Kafka

by Stach, Reiner

• ISBN13: 9780151007523
• ISBN10: 0151007527
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-30
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

This is the first of a three-volume, definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Eighty years after his death in 1924, Kafka remains one of the most intriguing figures in the history of world literature. Now, after more than a decade of research, working with over four thousand pages of journal entries, letters, and literary fragments, Reiner Stach re-creates the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915. These are the years of Kafka's fascination with early forms of Zionism despite his longing to be assimilated into the minority German culture in Prague; of his off-again, on-again engagement to Felice Bauer; of the outbreak of World War I; and above all of the composition of his seminal works-The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Judgment, and The Trial. Kafka:The Decisive Years-at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and an original contribution to the art of literary biography.

Author Biography

REINER STACH is a widely respected writer, editor, and scholar. After working extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works, he devoted more than a decade to researching and writing this biography. He lives in Hamburg.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(15)
Prologue: The Black Star	16	(5)
At Home with the Kafkas	21	(21)
Bachelors, Young and Old	42	(12)
Actors, Zionists, Wild People	54	(17)
Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar	71	(15)
Last Stop Jungborn	86	(8)
A Young Lady from Berlin	94	(14)
The Ecstasy of Beginning: ``The Judgment'' and ``The Stoker''	108	(11)
A Near Defenestration	119	(15)
The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman	134	(11)
Love and a Longing for Letters	145	(14)
Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues	159	(10)
The Bauer Family	169	(6)
America and Back: The Man Who Disappeared	175	(17)
The Lives of Metaphors: ``The Metamorphosis''	192	(14)
The Fear of Going Mad	206	(20)
Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door	226	(5)
1913	231	(11)
The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration	242	(11)
Invention and Exaggeration	253	(13)
Sexual Trepidation and Surrender	266	(15)
The Working World: High Tech and the Ghosts of Bureaucracy	281	(16)
The Proposal	297	(27)
Literature, Nothing but Literature	324	(26)
Three Congresses in Vienna	350	(18)
Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva	368	(11)
Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives	379	(11)
An All-Time Low	390	(11)
Kafka and Musil	401	(12)
Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism	413	(20)
Tribunal in Berlin	433	(11)
The Great War	444	(20)
Self-Inflicted Justice: The Trial and ``In the Penal Colony''	464	(20)
The Return of the East	484	(9)
The Grand Disruption	493	(15)
No-Man's-Land	508	(9)
Acknowledgments	517	(2)
Translator's Note	519	(2)
Key to Abbreviations	521	(2)
Notes	523	(28)
Bibliography	551	(12)
Photo Credits	563	(2)
Index	565

Excerpts

At Home with the KafkasThe guiding principle of every community is accepting others in order to be accepted.-Franz Grillparzer, DiaryI SIT IN my room in the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment. I hear all the doors slamming; their noise spares me only the steps of the people running between them; I can still hear the oven door banging shut in the kitchen. My father bursts through the door to my room and passes through, his robe trailing; the ashes are being scraped out of the stove in the next room; Valli asks, shouting one word after the other through the foyer, whether Father's hat has been cleaned yet; a hushing sound that aims to be friendly to me raises the screech of a voice in reply. The apartment door is unlatched and makes a grating noise like a scratchy throat, then opens wider with the singing of a woman's voice, and finally closes with a dull manly bang, which is the most inconsiderate sound of all. Father is gone; now the subtler, more diffuse, more hopeless noise begins, led by the voices of the two canaries. I had been thinking about it earlier, and with the canaries it now occurred to me again that I might open the door a tiny crack, slither into the next room like a snake and in that way, on the floor, ask my sisters and their governess for peace and quiet.Kafka called this prose piece "Great Noise." He jotted it down in his diary on November 5, 1911, and about a year later published it in a Prague literary journal, for the "public flogging of my family,"1 since the circumstances depicted in it had not changed in the slightest. It is unlikely that Hermann Kafka ever saw with his own eyes the mark that his trailing robe left on German literature. Although Kafka's father was a stocky man and not yet sixty years old, no one was allowed to "excite" him. His blood pressure was out of control, he had respiratory and cardiac problems, and he did not appreciate humor at his own expense. Kafka's three sisters were sure to have greeted their author's copies with a flurry of giggles. "Valli" was there in black and white; Kafka had not even disguised the name of his middle sister.The text had been written on a Sunday, and the few friends who knew the details of Kafka's life at home probably had a flash of recognition that this was the typical Sunday noise. Any other morning on the fourth floor of the apartment building at Niklasstrasse 36 in Prague was ruled by the dictates of the tenants' jobs. No one had the leisure to sit still at the table and record the acoustic events.Mornings in the Kafka household typically began at about 6 A.M. The tedious and noisy manual labor was of course left to a servant girl: removing the ashes from the kitchen stove, preparing breakfast, heating the living room, and preparing warm water for washing. Still, Kafka's youngest sister, Ottilie, known as Ottla, had to get up just afterward. The daily morning chore that had fallen to her for years needed to be taken care of right after a q

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Excerpted from Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach
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