable). Early in the biography I found it strange when Stach brought up, say, a minor contemporary Polish novel that takes licence in imagining the inner life of a correspondent of Kafka’s, only to tear the novel down; most biographers and scholars would have just left that novel out. Even in his introduction, Stach opens a section with a relatively obscure quote from the 18th-century German satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, only to take issue with it, not in one way but in two, after which Lichtenberg never comes up again. These inclusions seem particularly strange since Stach has decided not to discuss Walter Benjamin’s essays on Kafka, or the respected work of Eric Santner, even though much more minor scholarship is gone into. This does make for some good comedy with Stach as the protagonist. Consider his Bernhardian brevity on literary scholars, whom he describes as having ‘dismantled, crushed and reconstituted’ quotations from Kafka’s diaries ‘with a vengeance, generally in the form of essays written as stepping-stones to academic advancement’. This is a bit harsh, especially since it’s reasonable that people who study Kafka for a living use their work on Kafka to keep getting to work on Kafka for a living. Stach, so even-tempered most of the time, emerges in these moments as a character who has left the relatively rational arena of the academic and entered into the more reliably irrational realm of the parent. It lends a further pathos to the biography: Stach himself is a better and better character as the book goes on.His astute offhand descriptions accumulate. He succinctly describes ‘the Kafkaesque’ as consisting in part of a ‘peculiar form of rhetoric, which obscures the situation with analytical precision’. On the evolution of the Kafka fragment on the Olympic swimming champion who doesn’t know how to swim: ‘Kafka does not seek out an image; he follows it, and would rather lose sight of his subject matter than the logic of his image, as even some of his early readers noted.’ Stach notes that guilt and punishment are less present as themes in Kafka’s later writings. Of the later passages in Kafka’s diary, when he returns to writing of himself in the first rather than the third person, Stach observes that ‘he struck a tone that sounds almost serene in comparison with the many laments with which he had always accompanied even the most easily foreseeable disturbances and disappointments.’ (An example: ‘No matter how wretched a constitution I may have … I must do the best I can with it, even in my sense, and it is hollow sophistry to argue that there is only one thing to be done with it, and this one thing is thus the best, and is despair.’) Discussing ‘The Burrow’, written towards the end of Kafka’s life, Stach observes the mysterious noise that disturbs the animal’s serenity: ‘A hissing and piping with regular pauses that the animal hears is its own sound of life, its own breath; the animal itself is the ultimate source of the disquiet that continually disturbs the perfect silence of its creation.’ These are soft observations, not strictly defensible, not particularly biographical. But the softness, and the way Stach mostly but not entirely withholds it, is essential to the book’s effect.
In great comic novels, say Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the element that generates the comedy – often social norms, whether norms of class or war – also generates the tragedy. But in Kafka’s life, we see this structure in the more ahistorical aspects, in the situations generated by Kafka’s way of going through the world, by his character.
Another element of many great comic novels is the extended set of minor characters, who by being funny, make a disproportionately deep claim on our emotions, however brief their appearances. Stach has brought to life so many fantastic minor ‘characters’ in this biography; they are what makes the way the biography ends so brilliant and so sad – or more precisely, it’s through them that we feel the sadness of the endings, since of course we already know how it ends. I am not speaking only, or even mainly, of the ‘major’ minor characters, like Kafka’s fiancées or family members, though Stach offers particularly vivid and valuable portraits of Kafka’s sister, Ottla, and of his translator and romantic friend, Milena Jesenskà. Some characters come in only for a paragraph, or even just a line or two. Consider the 22-year-old Karl Müller, who publishes a piece in his local newspaper titled ‘The Re-Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa’, in which Samsa comes back to life and things improve for him; shortly after publication of that piece, the very poor and very young Müller dies of TB. Or the writer Oskar Baum, blind since the age of 11 and supporting his family by giving piano lessons, who gets a letter from Kafka’s mother in which she implores him, as the one married man in young Kafka’s circle of friends, to help set Kafka’s ‘head straight’. In his lifetime, we learn in a footnote, Baum had trouble being seen by publishers as more than just a chronicler of specialist literature on being blind; his most but barely enduring work is called The Door to the Impossible. We see the once celebrated writer Johannes Schlaf at the age of fifty, having gone mad and giving cosmological lectures that make no sense, but make him (in Kafka’s eyes) happy. We see Kafka’s boss at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, who writes poetry himself, and who elegantly handles his employee’s petitions to enlist and die as a soldier at the front. It turns out that several of the employees at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute wrote poems and stories. We meet the cheerful Czech man at the sanatorium who wants to show Kafka his throat abscesses with a mirror, and whose family never visits him. A young woman, Puah, just 18 years old, comes through Prague on a visit from Jerusalem and gives Kafka Hebrew lessons. The innkeeper Fraulein Olga Stüdl tells the modest, polite young Kafka staying at her boarding-house about her failed engagement, and he gives her a galley proof of his manuscript. Kafka’s hapless brother-in-law can’t keep a business going. The writer Ernst Weiss passionately hates Kafka for not writing him a blurb. A cute schoolgirl in the botanical gardens catches Kafka’s attention as she calls something out to him; he smiles and waves to her, repeatedly, then realises what she had said: ‘Jew.’
Comedy makes us feel safe, maybe because the form once implied a happy ending. It’s difficult to claim the endings of Catch-22 or Memento Mori or Blackadder are happy. It turns out we had all along been reading about ghosts – which we had already known, but the comedy had allowed us to forget it for just long enough to be able again to remember. Stach’s three-page epilogue to his three-volume biography moves swiftly through the final fates of many of those whose lives overlapped with Kafka’s. Kafka is still with us; the most moving part of this biography is the absence of everyone else. - Rivka Galchen
1.
On April 10, 1917, Dr. Siegfried Wolff of Berlin-Charlottenburg wrote to an unprolific but well-connected author about his recently republished story. The story had been originally rushed to publication under difficult wartime circumstances, but its author did have the opportunity to edit the galleys for a subsequent stand-alone volume. Anyway, Dr. Wolff was not interested in airy questions of prose style. He was unhappy:
Dear Sir,
You have made me unhappy.
I bought your “Metamorphosis” as a present for my cousin, but she doesn’t know what to make of this story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn’t know what to make of it either. Her mother gave the book to my other cousin, and she doesn’t know what to make of it either. Now they’ve written to me. They want me to explain the story to them because I am the one with a doctorate in the family. But I am baffled.
Sir! I spent months fighting it out with the Russians in the trenches without flinching, but if my reputation among my cousins went to hell, I would not be able to bear it.
Only you can help me. You have to, because you are the one who landed me in this situation. So please tell me what my cousin ought to make of “The Metamorphosis.”
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Siegfried Wolff
Though we have no record of Franz Kafka’s response, his biographer Reiner Stach points out that Dr. Wolff’s letter would be “a harmless harbringer of the enormous discursive surge that would descend upon [Kafka’s] posthumous writings a generation later.”
Several generations later, every student assigned to read “The Metamorphosis” is introduced to the myth: the quest to write a book that would serve as “an axe to break the frozen sea within us,” his unrecognized genius, the overbearing father, and the friend who refused to carry out his wish to have the unfinished work burned. Scholars and biographers have complicated that image without really challenging the myth. Kafka and friend and literary executor Max Brod, understandably, haven’t made their work easy. When he prepared Kafka’s work for publication, Brod excised passages from Kafka’s work that contained anti-Semitic material or details about brothel visits.
Even 40 years after Max Brod’s death, papers important to Kafka’s biographers were still mired in a long, complicated legal case. Towards the end of his life, Brod entrusted documents to his longtime lover Esther Hoffe. Instead of making them publicly available, she held onto almost all of the material until her death in 2008. Hoffe’s daughters inherited them and stated their intention to sell them to the German Literature Archive, which had bought The Trial from Esther Hoffe in 1988, rather than the National Library of Israel, to which Brod had ambiguously promised to donate them. The public debate about the papers has touched on Nazi history, Brod and Hoffe’s possible sexual debauchery, the “best interests of the scholars,” and the Hoffe daughters’ cat-lady reputations. Which is all to say, the Kafka trial was improbably Dickensian.
In 2012, the lawsuit was resolved, with the National Library of Israel being awarded the Kafka archives. Quoted in The New York Times, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret put it nicely, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”
Biographer Reiner Stach held off on writing the first volume covering Kafka’s childhood until the lawsuit was resolved. That volume will draw on letters from Kafka’s childhood friends and Brod’s notebooks and diary that were held by the Hoffes. What Stach has given us so far are two-thirds of a brilliant, authoritative portrait: translated into English by Shelley Frisch, Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight begin in 1910 and end with Kafka’s death in 1924.
Stach’s Kafka belonged to his contemporary world and stood estranged from it. In many of his stories, he masterfully reworked the Symbolist and Expressionist tropes that featured in his contemporaries’ writings — surreal transformations, enigmatic dialogue, alienated protagonists — as well as those of Jewish myth, Enlightenment philosophy, and the picaresque novel. Aside from the influence of Franz Grillparzer, Knut Hamsun, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whom Kafka explicitly cited as influences), Stach also draws attention to the non-literary influences on Kafka’s work. He was an early cinephile.
Consider the Chaplin-esque sections in “Lawyer, Manufacturer, Painter,” (usually published as the seventh chapter of The Trial), in which lawyers charge up a flight of stairs only to be thrown down by a bouncer-like official:
On the other hand, any day not spent in court is a day lost for them and it was a matter of some importance to force their way inside. In the end, they agreed that they would try to tire the old man out. One lawyer after another was sent out to run up the steps and let himself be thrown down again, offering what resistance he could as long as it was passive resistance, and his colleagues would catch him at the bottom of the steps. That went on for about an hour until the old gentleman, who was already exhausted from working all night, was very tired and went back to his office.
His satire belies his own genius for legal work. Professionally, he was a diligent, detail-oriented bureaucrat. He spoke convincingly to groups of hostile entrepreneurs about the importance of insuring their employees at a time when the idea was exotic and strange. When he did choose to write prose that baffled Dr. Wolff, he did so with the same precision as he prepared legal memos.
Kafka’s interest in Yiddish theater also nourished his writing. He gave a successful speech before a performance by a group of “Eastern” Jewish theater troupes, pointing out the historical and literary significance of what amounted to “cultural exotica” for Jewish audiences in Prague. His performance, as a reporter described it, was remarkable: At the same time, he grew bored with or disenchanted with Yitzhak Löwy, a writer-actor who tried to bring artistic credibility to Yiddish theater.
Doubtlessly, his own personal mythology was an important source for his fiction. The biography is, of course, an exhausted corner of the vast Kafka industry. We know: in addition to being a zealous bureaucrat and an active member of Prague’s logrolling literati, Franz Kafka was an unusually fastidious craftsman of German prose. To wit, when he was near death, he demanded that his friend and literary executor Max Brod burn unfinished work, including The Trial, that did not meet his impossibly high standards.
But he had worked hard and felt “The Metamorphosis” had fulfilled its potential, if it still was not quite on par with “The Judgment.” Among all the myths surrounding Kafka, perhaps his own self-mythology is the most misleading and misled. Few readers would rate “The Judgment,” a frantic, claustrophobic, and humorless story, better than “The Metamorphosis.” Kafka though considered “The Judgment” a moment of transcendent creation. He wrote it in a single night, in the midst of an anxious, awkward courtship. Contrastingly, on January 19, 1914, he disparaged “The Metamorphosis,” the greater story of the two, which he had written in spurts, in his diary: “Great aversion. Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its core.”
Perhaps he was turning away from what his friends clearly recognized as autobiography. Or he was feinting. About “The Judgment,” he resisted the claim on technical grounds, saying “Then our father would have to be living in the toilet.” His Hebrew teacher recounts how, when speaking with someone who had read “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka “took a step back” and said “as though he were discussing a real occurrence, ‘That was a dreadful thing.’”
2.
One of the successes of Stach’s biography is how well-drawn his friends and family are. Max Brod was a loyal friend and selfless promoter of others’ work. When Brod engaged in an ill-advised public dispute with Karl Kraus, though, you can sense his frustration at his standing in the larger republic of letters — a power-broker in a cultural outpost like Prague is considered a hack in Berlin.
His father, Hermann, who owned a luxury-goods store on Aldstader Ring, is also thoughtfully sketched. Clearly, he was a man who recognized the vulnerability of his social standing; in his lifetime, he was required to maintain his reputation in the community, overcome the financial imprudence of one son-in-law, distinguish himself at a time when anti-Semitism erupted regularly, and navigate the slow decline of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and the sudden emergence of Czech nationalism. To him, his son’s indifference to the family’s financial solvency and his own career advancement seemed like fatal dilettantism.
Kafka’s fiance, Felice Bauer, was a middle-class Berliner, sometimes dismissed by his biographers as unworthy of his devotions. She emerges as a complex figure in The Decisive Years. She was an accomplished office worker, comfortable with the sudden mechanization of the workplace. As Stach puts it, “Pragmatic, straightforward, and always grounded in reality, she oscillated daily between the pressure cooker of her family and the cold rationality of her office with no apparent ill effects. She seems to have adapted well to a professional world in which both maternal behavior and daintiness were scorned.”
She was pragmatic, even mercenary, in romance too. In the correspondence with Kafka, she also kept secrets to maintain an image of bourgeois propriety. From a private detective agency hired by Franz’s parents, she impressively managed to hide both an unstable brother and an unmarried, pregnant sister.
3.
The clubby literary world of early-20th-century Prague, the anxious and unfulfilled courtship, the grinding filial obligations — none of it seems to promise an extraordinary literary career. What distinguished the Prague novelist and short-story writer from his contemporaries, the largely-forgotten Symbolist and Expressionist writers that he shared stage and page with?
He remains singular because his choices are not inevitable. There are no clear lines between his work and his aesthetics, history, biography, and philosophy. His literature is defiant, organic, and idiosyncratic. The ending of “The Metamorphosis” that he disliked so much is one of those singular moments that distilled the difference between Kafka and his peers: the Samsas, having rid themselves of Gregor, enjoy an idyll outside of their cramped apartment. Similarly, in “The Stoker,” the first chapter of Amerika, Kafka re-imagines the Statue of Liberty with a sword in its hand.
Despite setting his fiction in the U.S. or imperial colonies (neither of which he ever saw firsthand), it was Prague that he belonged to. Though Stach amply demonstrates how Kafka fully inhabited the city, its fringe theaters and its literary salons, Prague has had an uneasy relationship with its native son. He was Jewish and wrote highly personal fragments in German, which has not necessarily endeared him to later generations of nationalists. Yet there has been a reconciliation of sorts. Today, the Kafka Museum in Prague displays some of the seminal mementos of his life, including the unposted “Letter to His Father,” and scores of travel-visa requests when he was frantically trying to visit Germany during the war. It is located not far from the Charles Bridge, from which Kafka probably had Georg Bendemann leap to his doom.
That semblance of proximity is illusory though. As Stach points out in his epilogue, in the next 20 years,
The fate of many people he was close to was sealed, and countless traces of Kafka’s life that were left behind in the collective memory were wiped out. Letters, photographs, literary estates, even entire archives were destroyed. The violence that gripped the era often made it impossible to identify what was lost, and even to ascertain that it was lost. […] He would not have recognized anything left after the end of this catastrophic blow to civilization. His world no longer exists. Only his language lives. - John Yargo
How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume? Franz Kafka, named for the fallen crown of a defunct empire, has himself metamorphosed into an empire of boundless discourse, an empire stretched out across a firmament of interpretation: myth, parable, allegory, clairvoyance, divination; theory upon thesis upon theophany; every conceivable incarnation of the sexual, the political, the psychological, the metaphysical. Another biography? Another particle in the deep void of a proliferating cosmos. How, then, does one dare to add so much as a single syllable, even in the secondary exhalation of a book review?
One dares because of the culprits. The culprits are two. One is “Kafkaesque,” which buries the work. The other is “transcend,” which buries the life. A scrupulous and capacious biography may own the power to drive away these belittlements, and Reiner Stach’s mammoth three volumes (only the second and third have appeared in English so far) are superbly tempered for exorcism. With its echo of “grotesque,” the ubiquitous term “Kafkaesque” has long been frozen into permanence, both in the dictionary and in the most commonplace vernacular. Comparative and allusive, it has by now escaped the body of work it is meant to evoke. To say that such-and-such a circumstance is “Kafkaesque” is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism—even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like “The Hunger Artist.” Nothing is like “The Metamorphosis.”
Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. The Kafkaesque is what Kafka presumably “stands for”—an unearned, even a usurping, explication. And from the very start, serious criticism has been overrun by the Kafkaesque, the lock that portends the key: homoeroticism for one maven, the father-son entanglement for another, the theological uncanny for yet another. Or else it is the slippery commotion of time; or of messianism; or of Thanatos as deliverance. The Kafkaesque, finally, is reductiveness posing as revelation.
The persistence of “transcend” is still more troublesome. What is it that Kafka is said to “transcend”? Every actual and factual aspect of the life he lived, everything that formed and informed him, that drew or repelled him, the time and the place, the family and the apartment and the office—and Prague itself, with its two languages and three populations fixed at the margins of a ruling sovereignty sprawled across disparate and conflicting nationalities. Kafka’s fictions, free grains of being, seem to float, untethered and self-contained, above the heavy explicitness of a recognizable society and culture. And so a new and risen Kafka is born, cleansed of origins, unchained from the tensions, many of them nasty, of Prague’s roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew, its ambient anti-Semitism and its utopian Zionism, its Jewish clubs and its literary stewpot of Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Weiss. In this understanding, Kafka is detached not from the claims of specificity—what is more strikingly particularized than a Kafka tale?—but of a certain designated specificity.
In an otherwise seamless introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories, John Updike takes up the theme of transcendence with particular bluntness: “Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.” As evidence, he notes that the Samsas in “The Metamorphosis” make the sign of the cross. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche. (Danilo Kiš, Isaac Babel, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth: from these wounded ghosts, a chorus of knowing laughter.) The idea of the parochial compels its opposite: what is not parochial must be universal. And if the parochial is deemed a low distraction from the preponderant social force—“that is to say, predominantly Christian”—then what is at work is no more than supercilious triumphalism. To belittle as parochial the cultural surround (“the ethnic source”) that bred Kafka is to diminish and disfigure the man—to do to him what so many of Kafka’s stories do to their hapless protagonists.
Reiner Stach will have none of this. Nowhere in The Decisive Years or in The Years of Insight does he impose on Kafka an all-encompassing formula. He offers no key, no code, no single-minded interpretive precept: the Kafkaesque is mercifully missing. Instead he allows Kafka’s searing introspections, as they emerge from the letters and diaries, to serve as self-defining clues. Kafka saw his stories not as a reader or a critic will, but from the inside, as the visceral sensations of writing. “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else,” he announced to Felice Bauer, the woman he would never marry. It was a statement meant not so much metaphorically as bodily. At twenty-nine, on September 23, 1912, he exulted in his diary as an exhausted but victorious long-distance swimmer, on completing a marathon, might:
The story, “The Judgment,” I wrote during the night of the 22nd, from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M., in one sitting. I could hardly pull my legs out from under the desk; they had become stiff from sitting. The frightful exertion and pleasure of experiencing how the story developed right in front of me, as though I were moving forward through a stretch of water. Several times during the night I lugged my own weight on my back. How everything can be hazarded, how for everything, even for the strangest idea, a great fire is ready in which it expires and rises up again.... At 2 A.M. I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid came through the front room in the morning, I was writing the last sentence. Turning off the lamp, the light of day. The slight pains in my chest. The exhaustion that faded away in the middle of the night.... Only in this way can writing be done, only in a context like this, with a complete opening of body and soul.
Stach will go no further than Kafka’s own reflections and admissions. In this restraint he follows Kafka himself: on no account, he instructed the publisher of “The Metamorphosis,” should the insect be pictured. He saw explication as intrusion, and willful interpretation as a false carapace. A premonitory authorial warning: he was already warding off the Kafkaesque.
In refusing the critic’s temptation, Stach is liberated as biographer. Open to him is the limitless web of the societal, the political, the historical, the customary, the trivial; everything material, explicit, contemporaneous—sometimes day by day, on occasion even hour by hour; the trains and the telephones; the offices and the office machines; the bureaucrats and their litigations; the apartment and the family’s noises. In brief: the parochial, in all its dense particularity. The biographer excavates, he does not transcend; and through this robustly determined unearthing he rescues Kafka from the unearthliness of his repute.
Foremost is the question of language. In Prague, Czechs spoke Czech, Germans spoke German, Jews spoke German. Kafka’s ruminations on his relation to the language he was born into are by now as familiar (or as overfamiliar) as his face in the photographs, and equally revealing of shrouded pain. Jews who wrote in German, he lamented, resembled trapped beasts: “Their hind legs were still stuck in parental Judaism while their forelegs found no purchase on new ground.” They lived, moreover, with three impossibilities: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.” To which he added a fourth, “the impossibility of writing.”
Kafka’s prose has been universally lauded as spare, somber, comic, lucent, almost platonically pure; but many of those who acclaim it are compelled to read through the art of the translator. Shelley Frisch, Stach’s heroic American translator, movingly reproduces his intended breadth and pace and tone, though now and again she is tempted to transmute his turns of phrase into popular local catchwords (“tickled pink,” “thrown for a loop,” “let off steam,” “went to temple,” “right off the bat,” and many more). This is not altogether a failing, since it is Stach, not Kafka, whom these displaced Americanisms represent; but at the same time they serve to remind us that the biographer, whose Muttersprache is German, comes to Kafka’s idiom with the deep linguistic affinities that only a native German, one who is also a literary writer, can assert. It is with such felt authority that Stach looks back at Kafka’s writing—not to say how and what it is, but rather how and what it is not: “There were no empty phrases, no semantic impurities, no weak metaphors—even when he lay in the sand and wrote postcards.”
Yet there is another side to Stach’s closeness to Kafka’s rhetoric. When Kafka declared the impossibility of writing German, it was plainly not the overriding mastery of his language that was in doubt, but its ownership—not that German did not belong to him, but that he did not belong to it. German was unassailably at the root of his tongue: might he claim it societally, nationally, as a natural inheritance, as an innate entitlement? The culture that touched him at all points had a prevailing Jewish coloration. Family traditions, however casually observed, were in the air he breathed, no matter how removed he was from their expression. His most intimate literary friendships consisted entirely of writers of similar background; at least two, Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann, were seriously committed to Zionism. He studied Hebrew, earnestly if fitfully, during various periods of his life, and he attended Martin Buber’s lectures on Zionism at the meetings of Bar Kochba, the Association of Jewish University Students. Unlike the disdainful Jewish burghers of Prague, who had long ago shed what they dismissed as an inferior zhargón, Kafka was drawn to a troupe of Yiddish-speaking players from Poland and their lively but somewhat makeshift theater. He was a warm proponent of the work of Berlin’s Jewish Home, which looked after the welfare and education of impoverished young immigrants from Eastern Europe. He read Heinrich Graetz’s massive History of the Jews; he read Der Jude, the monthly founded by Buber; he read Die Jüdische Rundschau, a Zionist weekly; he read Selbstwehr, yet another Zionist periodical, whose editor and all of whose contributors he knew. He also read Die Fackel, Karl Kraus’s scourging satiric journal.
If Kafka’s profoundest conviction (“I am made of literature”) kept its distance from these preoccupations and influences, he nevertheless felt their pressure in the way of an enveloping skin. His commanding conundrums, including the two opposing impossibilities—writing and not-writing—are almost suffocatingly knotted into Jewish insecurities. Zionism was one symptom of this powerful unease; and so was Kraus’s repudiation of Zionism, and his furious advocacy of radically self-obscuring assimilation.
It is difficult to refrain from pondering how a biographer (and a biographer is inevitably also a historian) will confront these extremes of cultural tension. Every biography is, after all, a kind of autobiography: it reveals predispositions, parallels, hidden needs; or possibly an unacknowledged wish to take on the subject’s persona, to become his secret-sharer. The biographer’s choice of subject is a confession of more than interest or attunement. The desire to live alongside another life, year by year, thought for thought, is what we mean by possession. And for Stach to be close, both as a given and as a fortuity, to Kafka’s language can hardly reflect the full scope of his willed immersion. He must also come close to Jewish foreboding—a foreboding marinated in the political and tribal and linguistic complexities of Austria-Hungary at the turbulent crux of its demise.
Much of Kafka’s fiction—The Trial, The Castle, “In the Penal Colony”—has too often made of him a prognosticator, as if he could intuit, through some uncanny telescope, the depredations that were soon to blacken Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. But the times required no clairvoyance; Jewish disquiet was an immediacy. At fourteen, Kafka witnessed anti-Semitic rioting that had begun as an anti-German protest against the Habsburg government’s denial of Czech language rights. At thirty-seven, three years before his death, and with The Castle still unwritten, he saw Prague’s historic Altneu synagogue attacked and its Torah scrolls torched. “I’ve been spending every afternoon outside on the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitism,” he recounted. “The other day I heard the Jews called Prašivé plemeno [mangy brood]. Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? ... The heroism of staying on nevertheless is the heroism of cockroaches that cannot be exterminated even from the bathroom.”
Post-Holocaust, all this must sting a susceptible German ear; note that Zyklon B, the genocidal gas of the extermination camps, was originally used as an insecticide. Yet there are reminders still more unsettling. Since a biography of Kafka will perforce include minor characters—his sisters Elli, Valli, and Ottla, for instance—it must finally arrive at Kafka’s afterlife, the destiny he did not live long enough to suffer: that zone of ultimate impossibility wherein all other impossibilities became one with the impossibility of staying alive. Between 1941 and 1943, all three sisters perished, Elli and Valli in Chełmno, Ottla in Auschwitz. They hover over Kafka’s biographies—this one, and all the rest—like torn and damaged Fates. Stach is never unaware of these points of connection; at first, uninvited, sotto voce, behind the scenes, in quiet recognition, they pierce the weave of his narrative. But by the time he attains his coda, Stach’s watchful voicing of the fraught history of the Jews of central Europe during the passage of Kafka’s life will have risen to a thunder.
And while a biographer may be willy-nilly a historian, and subliminally an autobiographer, he is, even more so, a species of novelist—of the nineteenth-century, loose-baggy-monster variety. He is in pursuit of the whole trajectory of a life, beginning, middle, end: chronology is king, postmodern fragmentation unwelcome, landscapes lavish, rooms and furnishings the same, nothing goes unnoticed. The biographer is a simulacrum, say, of George Eliot, who places her characters against the background of a society rendered both minutely and expansively, attending to ancestry, religion, economic standing, farming, banking, business, reading, travel, and more. Stach, in this vein, is doubtless the first to give so plentiful an account of the activities of the Prague Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, the government agency where Kafka was employed as a lawyer from 1908 until 1918, when advancing tuberculosis forced his retirement. That he divided his day into office and work—by declaring them antithetical—is itself a type of credo; but Kafka’s exalted literary image has too readily obscured the press of the quotidian. What did Kafka do, what were his everyday responsibilities? Stach lifts the dry-as-dust veil:
If an industrialist submitted an appeal, the office had to establish proof that the safety precautions of the firm in question were not up to the latest standards. But what were the latest standards? They could not be definitively stipulated with ordinances; they had to be continually reestablished, if possible by personal observation. Kafka, who already had legal expertise, quickly acquired the technical know-how; he attended courses and traveled through northern Bohemian industrial cities. Next to the swaying stacks of appeals on his huge office desk there was an array of journals on accident prevention ... in the areas in which he specialized—particularly the woodworking industry and quarries.
And so on and so on. An annual report, ostensibly submitted by Kafka, is titled “Accident Prevention Rules for Wood Planing Machines,” and recommends the use of a cylindrical spindle. It is accompanied by illustrations of mutilated hands. In the wake of World War I, with its tens of thousands of maimed and shell-shocked soldiers, he was to see far worse.
For Kafka, none of these lawyerly obligations, however demanding, counted as work. No matter that his acumen and skills were regularly rewarded with promotion by the pair of bookish and obliging men who were his superiors, and though he was deemed so valuable that they contrived to have him exempted from military service, he felt depleted, and even assaulted, by the very papers his own hand produced. Of this necessarily official language he wrote bitterly, “I am still holding all of it in my mouth with revulsion and a feeling of shame, as though it were raw flesh cut out of me (that is how much effort it cost me) ... everything in me is ready for lyrical work, and a work of that kind would be a heavenly resolution and a real coming alive for me, while here, in the office, because of such a wretched document I have to tear from a body capable of such happiness a piece of its flesh.” And again, with the emphasis of despair, “real hell is there in the office; I no longer fear any other.” And yet another tightening of the vise: “For me it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no way out except insanity.”
At two o’clock in the afternoon, at the close of the six tormenting hours in the office, he escaped to the family apartment, a noisy and crowded habitat that was less a refuge than a second entrapment. Seven persons occupied these cramped and untranquil rooms: the blustering bullying paterfamilias, the compliant mother, the three daughters, the discontented son yearning for privacy and quiet, and a live-in maid. Kafka’s bedroom, the burning vortex of his nocturnal writing, lay between the parlor and his parents’ room; it was a passagewayfor his father’s comings and goings, early and late, trailing his bathrobe. And the apartment, like the office, had its own distinct raison d’être: it was the ground, the support, and the indispensable source of administrative personnel for the family shop, a successful fancy-goods emporium with numerous employees. Since both parents put in many hours there, and all family members were obliged to do the same, in this way the shop fed the apartment, and the apartment fed the shop.
Hermann Kafka, the son of a shochet—a ritual butcher—had risen from a burdened childhood in a backward rural village to bourgeois respectability, and was impatient with any deviation from conventional expectations. Ottla, the youngest daughter, was attracted to the countryside and aspired to farming—a far cry from her duties in the shop. Franz was still another riddle. At the dinner table he confined himself to an ascetic diet of mainly fruits and nuts, masticating each mouthful thirty-two times, according to the nutritional tenets of Fletcherism. But his most controversial habit was sleeping in the afternoon after leaving the office: this was to secure a usable wakefulness for the sake of his work—his true work—in the apartment’s welcome middle-of-the-night silence. Sleeping in the afternoon, during shop hours? To the business-minded father, this was incomprehensible; it was delinquent.
Kafka’s delinquency became still more scandalous when he was recruited to take on the ownership and management of an asbestos factory, in partnership with the ambitious husband of his newly married sister Elli. Hermann Kafka approved of his son-in-law’s entrepreneurial plans, but since family money was being dedicated to this enterprise, and the young man was an untried stranger, it was imperative that a blood relation contribute to the stability and probity of the business. At first Kafka attempted to fulfill a commitment he had never sought—the literature-besotted son as industrialist!—and grudgingly gave his afternoons to the factory, which meant sacrificing his nights. But despite his father’s irritable proddings, he could not keep up even a pretense of interest (he was at this time far more absorbed in the precarious fortunes of the Yiddish players he had befriended), and at length the business failed.
The record Kafka left of it is oblivious to product and profit-and-loss; and though conceivably he might have appraised the factory and its perilously superannuated machines through the eyes of the workers’ accident official, it was instead the fevered midnight writer who observed “the girls in their absolutely unbearably dirty and untailored clothing, their hair unkempt, as though they had just got out of bed, their facial expressions set by the incessant noise of the transmission belts and by the separate machine that is automatic but unpredictable, stopping and starting.” “The girls,” he went on, “are not people—you don’t say hello to them, you don’t apologize for bumping into them; when you call them over to do something, they do it but go right back to the machine; with a nod of the head you show them what to do; they stand there in petticoats; they are at the mercy of the pettiest power.... When six o’clock comes, however, and they call it out to one another, they untie their kerchiefs from around their necks and hair, dust themselves off with a brush that is passed around the room and is demanded by the ones who are impatient, they pull their skirts over their heads and clean their hands as well as they can; they are women, after all; ... you can no longer bump into them, stare at them, or ignore them; ... and you do not know how to react when one of them holds [your] winter coat for [you] to put on.”
The kerchiefs, the skirts, the brush, the washing, the coat: Walter Benjamin, in his discriminating musings on Kafka, concludes that “the gesture remains the decisive thing.” “Each gesture,” he writes, “is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself.” And it is the factory girl’s simple act of helping with a coat that has the power to embarrass, perhaps even to shame, the owner.
This drama of the minutely mundane was what Kafka demanded of Felice Bauer: it was an inquisition of the humdrum, a third-degree of her every movement and choice. He wanted a description of her blouse, her room, her reading, her sleeping; what her employment entailed; how she was occupied when at leisure (she liked to go dancing, she practiced gymnastics). He wanted to claim and envelop her altogether. He repeatedly asked for her photograph, and he repeatedly sent his own. When in their accelerating daily—sometimes hourly—correspondence she abandoned the formal “Sie” and addressed him familiarly as “Du,” he fell into a trance of happiness.
Felice, a distant relation of Max Brod’s visiting from Berlin, was introduced to Kafka at the Brod family dinner table. It was, apart from Brod’s parents, a meeting of young people. Felice was twenty-four, Max twenty-eight, Kafka twenty-nine. Stach announces this unwittingly portentous occasion with a trumpet blast: “The history of human events, like intellectual and literary history, highlights certain dates; these are engraved in the cultural foundation of future generations.... The evening of August 13, 1912 ... changed the face of German language literature, of world literature.” These grand phrases might have been applied to the somewhat more modest purpose of Kafka’s presence that night: he and Brod had planned to look over a collection of sketches that Brod had long been urging his reluctant friend to agree to publish. The final decision about the order of the pieces was consummated in a colloquy after dinner, and what was to become Kafka’s earliest publication, Meditation, was at last ready to be sent off. From the point of view of Kafka’s biographers, though, what changed the face of world literature was not this small book by a little-known writer too perfectionist to release his work without lacerating self-doubt. It was the face of Felice Bauer. If not for the blizzard of revelatory letters that swept over her, enraptured and entreating to begin with, and then dismissive and retreating, Kafka’s ponderings and sufferings during five crucially introspective years would have remained a vacuum: cries unheard, crises unrecorded.
Hers was a wholly ordinary face. Kafka, sitting across from the young woman from Berlin, at first mistook her for the maid. “Bony empty face,” he later wrote, looking back at his initial impression, “displaying its emptiness openly. A bare throat. Her blouse tossed on.... A nose almost broken. Blond, somewhat stiff, unappealing hair, and a strong chin.” He did not note the two black moles that are prominent in one of her photos, though absent in others, or, in nearly all of these, the bad teeth masked by closed lips. He learned that she worked for Parlograph, a firm selling dictation machines, having risen from typist to managerial status, and often traveling to trade fairs as company representative. If her looks and dress failed to attract him, her independence, reflected in her conversation, did. That she frequently read through the night impressed him. When she mentioned that she was studying Hebrew, he was captivated, and before the evening was over, the two of them were planning a journey to Palestine together—after which Kafka did not set eyes on her again for seven months. When he began to write to her, it was as a smitten and instantly possessive lover.
The Felice of Kafka’s tumultuous letters was an imagined—a wished-for—figure. The actual Felice was an intelligent, practical, reasonable, efficient, problem-solving, generous woman who soon recognized that she had been singled out by an uncommon rapture stirred by an uncommon nature. She was more than willing to respond, but every accommodating attempt resulted in a setback. He complained that she was not open enough—but according to the standards and constraints of the proper middle-class background that defined her, how could she be? Her father was living apart from his family, her unmarried sister was suddenly pregnant, her brother had to be shipped off to America to escape reckless money entanglements. When these secret shames were finally disclosed, they were scarcely what put off Kafka; her habit of silence would bring him a deeper dismay.
He sent her an inscribed copy of Meditation, and though he appealed to her, piteously, for a comment (“Dearest, look, I want to have the feeling that you turn to me with everything; nothing, not the slightest thing should be left unsaid”), she never replied. Perhaps she could not: what was she to make of writing so enigmatic? She went to the theater, she read Ibsen; still, what was she to make of, say, “Trees,” a story, if that is what it was, of four perplexing sentences? How was she to fathom such a thing?
For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, but they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.
His passionate explanation—“I am made of literature and nothing else”—led to misunderstanding. Pragmatist that she was, she counseled moderation. And worse yet: it led to what she took to be understanding—she had begun to sense in him “seeds of greatness.”
And with all the sympathetic warmth of wishing to please him, she stumbled into a critical misjudgment—she offered to be close to him while he wrote—and lost him altogether. His shock at this innocent proposal turned into vehement resentment, bordering even on revulsion, as if she were intending to fleece him of his survival as a writer; and shock, resentment, revulsion culminated in one of his most wrenchingly monastic images of artistic self-entombment:
Once you wrote that you wanted to sit by my side as I write; just keep in mind that I cannot write like that (even so I cannot write much), but in that case I would not be able to write at all. Writing means revealing oneself to excess, the utmost candor and surrender, in which a person would feel he is losing himself in his interaction with other people and from which he will always shy away as long as he hasn’t taken leave of his senses—because everyone wants to live as long as he is alive.... Anything that writing adopts from the surface of existence ... is nothing, and caves in on itself at the moment that a truer feeling rattles this upper ground. That is why one cannot be alone enough when one is writing; that is why it cannot be quiet enough around one; the night is not night enough.... I have often thought that the best kind of life for me would be to stay in the innermost room of an extended locked cellar with my writing materials and a lamp.... What I would write! From what depths I would draw it up!
Here he was assuring the woman who trusted she would soon become his wife that the prospect of her coming near would threaten his capacity to live, and that rather than have her sit beside him he would prefer to be immured underground. This ruthless detachment continued through two painful official engagements (the last embroiling him in the off-putting ritual of choosing the marital furniture and the conjugal apartment), until he had depleted Felice down to the very lees of her usable sustenance.
In the vista of Kafka’s life, Felice is a promontory, partly because she occupied so large a tract of it, but also because of a simple bibliographical datum: she kept his letters. (He did not preserve hers.) She kept them through her marriage, and through her emigration to America in 1936, when escape from Nazi Germany became imperative, until her unremarked death in 1960 in a New York suburb. Beyond—or below—the promontory are the foothills, lesser outcroppings that reflect the configuration of the greater. Or put it that the letters to Felice expose the template, the very genome, of Kafka’s character as it has revealed itself to biographers, and to Stach in particular; and by now they are themselves seen to be literature as much as the canonical work itself. They underlie a binding continuum: from the diaries to the letters to Felice to the letters to Milena Jesenská to the letters to Max Brod to the prodigious one-hundred-page letter to Kafka’s father—and even to a single sketch, ink on paper, drawn by Kafka. A stark black stick figure, stick elbows bent, stick legs outstretched among stick legs of table and chair, all of it spider-like. The spider’s body—a human head—rests on the table. It is an image of defeat, surrender, despair, submission.
Milena Jesenská came to Kafka as a translator; in every way she was what Felice was not. Her eyes were as pale as Felice’s, but rounder, and her nose was round, and her chin, and her mouth. Felice was a conformist: the furniture must be heavy and ornate, signaling a settled and prosperous marriage. Milena was a rebel, and to earn money in a lean time she was not above carrying luggage for travelers in the Vienna train station. She was a nimble writer and an ardent if contrarian spirit: “a living fire,” as Kafka described her to Brod. Her mother was long dead, and her father, an eminent professor of dentistry, recognizing her exceptional gifts, sent her to an elite high school for Czech girls, where the classics and modern languages were taught and the arts were encouraged and cultivated. She and a handful of like-minded classmates made it a habit to loiter in Prague’s literary cafés, where she encountered Ernst Pollak, ten years her senior, whom she eventually married.
From her father’s standpoint the marriage was an insurrectionist act that estranged him from his daughter. The professor was a Czech nationalist, hostile to Germans, and especially averse to their Prague subdivision, German-identified Jews. After futilely confining Milena in a mental institution for some months, he dispatched her and the social embarrassment of her Jewish husband to Vienna—where, in a period of serious postwar scarcity, food was even harder to come by than in Prague. Only yesterday the capital of an empire, Vienna was now a weakened and impoverished outlier, despite its lively literary scene. It turned out to be an uneasy match: Pollak was a persistent philanderer and a dissatisfied writer manqué, impressively voluble in bookish circles but stymied on the page. It was he who introduced Milena to Kafka’s still sparse publications, which inspired her to render “The Stoker” into Czech—the story that was to become the opening chapter of The Man Who Disappeared, his abandoned early novel. Kafka was admiring and gratified (“I find there is constant powerful and decisive understanding,” he told her), and their correspondence began, rapidly turning intimate: Kafka’s second limitless outpouring of letters to a young woman who kindled his longings and embodied his subterranean desires.
But if Felice had been a fabricated muse, as unresponsively remote from his idée fixe as a muse ought not to be, Milena was no muse at all. She provoked and importuned him from a position of equality; she was perceptive and quick and blunt and forward. Almost instantly she startled him: “Are you a Jew?” And though he had rarely spoken to Felice of the disquieting Jewish consciousness which perpetually dogged him (a self-punishing sensitiveness he and Brod had in common), to Milena he unburdened himself with a suicidal bitterness that in one ferocious stroke reviled and mocked the choking anti-Semitism he knew too well:
I could sooner reproach you for having much too high an opinion of the Jews you do know (me included) ... at times I’d like to stuff them all, as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest, wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve all suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again, and keep doing this until the end.
She had to put up with this; yet she summoned him, and he came, and in the Vienna woods one afternoon they lived out an idyll, the two of them lying on the forest floor, he with his head on her half-exposed breast. Together they schemed how she might leave Pollak; in the end she could not.
He was himself not free. He was at this time engaged to be married to Julie Wohryzek, a young woman whom Hermann Kafka, threatening and berating, disapproved of as déclassé; unlike Felice, she was not suitably respectable. Her father was a penniless cobbler and the shammes of a synagogue—worse, she occasionally fell into a low Yiddish phrase, and still worse, she had a “loose” reputation. Kafka had met her at a boarding house passing for a tuberculosis sanitorium; like him, she was there to convalesce. When Milena swept in, he disposed of this inflamed but short-lived attachment as no better than a dalliance, to be blown away like a stray straw.
A space, then, was cleared for Milena: a landscape wherein the intellectual could be joined to the erotic. She filled it with her certainties and uncertainties, her conviction too often erased by ambivalence. Kafka’s uncertainties ran deeper, and his mode of retreat was well practiced: “We are living in misunderstandings; our questions are rendered worthless by our replies. Now we have to stop writing one another and leave the future to the future.” To Brod, Milena sent an epitaph to the marriage that both she and Kafka had evaded. “He always thinks that he himself is the guilty and weak one,” she wrote. “And yet there is not another person in the world who has his colossal strength: that absolute, unalterable necessity for perfection, purity, and truth.” Milena outlived Kafka by twenty years. In 1944, she was arrested for sheltering Jews and aiding their flight; she perished in Ravensbrück.
Despite three failed engagements, Kafka never married. Yet he was not without such confidential support; there were, in fact, three loyally solicitous persons who took on a wifely role: his sister Ottla; Max Brod; and, at the close of his life, Dora Diamant. Ottla and Kafka had, early on, an obstacle in common—Hermann Kafka and his resistance to their independence. The monstrous (in size and in force) j’accuse that the son addressed, but never delivered, to the father now stands as yet another canonical work. Ottla’s more quiet eruption came through stubborn acts of autonomy; unlike Kafka, she left behind both the family apartment and her role in the family economy. Hermann Kafka might mock his Czech employees as “my paid enemies,” but Ottla chose to marry a Czech. And when the domestic commotion became unsustainable for Kafka’s work, she gave him the use of the little neighborhood hideaway she had privately acquired. When his tuberculosis began to advance, and he declined to be admitted to yet another sanitorium (there were many such recuperative sojourns), she cared for him with wifely devotion at the longed-for farm she finally secured in the remote village of Zürau, where Kafka felt uncommonly serene. “I live with Ottla in a good little marriage,” he assured Brod.
Brod was Kafka’s confidant and champion, his first reader, and also his first listener: despite reticence and self-denigration, Kafka relished reading his work to friends. It was Brod who pushed Kafka to publish, pursuing skeptical editors on his behalf. “I personally consider Kafka (along with Gerhart Hauptmann and Hamsun) the greatest living writer!” he exclaimed to Martin Buber. “What I wouldn’t do to make him more active!” Brod was himself energetic on many fronts: he turned out novels, plays, polemics, political broadsides; he ran to meetings for this cause and that; he labored to bridge the divide between Germans and Czechs; he promoted Czech writers and composers; and with Kafka (though not so diligently) he studied Hebrew. The two friends traveled to Weimar to visit Goethe’s house, where each drew a sketch of the house and garden, and Kafka was all at once infatuated with the caretaker’s young daughter.
But increasingly Kafka’s excursions away from Prague were solitary journeys to health resorts and tuberculosis sanitoriums; and inexorably in step with these, Stach’s later chapters hurtle through harrowing episodes of fever, relentless coughing, days forcibly spent in bed, and finally, when the disease spread to the larynx, the threat of suffocation. Brod, always Kafka’s anxious guardian, pressed him from the first to see the proper specialist and undertake the proper treatment. Kafka himself was oddly unperturbed: he believed that a psychosomatic element was the cause, and that, as he wrote to Ottla, “there is undoubtedly justice in this illness.” As his condition worsened, he was compelled to give up his position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute—which, like much of postwar Europe, was undergoing a political transformation. Habsburg officialdom was now replaced by Czech officialdom, in Munich swastikas were flying, and in Prague the decibels of anti-Semitism rang shriller. Hermann Kafka, uneasy in the company of his paid enemies, closed up his shop.
In the summer of 1923, Kafka—already seriously beginning to fail—entered into what can only be called a marriage, even if it had no official sanction and might never have been sexually consummated. It was his most daring personal commitment, and the only one untroubled by vacillation or doubts. Dora Diamant was twenty-five years old, the daughter of a rigidly observant Polish Hasidic family loyal to the dynastic rebbe of Ger. Though Zionism was frowned upon as dangerously secular, Dora found her way to the writings of Theodor Herzl, broke from the constrictions of her background, and settled in Berlin. Here she worked with the children of the Jewish Home, the very institution Kafka had been so moved by in the past (and had pressed hard for Felice to support as a volunteer). Berlin was in chaos, reeling under strikes, riots, food shortages, and massive inflation. Despite every predictable discomfort and gravely diminishing funds, it was into this maelstrom that Kafka came to join Dora for one of the most tranquil intervals of his life.
Half earnestly, half fancifully, they spoke of a future in Palestine, where, to make ends meet, they would open a little restaurant. But the fevers continued to accelerate, and while Dora nursed him with singular tenderness, it became clear, especially under pressure from the family in Prague, that Kafka was in urgent need of professional care. Another sanitorium followed, and then a hospital specializing in diseases of the larynx, always with Dora hovering protectively near. By now Kafka’s suffering had intensified significantly: unable to speak, he communicated on slips of paper; unable to swallow food, he was facing actual starvation, even as he struggled over proofs of “The Hunger Artist.” At the last he pleaded for a lethal dose of morphine, warning—Kafka’s deliberate paradox of the final paroxysm—that to be deprived of his death would count as murder. With Tolstoyan power, Stach carries us through these sorrowful cadences. The reader is left grieving.
Ottla; Hermann Kafka; Felice; Milena; Dora. They are, ultimately, no more than arresting figures in a biography. When the book is shut, their life-shaping influences evaporate. Not so Max Brod. He became—and remains—a lasting force in Kafka’s posthumous destiny. In disobeying his friend’s firm request to destroy the existing body of his unpublished manuscripts and to prevent further dissemination of those already in print, Brod assured the survival of the work of an unparalleled literary master. Solely because of this proprietary betrayal, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (Brod’s title for The Man Who Disappeared) live on. Had there been no Brod, there would be no Kafka as we now read him. (And had Brod not fled German-occupied Prague for Tel Aviv in 1939, there would today not be a substantial cache of still unvetted manuscripts preserved in an Israeli national archive. It is from this trove that Stach’s yet-to-be-published final volume will be drawn.) Savior though he was, Brod also manipulated whatever came into his hands. He invented titles for what was left untitled. He organized loose chapters into a sequence of his own devising. Having taken on the role of Kafka’s authentic representative, he argued for what he believed to be the authoritative interpretation of Kafka’s inmost meanings.
Stach ventures no such defining conviction. Instead he ruminates and speculates, not as a zealously theorizing critic but as a devoted literary sympathizer who has probed as far as is feasible into the concealments of Kafka’s psyche. Often he stops to admit that “we cannot know.” In contemplating the work, he tentatively supposes and experientially exposes. He eschews the false empyrean, and will never look to transcend the ground that both moored and unmoored his subject. In this honest and honorable biography there is no trace of the Kafkaesque; but in it you may find a crystal granule of the Kafka who was. - Cynthia Ozick
Franz Kafka and Asceticism Excerpts from two volumes of Reiner Stach's Kafka
Reiner Stach, Is that Kafka?: 99 Finds, Trans. by Kurt Beals, New Directions, 2016.
Out of the massive research for an authoritative 1,500-page biography emerges this wunderkammer of 99 delightfully odd facts about Kafka
For Is that Kafka? Stach has assembled 99 of his most exciting discoveries, culling the choicest, most entertaining bits, and adding his knowledge-able commentaries. Illustrated with dozens of previously unknown images, this volume is a singular literary pleasure.
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