before getting to the books, who was franz kafka?
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, the second largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1883 to a German-speaking Jewish family. he lived and died single, to his great personal regret, having believed that starting a family was the most important thing to do on earth. Often suffering from nervous exhaustion, on the brink of an imaginary illness, he realized his worst imaginings of him in 1917, when he suffered a gush of blood from his lungs. seven years later he died a terrible death from tuberculosis of the larynx. but he is a man of many adversities. for many years he visited brothels, swam vigorously, climbed steep hills and toured the countryside on a motorcycle.
You are reading: Franz kafka books and plays
He spent his mature days as a competent and highly regarded in-house attorney at a partially state-run workers’ compensation institute. there, he innovated safety devices for bohemian factories and advocated the founding of a hospital for bomb-shocked war veterans, which was a first. he had many interests, including gardening and reading platonic dialogues with friends, but also social work, especially on behalf of eastern european war refugees. he was engaged to be married twice to one woman and once to another; but otherwise he was consumed with a passion for writing. it would be, he hoped, his salvation.
In his life he published only a few stories, but they were highly appreciated by connoisseurs. Time and time again, major publishers asked for more of his work. but he was extremely scrupulous about the quality of the work he was about to publish, even going so far as to write in his diaries (splendid texts!) this extraordinary entry:
“I can still have temporary job satisfaction as a country doctor… but happiness only if I can raise the world to purity, truth and immutability.”
judging by the current history, he did not acquire this happiness. But if, as they say, history is a fair judge of last resort, then the fame —better, the genius— of Kafka’s writings effectively constitutes his justification.
kafka’s work has inspired the now famous adjective: ‘kafkaesque’. but, as an ‘Orwellian’, there is a danger that these terms stray from his inspiration. how ‘kafkaesque’ is kafka?
With few exceptions, there is no correlation between people who employ the ‘Kafkaesque’ trope and those who have actually read Kafka. But here, immediately, is another kind of exception: in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, a character named Pam says to the Woody figure, “sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience.” then, seeing that his mistress Alvy is upset by this comment, he hastens to add, “I mean that as a compliment.” Woody Allen is a consummate reader of Kafka, as evidenced by his anthology The Insanity Defense and the admittedly Kafkaesque film Zelig, which has caused great academic furore.
‘Kafkaesque’ has some validity as a descriptor of the case which, arising from a commonly conceived normality, does not belong at all, or is, in other words, sinister. it has traits of normality, but in other respects it constitutes a deviation. but it may not be entirely surreal.
“During his lifetime he published only a few short stories”
‘Kafkaesque’ tends to be reserved for horrible and unintelligible interactions with the law and other similar (often faceless) bureaucracies. This is largely because the trial has exerted such control over the common imagination, and the situation of Joseph K. it’s lawful. It is produced by an unexpected and improper application of the law, namely, the concealment of the name of the crime imputed to the accused. In a similar instance, my own case, it’s about being locked into a year-long contract with dead-end bug sprayers. which brings us to the figure of gregor samsa, the insect-man. indeed, the metamorphosis into a giant vermin goes far beyond an almost plausible but nevertheless mysterious violation of personal identity and is therefore something more (or worse) than a Kafkaesque phenomenon. but, on the other hand, gregor samsa’s answers are too faithful to the kafkaesque norm: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, so the link with reality is tenuous and therefore too worrying.
and the ‘same’ kafka? Kafka is Kafkaesque—in his view—in his inability to maintain any intrinsic or extrinsic sense of his personal identity (“I hardly have anything in common with myself”) while all the while walking in relative safety through the streets. and corridors of Prague.
as you say, kafka’s work often involves the introduction of the sinister or the surreal into a narrative world that is, in all other respects, normal and recognizable. What else would you identify as salient themes in Kafka’s books? where is it better to start with it?
I read his stories consecutively, beginning with ‘the trial’ (the earlier work is more elusive) and read his diaries and letters at the same time. then one comes across themes like the struggle for authority, often interestingly fought with the tactic of finding the antagonist’s language laughable.
Think of georg’s response when his father, who seems to share running a business with georg, declares that he has all of georg’s clientele ‘in his pocket’. George replies, looking humorously at her father’s nightgown, “Even in the nightgown he has pockets.” This comment might seem playful enough, but not when one recalls (as do Kafka, her readers, and George and her father) the proverbial description of a shroud: “The last shirt has no pockets.” on georg’s lips, her father’s nightgown has become a shroud: he wants to see her father dead! awareness of this infamy rises to a crescendo: it is georg’s father’s turn to traffic in death, and he sentences his “diabolical” son to drown. In George’s unresisting acceptance of this verdict, he seems to have accepted a terrible punishment for his parricidal fantasy and even be grateful for it.
This struggle in Kafka’s later work begins to take the form of the war between the outcast, the figure on the fringes of ‘normal’ society, and the usual authoritarians. When his father reproached Kafka, wondering why his son couldn’t be less meshugge (crazy in Yiddish), more “normal”, Kafka responded, uniformly, “normal is world war”.
Just before we discuss your choices of Kafka books, I want to ask you: what were your most significant literary or philosophical influences?
Kafka was not someone who was easily influenced. he marched to the beat of his own drum, an extraordinary power of imaginative recombination. But certainly the materials for the transformation had to come from outside, in particular from life in Prague and from the books of Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, the lesser-known German writer on storm and stress, Jakob Michael Reinhold. lenz, and the majestic Austrian playwright Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer, among many others. Readings of him also included a variety of contemporary “philosophical psychologists,” such as Herbert, Wundt, Brentano, Marty, Husserl, and Meinong, among others, whom Kafka heard about from friends and as an enthusiastic conference attendee.
We know that he was otherwise a voracious and rapid reader, proficient (to varying degrees) in nine languages: Greek, Latin, German, Czech, French, English, Italian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. an example of his art of recombining, of his power to metamorphose the remains of the day: in prague he lived on the banks of a river, the vltava —or moldau— and he would have seen or read about people who drowned, by accident or not. “Over the course of the 1870s,” explains Kafka scholar Benno Wagner, statistics, amassed with ever-increasing precision, identified the Habsburg Monarchy as a “breeding ground for suicide.” Especially in Bohemia, this trend of an abnormal increase in suicides persisted into the 1880s as well, when Prague re-emerged as the statistical capital. but few would have been able to transform such a statistic into the aphorism, as kafka does:
“the ecstatic man and the drowning man—both raise their arms. the first does it to signify harmony, the second to signify conflict with the elements.”
let’s see the kafka books you have chosen. We’ve already alluded to it, but first on your list is Kafka’s most famous work: The Metamorphosis. tell me about this.
the metamorphosis tells the story of a turn-of-the-century Central European textile salesman who wakes up one rainy morning to find himself turned, according to an unreliable narrator, into a verminous insect—a huge one! Called “one of the few great and perfect poetic works of the century,” this novella, which Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called, recounts the struggles of Gregor Samsa and his family to come to terms with this monstrous and unprecedented metamorphosis.
It remains debatable whether we should regard this event within the world of the story as fact or an illusion inflicted by the family on this hapless son and brother. Although Kafka often dislikes him, Metamorphosis is his best known and most talked about story. I’ve always loved this perplexing story, ever since my older brother, Noel, brought it home from Columbia University to add to my high school reading list. and an edited paperback translation of the metamorphosis, still in print, is the first book I ever published, one I can’t help but like as it has sold over 2 million copies!
the kafka term used to describe what gregor samsa becomes is “ungeziefer”. am I right in thinking this is more ambiguous than just ‘insect’?
the problem with translating the ‘ungeziefer’, indeed the ‘ungeheures ungeziefer’, usually ‘the monstrous bugs’, into which gregor samsa has been changed is that in ordinary English ‘bugs’ is plural. but we want some form of the word ‘vermin’, and not ‘insect’, because their ways of being are radically different. insects are what they are by biological or, more precisely, entomological determinism. vermin are what they are through social determinism, that is, linguistic and, therefore, etymological.
for the Nazis, the Jews are vermin; To sheep farmers in the American Wild West, cougars are vermin; For the citizens of Berlin who want to quietly enjoy their white beer while wild boars rampage through their cafe tables, these pigs are vermin. there is a clue.
one possible way to understand the metamorphosis of gregor samsa is in the social determination of vermin: his metamorphosis is not a real event but a delusion inspired by what an astute scholar—fernando bermejo-rubio, professor of gnostic theology at the national university of distance education—called ‘the cycle of victimization’. you are trapped, perhaps unprepared, by the low opinion others have of you; you agree to find it reasonable and begin to conform to it, which in turn ‘proves’ the others’ accusation that you are a vermin.
“we want some form of the word ‘vermin’, and not ‘insect’, because their ways of being are radically different”
This point is supported by a second etymological factor: the German word ‘ungeziefer’ in Middle High German connotes a being unsuitable as a sacrifice, that is, unacceptable to the divinity. such a being has no place in the cosmos. moreover, as ‘ungeheures ungeziefer’—listen to the negative force of that repeated ‘un’ (and earlier in the sentence we have gregor’s ‘unruhige träume’)—he or she is literally without a place in the family home—an outcast family. the Latin for ‘ungeheuer’ is infamiliaris.
When the “gigantic, bony housemaid” at the end of the metamorphosis calls Gregor, “come here, you old dung beetle,” the narrator informs us, quite correctly, that “to forms of address such as these, Gregor will not respond… .” he is not a dung beetle; he is “a monstrous vermin”.
You mentioned that Kafka didn’t like this book. can you tell me why?
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The answer is quite simple. occasionally, writing to her fiancée felice bauer, she found the story “a little horrible”, in fact, a day later, “exceptionally disgusting”, although, on another occasion, it was not without “sweet passages”. . the crux was her ending, which she claimed to have spoiled: the sign of it could well be the “metamorphosis” of her narrative posture.
To the very end, everything, the entire diegesis, was recorded by a narrator whose perspective is almost entirely congruent with Gregor’s. a problem arises, which kafka presumably did not solve well; Gregor is dead. the narrator must say goodbye to him, and now, in effect, ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have become mr. and lady samsa! the book ends, “in many passages of the story, … states of exhaustion and other interruptions and extraneous concerns are clearly inscribed; It certainly could have been done more cleanly.”
why was kafka so distracted throughout this writing? Narrative flow was severely interrupted: Kafka had to make a business trip—to Chrastava (Kratzau), a couple of hours north—with an unfinished story in mind and, in its own right, a kind of annoying interruption to his work. life. main predilection, to continue with the writing of amerika. the whole constellation must have caused him considerable distress. But Kafka, an athlete of angst, was undeterred enough to relax his commitment to his task as a persecutor of lazy factory owners who were unwilling to pay premiums for their workers’ accident insurance. in fact, that weekend he won a substantial payment for his institute; but that ‘restitution’ was ‘disproportionate’ to the pain he suffered for having ruined the end of the metamorphosis.
Now, this is not the only metamorphosis we find in Kafka. we also find one in his story ‘the new lawyer’. why do you think kafka was so fascinated by the idea of transformation?
if such a transformation is an event in space (from one frame to the next the victim assumes a different form), consider its analog: a transformation in, rather, time. the sense of time occupied by some event is radically transformed in the next instant. more clearly, the new event occurs abruptly, breaking the ordinary flow. the two can occur together: a different and overwhelming sense of self suddenly arises. If Kafka could compare himself to a creature without a foot, he too could suddenly think of himself as a great leader of men, another Alexander the Great.
but here is the most common experience: kafka is overcome by a sudden flight of images and ideas, not egocentric: a brainstorm, a fullness—’the tremendous (ungeheure) world’ in his head—and now, how to express them without breaking? but, above all, it is its different temporal character. they come suddenly, but they also leave suddenly.
kafka is subject to this incessant alternation of the temporalities of coming and going. The oldest surviving piece of his writing, as I have noted in Lambent traces, are runes he wrote in 1897, at the age of fourteen, in a poetry album belonging to his friend Hugo Bergmann (whom we shall meet): “ there is a coming and going/separating and often not meeting again.”
the vision of an immense becoming and an equally powerful vanishing accompanied kafka throughout his life —a vision of affirmation of the world and extinction of the world— that he adapts in his aesthetics as a logic of recursion, chiastic return.
p>
Next on your list of kafka books is the trial. again, this is a work that is deeply absorbed in the public imagination.
the trial narrates the struggle of a high-ranking bank official (a status similar to that of kafka in his insurance institute) who is accused by a mysterious court of having committed a crime (always unspecified) and is assassinated by guards of court in a particularly brutal and sexually charged manner. What is extraordinary is the degree of penetration that the “novel” has also achieved in the legal mind. If you take a look at Westlaw (the online resource for case law), it records several judgments that might have jumped off the trial pages and are even recognized as such by scholarly judges. an article by amanda torres quotes an edenfield judge in a case where a victim had her parole revoked without explanation:
“…that not even the most skillful of lawyers, finding themselves in the Kafkaesque situation of being deprived of their liberty by a court that will not state the reasons for its decision, can concisely and clearly complain about their objections to said decision …[such a situation] leaves the inmate no recourse but to go to court with an attempt to refute all real, feared or imagined justifications for his incarceration.”
It is important to note that no final determination has ever been made and can never be made as to the “correct” sequence of chapters/issues that make up the trial. Kafka left them in an uproar, with the well-known command to his friend and Booster Max Brod to burn them, which, as Kafka knew, Brod would never do. readers can enjoy the added pleasure of constructing their own sequence in light of the hermeneutical appeal projected by these texts.
but this disturbing work doesn’t need my praise. Since its posthumous publication in 1925, it has long exerted its fascination on the popular mind and has often reappeared as a play (by Jean-Louis Barrault and André Gide in 1947, among others) and, more than once, as opera (by boris blacher and heinz von cramer in 1953; philip glass and christopher hampton in 2014).
we don’t know why joseph k. been arrested, or whatever he’s been charged with, and neither has he. Kafka excels at creating an overwhelming sense of disorientation. however, how would you characterize his tone? Is it always ominous or does it play with comic elements?
You’re hitting me an easy grounder. Kafka’s comic twists have been the staple of many desperate doctoral dissertations over the last century. I remember growing up a budding kafka scholar, but also a somber deconstructionist, with michel dentan’s humor et creation littéraire dans l’oeuvre de kafka perched on my shoulder and patting me meaningfully. I particularly liked an observation on metamorphosis made by Carsten Schlingmann, a scholar I never met. kafka writes:
“When gregor’s body was protruding from the bed—the new method was more of a game than a fight, he just had to keep rocking and shaking—he thought how easy everything would be if he could just get some help. two strong people-he thought of his father and the maiden-would have been quite enough; they would have only had to push his arms under his arched back, thus lifting him off the bed, crouching down with his load, and then being careful and patient as he managed to balance himself to the ground, where his little legs would hopefully acquire some purpose. well, putting aside the fact that the doors were locked, should he really ask for help? despite all the miseries of him, he couldn’t suppress a smile at this thought.” (emphasis added)
schlingmann comments: “…the strangest smile in the history of literature.”
if we think about the trial, we will assign many of its characteristics to a new genre: the political grotesque, a grotesque that is ‘abysmally’ comical. we have this rather light-hearted account in joseph vogl’s essay on kafka’s “political comedy”:
From the terror of the secret scenes of torture of child officials, from the filth of the bureaucratic order to the atavistic rituals of power runs a comedy track that indicates forever the absence of reason, the element of the arbitrary in the execution of power and rule however, this element of the grotesque is not limited to unmasking and denouncing. it refers—as Foucault once pointed out—to the inevitability, the inescapability of precisely the grotesque, ridiculous, crackpot, or abject aspects of power. Kafka’s “political grotesque” shows an unsystematic arbitrariness, which belongs to the functions of the apparatus itself. there really is no real reason why [at trial] an exhausted judicial officer at the end of the working day should occupy himself for an hour throwing lawyers down the stairs…
such “instances” can easily be multiplied throughout the castle, par excellence, the antics of k’s bewildered “helpers”.
you mentioned that joseph k’s occupation resembles the author’s. kafka worked at the bohemia kingdom workers’ accident insurance institute. This clearly brings us to the third of the books he has chosen, which are Kafka’s office writings.
Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of short stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, disgruntled in his office, whipped out the “hell of office life.” but few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of chief legal secretary at the industrial accident insurance institute of the imperial royal kingdom of austria-hungary prague (called, after 1918, the industrial accident insurance institute of the czech lands ).
kafka was not a fraud of the notary, nor an inoffensive office slave. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s rule, between 1908 and 1922, was one of the most developed industrial areas in Europe. Now, let us consider that Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is surprising if one takes into account his formal economy. this work of allusion proceeds through several logics.
“kafka…was a brilliant innovator of legal and social reform”
One of these logics, the logic of risk insurance, stems from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Although ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka fought to enforce mandatory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacturing, farms, and automobiles. Images of his working world, such as machine mutilation, the dangers of digging in quarries while intoxicated, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate stories such as the metamorphosis, the trial, and in the penal colony.
Are these legal writings fascinating in terms of how they complement Kafka’s work of fiction, or can they be enjoyed in their own right? I can’t imagine that many people’s idea of a weekend read is dense bureaucratic writing.
it’s true, it wouldn’t be the moby dick of many readers. but these writings are the result of an editorial selection of the juiciest of the lot. (You should see the ones that got away!) And, believe it or not, a senior at the University of Utah—perhaps under the pedagogical spell of charismatic professor Anne Jamison—wrote on the web that she was her favorite. book of all time.
several of the articles here reflect the traumas of war: the insurance institute formerly dedicated to repairing the trauma of occasionally mutilated workers in factories must now deal with ‘factories’, so to speak, that is, entire armies , whose entire mission is the manufacture of mutilated bodies. Kafka’s imaginative immersion in trench warfare would have conditioned his representation of ‘the burrow’ and could provoke a more intense and detailed reading of its architecture and psychic climate.
but the most fundamental analogy between fiction and the world of insurance, as shown in these articles, reflects on which “accidents” of the human condition can be insured and which cannot. kafka’s stories are all about uninsurable accidents, like dying, as in ‘the gracchus hunter’, but not finding your way to the regions of death, let alone being accused of an unnamed crime, which causes a harrowing metamorphosis of sensitivity.
kafka strongly advocated the creation of a hospital dedicated solely to the treatment of bomb-shocked veterans: he understood the ptsd better than most bureaucrats.
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from an ethical-legal point of view, kafka had a deep suspicion or cynicism towards ideas of justice. The punishments people receive in Kafka’s fiction rarely seem proportionate. why do you think this is?
Kafka’s working life was a pure immersion in an excessive punishment. their day job was to pay workers whose limbs, say, had been torn off by industrial machines. And what remuneration —a question of crowns— would really be proportional to the disorientation and anguish of the victim?
but this is an empirical confirmation of a perspective deeply embedded in childhood. In his ‘letter from him to his father’, the boy Franz places the permanent sense of intrinsic disproportionality in a punishment inflicted by his father in the notorious ‘Pavlatche’ incident. a pavlatche is ‘a balcony that runs along the edge of a house on the first floor or higher, within the outer wall’. kafka remember:
I was whining persistently for water one night, certainly not because I was thirsty, but in all likelihood partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. after several vicious threats failed, you dragged me out of bed, took me to the pavlatche, and left me alone for a while, standing outside the closed door in my nightgown. …this incident almost certainly made me obedient for a while, but it hurt me inside. by nature, I was unable to reconcile the simple act (as it seemed to me) of casually asking for water with the sheer horror of being led outside. Years later, I was still tormented that this giant man, my father, the highest authority, could walk into my room at any moment and, almost without provocation, take me from bed to pavlatche, and that I meant so little to him. /p>
There we have it, from the mouth of the victim.
but the idea of proportionate justice implies finding an equivalent, the punishment, for something different, the crime. Kafka was horrified by the injustice of claiming equivalents in many spheres, especially when the things that are claimed to be equivalent—or radically different—are constantly subject to internal metamorphosis.
your next book is kafka’s selected stories, but i know you want to talk about two stories in particular: ‘the trial’ and ‘in the penal colony’. these are very much in line with the legal issue.
why read these two stories above all others? it is rather that they should be read along with all kafka’s stories, but they should not be missed. they are great stories individually. the first, ‘the trial’ (1912), speaks of a sudden change in the power relations between father and son. the son, confident in his future, which includes the prosperous management of the family business and his imminent marriage to the daughter of a wealthy family, tells his weakened father the news that he has communicated to his friend . petersburg of the engagement of him. In the course of their conversation, his father rises from his bed, suddenly a giant, and condemns his son to death by drowning, a judgment that the son cannot resist and executes, shouting: “Dear parents, I have always truly loved you.” . ”.
kafka composed the story in a fit of literary ecstasy in a single breath one night until dawn and it constitutes, by common consent, his irruption as a writer, his conviction that he is henceforth destined to live as the ‘being of the writer’ (schriftstellersein, in his words).
The second, ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914-19), written to dispel a writer’s block while Kafka was working on the trial, describes another heinous punishment. the torturer in a penal colony, desperate not to get a confirmation of his “machinery” from a visiting explorer, chooses to have himself tortured to death in the hope of realizing, through a fatal inscription on his own body, the nature of a crime of which he is considered guilty. the ‘machinery’ breaks down. In an intriguing way, the second story literally alludes to the first: the victim, it is said, “does not know his own judgment”; The allusion proceeds through a strange communication process that, according to Kafka, is presided over by thirsty ghosts.
As far as we know, Kafka only gave two public readings of his work. the stories he chose for these two occasions were exactly the two he has chosen here. do you think they were distinctively important to him?
The first was decisively important for him, as we have pointed out; it constituted his literary ‘advance’. he loved reading it aloud to his family and friends. the reading, he said, confirmed the truth of the story. the second is a puzzle, as, as with the metamorphosis, he was once again deeply dissatisfied with the ending. in this case, he wrote several drafts of the ending: they are completely insane. here is one we are hearing about the explorer, who has been called by the commander of the island: “he jumped as refreshed, when they spoke to him. With his hand on his heart, he said: “It would be a scoundrel [hundsfott] if he allowed that to happen.” but then he took it literally and started walking on all fours.”
kafka read the story in munich. we all ‘know’ that due to her terribiltà, a woman in the audience fainted and had to be carried out. but that is, if you’ll excuse her, “fake news,” made up by a dishonest reporter writing about the event for a local newspaper.
a speculative argument (among many) for his desire to publish ‘in the penal colony’ by reading it aloud, a rather rare event, is the way in which he reproduces in its essence the structure and conclusion of ‘the trial’ which he valued so much. The two works go together as punitive works: Kafka always contemplated publishing several stories together under this rubric: Strafen. both stories are based on a kind of logomachy between two people. at first, in ‘the trial’, the son assumes authority, but georg will be crushed and sentenced to death by his father, initially the weakest. in ‘in the penal colony’, traveling and official debate; The officer tries to assert his authority as executioner, but his doubts are reinforced by the traveler’s resistance. the officer sentences himself to death. Both victims agree to his conviction.
would we be correct in detecting an autobiographical element in the difficult father-son dynamic depicted in ‘the trial’?
It would be hard not to, knowing what we know of the unfortunate relationship between Kafka and his father, who at one point, when Franz was very young, seemed to cover the map of the world. the boy’s sense of the father of him was that of a giant, the giant in which mr. Bendemann, in ‘the trial’, metamorphoses.
what is indisputable is that franz would have greatly appreciated his father’s blessing as a writer. I think this drama of desire takes place in the second half of ‘the trial’. in a sense, history is about writing and reading what writers write in their letters. ‘evil’ son georg is at work writing another letter to his ‘friend of his’ in st. petersburg but his friend, if we are to believe mr. bendemann, ignores them; he, georg’s father, has been writing letters to this friend. It is this impoverished bachelor who enjoys seamless and transparent communication with George’s father. could this not be a blessing? but who, then, is this st. single from petersburg?
“kafka understood the ptsd better than most bureaucrats”
It is not a distant interpretive cry to see that Kafka has split into two daughter figures: the prosperous businessman Georg, who is about to embark on an advantageous marriage (how Herman Kafka would have blessed this figure in life! ); and a lonely, sick outcast, “yellow enough to be thrown away.” but these are not words that apply to people, but rather to paper. this bachelor is at least for a moment entirely on paper; remember that at other times kafka described his own being as entirely ‘literatur’, as ‘schriftstellersein’, the being of the writer.
kafka finished writing ‘the trial’ in an ecstatic trance. what he had achieved was to destroy the bourgeois modality of the self whose conatus would have won his father’s blessing—but not his own—and visualized, in a dream-wish, a flow of paternal love toward himself as an ascetic and writer. .
since we are talking about the life of kafka, let’s move on to the last of the books you have chosen. You have chosen Kafka: The Early Years. This is the first installment of Reiner Stach’s distinguished three-volume Kafka biography.
By selecting this volume from Reiner Stach’s richly detailed three-volume biography of Franz Kafka, elegantly translated by Shelley Frisch (Volume 2 is Kafka: The Decisive Years and Volume 3 is Kafka: The Years of Insight), I am primarily engaged by its novelty. Contrary to appearances, this is the last book of the three to appear, due to the author’s desire to consult materials to which he has had exclusive access. these notebooks and letters are now in the possession of the national library of israel, after taking possession of kafka’s papers stored in vaults in zurich and tel aviv and a messy pile allegedly scattered around the house of the elderly cat-loving daughter of the secretary of max brod —max brod being kafka’s great friend and promoter, who rescued kafka’s papers from destruction at the hands of the nazi ss.
The early years shed new light on Kafka’s friendship with Brod, emphasizing the mutual intimacy and intensity of their bond, one generally underestimated or considered unlikely by Kafka’s biographers, but strengthened by their many trips to Switzerland together. to northern italy, to paris and for their joint writing and publishing projects. they planned a modestly priced travel guide for middle-class tourists in the cities they had visited, carefully including suggestions on where to have sexual entertainment at a fair price.
What does this biography reveal to us about who Kafka really was? Does it undermine Kafka’s own attempts to mythologize himself?
we see a ‘normal’ young man, full of curiosity about the world and full of tricks, not a lover of school and a great friend, especially of max brod, at that time the much more accomplished young man of letters. As I have written elsewhere, Stach’s account voids the validity of Walter Benjamin’s assumption that one of the great puzzles about Kafka is that he should once have had Brod as a friend. Surely Benjamin could imagine himself in Brod’s place as best friend. however, you do get to feel, at least from brod’s perspective, the affection and enthusiasm flowing from kafka’s side, for reasons not hard to conceive of.
franz once amazed his friend hugo bergmann. As they approached the window of a large bookstore, Kafka closed his eyes and had Bergmann recite the titles of all the books he could see, to which Kafka responded with the author’s names, correctly in all cases. what bergmann did not know was that kafka was passionate about reading publishers’ lists and he already knew, long before this exercise, the names of the authors.
as for kafka’s school traumas: kafka’s greek grammar classes turned him upside down. he could not integrate an understanding of grammatical forms with a knowledge of content, which his teacher withheld from students anyway, as being beyond his reach. Stach concludes that this tension may have cast a lasting shadow on Kafka’s literary imagination. Joseph K., for example, at trial, is instructed in the formalities of the court of law, but is told that he will never understand the law. the same goes for the inhabitants of the town under the domain of the castle: neither the intruder k. nor will the villagers themselves ever understand his logic and his law.
Connected to this school year’s mini-trauma is the cruelest imagination of the teacher with pen raised about to mark Franz’s tests with a resounding “fail!”. Stach points out that the ordeal his protagonists face is not always that of dealing with a judicial bureaucracy. rather: “practically all of them are put into existential testing situations, for which they are not prepared and doomed to fail” (i/204).
This is young Kafka’s perpetual concern at school and college, closer to his experience than being turned into a vermin or stabbed through the heart as punishment for an unspecified crime.
Lastly, I want to ask: Given the vast amount of research on Kafka, do you think there are still areas of his life and work that remain untapped?
the other day the archive for german literature in marbach held a brilliant zoom conference exhibiting and commenting on an 8 page letter kafka wrote to max brod in 1922. marbach had bought it from a collector. In a kind of Kafkaesque story, Kafka describes having doubts about wintering alone in Planá. for one thing, the woman who ran his boarding house promised to cook him vegetarian meals all winter long. she would be blissfully alone and would have the solitude she longed for. On the other hand, the landlady who could seem so cooperative could also become angry and mischievous, completely anticipating the landlady in the terrifying story that Kafka would write two years later in Berlin. then there were the other villagers—peasants, mainly—in his vicinity. and the feeling of loneliness could become more acute and distressed among others with which one had nothing in common: the specialty of Kafka. he reminds: “only the limited circle is pure.”
this letter text fits the range of kafka’s work that at one point (2011), when i was actively engaged with it, i felt hitherto insufficiently cared for, namely ‘kafka’s late style’, the castle and the last of kafka short stories. but i think that lacuna has since been well addressed by intervening scholarship. still, the letter above suggests that as more ancillary material emerges (think of the pile of initial documents that the national library of israel is said to be digitizing and preparing to publish), there will once again be gaps that kafka scholarship is ready to fill.
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