Kafka: The Early Years

"In selecting this volume of Reiner Stach’s richly detailed 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, elegantly translated by Shelley Frisch (volume 2 is Kafka: The Decisive Years and volume 3, Kafka: The Years of Insight ), I am chiefly engaged by its newness. Contrary to appearances, this is the last book of the three to appear, owing to the author’s wish to consult materials to which he has had exclusive access. These notebooks and letters are now held by the Israeli National Library, after taking possession of Kafka’s papers stored in vaults in Zurich and Tel Aviv and an ill-assorted heap allegedly scattered about the house of the aged, cat-loving daughter of Max Brod’s secretary—Max Brod being Kafka’s great friend and booster, who rescued Kafka’s papers from destruction at the hands of the Nazi SS. The Early Years casts new light on Kafka’s friendship with Brod, stressing the mutual intimacy and intensity of their bond—one generally understated or thought improbable by Kafka’s biographers, but strengthened by their many travels together to Switzerland, to Northern Italy, to Paris and by their joint writing and publishing projects. They planned a modestly priced travel guide for middle-class tourists to the cities they had visited, thoughtfully including suggestions as to where sexual entertainment could be had at a fair price. We get to see a ‘regular’ young man, full of curiosity about the world and full of tricks, no lover of school, and a great friend, especially of Max Brod, at that time the far more accomplished young man of letters. As I have written elsewhere, Stach’s account hollows out the validity of Walter Benjamin’s surmise that one of the great riddles about Kafka is that he should ever have had Brod as a friend. No doubt Benjamin could imagine himself in Brod’s place as the better friend. Nonetheless, you come to feel, at least through Brod’s perspective, the affection and enthusiasm flowing in from Kafka’s side, for reasons not hard to conceive. Franz once astonished his friend Hugo Bergmann. As they approached the window of a huge bookstore, Kafka closed his eyes and had Bergmann recite the titles of all the books he could see, whereupon Kafka responded with the names of the author—correctly in every case. What Bergmann didn’t know was that Kafka was a passionate reader of publishers’ lists and already knew, long before this exercise, the names of the authors. As to Kafka’s school traumas: Kafka’s Greek grammar classes threw him for a loop. He could not integrate a grasp of grammatical forms with a knowledge of content, which his teacher withheld from students anyway, as being beyond their range. Stach concludes that this tension may have cast a lasting shadow over Kafka’s literary imagination. Joseph K., for example, in The Trial , is instructed in the formalities of the Court of Law but is told he will never understand the law. The same holds true for the village dwellers under the sway of the Castle: neither the intruder K. nor the villagers themselves will ever understand its logic and its law. Connected with this school years’ mini-trauma is the crueler imagination of the teacher with raised pen about to mark Franz’s tests with a decisive “Fail!” Stach notes that the ordeal faced by his protagonists isn’t always one of being confronted by a judicial bureaucracy. Rather: “practically all of them are put into existential testing situations, for which they are unprepared and bound to fail” (I/204). This is young Kafka’s perpetual worry at school and university—closer to his experience than being translated into a vermin or stabbed in the heart as punishment for an unspecified crime. The other day, the German Literature Archive at Marbach held a brilliant zoom conference exhibiting and commenting on an 8-page letter that Kafka wrote to Max Brod in 1922. Marbach had bought it from a collector. In a sort of Kafkaesque story, Kafka describes being of two minds about whether to winter by himself in Planá. On the one hand, the woman who ran his lodging house promised to cook vegetarian meals for him all winter. He would be blessedly alone and have the solitude he craved. On the other hand, the landlady who could seem so cooperative could also turn angry and mischievous—anticipating absolutely the landlady in the frightening story ‘Eine kleine Frau’ Kafka was to write two years later in Berlin. Then there were the other villagers—peasants, mainly—in his vicinity. And the feeling of solitude could become acute and distressing among others with whom one had nothing in common—Kafka’s specialty. Recall: “Only the limited circle is pure.” This letter-text fits in with the range of Kafka’s work that at one point (2011), when I was actively engaged with him, felt hitherto insufficiently attended to—namely, ‘Kafka’s Late Style’— The Castle and Kafka’s last stories. But I believe that lacuna has since been well addressed by the intervening scholarship. Still, the letter above suggests that as more ancillary material emerges—think of the heap of early papers the Israeli National Library is said to be at work digitizing and preparing to publish—there will once again be gaps that Kafka scholarship stands ready to fill."