Reiner Stach - Kafka

KAFKA

KAFKA

THE DECISIVE YEARS

REINER STACH

Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Originally published as Kaf kaDie Jahre der Entscheidungen

S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2002

English translation copyright 2005 by Shelley Frisch

Reprinted by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt Publishing Company

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should

be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published in paperback in 2013 by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number 2013930936

ISBN 978-0-691-14741-3

eISBN 978-0-69123-356-7 (ebook)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

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CONTENTS

1

16

21

42

54

71

86

94

108

119

134

145

159

169

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192

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368

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401

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464

484

493

508

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519

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551

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565

KAFKA

INTRODUCTION

T HE LIFE of Dr. Franz Kafka, a Jewish insurance official and writer in Prague, lasted forty years and eleven months. He spent sixteen years and six and a half months in school and at university, and nearly fifteen years in professional life. Kafka retired at the age of thirty-nine. He died of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium outside Vienna two years later.

Apart from stays in the German Empireprimarily weekend excursionsKafka spent about forty-five days abroad. He visited Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, Milan, Venice, Verona, Vienna, and Budapest. He saw three seas, each once: the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Italian Adriatic. And he witnessed a World War.

He never married. He was engaged three times: twice to Felice Bauer, a career woman in Berlin, and once to Julie Wohryzek, a secretary in Prague. He appears to have had romantic relationships with four other women as well as sexual encounters with prostitutes. He shared an apartment with a woman for about six months of his life. He left no descendants.

As a writer Franz Kafka left about forty complete prose texts to posterity. Nine of these can be called stories, if we interpret the genre liberally: The Judgment, The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Report to an Academy, First Sorrow, A Little Woman, A Hunger Artist, and Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. The works Kafka regarded as complete add up to about 350 printed pages in the critical edition of his writings that is currently considered definitive.

In addition, Kafka generated about 3,400 pages of diary entries and literary fragments, including three unfinished novels. According to the directives addressed to his friend Max Brod in Kafkas will, these manuscripts were all to be burned; Kafka himself destroyed an indeterminable but sizable number of notebooks. Brod did not follow Kafkas instructions; he published as much of Kafkas literary estate as he could find. Virtually all of Kafkas approximately 1,500 letters that were preserved have been published.

HOW ARE YOU? Life is the same as ever, thank you. Life is a state of being, not an activity. You find out only at the end whether you had a life. In 1892, Italo Svevo published his first novel, A Life, the prototype of the modern novel about a white-collar employee. The protagonist, a minor clerk named Alfonso Nitti, seems almost a malicious caricature of Kafka. Like Kafka, Alfonso fails to find erotic gratification. His resolve is stymied by the dreary routine of endless hours at the office. He clings to the illusion of future intellectual productivity but never manages to generate anything aside from a few paltry fragments. Svevo originally had another title in mind: Un inetto (A Good-for-Nothing). He eventually opted for the concise and more effective Una vita. The title did not help; no one appears to have recognized the paradigmatic quality of this hero, and it is unlikely that Kafka ever heard of the novel.

A life? If one applies the standards of twenty-first-century Western society to Kafkas psychological existence, the result is devastating. We regard a life span of eighty years as a biological minimum, something to which we are entitled. A forty-year-old is at the zenith and does not think in terms of the end. If the end does come early, we regard the life as half lived, incomplete and senseless.

This fundamental deficit is multiplied if we employ the currently fashionable parameters of happiness: health, sexual activity, family life, fun, adventures, independence, and professional achievement. While it is true that Kafka did not live on the margin of societyhe had a social life and advanced to the position of deputy department head with pension privilegeshe did not love his profession and paid dearly for the modicum of security it offered. The variety of options young people feel entitled to these days was unavailable to Kafka. As a thirty-year-old, he was still living with his parents. With the exception of just a few months, he spent his life in one city, surrounded by a small, nearly unvarying circle of friends. Everything he owned was eaten up by illness and hyperinflation. He saw little of the world, and what he did see was almost always in haste, because his vacation time was severely restricted. He found pitifully few outlets for his recreational needsnamely, swimming, rowing, gymnastics, garden work, sanatorium respites, excursions to the country, and indulgence in the modest excesses of the taverns of Prague. Even more striking was the disparity between his desperate quest for sexual and erotic fulfillment and the rare instances when he came close to finding such happiness. His fulfillment was always blighted by ambivalence.

Coupled with these limitations and losses was Kafkas immense investment of time and effort on behalf of literature. He saw the act of writing as the focus of his existence. Writing soothed and stabilized him; writing that turned out well made him happy and self-confident. Here too, however, the proportion between effort and reward was almost bizarrely off-kilter. For every manuscript page he considered worth saving, there were ten or even twenty pages he wanted destroyed. All his literary projects that grew beyond the scope of a story failed. Failure plagued his endeavors in other literary genres: the language of poetry was inaccessible to him; his plan to write an autobiography was never realized; and his few halfhearted forays into dramatic writing yielded no tangible results. Let us imagine, as a comparison, that the works of a composer comprise just a few finished pieces of chamber music and dozens of fragmentary compositions, including three unfinished symphonies. Is the composer a failure? An incompetent? Brod tried to gloss over this lamentable situation by adopting a tendentious editorial strategy. Today, however, there is nothing left to conceal: the critical edition of Kafkas oeuvre is available, and it is impossible to escape the impression that Kafka left a heap of rubble for posterity.