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WORK TITLE: Kafka: The Early Years
WORK NOTES: trans by Shelley Frisch
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1951
WEBSITE:
CITY: Hamburg
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
lives in Hamburg. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiner_Stach * http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-disgraceful-lowlands-of-writing/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1951, in Rochlitz, East Germany.
EDUCATION:Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Ph.D., 1985.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, biographer, publicist, and publisher.
AWARDS:Winner of Die Zeit essay competition about Hans Henny Jahnn’s Fluss ohne Ufer (River Without Banks), 1991; cultural award of the Regional Association of Osnabrück Land, 2003; special prize of the Heimito von Doderer-Literaturpreis, 2008, for Kafka, die Jahre der Erkenntnis.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including Neue Rundschau and Revista de libros.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1951, Reiner Stach is a German writer, biographer, publicist, and publisher who has published a three-volume biography of writer Franz Kafka, as well as other writings about Kafka and the German Expressionist writer and organ builder Hans Henny Jahn. Stach has worked as a science editor and publisher of nonfiction and has received several literary awards. He attended Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt where he studied philosophy, literature, and mathematics and earned a Ph.D. in 1985.
In 2005, Stach published Kafka: The Decisive Years, the first volume of his Franz Kafka biographical trilogy translated by Shelley Frisch. Her translations of the trilogy have been awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Working from thousands of pages of journal entries, letters, and literature, Stach recreates the world that modernist writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) lived and worked in between 1910 to 1915, the years when he wrote his most famous books. This was also the time when Kafka became fascinated with early forms of Zionism, yet also wanted to be part of the German culture in his native Prague. Kafka was a vegetarian and a hypochondriac, and he was estranged from his Jewish relatives. Stach also describes Kafka’s disagreements with his father, his tenuous relationship with fiancé Felice Bauer, the onset of World War I, and Kafka’s seminal works: The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Judgment, and The Trial.
Reflecting on Kafka’s troubled psyche, Stach explores the writer’s obsessions and asceticism that are evident in his stories. “Stach probes the mind of a man who deeply craved intimacy but who finally insisted on an emotional martyrdom,” related Bryce Christensen in Booklist. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka’s personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted how Kafka’s writing was elegant and finely honed, adding that “Stach’s own writing is wonderfully expressive, a trait that hopefully will be carried through in the next two volumes.” Library Journal reviewer Ali Houissa said that the first book in Stach’s trilogy contains insight into what it was like to be Franz Kafka, concluding that it “can stand by itself as a distinguished and original contribution to the study of Kafka.”
The second book in Stach’s trilogy, Kafka, the Years of Insight, covers the years 1916 to 1924, a blighted post-World War I world of disease and inflation. Kafka’s job as a civil servant made him see the unspeakable misery and poverty in his hometown of Prague. “Stach here writes about the life events that informed the art of Kafka’s writing,” explained Lonnie Weatherby in Library Journal, adding that this is a monumental accomplishment. Kafka had lost his financial security, tuberculosis was rampant, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed. In this atmosphere, Kafka adopted a more existential view of the world, leading to his parable-like Country Doctor stories as well as A Hunger Artist and The Castle.
At this time, Kafka also started a passionate relationships with Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, yet his health was failing. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and then with the Spanish flu a year later; he died in 1924 in an Austrian sanatorium at the age of 40, after years of suffering. “Mr. Stach also effectively undermines conventional views of Kafka as a prophet of the atrocities to come,” remarked a reviewer in Economist, who then added, “A frequent target of anti-Semitic remarks, Kafka depicted the world as he saw it, full of lonely and persecuted individuals, but not one without hope.”
“Stach contextualizes all of the negativity afflicting Kafka personally within the worldwide negativity of a war,” noted Booklist reviewer Bryce Christensen. Writing in Choice, E. William stated, “Though Stach’s virtuosity and intimate knowledge is sometimes a liability. . . this biography is an extraordinary accomplishment.” Characterizing Kafka, the Years of Insight as “chockablock with neuroses, failures, but also moments of brilliance,” a Kirkus Reviews writer summed up the volume as “an illuminating book built, like its subject’s life, on small episodes rather than great, dramatic turning points.” Impressed with the scope of Stach’s research, a Publishers Weekly reviewer predicted that “despite the narrow time frame, this insightful book is likely to become a standard by which future biographies are measured.”
Stach ends his trilogy with Kafka: The Early Years. The early life of Kafka is presented last in the trilogy because of the problems Stach had encountered in asccessing sources related to this period. The book attempts to explain how Kafka was shaped as a writer by the world around him. Stach also draws on the notebooks of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, after Stach persuaded Brod’s Israeli heirs to let him read the diaries. Brod left Prague for Palestine in the 1930s.
This volume begins with Kafka’s birth in Prague to a German Jewish merchant family and ends with the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910. Stach recounts Kafka’s education, psychological development, and sexual maturation, during a time before World War I when there were violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Kafka developed an interest in modern technologies, such as the movies and airplanes, and adopted a back-to-nature attitude.
In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer noted, “Stach’s portrait of the young Kafka contradicts the legend of their source in an alienated, detached enigma.” A reviewer for the Economist commended Stach for going past the well-known aspects of Kafka’s life to show a young man who was not as neurotic or reclusive as other biographers have indicated. The reviewer suggested that the book will appeal to general readers as well as literary specialists, who can all “benefit from the illumination that Mr Stach’s detailed digging brings.”
Reviewing Kafka: The Early Years in the Australian, Nicolas Rothwell observed: “We can trace, through Stach’s measured narrative, the full course of Kafka’s brief life. . . . The result is not merely a biography of painstaking thoroughness but a piece of psychological investigation and literary detective work without clear parallel. It gives its readers a new Kafka. It explains much that has long seemed obscure; yet, by paradox, the more its author-hero is grounded in his context, and the more we grasp of the initial sources of his imagination, the more unfathomable his gifts become.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2005, Bryce Christensen, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight, p. 27.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, February 2014, E. Williams, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight, p. 1009.
Economist, July 27, 2013, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight, p. 67; November 12, 2016, review of Kafka, the Early Years, p. 73.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2005, review of Kafka, the Decisive Years, p. 1016; June 15, 2013, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight.
Library Journal, October 15, 2005, Ali Houissa, review of Kafka, the Decisive Years, 58; Lonnie Weatherby, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight, p.80.
London Review of Books, December 4, 2014, Riva Galchen, review of Kafka, the Decisive Years and Kafka, the Years of Insight.
New York Times Book Review, July 5, 2013, Joy Williams, review of Kafka, the Decisive Years.
Publishers Weekly, September 12, 2005, review of review of Kafka, the Decisive Years, p. 56; March 25, 2013, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight, p. 51; September 19, 2016, review of Kafka, the Early Years, p. 60.
ONLINE
Australian, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ (April 8, 2017), Nicolas Rothwell, review of Kafka, the Early Years.
Guardian Online (London England), (July 31, 2015), PD Smith, review of Kafka, the Years of Insight.
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com (February 1, 2017), Robert Minto, review of Kafka, the Decisivie Years, Kafka, the Years of Insight, and Kafka, the Early Years.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com (March 14, 2016), Evan James, review of Is That Kafka? 99 Finds.
Reiner Stach Home Page, http://www.reinerstach.de/ (July 22, 2017).
Reiner Stach
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reiner Stach
Reiner-stach-2011-ffm-031.jpg
Reiner Stach in 2011
Born 1951
Rochlitz, East Germany
Occupation Biographer, publicist, publisher
Language German
Notable works Kafka – Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (Kafka: The Decisive Years), Kafka – Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (Kafka: The Years of Realization)
Reiner Stach (born 1951) is a German author, biographer of Franz Kafka, publisher, and publicist. Stach lives and works as a freelancer in Berlin. He has received literary awards and published several works, including a biographic trilogy about Franz Kafka.
Contents
1 Life and work
2 Awards
3 Selected works
4 References
5 External links
Life and work
Stach was born in Rochlitz, Saxony. He studied philosophy, literature, and mathematics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Stach graduated in 1985 with a PhD. His dissertation was titled Kafkas erotischer Mythos. Eine ästhetische Konstruktion des Weiblichen (Kafka's erotic myth. An aesthetic construction of femininity).[1]
First Stach worked for major publishers as a science editor and publisher of nonfiction. He published several essays and reviews about the works of Hans Henny Jahnn and Franz Kafka,[2] in various journals and anthologies, such as in the Neue Rundschau and in Revista de libros, Madrid. He discovered the estate of Kafka's fiancée Felice Bauer in the United States and showed it as an exhibit "Kafka's Bride" in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Prague, among other places, during 1998 and 1999.
While Kafka had a relatively small literary output, his influence is so immense that Stach estimates there are at least 130,000 web sites devoted to him. Stach stopped his own internet count of Kafka sites when he got to 500 of them. There are dozens of Kafka biographies. Stach decided to write a detailed Kafka biographical trilogy because despite all this, "No definitive biography of Franz Kafka exists".[3]
Stach divided his biography of Kafka into three volumes: from birth to age 27 (1910), the period when he wrote his most famous works (1910–1915), and everything thereafter (1916–1924). However, obtaining enough suitable research material for the period covering early family, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood (1883–1910), relies in part on obtaining access to the estate of Max Brod in Tel Aviv, which has so far largely been inaccessible to research due to legal issues. Consequently, Stach decided to start writing this trilogy with period 1910–1915, the years Kafka's diaries start, so the first volume covers second chronological period. It took Stach about 10 years to write this volume. The first published volume of his Kafka biography, covering the years 1910 to 1915, appeared in 2002 as Kafka – Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (Kafka: The Decisive Years, literally: The years of decisions).[3] This was translated into English in 2005 by Shelley Frisch.[4] The second published volume, Kafka – Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (Kafka: The Years of Realization or "insight"), appeared in 2008, dealing with the last eight years of Kafka's life. This volume was published in English in late 2011. The final volume, covering the earliest chronological period, was published in German in 2014. An English translation of this volume by Shelley Frisch is slated for October 2016.[5] The trilogy has been described as "massive" and going "into painstaking detail".[6]
Awards
1991: Winner of a writing competition initiated by Botho Strauß in Die Zeit on Hans Henny Jahnn's Fluss ohne Ufer (River Without Banks), for his essay "Die fressende Schöpfung. Über Hans Henny Jahnns Romantrilogie Fluss ohne Ufer" ("The carnivorous creation. About Hans Henny Jahnns trilogy Shoreless River")
2003: Kulturförderpreis des Landschaftsverbandes Osnabrück Land (Cultural Award of the Regional Association of Osnabrück Land)
2008: Special prize of the Heimito von Doderer-Literaturpreis for his biography Kafka – Die Jahre der Erkenntnis[1]
Selected works
Stach's autograph on a paperback copy of Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidungen
100 Jahre S. Fischer Verlag 1886 - 1986. Kleine Verlagsgeschichte. [100 Years of S. Fischer Verlag 1886-1986. A Brief History.]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 1986. ISBN 978-3-100-75106-5.
Kafkas erotischer Mythos. Eine ästhetische Konstruktion des Weiblichen. [Kafka's Erotic Myth. An Aesthetic Construction of Femininity.]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 1987. ISBN 978-3-596-27370-6. (Dissertation, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 1985)
Gottfried Bermann Fischer und Brigitte Bermann Fischer: Briefwechsel mit Autoren. [Gottfried Bermann Fischer and Brigitte Bermann Fischer: Correspondence With Authors.]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 1990. ISBN 978-3-100-21602-1.
"Die fressende Schöpfung. Über Hans Henny Jahnns Romantrilogie Fluss ohne Ufer" [The Carnivorous Creation. About Hans Henny Jahnns Trilogy River Without Banks]. Forum Homosexualität und Literatur. Siegen, Germany: Universität-GH Siegen. 15: 41–50. 1992.
"Stil, Motiv und fixe Idee: Über einige Untiefen der Jahnn-Lektüre" [Style, Motif, and Obsession: Some Lectures about Jahnn]. Literaturmagazin. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag. 35: 79–92. 1995.
Kafka – Die Jahre der Entscheidungen [Kafka — The Decisive Years]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 2002. ISBN 978-3-10-075114-0.
"Das Ärgernis Hans Henny Jahnn" [The Scandal of Hans Henny Jahnn]. Literaturen. Berlin: Friedrich Berlin Verlag. 5: 52–57. 2003.
Kafka – Die Jahre der Erkenntnis [Kafka — The Years of Realization]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 2008. ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5.
Kafkas Spiele. Eine kleine, kommentierte Kreuzfahrt durch Kafkas Nachlass [Kafka's Games. A small commented tour through Kafka's Legacy]. Düsseldorf: Onomato Verlag. 2011. ISBN 978-3-942864-19-0. (Audio Book)
Ist das Kafka? 99 Fundstücke [Is that Kafka? 99 Finds]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 2012. ISBN 978-3-10-075135-5.
Kafka. Die frühen Jahre. [Kafka. The Early Years.]. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. 2014. ISBN 978-3-10-075130-0.
in German.
Kafka: The Early Years
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Kafka: The Early Years
Reiner Stach, trans. from the German by Shelley Frisch. Princeton Univ., $35 (648p) ISBN 978-0-691-15198-4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
German biographer Stach completes his massive three-volume life of the literary giant Franz Kafka (1883-1924) with a long-awaited account of the prodigy's life before 1910, enriched by Frisch's able translation. Kafka's eerie short stories and novels have electrified readers for generations, but Stach's portrait of the young Kafka contradicts the legend of their source in an alienated, detached enigma. Readers meet instead a likable, brilliant young insurance lawyer with, as Stach puts it, abundant perfectionism and self-doubt. Stach explores the Kafka family's complicated relationship to Judaism; Kafka considered converting to Christianity in his youth, but decided not to. He was fond of shop girls and prostitutes, and Stach goes so far as to recount his first sexual experience. The book reveals that Kafka was intrigued by airplanes and the new medium of cinema. Sigmund Freud's bold ideas and Prague's heady pre-WWI intellectual circles, which included the young physicist Albert Einstein, serve as backdrops. The Max Brod archives on which Stach's project depended were litigated for decades. Brod, Kafka's close friend and literary executor, famously refused to destroy the writer's work as instructed and published it instead. Brod's detailed reflections, which dominate much of this final volume, will chiefly interest Kafka scholars, but all Kafka devotees will find this biography's insights deeply fulfilling. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka: The Early Years." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352759&it=r&asid=3c95da9390ba716b0b22cc31db1e8e21. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352759
Refugee avant la lettre; Literary history
421.9015 (Nov. 12, 2016): p73(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
A new biography goes past the well-known surface to discover a young Kafka with strikingly modern concerns
Kafka: The Early Years. By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press; 564 pages.
POOR Franz Kafka. His lifetime being misunderstood by his family has been followed by an even longer literary afterlife being misunderstood by the world. According to a new biography by Reiner Stach, Kafka was not the neurotic, world-removed writer of, say, Isaac Bashevis Singer's 1960s story, "A Friend of Kafka", in which a friend says Kafka's inhibitions "impeded him in everything". Nor was he scarred solely by a difficult relationship with his overbearing father, an idea that Alan Bennett's play "Kafka's Dick" toyed with in the 1980s.
In "Kafka: The Early Years", the last instalment of a mighty, three-volume biography, Mr Stach pursues close description of Kafka's life and times rather than the "critical biography" approach combining biography and textual interpretation. What Mr Stach uncovers in this volume--written last because of a long struggle over access to documents--are the formative experiences of a Kafka who becomes new and surprisingly relevant.
"Readers…will find myths about Kafka exploded," writes Shelley Frisch in her translator's preface. Mr Stach himself lauds "the many pieces of the mosaic discovered by others", a half-century of academic discovery (about Kafka's first-rate work as an insurance clerk, for example) that Mr Stach now brings to a wider audience. Yet even those immersed in the specialist work benefit from the illumination that Mr Stach's detailed digging brings.
Kafka wrote his famous "Letter to His Father" in 1919, in which he took his father, Hermann, to account for his boorish ways with his son, who became beset by guilt and fear of punishment. But, as Mr Stach vividly shows, loneliness, not humiliation, was Kafka's first formative experience. Until he was four, his father and mother were busy in the family haberdashery shop 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week. Kafka learned that social relations were fraught and unstable--with great consequence for literature.
In Mr Stach's telling, this insecurity was compounded by threats that the observant and highly sensitive Kafka found in the world: an education system based on rigorous exams, and the risk of failing them; a society beset by tensions between Czechs and Germans, in which Jews were often the scapegoats; and new-fangled machines like aeroplanes, which both delighted and terrified the young author.
According to Mr Stach, guilt and punishment preoccupied Kafka from 1912--the year he wrote "The Metamorphosis", a groundbreaking story--until early 1915. But later works posed a new question: "What do people have to do to be accepted by a group--and why are some never accepted?" For the biographer, this is precisely the theme of "The Castle", an unfinished novel that Mr Stach calls Kafka's most brilliant work, written two years before he died of tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40.
In today's age of backlash against globalisation, the arc that Mr Stach draws between "The Early Years" and Kafka's later life takes on a new significance. It traces the life of a misunderstood German-speaking Jew in a city run first by an Austrian emperor, then by assertively nationalist Czechs. "We move from guilt to the question of identity," Mr Stach says. "The question, 'Who am I?' is, after all, closely linked to, 'Where do I belong?'"
The bloody climax of nationalism that followed makes Kafka's story not a little poignant: he found a true home neither in life nor in death. The difficulty of writing "The Early Years" was a symptom of this. Mr Stach spent years trying to persuade the Israeli heirs of Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, who left Prague for Palestine in the 1930s, to let him read Brod's diaries. Though he will not say how, Mr Stach got hold of copies of three volumes, rendering new insights about Brod's and Kafka's world.
The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the Brod manuscripts should be placed in the National Library. This is good news for the public, but ensures that Kafka will remain rootless: his and Brod's manuscripts will be scattered between Germany, Britain and Israel. And rootlessness breeds indifference. Vienna has neglected the sanatorium where Kafka died. Berlin has left commemoration of Kafka's time there to private initiatives. And the Czech government sees Kafka more as a tourist magnet than as a cultural icon. Mr Stach concludes that "No state feels responsible for him. That's absurd."
Kafka: The Early Years.
By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Refugee avant la lettre; Literary history." The Economist, 12 Nov. 2016, p. 73(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469668704&it=r&asid=554e1fd14284e7702f6671c91290de3c. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469668704
Stach, Reiner: KAFKA
(June 15, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Stach, Reiner KAFKA Princeton Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 7, 1 ISBN: 978-0-691-14751-2
Conclusion of a massive, comprehensive life of the famed Czech/German/Jewish writer, chockablock with neuroses, failures and moments of brilliance. The editor of Kafka's collected works in German, Stach (Kafka: The Decisive Years, 2005, etc.) delivers much that is known about the writer: his sexual insecurities; his fraught, near-paralyzing relationship with his father; the terrible fate of his beloved sisters in the Holocaust. We knew from Max Brod, to say nothing of Kafka's own correspondence, that he could be clinically cold, and clinically odd, as when he wrote to his one-time intended Felice Bauer, "Your last letter said that a picture was enclosed. It was not enclosed. This represents a hardship for me." Yet there are surprises as well: Who knew, for instance, that Kafka, though gravely ill, was still athletic enough to row a passenger across a swiftly flowing river? Kafka was, of course, ever anonymous in doing so: "It would never have occurred to the man that he might have been rowed by a thirty-seven-year-old with a doctorate in law, who served as head of his department and suffered from tuberculosis." Stach also reveals Kafka's efforts to join the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, thwarted by his employer, and offers a trove of observations on Kafka and the business of writing and publishing, with all the usual complaints about late and underpaid royalties and skewed contracts. Throughout, Stach considers Kafka's flourishing as a writer, precise but deeply emotional, in a time of works such as The Castle and "The Metamorphosis." He also sheds light on Kafka's sometimes-tenuous Zionism, including his concentrated studies of Hebrew and on-and-off plans to relocate to Palestine. 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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stach, Reiner: KAFKA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA333599241&it=r&asid=207197ef9a1d32d95afb4af35340d942. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A333599241
Nervous brilliance; Franz Kafka
408.8846 (July 27, 2013): p67(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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A definitive biography of a rare writer
IN 1915 a short story called "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung") was published in a small German magazine. It told the story of Gregor Samsa, a salesman who wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into an enormous bug. The author, Franz Kafka, was a middle-ranking civil servant working in Prague. He would die less than ten years later, a little-known author of three novels and several shorter works. But "The Metamorphosis"--perhaps 50 pages long--would go on to inspire countless stage adaptations and doctoral theses and scores of subsequent writers. The story, along with the novels "The Trial" and "The Castle", ensured Kafka's place as one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
"Kafka: The Years of Insight" is the second volume of Reiner Stach's masterful biography of the author. The first dealt with the years 1910 to 1915, when Kafka was a young man writing furiously into the night while working 50-hour weeks. The second volume records his burgeoning fame up until his death in an Austrian sanatorium at the age of 40, after years of suffering from tuberculosis. (A third volume, tracing his early years, is in the works.)
In these final years, from 1916 to 1924, Kafka receives letters from quizzical bank managers asking him to explain his stories ("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 the story"). He spends hours nagging away at his prose, only to rip it up, throw it away and start again. He apparently denies being the author of certain stories when asked by other invalids at a retreat. He has four love affairs, mostly through letters, and spends much of his time away from his cramped office at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. These are years of insight, but also of depression and illness.
Despite the gloom, this biography makes for an excellent read. Mr Stach, a German academic, expertly presents Kafka's struggles with his work and health against the wider background of the first world war, the birth of Czechoslovakia and the hyperinflation of the 1920s. Alert to the limits of biography, Mr Stach bases everything on archival materials and, where possible, Kafka's own view of events. He is also wryly aware of the academic cottage industry that has sprung up around Kafka's work, hints of which had already emerged in his lifetime. "You are so pure, new, independent...that one ought to treat you as if you were already dead and immortal," wrote one fan.
The picture that emerges is of a difficult, brilliant man. In Mr Stach's view, Kafka was "a neurotic, hypochondriac, fastidious individual who was complex and sensitive in every regard, who always circled around himself and who made a problem out of absolutely everything". A decision to visit a married woman, soon to be his lover, takes him three weeks and 20 letters. When writing to his first fiancee, he refers to himself in the third person and struggles to evoke intimacy. Kafka makes decisions only to swiftly unmake them. Other people irritate him. "Sometimes it almost seems to me that life itself is what gets on my nerves," he wrote to a friend.
But Mr Stach's biography also shows Kafka's lighter side. On holiday with a mistress, he feels almost sick with laughter. In the last years of his life he meets a crying young girl in a park who explains that she has lost her doll. He then proceeds to write her a letter a day for three weeks from the perspective of the doll, recounting its exploits. With his final mistress, Dora Diamant, Kafka has no doubt that he wants to marry her. She even inspires him to recover his interest in Judaism.
Such anecdotes pierce the austere image left by Kafka's work. Mr Stach also effectively undermines conventional views of Kafka as a prophet of the atrocities to come (his three sisters died in Nazi concentration camps, as did two of his mistresses). A frequent target of anti-Semitic remarks, Kafka depicted the world as he saw it, full of lonely and persecuted individuals, but not one without hope.
Kafka: The Years of Insight.
By Reiner Stach.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nervous brilliance; Franz Kafka." The Economist, 27 July 2013, p. 67(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA337808502&it=r&asid=5bfaf099242058900ce7a12f4b56de09. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A337808502
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Years of Insight
Lonnie Weatherby
138.7 (Apr. 15, 2013): p80.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Years of Insight. Princeton Univ. Jul. 2013. 736p. tr. from German by Shelley Frisch. photogs. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780691147512. $35. LIT
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Restriction to archival research material has predetermined the publishing sequence of Stach's tripartite biography. The first, Kafka: The Decisive Years, covered Franz Kafka's most markedly creative period (1910-15). The volume dealing with Kafka's family history and formative years is forthcoming. Stach's current volume--with marginal overlap--covers the period from 1916 to 1924, his terminal years. Beset by a world war that irreparably shattered lives, landscapes, cities, and ideals, a neurotic and insomniac Kafka was obsessed with finding the time and space to feed his hunger: writing. But the expectations, desires, and burdens of everyday life seemed to conspire against him: his father's disapprobation, his job at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute, his turbulent courtships with Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenska, and Dora Diamant, and finally his encounter with malignant and fatal tuberculosis. In time, his work overshadowed the details of his life. Braiding letters, diaries, memoirs, and notebooks with concentrated literary and historical commentary, Stach here writes about the life events that informed the art of Kafka's writing. VERDICT This work is a monumental accomplishment with a first-rate translation by scholar Frisch.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal
Weatherby, Lonnie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Weatherby, Lonnie. "Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Years of Insight." Library Journal, 15 Apr. 2013, p. 80+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA325892471&it=r&asid=77af20d8c1ff6c3e5ba256f4f673941c. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A325892471
Kafka: The Years of Insight
260.12 (Mar. 25, 2013): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Kafka: The Years of Insight
Reiner Stach, trans, from the German by Shelley Frisch. Princeton Univ., $35
(7360) ISBN 978-0-691-14751-2
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 fiance, 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. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka: The Years of Insight." Publishers Weekly, 25 Mar. 2013, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA324587827&it=r&asid=894033b4952651ec12f9a5c3d8d94e77. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A324587827
Kafka: The Years of Insight
Bryce Christensen
109.19-20 (June 1, 2013): p27.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Kafka: The Years of Insight. By Reiner Stach. Tr. by Shelley Frisch. July 2013.736p. Princeton, $35 (9780691147512). 833.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Kafka summed up his life this way: "I have powerfully absorbed the negative element of the age." In this final volume of his definitive biography, Stach unfolds the life process through which a mature Kafka absorbs that nightmarish negativity and distills it as literature. Readers see up close how Kafka absorbs domestic negativity in a family dominated by a tyrannical father. Readers also watch as Kafka absorbs the emotional negativity of repeated romantic failure. Even Kafka's physical body attracts negativity, as a man already suffering from lethal tuberculosis contracts the Spanish flu of 1918. But Stach contextualizes all of the negativity afflicting Kafka personally within the worldwide negativity of a war tearing apart traditional political and cultural structures, so loosing new ethnic animosities, exposing Jews such as Kafka to peril. 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
Christensen, Bryce
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Kafka: The Years of Insight." Booklist, 1 June 2013, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA335921528&it=r&asid=17f5ad55e7c4bb8246b09ec331d63459. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A335921528
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years
Ali Houissa
130.17 (Oct. 15, 2005): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Harcourt. Nov. 2005. c.608p. photogs. bibliog, index. ISBN 0-15-100752-7. $35. LIT
Surprisingly, there has never been a definitive biography of Franz Kafka, the Prague-born German-language novelist and enigmatic figure of early 20th-century literature. Stach, a German writer and scholar, remedies that deficit with this masterly work, which, while net yet comprehensive (it is the first of a projected three-volume study), seeks to give the reader the experience of "what it was like to be Franz Kafka." To that end, the author concentrates on what he considers the decisive period in the relatively short life of his subject. Relying on more than 4000 pages of Kafka's diary entries, letters, and literary fragments, he raises the curtain in 1910, the threshold of the author's major creative period that extended beyond the outbreak of World War I to 1915. This 35-chapter volume offers an eclectic array of themes and commentaries on Kafka's life and work and includes both extensive notes and two 16-page black-and-white photo inserts. Though only the first volume, The Decisive Years can stand by itself as a distinguished and original contribution to the study of Kafka. Highly recommended for large public libraries and all literature and academic collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/05; for another illuminating study of Kafka the man, consider Nicholas Murray's Kafka, an LJ Best Book of 2004.--Ed.] Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Houissa, Ali
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Houissa, Ali. "Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2005, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138704716&it=r&asid=b197c5248df35ec8349671780b83a2ee. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138704716
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years
Bryce Christensen
102.3 (Oct. 1, 2005): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Tr. by Shelley Frisch. Nov. 2005. 608p. illus. index. Harcourt, $35 (0-15-100752-7). 833.
A voracious reader of biographies, Kafka himself eluded the attention of capable biographers for a very long time. Finally, in 2002, Stach published this probing first volume of what--when completed in two more volumes--will stand as the first definitive biography of a modern genius. Fortunately, the skills of a gifted translator now permit English-speaking readers to share in Stach's achievement. The text begins just before the young adult writer manifests his astonishing literary powers. Though much of the external life of this fastidious insurance agent might appear tedious, Stach recognizes that for a man who declared, "My stories are me," what counts is the hidden unfolding of the creative imagination. Thus, in Kafka's obsession with personal hygiene and Spartan furnishing Stach detects the same relentless asceticism that runs through all of his literary art. More tellingly, in the tortured course of an abortive courtship, Stach probes the mind of a man who deeply craved intimacy but who finally insisted on an emotional martyrdom that would preserve his aesthetic solitude. Within that intensifying solitude, readers glimpse the radical alienation that incubated the dark masterpiece "The Metamorphosis." Nor does Stach neglect the larger context, convincingly linking Kafka's personal turmoil to the deepening gloom pervading pre--World War I Europe. Kafka was thus crystallizing both his private distress and a global premonition in plumbing the ominous mysteries of "The Penal Colony" and The Trial. Essential reading for all Kafka devotees.--Bryce Christensen
Christensen, Bryce
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2005, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137873956&it=r&asid=99110f626359924f5e9c6eae64604004. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137873956
Stach, Reiner: Kafka: The Decisive Years
73.18 (Sept. 15, 2005): p1016.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Stach, Reiner KAFKA: The Decisive Years Trans. by Shelley Frisch Harcourt (608 pp.) $35.00 Nov. 7, 2005 ISBN: 0-15-100752-7
An astute analysis, by the German editor of Kafka's collected works, of the remarkable half-decade in which the Prague-based modernist wrote his best-known stories.
Given the impact of Kafka's fraught relations with his family, especially his father, on his writing, it's odd that Stach chooses to begin this first entry in a projected three-volume biography in 1910, when Kafka was 27 years old. His days were passed as an insurance official, a commitment he dutifully fulfilled while devoting his nights to his art. Stach ably delineates the writer's peculiar personality--vegetarian, hypochondriac, utterly estranged from the bourgeois preoccupations of his Jewish relatives, yet unable to even move out of the family apartment--without ever exploring the childhood roots of his stunted character. This major caveat aside, the biographer does a brilliant job of examining in depth the adult Kafka's transmutation of his neuroses into exacting, unsettling fiction that captured the unease of a world confronting modernity but still constricted by 19th-century conventions. Discussing "The Metamorphosis," The Trial and "In the Penal Colony," Stach pays equal attention to themes, autobiographical content and Kafka's precise prose and resonant metaphors. He also acutely examines the writer's on-again-off-again romance with Felice Bauer, conducted primarily through letters (this up-to-date career woman had a demanding job in Berlin and her ambivalent suitor seldom left Prague). Though Kafka rarely noted world events in his diaries and letters, he was deeply affected by the Yiddish theater and Zionism; Stach assesses the influence of these historical trends as ably as he delineates the vibrant German-language publishing scene. This vivid recreation of a complex man and his milieu closes at an appropriately uncertain moment: one year into WWI, which spurred Kafka's strongest efforts yet toward autonomy and a life dedicated wholly to literature, even as it made such a life virtually impossible.
A judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka's personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stach, Reiner: Kafka: The Decisive Years." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2005, p. 1016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA136710029&it=r&asid=584836fd6b7d4259146c0eafe91012fc. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A136710029
Kafka: The Decisive Years
252.36 (Sept. 12, 2005): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Kafka: The Decisive Years REINER STACH, TRANS. FROM THE GERMAN BY SHELLEY FRISCH. Harcourt, $35 (608p) ISBN 0-15-100752-7
We know Kafka better than almost any other literary figure. His tormented psyche has been on view for decades, not only from his great stories and novels but also from countless letters and diary entries, his own as well as those of lovers, and his friend and editor, Max Brod. Oddly, he has not commanded a great biography. German editor and author Stach enters the breach with the first volume of a planned trilogy, now published in an excellent English translation. Stach begins with a superb meditation on the art of biography, including the pitfalls of the empathy a biographer establishes with his subject. He picks up Kafka's life not in childhood, but in 1910, the fitful beginning of his literary career, and follows it only until 1915. But these were the years when Kafka produced some of his greatest works, including "The Metamorphosis" and The Trial. We see the writer in all his torments, but also his moments of triumph, however fleeting. Most impressive is Stach's recounting of the creation of his subject's writings. The biographer is not deluded by the simplicity of Kafka's prose. His language was elegant and finely honed and, in personal relations, could be used to great manipulative effect. Stach's own writing is wonderfully expressive, a trait that hopefully will be carried through in the next two volumes. 32 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka: The Decisive Years." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2005, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA136340025&it=r&asid=f9423dba0beff887bbb99c2acce19440. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A136340025
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: the years of insight
E. Williams
51.6 (Feb. 2014): p1009.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
51-3125
PT2621
2012-42048 CIP
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: the years of insight, tr. by Shelley Frisch. Princeton, 2013. 682p bibl index afp ISBN 0691147515, $35.00; ISBN 9780691147512, $35.00
Stach's award-winning three-part study is the most extensive and insightful biography of Franz Kafka to date. The first volume released (covering Kafka's middle years), The Decisive Years (CH, Jun'06, 43-5779), set high standards. The present volume (the second released), which covers the last decade of Kafka's life (1914-24), meets that challenge and reads almost like a novel. During his final years, Kafka's mounting inner turmoil and estrangement were exacerbated by not only his final break with Felice Bauer and his deteriorating health (the tuberculosis that killed him), but also the social upheaval of world war, the demise of the Habsburg Empire, and the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia. Countering the prevailing notion that Kafka was out of touch with reality, Stach details how this quixotic modernist was actually well informed about the crisis and how this knowledge altered the course of his writing. In addition to being a skillful biographer, Stach is an authority on Kafka, having worked for more than a decade on the definitive critical edition of Kafka's writings (including journals, letters, and literary notebooks). Though Stach's virtuosity and intimate knowledge is sometimes a liability (when he proffers "biographic" explanations of aspects of Kafka's fiction), this biography is an extraordinary accomplishment. Summing Up: Essential. **** All academic readers.--E. Williams, Universidad de las Americas, Puebla (Mexico)
Williams, E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williams, E. "Stach, Reiner. Kafka: the years of insight." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Feb. 2014, p. 1009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA360609260&it=r&asid=9c81641af50783218c725c96ef24ef20. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A360609260
Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Years of Insight
John Banville
36.4 (Fall 2013): p882.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Kafka, Franz
Kafka: The Years of Insight. Reiner Stach. Trans. Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. 682 pp. $35.00.
Kafka: The Decisive Years. Reiner Stach. Trans. Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. 581 pp. $24.95.
"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. By a combination of tireless scholarship, uncanny empathy, and writing that might best be described as passionately fluent, 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."
John Banville. NYRB, Oct. 24, 2013: 17.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Banville, John. "Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Years of Insight." Biography, vol. 36, no. 4, 2013, p. 882. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA373371806&it=r&asid=1e8323fe3d0b1056eae6e7c3626db17b. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A373371806
Kafka; the years of insight
28.4 (Aug. 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9780691147512
Kafka; the years of insight.
Stach, Reiner. Trans. by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton U. Press
2013
682 pages
$35.00
Hardcover
PT2621
Part of a projected three-volume biography of writer Franz Kafka, this volume covers the final years of his life, 1916 to 1924. While paying close attention to the details of Kafka's personal life and literary productions--including, during this period, A Hunger Artist and The Castle--biographer Stach also situates Kafka's life in the much broader sweep of tumultuous history that influenced Kafka and his work, including war, the outbreak of tuberculosis, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another volume covering the years 1910-1915, Kafka: the decisive years, originally published in 2005, is now available in paperbound edition and a third volume covering the writer's childhood and youth is projected.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka; the years of insight." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338399994&it=r&asid=42e43ae97bbf96fd5f130bd0e7312c33. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338399994
Kafka; the decisive years. (reprint, 2005)
28.4 (Aug. 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9780691147413
Kafka; the decisive years. (reprint, 2005)
Stach, Reiner. Trans. by Shelly Frisch.
Princeton U. Press
2013
581 pages
$24.95
PT2621
First published in 2005, this is part of a three-volume biography of writer Franz Kafka that is being republished in paperbound format in order to accompany the appearance of a companion volume, Franz Kafka: the Years of Insight (published in hardbound edition). Chronologically, that newer volume, covering the final years of Kafka's life, is the third and this volume is the second of the three, covering the years 1910-1915 (a third covering Kafka's childhood and youth is projected). Biographer Stach pays close heed to the details of both Kafka's personal life as well as his literary output during this period, which included The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and The Judgment, while simultaneously situating those details in relation to the broader sweep of war and other sociopolitical developments that influenced Kafka's life and career.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka; the decisive years. (reprint, 2005)." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338401466&it=r&asid=dab2a697e37fb6e8f0b272c03f985688. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338401466
Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Years of Insight
Joy Williams
36.3 (Summer 2013): p616.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Kafka, Franz
Kafka: The Years of Insight. Reiner Stach. Trans. Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. 682 pp. $35.00.
"'Kafka: The Years of Insight' ... 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 explains that his somewhat unusual manner of transmittal over the years has to do with the availability of biographical materials.... 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. ... [This book] 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. NYTBR, July 7, 2013: 34-35.
Williams, Joy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williams, Joy. "Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Years of Insight." Biography, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, p. 616. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA358058479&it=r&asid=53c4830cecac62b75491d4c8833732f2. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A358058479
Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years
Courtney Andree
24.8 (Apr. 2006): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Foundation for Cultural Review
Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years. Harcourt, 592 pages, $35
Upon finishing Kafka's The Trial, the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky noted, "The reader of a book knows after twenty or thirty, pages what kind of a writer he is dealing with, what the book is, how it flows, whether it is meant to be taken seriously, how to classify it. Here you know nothing, you grope in the dark. What is this? Who is that?" In the case of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years, far fewer than "twenty or thirty pages" are required for an accurate forecast of the chapters to come.
While Stach's study is indisputably complete and Shelley Frisch's translation from the German is beautifully wrought, the first pages of Kafka read like a balance sheet, with Kafka's existence reduced to "forty years and eleven months" with "sixteen years six and a half months in school and at university, and nearly fifteen years in professional life" with "about forty-five days abroad."
And as for his love life? "He was engaged three times" and "shared an apartment with a woman for about six months of his life" Kafka's body of work consisted of the "forty complete prose texts" he left and "3,400 pages of diary entries and literary fragments." Here too, Stach explicates his methodology for relating the events that unfolded in "the decisive years" (1910-1915) in excruciating detail, addressing the "hermeneutic horizon" that is to become a refrain throughout the work, and his persistent excuse for resisting even the most tentative conclusions, the faintest extrapolations.
Though Kafka concentrates on the bare facts of Kafka's correspondences with his on-again-off-again fiancee, Felice Bauer, and with the author Max Brod, Stach is unable to resist the temptation to devote whole chapters to superfluous European history lessons, and precious pages to a diatribe against the telephone, which he describes as an "altered voice" that becomes "abstract and loses its sensuality;' ultimately subjecting "the psyche to additional pressure instead of providing stability and form, as letters do."
Kafka the author, the insurance official, the crazed lover, and the silent partner in the asbestos works coalesce here into little more than the shell of a man. He seems to be a mere prototype for his protagonists. Where is the man who would rave about "what magic there is in tickling an old woman under the chin"? Perhaps, like a little arthropod, this rare "sunny" Kafka has been squashed and swept into the dustbin by Stach's "proper" biographical study.
Andree, Courtney
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Andree, Courtney. "Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years." New Criterion, vol. 24, no. 8, 2006, p. 79. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA145024300&it=r&asid=d31e8d1e219480b136063f34a7799389. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A145024300
Kafka; the decisive years
21.1 (Feb. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
0151007527
Kafka; the decisive years.
Stach, Reiner. Trans. by Shelly Frisch.
Harcourt
2005
581 pages
$35.00
Hardcover
PT2621
Stach begins his quest to discover "what it was like to be Franz Kafka" with this first volume of a planned three-volume biography. Focusing on the years during which Kafka encountered early forms of Zionism, began his tenuous relationship with Felice Bauer, and wrote his seminal works, Stach finds the beginnings of Kafka's asceticism and alienation. Stach is the German editor of Kafka's collected works.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kafka; the decisive years." Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA141643782&it=r&asid=a128623610abe9f78c26766c7508af0e. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A141643782
Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Decisive Years
Marco Roth
29.1 (Winter 2006): p225.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Decisive Years. Reiner Stach. New York: Harcourt, 2005. 581 pp. $35.00.
"One could credit Stach with a bold and 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."
Marco Roth. NYTBR, Jan. 1, 2006: 10.
Roth, Marco
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Roth, Marco. "Kafka, Franz: Kafka: The Decisive Years." Biography, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, p. 225. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146347008&it=r&asid=5859d903a7100c6012dec333f7293f0f. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146347008
The Disgraceful Lowlands of Writing
By Robert Minto (February 1, 2017) 3 Comments
Kafka: The Early Years
Kafka: The Decisive Years
Kafka: The Years of Insight
By Reiner Stach, Translated by Shelley Frisch
In 1917, one of Franz Kafka’s few readers sent him a letter. It was a rare taste of recognition. This reader, Dr. Siegfried Wolff, wanted something. Not an autograph, a signed book, or a manuscript page. He wanted answers. He had bought a copy of “The Metamorphosis” for his cousin, who passed it to Wolff’s mother, who passed it to another cousin. None of them could figure out what it meant. Dr. Wolff read the story for himself and came away equally confused. “Only you can help me,” he wrote to Kafka. “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.'”
The supplicating Dr. Wolff came at the head of a long line of readers who would be stymied by Kafka’s stories. Not having Kafka around to pester for answers, many of the perplexed wrote their own guides. Perhaps no modern author has initiated such a frenzy of interpretation with so slender and fragmentary a body of work. Three unfinished novels, one volume’s worth of shorter pieces, some aphorisms: even if we include his journals and letters, Kafka’s work would fill a very small shelf, yet it bears the weight of a whole scholarly industry. Despite this glut, there have been comparatively few full-dress biographies. (A notable exception is Ronald Hayman’s K: A Biography of Kafka.) For many years the owners of the best collection of sources on Kafka’s early life, the literary estate of Max Brod, refused access to researchers. Even for those interested in a biographical approach Kafka remained frustratingly inaccessible, and the best work on his life has been partial, like Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial about Kafka’s engagement to Felice Bauer.
These barriers were still in place when Reiner Stach decided to enter the field. He had to compose his three-volume biography of Kafka out of chronological order, hoping that Brod’s estate would eventually be opened to him. Volume two came first, treating Kafka’s middle years, then volume three, carrying the story to his death, and now, at last, volume one, about his youth. Given the state of the field, with Brod’s archives only recently opened, Stach’s completed trilogy has no competition as the definitive biography: nowhere else, at this point, can you learn so much about the life and times of Kafka. But even apart from any temporary preeminence, Reiner Stach’s biographical trilogy belongs in the company of the masterpieces of literary biography. Like Leon Edel’s Henry James, Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky, it is comprehensive but raised above mere competency through astonishing architectural beauty. Thanks to the superb work of Stach’s translator, Shelley Frisch, the trilogy also stands out in English at the sentence level, for the unbroken clarity, verbal ingenuity, and unflagging momentum of its prose.
Stach’s overarching goal is to answer Dr. Wolff’s question: what are we to make of Kafka’s texts? In the preface to book two (which, due to publication order, is really the preface to the whole work), Stach writes that upon reading Kafka,
Two questions come to the fore: “What does all this mean?” and “How does something like this come about?” Pursuing the first question, readers wind up in a jungle of textual interpretation; pursuing the second, they toil at a biographical crossword puzzle that cannot be completed.
Stach manages to avoid both forms of futility. His innovation is a new angle on the old question. He announces: “How it happened. That ought to be the starting point.” The question that should primarily engage us in a literary biography, he suggests, is one of production. He approaches Kafka’s texts not as ciphers he will decode, but as artifacts whose making he will describe. By focusing on the act of writing, he fashions into a coherent whole a long and detailed trilogy, written over the course of decades. It carries us through explorations of everything from the history of Prague to the sociology of letter-writing to the architecture of bathing pools. All of it subtends the goal of discovering what conditions could foster a writer who worked like Kafka.
Perhaps this succeeds because few writers have worked like Kafka. Stach describes it:
If we were to observe the ebb and flow of Kafka’s literary productivity from a great height, we would see a wave pattern: an initial phase of intensive, highly productive work that comes on suddenly and lasts several hours a day, followed by a gradual decline of his powers of imagination, lasting for weeks, and then finally, in spite of his desperate attempts to fight it, a standstill and feelings of despair for months on end.
Proof of the swift ebbing of creativity that Stach describes are the three unfinished novels (The Man Who Disappeared, The Trial, and The Castle) that rise like shipwrecks on Kafka’s shore. “It is […] a legend,” Stach writes, “that Kafka regarded the failure in general and the fragmentary character of his novels in particular as the appropriate expression of his aesthetic desire or even of himself.” No, he simply failed to carry his projects to their desired conclusion. What restrained him from working regularly? Why did his creativity seem to dry up prematurely every time? These are the mysteries Stach requires three volumes to explain.
Kafka was born in Prague and continued to live there for most of his life. His father, Hermann, was a first generation city-dweller. He never forgot that he had escaped the toil and uncertainty of a village. “For Hermann Kafka,” writes Stach, “mistrust, combativeness, and crude utilitarianism were lofty virtues that he sought to inculcate in his children to make them fit for survival in a dog-eat-dog society.” He was an impatient and quick-tempered man, and his effect on the sensitive, physically weak Franz was devastating. In an undelivered letter that Kafka wrote as an adult to his father, he recalled a specific incident that encapsulates the psychic wound. Once, when tiny Franz tried the bedtime avoidance technique of asking repeatedly for a drink of water, Hermann ran out of patience, dragged him onto a balcony, and locked him outside in the dark. This is the archetype of Kafka’s nightmare. He always felt disproportionately condemned by unreceptive judges; he worried that the surest human bond could suddenly disintegrate; and he felt alienated from normal social existence, locked forever on an existential balcony in a spiritual night.
This almost mythopoetic version of Kafka’s origin story — or at least the origin story of the particular neurotic sensibility subsequently named “Kafkaesque” — has often born too much explanatory weight, not least because it feels tailor-made for psychoanalysis. While Stach gives the father-son relationship its due, he refuses to stop there. Plenty of other things in Kafka’s circumstances were conducive to anxiety and alienation.
For example, Kafka was born to a Jewish family in Prague. The Jewish population of Prague was mixed up in a centuries’ old antagonism between the German and the Czech populations. Jews were distrusted, often hated, associated with the Habsburg regime that had suppressed Czech nationalism — so the story went — ever since the defeat of the Bohemian revolt in the 1620s. In Kafka’s lifetime, after the first World War destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the embers of Prague’s stale grudge were fanned by new racism and ancient religious bigotry, bringing the city to the verge of pogrom. Kafka did not live to see the conflagration; but all three of his sisters died in concentration camps. Even without an angry and overbearing father, Kafka’s life would not have been free of paranoia in Prague.
Fortunately, even beneath cruel patriarchs and among the oppressed, there is life. And Stach’s Kafka is more alive than he has ever been in a biography. We learn about his love for books and friendship and nature and travel and swimming. With the care of an archeologist, Stach picks up each available piece of Kafka’s history, habits, and personality, brushes off the dust, holds it to the light, and turns it carefully to examine every side.
Kafka’s swimming is a perfect example — a small thing, it might seem, a mere recreational tributary to the torrent of a life. But Stach begins by exploring its somatic and symbolic dimensions:
Swimming is an archaic activity that taps into deep, preponderantly unconscious realms of experience. It is an exceptionally intense and multi-layered, yet easily achievable physical and mental state of being, comparable only to sexuality.
From such lyrical abstractions, Stach circles in to mention virtually every major passage in Kafka’s texts that pertains to swimming (his story about a man who wins an Olympic medal for swimming despite not knowing how to swim, passages from his letters). He speculates on the psychoanalytic explanation for Kafka’s love of floating. He briefly summarizes Kafka’s prospects for swimming-places over the course of his life. Then he continues to weave appropriate references to Kafka’s aquatic disporting through the whole of his narrative. All of this sets up the moment when Stach will address one of the most famous sentences in Kafka’s writings, a line in his journal with which he commemorated August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia — went swimming in the afternoon.” This passage has been held up as an illustration of Kafka’s self-absorption and unworldliness. Stach touches it lightly, and merely notes why it has been over-quoted. But in the context of his tender inquiry, the reader of this biography understands at once how profound a response it was for Kafka to swim on the first day of the war. Stach lays the groundwork for such epiphanies everywhere. When you consider how long it took to write the volumes of this biography, and that they were written out of order, such an architectural achievement becomes truly remarkable.
Of course, what the reader of any biography of Kafka most keenly desires to see is an explanation for another activity he enjoyed: writing. Like most writers, Kafka seems to have acquired his vocation by reading. Yet even as Kafka’s inner life turned more and more in the direction of literature, his outer life turned away from it.
Kafka’s family pressured him to find work with good prospects. Reluctantly, he studied law and got a job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute. He despised it. Stach reveals that he was also exceptionally good at it, quickly rising to handle the most sensitive legal correspondence and enjoying the unstinting trust of his superiors; but in diaries and letters we find a near constant litany of complaint. Stach explains that,
Kafka knew precisely what he did not want: he did not even consider becoming an attorney or using his linguistic gifts to earn a living. Having his afternoons free was more important to him than the prospect of bourgeois prosperity […] and he never shared in the joys of business transactions.
If only he could get out of the office and find the time to write. As it was, he tried to carve out time by taking long afternoon naps and then staying up late into the night — sometimes all night — to work on his stories and write in his diary. This unhealthy schedule seemed necessary to him not just because of the day job, but because he lived in the same house as his parents and sisters, and he was unusually sensitive to noises. Almost no one in his family understood this lifestyle; his father complained about it at the table; only his youngest sister Ottla was on his side.
Hounded by interruptions at work and at home, given to depression and mental paralysis, it’s a wonder Kafka managed to write anything at all. He found it difficult even to begin, despite an enormous internal pressure to do so. Most of the time the best he could manage were exquisite, scenic diary entries. “[H]e was like a photographer,” writes Stach, “who spends the evening sorting through the optic yield of the day.” When he did assay a burst of real creation, almost always it marked the failure of a major attempt to break out of his grim rut.
Several of those attempts took the form of love. Kafka’s two engagements and a handful of love affairs were all (with one exception) precipitous, disastrous, and largely epistolary. Perhaps the closest thing to a complete novel in his work is the collected letters he wrote to Felice Bauer. He met her one evening at the home of his best friend, Max Brod, wooed her by letter (after first re-introducing himself, since she’d barely noticed him as he was falling for her), and, with many misgivings, initiated the formal engagement proceedings. Meeting her and opening their correspondence fueled his first major artistic breakthrough, the short story “The Judgment.” Losing her — in a most Kafkaesque manner — precipitated The Trial and “The Metamorphosis.”
Kafka came to suspect there was an inverse relationship between his prospects for romantic fulfillment and his reservoirs of creativity. He struggled with the idea that a commitment to literature entailed a commitment to almost metaphysical bachelorhood, bachelorhood not merely as alienation from the nuclear family but as alienation from the human race. Would he always be the gargoyle watching from the cornice?
Stach tells us that a joint vacation Kafka took with Max Brod first brought this problem home to him. They had decided to keep travel journals. The idea excited Kafka because note-taking seemed a better way of taking something genuinely personal home from the trip — his impressions — than buying souvenirs or taking photographs. “But Brod was skeptical and instantly put his finger on the drawback,” writes Stach:
The danger of taking such extensive notes is that one misses out on many impressions that one might have made for even more interesting notes. Isn’t writing while traveling like closing one’s eyes, Brod wondered, after which one has to keep refocusing one’s attention.
Kafka appears to have recognized that this problem is more universal than travel writing: it applies to life itself. Could he commit to literature in a serious way and still participate in life? Wouldn’t it be like closing his eyes? In fact, as he slept his afternoons away and retreated from the life of his family into the silent watches of the night, hadn’t he closed his eyes already? Such thoughts could lead to fearful reflections, like this passage in a letter to Brod:
[W]hat frail or even nonexistent ground I live on, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges according to its will and, heedless of my stammering destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but isn’t it more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? […] 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 sort of intensity about anything, even literature, can make Kafka seem genuinely alien. But one of the major triumphs of Stach’s biography is to show that much of Kafka’s intensity was, in fact, a result of conscious choices he made about his lifestyle and his aesthetic goals. It would be a disservice to the edifice of life and literature that Kafka constructed to treat him as a cringing freak, helpless before his own identification with writing.
Early in his life, Kafka made the choice to make choices. The details of everyday life and his most basic functions would be consciously determined and aesthetically arranged. He longed for purity: for a life of total aesthetic coherence, in which everything from washing his face in the morning to the posture in which he lay in bed would express the truth of his nature. “Truth” in this sense — as total aesthetic consistency — was more important to him than truth in the ordinary sense of correspondence to reality. Stach offers this summation of what Kafka meant by “truth”:
Kafka had been convinced for quite some time that truth could not be the extract of philosophical or religious judgments but rather had a fundamentally moral and social dimension. Truth cannot be taught; it has to be lived. […] Kafka [focused] his attention not on the avowal of an issue or its practical application but rather on a stance of absolute authenticity, which lent substance and weight to avowals of any sort. Authenticity was a seamless accord, free of outside interference and catchphrases, an accord of thinking, feeling, and acting: harmony with oneself, and truthfulness. Kafka found examples of this truthfulness in the oddest places, irrespective of his own convictions
In other words, Kafka didn’t admire any particular ideology, but rather wholeheartedness itself. This attitude could be a great tribulation to his friends, who were always disturbed to see him lend an ear to an authentic-seeming — and therefore admirable, by Kafka’s lights — enemy. Max Brod unwisely picked a fight with the sharp-tongued Viennese intellectual Karl Kraus, and found Kafka’s ongoing appreciation for Kraus’s truculent journalism a bit disloyal. Where was his Prague spirit, or, more to the point, his solidarity with his best friend? But Kafka admired people in a dispassionate way; he found authenticity (even if it entailed hostility to himself and his friends) irresistibly seductive. Even so, no one can live by substituting an empty formal appreciation of authenticity for actual commitments of their own. What did Kafka take to be true?
For one thing, Stach reveals that Kafka was a surprisingly enthusiastic proponent of Lebensreform, a back-to-nature movement. Kafka followed a daily regimen of naked calisthenics in front of an open window, made sure to chew each bite of food one hundred times as per the instructions of Horace Fletcher, and even spent a vacation at a nudist sanatorium. Stach argues that he was practicing a kind of asceticism:
Asceticism is a process of self-regulation and self-formation based on the utopian notion of attaining complete control over one’s body, self, and life. All Kafka’s interests, habits, and penchants were modified accordingly. A diet of nuts and fruits, a flawless method of chewing, devotion to calisthenics, and long walks.
So was Lebensreform Kafka’s “truth”? He remained fascinated by it, but as he grew older, and especially after the tuberculosis set in, some of his evangelical and self-improving fervor for it seemed to die down. Was Judaism his truth? Inspired by the rise of Zionism — not least in the person of Max Brod — Kafka worked to become fluent in Hebrew and made desultory plans to emigrate to Palestine; but he didn’t go. What about love? In a desperate moment he offered to his fianceé Felice Bauer to give up writing and make her his truth; but ultimately he traded their engagement for the brief incandescence of one of his bursts of writing.
Writing: that was it; always that. Writing was Kafka’s truth. And because of his strange ideas about truth, he had some strange ideas about writing. He thought that writing expressed authenticity — or, as Stach tells us Kafka liked to put it, “indubitability” — as if the act itself were a gesture rather than a discontinuous and patched together process whose meaning could be found in its product. “Kafka knew even as a child,” writes Stach, “that writing was not only an activity, but also a gesture.” In other words, writing was not just an act of communication, but the act itself communicated.
As a schoolboy Kafka once wanted to impress his relatives with his literary propensities. So he sat ostentatiously scribbling in the midst of a family gathering. At last his uncle picked up the notebook and glanced over the words. “The usual stuff,” he said, and tossed it back down, casually crushing the boy’s soul. This was only the first of many indications Kafka received from his family that they didn’t recognize or understand the significance of his writing. He had hoped for the very thing that happened, that his uncle would be intrigued by the focused activity of his nephew; but the casually dismissive response showed that the significance of what he was doing had been totally lost. We can relate: we’ve all been deflated by someone who failed to appreciate the dignity of what we were trying to do, by a failure to understand our gestures. Kafka didn’t give up the idea that writing was important primarily as a gesture, he just internalized it. The truth of writing — the indubitability of the gesture — would now be inscribed in the text itself.
The idea of writing as a gesture blossomed, according to Stach, when Kafka came in contact with the tradition of Japanese art. He didn’t encounter it directly. A traveler returned from the East displayed woodcuts in Prague that were based on paintings by Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai. These paintings,
were the result of hard work, yet they had a beguiling simplicity in which the technical aspect of art seemed to have been suspended: a single motion was evidently all it took to capture the essence of a person or a landscape, and the odd “flatness” of their pictures reflected a lofty refinement of extreme reduction.
Here was an aesthetic — art as the simple and complete gesture — perfectly adapted to Kafka’s longing for purity. Like everything else in Stach’s rich biography, this insight feeds directly back into his overarching inquiry into the act of Kafka’s writing. Kafka was trying to import the gestural aesthetic of Japanese art into the medium of literature. Each intense abortion of a novel, for example, seemed to falter in the same way a gesture would falter if it took too long, if it were interrupted by other movements. “I am in the disgraceful lowlands of writing,” Kafka once wrote in his diary, as the gestural energy of one of his attempts at a novel was beginning to peter out. “Only in this way can writing be done, only in a context like this, with a complete opening of body and soul.”
As a writer it’s easy to shake your head at a pronouncement like that, cast a pointed glance at Kafka’s fragments, and turn back to log your day’s five hundred words. But for those once exposed to Kafka’s writing at its finest, it can be hard to go back to the trivialities of loosely jointed narratives and creaky prose. If Reiner Stach’s biography does not exactly solve the mystery of an inscrutable oeuvre, it certainly clarifies the nature of the mystery. Stach may have given us the perfect, natural metaphor for Kafka’s writing: it is a gesture that does not communicate. The authenticity of the words hold our attention like the meaningful movements of a human body, but we don’t know these movements, and we watch in vain to understand.
We don’t know if Kafka ever wrote back to the confused Dr. Wolff about “The Metamorphosis.” If he did the letter has been lost. But I like to imagine Kafka settling into the silence of the Prague night, reading the letter and heaving a sigh. And then I imagine him picking up a pen and writing a response — in one complete and perfect gesture — that will cast his supplicant into even greater perplexities.
____
Robert Minto is a contributing editor of Open Letters Monthly. He blogs and tweets.
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What kind of funny is he?
Rivka Galchen
BuyKafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton, 682 pp, £24.95, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 691 14751 2
BuyKafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach, translation by Shelley Frisch
Princeton, 552 pp, £16.25, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 691 14741 3
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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.’
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.
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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.
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Kafkaesque
‘Kafka: The Years of Insight,’ by Reiner Stach
By JOY WILLIAMSJULY 5, 2013
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Franz Kafka Credit Kristian Hammerstad
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.”
He loved fresh air and was deeply tanned. Dora Diamant, the woman who cared for him in the last years of his life, thought when she first saw him that he was a “half-breed American Indian.” He suffered from nervousness, headaches and insomnia and once received a diagnosis of “cardiac neurosis.” His birthday was July 3, his death day June 3. He had lived for almost 41 years and been tubercular for six of them. Initially he called his TB a mental illness, a punishment. Also a “symbol” and something justifiably “bestowed.” He had holidayed at many spas, health resorts and sanitariums in his life, but when he really became sick he was sent away from one of the best, the Wienerwald near Vienna, because it was finally confirmed that his tuberculosis had spread to his larynx, and they lacked the facilities to treat him there. He died in a small private sanitarium, little more than a modest inn where therapy consisted mostly of the “silence cure.” Speaking would only further harm the larynx, so Kafka wrote messages on slips of paper, so-called conversation slips. One of the last ones read: “Do you have a moment? Then please spray the peonies.”
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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.
This arrangement can cause confusion. The debacle — the catastrophe — at the Hotel Askanischer Hof in Berlin, where the engagement to Felice ended, is mentioned several times in this volume but never sufficiently explained. (That belongs to “The Decisive Years.”) The same is true about the family asbestos plant, which caused Kafka such worry. Brod’s physical deformity is mentioned glancingly in “The Decisive Years” and not at all in “The Years of Insight.” Such a curious story and one Kafka must have been fascinated by, but perhaps Stach is saving it for the final book, which will become the first. (It concerns a miracle healer in the Black Forest, Ernst Pawel wrote in his Kafka biography, “a shoemaker by trade,” who built the child Brod “a monstrous harness into which he was strapped day and night” in an attempt to cure a congenital spinal curvature.) And what on earth are the “mouse letters”?
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Kafka to his publisher: "The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance." Credit Kristian Hammerstad
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:
“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).”
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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.
KAFKA
The Years of Insight
By Reiner Stach
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Illustrated. 682 pp. Princeton University Press. $35.
Is that Kafka? by Reiner Stach
Review by Evan James — Published on March 14, 2016
Published in Issue 43
Is that Kafka? by Reiner Stach (tr. Kurt Beals). New Directions. $27.95, 352 pp.
The first volume of Reiner Stach’s monumental, three-volume biography of Kafka was published in Germany about fourteen years ago. The second came six years later, in 2008. Is that Kafka?, which isn’t one of the three volumes,appeared in 2012, the same year that a decades-long legal battle finally made a trove of papers belonging to Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, available to the public. Presumably this fortuitous ruling allowed Stach to write, at last, the final volume of his big, widely praised biography—funnily enough, the volume that addresses the first part of Kafka’s life. That book, Kafka—The Early Years, was published in 2014. (An English translation is forthcoming.)Even if Is that Kafka? was a kind of stopgap that kept Stach contemplating Franz while he awaited the release of key documents, it’s also an unconventional work of biography-by-collage in its own right. Its subtitle, 99 Finds, points to the raw material of the project: surprising discoveries made in the course of an epic research process.
Underlying all of this biographical work is a desire to complicate received ideas about the author. In his introduction, Stach describes the enduring image of Kafka in characteristically clear-eyed terms: even though “decades of international, interdisciplinary research” have given scholars a more nuanced picture of Kafka and his times, he has persisted in the popular imagination as ” “the quintessential archetype of the writer as a sort of alien: unworldly, neurotic, introverted, sick—an uncanny man bringing forth uncanny things.” Stach’s aim is to “destabilize” these images by introducing “counter-images” in which he emphasizes the unexpected and the overlooked to help “quietly divorce us from clichés.” Implied here is the conviction that clichés about an author’s life obstruct appreciation of their work. Why else bother to challenge them?
It is often amusing to watch Stach’s destabilization in action. Chapter heading likes “Kafka’s Exercise Routine” or “Kafka Writes a Poem and Loves It” are the norm here; in “Kafka Cheats on his Exams,” which is drawn from the unpublished memoirs of a school classmate, we’re given an appealing sketch of students plotting to steal an instructor’s notebook in order to pass their Greek oral exams—an ultimately successful bit of cheating for which young Kafka served as copyist.
Further oddities and amusements compound: Kafka beginning the daily practice of a fitness routine and breathing exercises created by the Danish athlete (and author of the best-selling My System)Jorgen Peter Muller; Kafka, who seems to have hated lying, failing to respond to pleas from Milena Jesenská, a journalist who had a “short but intense relationship ” with him (and who also translated his work into Czech), to invent a fake uncle’s death in order to go see her in Vienna; a couple of letters sent from a sanatorium attesting to his love of a song written in 1933 called “Now Farewell, You Little Alley”:
Now farewell, you little alley
now adieu, you quiet eaves!
Father, Mother watched me sadly
and my dearest watched me leave.
In the distance now I tarry,
for my home I sadly long!
My companions’ song so cheery,
but it is a lying song.
There are other little cities,
other ladies here to see;
Ah, but only other ladies,
not the only one for me.
Other cities, other ladies,
I stand silent, looking round!
Other ladies, other cities,
I wish I were homeward bound.
Each turn Stach makes adds nuance to his skillfully collaged portrait of Kafka. We see Franz writing postcards and diary entries about bordellos (chapter title: “Going Whoring”) and reading his then-unpublished story “In the Penal Colony” to an audience at the Goltz Bookstore and Gallery in Munich. Particularly entertaining and touching are the chapters in which he and Max Brod get up to some mischief together. “How Kafka and Brod Almost Became Millionaires,” for example, details a scheme the two had for a new type of travel guide. Stach quotes Brod:
It would be called Billig (On the Cheap) . . . Franz was tireless and got a childlike pleasure out of elaborating all the principles down to the finest detail for this new type of guide, which was supposed to make us millionaires, and above all wrest us away from our awful office work.
Brod also drafted a memorandum for this project. It reads:
Our Plan to Make Millions: On the Cheap
On the Cheap through Italy, On the Cheap through Switzerland, On the Cheap in Paris—On the Cheap in the Bohemian Spas and in Prague
Can be translated into every language.
Motto: Just Dare.
Stach’s destablization works its magic here. His arrangement of finds presents a writer who could be, among other things, playful, gullible, funny, entrepreneurial, and kind. And by briskly leading the reader through a life of Kafka so varied in texture, he awakens a longing to turn from the biography to the stories and novels while this openness to nuance lasts. Clichés, as promised, quietly fall away; in their place, Stach seems to suggest, fresh engagement waits.
Stach also artfully manages, in his collaging, to introduce a certain amount of historical and social context. In “Is that Kafka? (I),” a chapter in which he attempts to identify Kafka and Brod by the back of their heads in a photograph at the Montichiari airfield near Brescia, we learn that the author of “The Metamorphosis” attended an air show there in 1909, seeing airplanes for the first time. (Many had flocked to see the French pilot Louis Bleriot, who’d become the first person to fly across the English Channel.) Elsewhere, we learn of doctor Hugo Hecht, a former schoolmate of Kafka’s who, in the early 1960s, began researching the fate of his graduating class. “It is a gruesome record,” recalls Hecht, “more than a third of the class died a violent death.” Due in large part, Stach notes, to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, as well as other events related to the war.
Perhaps the most defamiliarizing chapter is “Kafka as Ghostwriter.” Here we glimpse Kafka writing a series of letters in the voice of a doll in order to soothe a child he meets in passing. This description comes from the memoirs of Dora Diamant, who Kafka lived with in Berlin for half a year:
When we were in Berlin, Kafka often went to Steglitzer Park. Sometimes I went with him. One day we met a little girl who was crying and seemed to be completely distraught. We spoke to the girl. Franz asked her what was wrong, and we learned that she had lost her doll. He immediately came up with a plausible story to explain the disappearance: “Your doll is just on a trip right now, I know because she sent me a letter.”
. . .
She promised to write every day—and Kafka actually then wrote a letter every day, reporting each time on new adventures, which unfolded very quickly, keeping pace with the special rhythm of the doll’s life. After a few days, the girl had forgotten about the real toy that she’d lost, and she was only thinking about the fiction that she’d been offered as a replacement. Franz wrote every sentence of this story in such detail, and with such humorous precision, that it made the doll’s situation completely understandable: the doll had grown up, gone to school, met other people. She always reassured the child of her love, but made reference to the complications of her life, her other obligations and interests that prevented her from returning to their shared life right now. She asked the little girl to think about this, and in doing so she prepared her for the inevitable, for doing without her.
Though colored by Diamant’s adoration, there is evidence of tenderness here, of care for innocents taken to a moving and comic extreme. The absurd lengths to which the young writer goes are, indeed, “Kafkaesque” in a faintly familiar way. All the more disarming, then, to glimpse that same capacious imagination spurred on by sweetness and concern at the same time: Kafka applying his literary talents to a spontaneous fiction intended solely to soothe a child.
If Is that Kafka? were made up only of this kind of anecdote, it would have failed in its stated mission. It would have left us with a new set of clichéd images—a kinder, gentler, more “accessible” Kafka, and still a saint. Fortunately, even Stach’s counter-images have their counter-images; for every “Kafka as Ghostwriter,” there is a “Kafka Spits from the Balcony.” The sum effect is to bring the reader closer to a vivifying paradox: that the more one learns about the life of Kafka, the less stiffly certain one feels about what he, or any one of us, is.
This is a worthy achievement, for it encourages the reader to approach Kafka’s literary output with renewed curiosity, a renewed appreciation for its potent mysteries and trenchant humor. For Kafka’s work is wonderfully destabilizing in its own right. Stach knows this; one can almost see Is that Kafka? as an amused, patient rejoinder to the all-too familiar plea captured in a letter from one Dr. Siegfried Wolff, which he reproduces in “Kafka Gets Mail from a Reader.” Its final paragraph:
Only you can help me. You must; because you’re the one who got me into this mess. So please tell me what my cousin is supposed to think when she reads The Metamorphosis.
Evan James has written for Oxford American, The New York Observer, The New York Times, Catapult, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily.
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REVIEW
Franz Kafka biography by Reiner Stach explores young writer’s fears
Franz Kafka was scarred by his father’s cruelty. Picture: Alamy
Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian
12:00AM April 8, 2017
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The young man transformed into a monstrous cockroach while asleep in his bedroom at night; the hunger artist performing dutifully in his cage; the remote penal colony, with its death machine that inscribes a fatal sentence on a condemned man’s skin; and the mysterious Trial, above all, the opaque, relentless trial of the bank officer Jozef K.
Where do they come from, these dark dreams in narrative? What explains them — what distinctive features in the background of their creator, Franz Kafka, what tensions within his society or family, what aspects of his schooling, his early friendships and first experiences?
All these different elements are presented in detail and probed with subtle, forensic care in Kafka: The Early Years, the first volume of Reiner Stach’s three-part biography, which, by a suitable piece of Kafkarna, appears, due to archival access problems, only after the prior publication of its two sequels. Now the portrait is complete. We can trace, through Stach’s measured narrative, the full course of Kafka’s brief life, stretching from his birth in the dying days of the Hapsburg empire in 1883 to his death from tuberculosis in 1924, just as the shadows of Nazism were beginning to take form. The result is not merely a biography of painstaking thoroughness but a piece of psychological investigation and literary detective work without clear parallel. It gives its readers a new Kafka. It explains much that has long seemed obscure; yet, by paradox, the more its author-hero is grounded in his context, and the more we grasp of the initial sources of his imagination, the more unfathomable his gifts become. The haze clears; he stands alone.
Franz Kafka monument in the Jewish quarter of Prague. Picture: Alamy
Franz Kafka monument in the Jewish quarter of Prague. Picture: Alamy
No stereotypes or easy assumptions about his milieu or cultural influences help much in situating Kafka. Indeed, we would scarcely read him with such care and attention if he were simply a product of his multiplicit times — a German-speaking Jew coming of age in the new capital of Czechoslovakia, leaving the high bourgeois era for the travails of the 20th century and the looming Great War. Stach is emphatic on this point. Kafka was radically different from his contemporaries: different in the degree of his linguistic skill, in his flair for literary form, above all in his scorn for standard cultural fashions.
His writing was magical in a sense that was utterly unlike the alleged magic of Prague, because every one of his lines passed through the filter of a daunting, often ice-cold intellectual alertness and an unyielding reflexivity saturated with imagery. Kafka was not merely captive to the city of his birth like thousands of others; he was bound and compelled to get to the bottom of the mystery of this attachment.
This unending quest for clarity and self-awareness gives his stories, letters and diaries a tone one rarely finds in the works of the time. His tales are wholly free of schmaltz and sentiment; there is nothing in them of the melancholy murk of Central European tradition. They seem brightly lit and sharply drawn. The uncanny lurks close at hand, but it is real; there is nothing ghostly or indistinct about its presence. The accepted contours of the world are what must be questioned and redefined.
Given this authorial flavour, and Kafka’s desire to know himself through words and use writing as his private guide rail for making sense of things, it is natural that Stach looks to psychology and gives great attention to the most Freudian-seeming of Kafka’s texts, the book-length undelivered letter in which the details of his relationship with his overbearing father are anatomised. Hermann Kafka was a successful merchant, driven, straightforward, well-built. His eldest child and only son was tall, thin and almost dandyish in his refined fragility. They were virtual opposites and in constant opposition. But the handwritten, hundred-page “Letter to His Father” was not a conventional analysis of troubles within a family so much as a description of “a real relationship’s fantasized dimensions”, first drafted in the hope that confession and filial candour might lead to “mutual enlightenment” and then finished off in despair. There was nothing to hope for: Kafka had nothing in common with his father.
“The way I am,” he wrote, “I am (apart, of course, from my fundamental disposition and the influence of life itself) as the outcome of your upbringing and of my compliance.
“That this outcome is nevertheless distressing to you, indeed that you unconsciously refuse to acknowledge it as the outcome of your methods of upbringing, is due to the fact that your hand and the material I offered were so alien to each other.”
Kafka knew himself: he was reflective, he was introspective, he saw the way that episodes of confrontation sank deeply into him. The crucial night when his father refused his “whimperings” for water and shut him out on the apartment veranda had scarred him.
“Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting vision that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason and drag me out of bed into the night — and that I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.”
The impact of this scene resonated through Kafka’s life, but he understood it had not caused the anguish and the anxiety that ruled him so much as brought those feelings to the surface of his mind and “exposed an unconsciously existing distress that ran much deeper”. Here, then, in the after-echoes of a childhood episode, is the key theme that sounds constantly in Kafka’s writings: a sense of breakage that has no name, no cause, no ending. It is this void in the heart of his being, Stach argues, that spurs him on to write — and thus makes him into what he is, and drives him to transform himself. The procedure he adopted can be simply expressed: Kafka anticipated exclusion. His traumatic expulsion by his father was not so much the cause of his sufferings as an expression of them, and therefore an event to be faced. The “letter”, which is composed with all the gravity and style of a piece of literature, is much more than a recitation of his ordeal. In its pages, Kafka takes charge: “The once-abandoned child, caught up in passive sorrow, regains interpretive authority over his own life.”
For Stach, it is precisely Kafka’s need to tell the story of his life and being that drives him to provide an accurate, unsparing portrait of himself. Literature, then, could be seen not as the escape path he took to flee from life but the only way back he found into the surrounding world.
That world, in all its vivid, fast-shifting contours, is richly painted in this volume, just as in the two books that cover Kafka’s later years. Fine-grained chapters delve into the dress conventions of the Bohemian capital, the elaborate sociology of the coffee houses where aspiring writers and artists gathered, the complex, changing relationship between the native language of the country, Czech, and German, the language of the social and economic elite.
For the young Kafka, German was the language of authority, the language of law, and force. It was his familial tongue, his medium of expression, yet Czech was the language spoken to him by those who cared for him in childhood, and time and again at critical moments in his life words of telling, tender affection are spoken to him in Czech, by friends and strangers, by lovers and servants.
“I have never lived among the German people,” he wrote once to Milena Jesenska, the great flame of his adult years, who was herself a native Czech speaker: “German is my mother tongue and is therefore natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate.”
The divide between the two cultures of Prague was thus mirrored in Kafka’s mind. It was on his lips and in the words he spoke, it was a split between worlds that expressed itself around him every day. The city itself was changing, though. Not only were Czech political forces assuming control of the nation’s destiny, the heart of old Prague was being refashioned in those years. The medieval Jewish ghetto, close to where the Kafka family lived, was levelled and replaced with smart avenues lined with apartment buildings. The tide of modern technology was celebrated at a Jubilee exhibition that served as a rallying point for Czech industry and Czech national pride.
Darker accents were also being heard. A gathering by German students late in 1897 provoked a counter-surge of Czech nationalist riots targeting German shops, clubs and businesses in the heart of the capital. The Jews of Prague became a target. There was looting and large-scale damage to property, and even if this “December Storm” of violence subsided quickly and had nothing of the flavour of an anti-Semitic pogrom, it was Kafka’s first experience of collective violence against Jews, and it came when he was just 14. The school he attended was ransacked by the rampaging mobs and stayed shut for five days; his parents were in terror lest their shopfront and home be attacked.
The Prague riots and upheaval have made little mark in the historical record, and are now quite overshadowed by the bleak annals of the mid-20th century, but Stach gives the episode a degree of prominence. For Kafka, in its wake, there was now something unstable and menacing in the settled order of his social world. He was also increasingly prey to insecurities and anxieties about his performance at school. For all his brilliance as a student, he feared examinations, and, as he confesses in his letter to his father, he even cheated on one occasion to be certain of a pass.
This particular incident is fleshed out by Stach in his charming little book of offcuts from the main biography, Is That Kafka? — a compendium of 99 “finds” that serve to complicate the standard image of the author as a gloomy isolate. Kafka and his fellow conspirators were daunted by the difficulty of their looming Greek exam. They needed to see their teacher’s notebook with the list of questions. They hit on an effective ploy: the oldest, most worldly of their number seduced the teacher’s housekeeper, procured the crucial notebook and copied out the vital questions. The upshot: good grades — and, for Kafka, a lingering, guilty anguish that emerges in his writings as a constant fear of tests, examinations, assessment and judgment.
What kind of young man was he, on the edge of adulthood, both shy and flirtatious, retiring and flamboyant, convinced that life’s fixed prison trapped him and at the same time sure that he could use the powers of his ideas and thoughts to fight free? His close friend in those early years, Hugo Bergmann, saw in Kafka an unbending power of the will: “Since your childhood, you have been unconsciously searching for a mission in life. You could swing up to the sun and stretch your dreams all the way to the sky. What could cripple your strength? And you were always on your own and that’s how you got the strength to be alone.”
Stach sees both an inner resolve in his subject and a capacity for soaking up whatever scraps and stray details life brought his way. Kafka was agile-minded, of course, but he was also empirical; he gathered vast mounds of information and took it into himself, and that gift lent his later works “the illusory impression of meteoric originality, utterly without grounding in experience”.
This assessment helps explain the consistent method of the biography. Each of the three volumes pays close attention to events in the public sphere in Prague, dwells on their impact on Kafka and traces their echoes and resurfacings in the letters, diaries and stories of his later years. The looming bulk of Prague’s Hradcany reappears in the pages of The Castle, just as Kafka’s holiday trip to Riva provides the backdrop for his short story of the wandering Hunter Gracchus. Almost every geographic feature of the novels can be paralleled in the humdrum experience of the Prague day-to-day. Kafka himself liked to interweave place and reflection, as if seeking to staple the free flow of his ideas to specific circumstances. He left clues in his dairies for those who read him in later times.
“One day, many years ago,” he wrote in 1920, “I sat on the slope of the Laurenziberg, feeling decidedly sad. I was considering the wishes I had for my life. The most important or the most appealing wish was to attain a view of life (and — this was inescapably bound up with it — to convince others of it in writing) in which life retained its natural full complement of rising and falling, but at the same time would be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, as a dream, as a hovering …” — then he continues, qualifying, modifying, shifting eventually into the third person: “But he could not wish in this fashion, for his wish was not a wish, but only a vindication, a bourgeois rendition of this nothingness, a hint of playfulness he wanted to lend to the nothingness, into which he had scarcely taken his first few conscious steps at that time, but already felt it was his element. It was a sort of farewell he was then taking from the illusory world of youth …”
This famous passage, so typical of Kafka in its wanderings and revisions and repeated questionings that fall back upon themselves, so unforgiving in its self-scrutiny, stands for Stach at the centre of the quest for his subject. He glosses it in detail.
At one of the most beautiful spots in Prague, with the Vltava River and the panorama of the city at his feet, Kafka came upon the central wish of his life and recognised its consequences.
The view of life he was developing needed to be expressed in written words, and even then it fell short as a way of seeing the world:
It was not religion or philosophical theory, but literary works that made him realize that the full life he was yearning for and the nothingness over which every living being was hovering (himself in particular) were not mutually exclusive notions. The contrary: fleeting phenomena required heightened concentration, and the prospect of black nothingness intensifies any details that are seen.
Austere doctrine! Such were the ideas taking form in Kafka’s head as his student years began, and he entered on a course of legal studies, remaining all the while loyal to his love of writing, which he could indulge at the Reading and Lecture Hall of German Students in the heart of town. It was here, in the autumn of 1902, that he met the “remarkably eloquent and extremely striking” self-appointed prodigy of Prague letters, a man who would play a vital part in his future life and afterlife — Max Brod, then just 18 and already on the path of celebrity and fame.
For novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick, Brod is to be viewed as Kafka’s indispensable “confidant and champion, first reader and first listener”. For essayist Walter Benjamin, by contrast, Kafka’s friendship with the utterly mediocre Brod was one of the biggest mysteries in his unfathomable life. One thing is beyond doubt: without Brod, who revered Kafka and adored his work, and became, eventually, his literary executor and refused direct instructions to destroy his unpublished manuscripts, we simply would not know Kafka’s name today. Brod wrote the first biography of his friend and prepared Kafka’s posthumous works for publication, tidying, prettifying, interpreting them with a faintly religious slant. Their friendship, for all its waxing and waning, was indisputably the key bond of Kafka’s life; it runs through Stach’s three volumes like a red thread.
The paradox is worth dwelling on an instant. Brod, in the scheme of things, was a creature wholly of his own time and no other: a self-promoter, a networker, a fashion-courting boulevardier. Yet on first meeting Kafka he was struck. He had, somehow, the capacity to see Kafka in a true light. Brod swiftly swung into action, talking up his protege. He began urging editors to print Kafka’s early works. The pair exchanged ideas and shared experiences and confidences; they travelled together through Switzerland, Italy and France.
In due course, Brod introduced Kafka to Felice Bauer, the long-suffering fiancee who became recipient and preserver of Kafka’s most profound correspondence. Stach gives a subtle account of this strange literary friendship and its utility for Kafka, who needed a close, companionable foil yet was inclined to limit and control even his closest social contacts with deliberate care. He was already set on his path — the road of self-transcendence through writing.
Here he is, towards the end of a well-known letter to the polymathic Oskar Pollak, setting out his credo: writing was a way to open up man’s knowledge of the world. “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, why are we reading it? So it makes us happy? My God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if need be. What we do need are the books that affect us like a calamity that causes us great pain, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
What is this doctrine? A plea for writing as chemical solvent; for writing as magic balm; as therapeutic cure of the mind’s disquiets? Or something more, something wordless, elusive, beyond the reach of anything but metaphor. Kafka was already formulating this picture in his 20th year. When he died of consumption, aged only 40, he had spent his best efforts in fulfilment of his quest. He had his literary models and heroes, of course — Friedrich Hebbel, Thomas Mann, above all Gustave Flaubert, the cool, affectless Flaubert of the Education Sentimentale, a book he persuaded Brod to read with him in the original French. It was a novel, he confided in a subsequent, somewhat telling letter to Felice, that “for many years has been as dear to me as are only two or three people; whenever and wherever I’ve opened it, it has startled and absorbed me completely, and I’ve always felt like the spiritual son of this author, albeit a weak and awkward one”.
The man “made of literature” is taking form. As the first volume of Stach’s masterpiece of immersive biography draws to a close, its interplay between Kafka’s internal dramas and the unfolding political events of Central Europe well-established, Kafka’s private diaristic writings come to dominate the narrative.
From this point in his life on, the confidential record of his passing ideas and intimations provide a matchless portrait of his mind and heart. He included everything in his notes and sketchings. These are the fragments that stand behind much in the life-narrative Stach has shaped, and they convey to an uncanny degree the way Kafka felt and understood the experiences of his life. They contain the elements that went into his creative furnace:
Everything that was on his mind, with varying degrees of fictionality: microscopic sensory impressions, observations about his family, the street, the music hall and cinema, spontaneous pictorial notions, memories, dreams and daydreams, perceptions about his own body and those of others, physical and gestural anomalies, also soliloquies, drafts of letters, memorable literary passages and excerpts, and lead-ins to expansive reflections and narrative texts.
Stach portrays the diaries and notebooks as a “vestibule” of literature, its doors open to the reality Kafka was experiencing, its inner reaches leading away from life towards the transformations of art. The diaries are thus a kind of writing school with a single pupil, a school where Kafka could seek to transform his sense of his own incoherence into a mosaic, fragments brought into a whole.
The book draws to a close that is just a beginning: Kafka, fresh from a trip with Brod to Paris, is resting up at the Erlenbach naturopathic sanatorium on the shores of Lake Zurich, a stay that presages the long sojourns he would spend at health clinics across Central Europe during his slow descent to death. An elderly lady with a deck of solitaire cards happens to be in the near-deserted reading room with Kafka and sees him making his entries in his diary, recording impressions, memories, the passing details of the scene around him. “What are you writing there, anyway?” she asks him. And so we end, in fitting fashion, with the answers to that question still ahead, and Kafka’s journey through words towards self-mastery just beginning to take flight.
Nicolas Rothwell is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Quicksilver.
Kafka, The Early Years
By Reiner Stach
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton University Press, 564pp, $79.99 (HB)
Is that Kafka? — 99 Finds
By Reiner Stach
Translated by Kurt Beals New Directions Press, 312pp, $24.95
METAMORPHOSIS
A poem by Claire Potter
I wake inside a spider at the pivot of a web. It feels like a graduation from my
previous state until the breeze starts up and my webbed skirt starts to give. I cling to
the silk threads, tilting backwards and forwards as though pinned to a warbling
rocking chair. It is in this fashion that I notice other pendulate spiders bemoaning
the breeze, many are spread-eagled across the hedgerow or pulled in tangents
between the maple and the ivied wall. Things quieten, the breeze softens. Stasis
proffers a garden full of spiders doing patchwork.
I peer out from my lacy steeple. My eyes dissect ‘IL ov eN ew Yo rk 20 07’ on a
discarded mug — cross-eyed, the sun rotates in a wheel of sixteen. I’m whispering a
name — Rumpelstilzchen? But of course I wonder about nothing other than the wind
or the rain, or perhaps the fly or the bee around whom I will wrap my golden thread
turning the benumbed form into a warm spindle — into a feast made innocent
again.
Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach review – a triumph of literary scholarship
The second volume of a masterly biography covers the end of Kafka’s relationship with Felice Bauer and the writing of The Castle
'I am memory come alive' … Franz Kafka.
'I am memory come alive' … Franz Kafka. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images
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PD Smith
Friday 31 July 2015 17.30 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 19.40 BST
This is the second volume of Reiner Stach’s masterly trilogy on Kafka, expertly translated from German by Shelley Frisch. The first covered the years 1910 to 1915 and this one focuses on Kafka’s later life: the end of his relationship with Felice Bauer; the haven he found in Old Prague’s Alchemistengasse, where he wrote such remarkable stories as “A Country Doctor”; the diagnosis in August 1917 of the tuberculosis from which he would die seven years later; the writing of Letter to His Father in 1919, “a core text of literary modernity”; his relationships with Milena and Dora; and in 1922, Kafka’s third attempt to write a novel, The Castle, in which he once again sought “the strange, mysterious, possibly dangerous, possibly redemptive comfort of writing”. In his diary, Kafka noted: “I am memory come alive.” Stach’s great achievement is to place the literary work into a biographical context that emphasises the complex interplay of memory, experience and symbolism in the writing. As he puts it, Kafka was constantly “zigzagging between word and world”. A triumph of biography and literary scholarship.
• To order Kafka: The Years of Insight for £13.56 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.