Ending at the Beginning

John Banville
August 17, 2017 Issue

Kafka: The Early Years

by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Princeton University Press, 564 pp., $35.00

Reiner Stach has a droll way with epigraphs, and in Kafka: The Early Years he heads his
chapters with a selection of gnomic snippets from numerous ingeniously obscure sources.
Chapter 1, for instance, has a tag from a song by Devo, an American rock band of the 1980s:
“Think you heard this all before,/Now you’re gonna hear some more.” This is Stach’s impish
acknowledgment that the present book is the first of three volumes, the second and third of
which have already been published. The joke is a good one, and sends the reader off smiling on
what will be a long though immensely rewarding journey. This volume completes one of the
great literary biographies of our time—indeed, of any time.

The reason for the delay in the appearance of the first volume is explained in a preface by
Stach’s devoted and richly gifted translator, Shelley Frisch:

This order of publication, which may appear counterintuitive—even fittingly “Kafkaesque”—

was dictated by years of high-profile legal wrangling for control of the Max Brod literary estate
in Israel, during which access to the materials it contained, many of which bore directly on
Kafka’s formative years, was barred to scholars.

In August of last year the Israeli Supreme Court found against Brod’s heirs, and ordered that the
withheld documents be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem. Frisch states that Stach
“has been able to examine three volumes of Brod’s diaries in this collection, those from the years
1909 to 1911,” and indeed it is clear that Stach did draw heavily on the diaries—so heavily that
at times the book might be mistaken for a joint biography of Franz Kafka and Max Brod.

However, a mystery remains. Since Stach’s book was originally published in German in 2013,
how did he get his hands on the much-needed material from the Brod archive, since the court
order for its release was not handed down until 2016? Perhaps he will add an appendix to a
future edition explaining how he managed it, for it sounds as if there is a good story there,
somewhat in the manner, perhaps, of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. One hopes that Stach
did not at any point in the process find himself hissed at furiously as “you publishing scoundrel!”
as did the hapless narrator of James’s tale.

As Frisch notes, the saga of the Brod archive smacks not a little of the Kafkaesque; there are few
aspects of Kafka, as man and writer, that do not have a Kafkaesque dimension. How apt, for
instance, that an artist who sets an animal as the protagonist, or even as the narrator, of so many
of his stories—most notably, of course, “The Metamorphosis”—should have a name that is most
likely derived from that of a bird: kavka is the Czech word for jackdaw.* And further, in the
matter of names, Kafka’s mother’s family, the Löwys, “were once known,” Stach informs us, “as
Boreas, like the god of the north wind, and later as Borges.” One wonders if the great
Argentinian fabulist was aware of this admittedly tenuous connection to his Czech precursor. In
the world of the kavka, everything makes strange.

Stach opens the narrative of Kafka’s life with one of his brilliant set-piece meteorological
recreations of a particular day, in this case July 3, 1883, which was “a clear, pleasant summer’s
day, with a gentle breeze wafting through the narrow streets of the Old Town in Prague.” When
he first set out to write this biography, two decades ago, his aim, Stach declared, was to show
“what it was like to be Kafka.” One of the strategies by which he triumphantly fulfills this aim
has been to place the reader as directly as possible in Kafka’s world and time, as he does in this
bravura opening description of the day and place of Kafka’s birth:

Today was a Tuesday, which meant that there were a good many “military concerts” in store. In
the spacious beer garden on the Sophieninsel, the hoopla started up at four in the afternoon for
tourists, students, and retirees. Most people still had a few more hours of work ahead of them,
and those unlucky souls who earned their living in a shop had to wait until after sundown to join
the festivities.

It might be the opening of a bildungsroman by Thomas Mann or Robert Musil. The immediacy
of Stach’s narrative makes it not only uncannily evocative but compulsively readable, and the
three big volumes of his Kafka constitute a work of literature as subtle, as intricate, and as
entertaining as any novel.

“No intellectual biography that is situated in the Bohemian metropolis,” Stach writes, “is
comprehensible without the history of this city and the surrounding region.” Therefore he goes
far back to locate the beginnings of his tale, all the way to the Battle of the White Mountain, near
Prague, in November 1620, in which a Protestant alliance of German states was defeated by the
Catholic Habsburgs. The battle—the young René Descartes fought in it—lasted no more than
two hours and was hardly more than a skirmish, yet it was celebrated with jubilation all over
Catholic Europe, and ushered in a period known to Czechs as “the darkness,” which was to last
for three centuries.

The following year, twenty-seven notable Protestants, including Jan Jessenius, rector of Charles
University in Prague, were executed in public in the Old Town Square, as punishment for
rebellion and a demonstration of the Habsburgs’ calculated ruthlessness. Praguers to this day
retain a strong memory of what they see as the tragedy of the White Mountain; as Stach has it,
“In some corners of this city, the intertwining of past and present, of death and life can make the
presence of history feel downright eerie.”

The Habsburgs were still firmly in power in 1883 when Kafka was born, into a milieu that was
an amalgam of ancient resentments and present complacency. He was deeply riven in his attitude
toward his native city. He never ceased to bemoan having to live there, yet he was incapable of
moving elsewhere. “Prague doesn’t let go,” he famously wrote. “This little mother has claws.” If
Bohemia felt itself a victim and an outcast, Kafka had the added burden of being a Jew in Central
Europe—although he would plaintively demand to know what he could have in common with
the Jews, since he had hardly anything in common with himself. The forebears of both his
parents were not Praguers; his father, Hermann, was born in a village near Strakonice in southern
Bohemia, and his mother’s people, the Löwys, had lived for generations in Podĕbrady, a town on
the river Elbe “in the shadow of a massive castle”; they were “a family of scholars and
eccentrics, complete with depressions,” as Stach notes.

Hermann Kafka and Julie Löwy were married in 1882, and the following summer their son Franz
was born. When one studies photographs of Franz Kafka—and there are surprisingly many of
them for such a notoriously self-effacing person—one is struck by how little he resembles his
parents. Hermann Kafka is burly, with a flat skull, a broad face, and a thick neck, the very model
of the character Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while his wife Julie’s most marked feature is her
lantern jaw. How did this couple beget a son so delicately made, so tall, and thin to the point of
emaciation? It is as if this singular creature were his own self-creation. One cannot imagine
anyone looking like Franz Kafka—certainly none of his three sisters did, if, again, we take the
photographs as dependable evidence—and there are even instances when he does not look
entirely like himself.

Stach displays a deep tenderness toward his subject as a child. Kafka’s parents ran what used to
be called a fancy goods store in central Prague, and Hermann, aggressive and volatile, frequently
flew into rages and gave staff their notice on the spot. There was also the fact that the two boys
born to Julie Kafka after Franz did not survive long: Georg died of measles when he was fifteen
months old, and the next-born, Heinrich, lived only six months before succumbing to meningitis:

These constant fluctuations resulted not only in an atmosphere of tumult and frayed nerves, but
also in a series of separations that instilled in little Franz a deep mistrust regarding the
consistency of human relationships and wariness of a world in which every face he had become
accustomed to or even grown to love could vanish instantly and forever.

For a person as sensitive as Kafka was, or at least as he presented himself as being—it is entirely
possible to view his life in a light other than the one he himself shone upon it—inner escape was
the only available strategy. “If we are to believe his own personal mythology,” Stach writes, “he
drifted out of life and into literature,” to the point, indeed, that as an adult he would declare that
he was literature, and nothing else. Stach, however, offers another and, in its way, far more
interesting possibility when he asks, “What if literature was the only feasible way back for him?”
Yet along this route into the psychological depths of Kafka’s emotional and artistic self we must
pick our way carefully, recalling Kafka’s own skepticism toward Freudian analysis—“I consider
the therapeutic part of psychoanalysis a helpless error”—and keeping in mind one of what are
known as the Zürau aphorisms, in which he declares with uncharacteristic vehemence: “No
psychology ever again!”

Naturally much of this volume is taken up with an account of Kafka’s formal education. One
might expect that the student years of an artist would be of great biographical interest, but it is
rarely the case, and Stach’s account of Kafka’s schooling is no exception. Perhaps the reason is
that the education of an artist is for the most part a self-administered process, the progress of
which is not recorded in class placings and examination results. If there are longueurs in the
present volume, they occur here, as we might guess from the title to Chapter 7: “Kafka, Franz:
Model Student.” He was a tireless and omnivorous reader—it is really by reading that writers
learn to write—but early on he tried his hand at composition, too, and by the age of twelve or
thirteen he had determined to become a writer.

Stach tells us that Kafka “grouped his first literary endeavors under a surprising watchword:
coldness,” and lamented: “What a chill pursued me for days on end from what I had written!” It
is not clear why the biographer considers this surprising; the first and hardest lesson an artist
must learn is to curb the excesses of youthful ardor. A mark of Kafka’s greatness was the
distance from himself that he achieved in his writings from the outset. The remarkable story
“The Judgment,” composed in a single sitting one night in 1912, which he considered his first
fully achieved work, is written at “degree zero,” to use Roland Barthes’s formulation, and
maintains a dreamlike steadiness and purity of tone, despite its strongly autobiographical theme
—the son humiliated and overborne by the father—and the fact that it was done, the author
himself wrote, by way of “a complete opening of body and soul.” Kafka always wrote out of
himself, and of himself, without ever imagining that thereby he was directly expressing himself.
The artist, he once remarked, is the one who has nothing to say. “He would always speak only of
the act of writing as the truly precious element,” Stach observes, “but not of the resulting works,
which always conveyed no more than a hazy image of the flash of creation.”

In his diary in 1920 he wrote of a moment when he had a clear glimpse of what would be for him
the true creative flame. He was sitting one day, “many years ago,…on the slope of the
Laurenziberg,” the hill in the center of Prague that figures in “Description of a Struggle,”
brooding on “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.

This artistic epiphany—remarkably reminiscent of that interrupted moment in Beckett’s Krapp’s

Last Tape when Krapp recognizes that his aim must be to allow into his work the darkness he
had always struggled to keep out—is summed up beautifully by Stach when he writes: “The
presence of being and nothingness in one and the same moment, in the same object or the same
sentence, struck Kafka as a sign of perfection that made life worth living.” And art worth
making.

The Early Years brings Kafka through school and college and into his life as “The Formidable
Assistant Official,” to quote another of Stach’s chapter headings. Kafka hated his work as an
insurance clerk, but he clung to his desk as if it were the raft of the Medusa. In the office he was
in a state of unrelenting frustration, yet even there he saw the slapstick comedy of his
predicament:

I have so much to do!… People fall off the scaffolds as if they were drunk, into the machines, all
the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slip, whatever people carry up falls
down, whatever they hand down, people stumble over. And I have a headache from all these
girls in porcelain factories who keep throwing themselves down the stairs with mounds of
dishware.

Stach is not the first to comment on the peculiarities of Kafka’s lifelong relationship with his
fellow writer Max Brod. In the late 1930s, Brod’s biography of his friend was attacked by Walter
Benjamin, who was particularly exercised by what he saw as Brod’s entirely mistaken religious
interpretation of Kafka’s work. Stach sees Kafka’s connection with the outgoing and essentially
middle-brow Brod as a typical cleaving to figures with a stronger, perhaps more elemental, grasp
on life and the business of living:

Kafka felt closest to people whose superior vitality he could share without buckling under,
partaking in the lives of others, whose fluxes of energy he could latch on to without ceding
control over the dosage of the energy.

It is as if Kafka, believing he could only live vicariously through other people, considered Brod
as good an exemplar as any other. Yet it would be hard to imagine a more ill-assorted pair. Brod,
a year younger than Kafka, came from a solidly middle-class Jewish background—his father was
a successful banker—and therefore found it hard to empathize with the social unease and sense
of displacement of Kafka the haberdasher’s son. He even tried to get Kafka to curb his fantastical
notion of his father’s power over him. “We know how well that worked,” Stach mordantly
observes.

There was too a darker aspect to Brod’s proprietorial attitude to Kafka; as Stach notes,
“Deliberate manipulations to serve his own interests, which even extended to altering Kafka’s
diaries, have been identified.” Stach is careful to be fair-minded and to suppress what seems an
instinctive antipathy toward Brod—it would probably be unfair to attribute this, even in part, to
Stach’s lingering irritation over the difficulties he had in securing access to the Brod archive—
and he goes so far as to wonder not how Kafka the genius tolerated the mundane Brod, but how
Brod in turn put up with Kafka’s endless emotional fidgetings, over his writing, his health, his
loves. After all, we have Brod to thank for the very survival of the Kafka oeuvre, since he
decided to ignore Kafka’s direction to him to destroy his papers after his death. One might surely
forgive a bit of proprietorship, and even a certain fiddling with the facts, in return for the great
gift to posterity—to us—of such a literary treasure.

That Kafka was fond of Brod cannot be doubted. Stach gives a comical and wonderfully
endearing account of a holiday they took together in 1911:

“Let’s be quick now,” Kafka said when they arrived at the hotel. “We’re going to be in Paris for
only five days. Just give the face a little wash.” Brod rushed off to his room, put down his
luggage, took care of the bare necessities, and was back in a matter of minutes. His friend, by
contrast, “had taken every last thing out of his suitcase and would not go until he had put
everything back in order.” Kafka asked why Brod was carping at him.

On their way to France they had been eager to get there at once, without delay, but at Lake
Maggiore they could not resist stopping over for some days, beginning with a swim. Such was
their relief from the heat and the stresses of travel “that they embraced while standing in the
water,” Stach writes, adding, with po-faced flatness, “—which must have looked quite odd
especially because of the difference in their heights.”

How, one wondered, would Stach find an ending to this first volume, which would be an ending
also to the magnificent venture he embarked on so many years ago? The solution he comes up
with, Mozartian in its deceptive lightness, is wholly captivating. It takes place in a sanatorium on
Lake Zurich that Kafka had checked himself into for a rest after that hectic trip to Paris with
Brod. So delightful, so magical, are the closing couple of pages that one longs to paraphrase
them, but that would be to spoil the perfect balance the biographer achieves between comedy,
wistfulness, and faint absurdity, qualities that are as much a mark of Kafka’s writing as its
darkness and its terror. There could not have been a better close to this marvelous account of the
life of a supremely great artist.

1. *

I cannot resist noting that as I was writing this paragraph, a jackdaw flew in through the
open window of my study, and got out again only with the greatest difficulty. ↩

A Different Kafka
John Banville
October 24, 2013 Issue

Kafka: The Decisive Years

by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Princeton University Press, 581 pp., $24.95 (paper)

Kafka: The Years of Insight

by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Princeton University Press, 682 pp., $35.00

Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt

by Saul Friedländer
Yale University Press, 183 pp., $25.00
Hans-Gerd Koch, Hagen
Franz Kafka (right) with, from right, his secretary Julie Kaiser, his s

ister Ottla, their cousin Irma, and the maid Mařenka, near Zürau, Bohemia, 1917

What are we to make of Kafka? Not, surely, what he made of himself, or at least what he would
have us believe he made of himself. In a letter to his long-suffering fiancée Felice Bauer he
declared: “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.” This was a
constant theme of his mature years, and one that he expanded on in a highly significant diary
entry from August 1916: “My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered
everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying.”

Of course, Kafka is not the first writer, nor will he be the last, to figure himself as a martyr to his
art—think of Flaubert, think of Joyce—but he is remarkable for the single-mindedness with
which he conceived of his role. Who else could have invented the torture machine at the center
of his frightful story “In the Penal Colony,” which executes miscreants by graving their sentence
—le mot juste!—with a metal stylus into their very flesh?

His conception of himself as tormented artist is allied closely to his view of his predicament as a
man struggling to maintain his health and sanity in the face of an unrelentingly inhospitable
world. In the annals of lamentation, from Job and Jeremiah to Beckett’s Unnamable, surely no
one has devoted himself to the sustained moan with such dedication, energy, and exquisite
finesse as the author of the “The Judgment” and the “Letter to His Father,” of the diaries, and of
the correspondence with Felice Bauer and his lover Milena Jesenská, as well as his friend Max
Brod.1

There are moments, numerous moments, when this supreme ironist seemed to recognize the
comical aspect of his endless complaining, and the wintry, self-mocking smile that flashes out at
us on these occasions is peculiarly irresistible. We think too of that famous incident when Kafka
was reading aloud the opening pages of The Trial before a group of Prague friends but laughed
so much that he had to stop at intervals, while his listeners also laughed “uncontrollably,” despite
what Brod described as “the terrible gravity of this chapter.” That must have been quite an
evening.

Despite the particularity of Kafka’s work—and what other writer has fashioned a literary
landscape as instantly recognizable as his?—as an artist he is generally taken for a tabula rasa. In
his short study, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, Saul Friedländer quotes the German-
American critic Erich Heller’s description of Kafka as “the creator of the most obscure lucidity
in the history of literature,” and goes on to note how the opacity of Kafka’s texts has allowed
him to be regarded as

a neurotic Jew, a religious one, a mystic, a self-hating Jew, a crypto-Christian, a Gnostic, the
messenger of an antipatriarchal brand of Freudianism, a Marxist, the quintessential existentialist,
a prophet of totalitarianism or of the Holocaust, an iconic voice of High Modernism, and much
more….

It is notable how few critics and commentators have seen Kafka as essentially a product of his
time and milieu—early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa—and it is to Friedländer’s credit that he
notes “the ongoing influence of Expressionism” and contemporary works of fantastic literature
such as Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem on Kafka’s literary sensibility. The fact is, Kafka was a
son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips. As a young man he remarked ruefully that the city had
claws, and would not let go. He knew well both himself and his birthplace.

Reiner Stach, in his ongoing biography of Kafka, strives for a similarly intimate knowledge of
his subject, and of the time and place in which he lived and worked. Stach is at once highly
ambitious and admirably unassuming. He wishes, he tells us, to experience “what it was like to
be Franz Kafka,” yet suggests that the effort even to get “just a little bit closer” is illusory:

Methodological snares are of no use; the cages of knowledge remain empty. So what do we
achieve for all our efforts? The real life of Franz Kafka? Certainly not. But a fleeting glance at it,
or an extended look, yes, perhaps that is possible.

This modesty is not false, but it is misplaced. So far, two volumes of this latest Kafka biography
have been published. 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.2 By a combination of tireless
scholarship, uncanny empathy, and writing that might best be described as passionately fluent,3
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.

Part of Stach’s method is a point-by-point mapping of the biographical evidence against the
autobiographical evidence within the work—and Kafka is everywhere autobiographical, though
he seeks to cover his tracks with finical care. Stach is in sympathy with Kafka’s dismissal of
psychology, and maintains an epistemological approach to his task, cleaving to the facts as he
knows them—and he knows a great many—and never indulging in the kind of fanciful
speculation that so many biographers permit themselves.4

On occasion he will take a deliberate step back in order to present a broad view of this or that
aspect of Kafka’s life and work. See, for instance, in volume three, his brilliant exegesis on the
prose fragment “The Great Wall of China.” The piece focuses not on the emperor on whose
orders the wall was constructed, but on the construction itself, which was built “not as a single
entity but rather in individual sections far apart from one another,” the same method, Stach
points out, that Kafka brought to the assembling of his novels, The Trial in particular. Of the
Great Wall, Stach writes:

no one apart from those in the top command can say with any certainty how far the construction
has progressed; it is not even clear whether the wall will really have all the gaps filled in when
the work is done. It is never completed, and remains a fragment made up of fragments.

In this way the Wall matches the “meta-structure that has been characterized as ‘Kafka’s world’
or ‘Kafka’s universe.’”

Volume two, The Decisive Years, begins, excitingly, in May 1910, with the approach of Halley’s
Comet. “For months, newspaper reports had been warning of a possible collision, gigantic
explosions, firestorm, and tidal waves, the end of the world.” On May 18, the day when the
comet would either smash into the earth or miss it, excited crowds thronged the streets and cafés
of Prague, among them “a thin, sinewy man…a head taller than everyone around him.” One
wonders how much heed Kafka paid to the threatened celestial collision. If we are to take the
diaries and the letters at face value, he regarded the momentous events of his time with weary
indifference. Consider his infamous diary entry for August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war
on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon.” In this matter Stach takes a characteristically subtle
approach:

One of the primary reasons that Kafka has come to be regarded as oblivious to reality and
politically remote is that he focused less on great losses themselves—even when they were
catastrophic—than on the larger significance of these losses, and the way they laid bare the
essence of the era as a whole. The decline of a great symbol, the end of a tradition, the tip of the
pyramid chopped off [e.g., the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the subsequent
destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire]—like most of his contemporaries, he experienced
these events as signs of an irreversible dissolution.

Kafka was twenty-seven the year of Halley’s Comet, and as Stach notes, with muted wryness,
“the fifteen pages he had published already showed every indication that he would go far.” This
was not apparent to everyone, and the long litany of Kafka’s publishing woes makes for
dispiriting reading—however, it should be said in defense of his publishers that Kafka must have
been impossible to deal with. Yet although he was both diffident and difficult, this does not mean
he was also indifferent. “The notion that he was not concerned about public resonance,” Stach
writes, “that he was immune to both praise and criticism, is false.” Indeed, it seems that during
World War I he engaged a clippings agency so that he would not miss even the most fleeting
public reference to his work. All the same, he had no illusions about the possibility of worldly
success and fame. He remarked with melancholy humor of his first book, a slim volume entitled
Meditation, “Eleven books were sold at André’s store. I bought ten of them myself. I would love
to know who has the eleventh.”

Much of his energy, physical and spiritual, was bent to the task of insulating himself against the
world’s affronts. In the process, Stach writes, he

established a system of obsessions that would enhance his life on a narcissistic level but consume
all his vitality. His story “The Burrow” presents a vivid symbol of this: A creature who walls
himself in to remain self-sufficient, in a permanent state of siege, is therefore condemned to
permanent vigilance. Everything is threatening; every spot is vulnerable. One cannot let down
one’s guard anywhere, every act of carelessness is punished, and a single leak will sink the ship.
If nothing can enter, and all cracks are sealed, nothing can exit either. He noted laconically in his
diary, “My prison cell—my fortress.” It is hard to imagine a more precise analogy.

But what is it, exactly, that drives him down into the burrow of himself, there to cower in
Kierkegaardian fear and loathing? He saw himself as alien, hardly human, a creature who, as one
of Nietzsche’s friends said of the philosopher, seemed to come from a place where no one else
lived. Why? In seeking an answer, one returns to Erich Heller’s elegant characterization of
Kafka’s prose style as at once lucid and obscure. Native speakers assure us of the limpid beauty
of Kafka’s German, of its unrivaled purity and conciseness. Yet his language, like Freud’s, gives
a distinct sense of shroudedness. His sentences move like Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers in
Yeats’s poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” who “enwound/A shining web, a floating
ribbon of cloth,” inside which the dancers themselves seemed no more than flickering shadows.
In Kafka, something is always not being said. What is it?

Saul Friedländer has a strong suspicion about what the answer might be. Describing Kafka,
beautifully, as “the poet of his own disorder,” Friedländer states his case baldly:

These Diaries and the Letters indicate clearly enough that—except for the constant pondering
about his writing, the quintessence of his being—the issues torturing Kafka most of his life were
of a sexual nature.
Later he reinforces this view, insisting that “aside from the total primacy of writing, sexual issues
turned into the most obsessive preoccupation of Kafka’s life.” Of what variety were these sexual
issues? “All the sources indicate…that his feelings of guilt were related not to some concrete
initiatives on his part but to fantasies, to imagined sexual possibilities.” And these possibilities,
Friedländer suggests, were homoerotic in origin.

In one of the more heated passages during the course of Lolita, Humbert Humbert pauses to
surmise that by now his respectable reader’s eyebrows will have traveled to somewhere near the
back of his balding head. No doubt there will be many Kafka admirers on whom Friedländer’s
thesis will have a similar effect. It is important to stress, therefore, that Friedländer is no
firebrand young academic thirsting for tenure and bent on making a scandalous name for
himself. He is emeritus professor of history and holds the Club 39 Endowed Chair of Holocaust
Studies at UCLA; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination:
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.

He was born in Prague, and a number of aspects of his life chime with Kafka’s: his father studied
law at Charles University and became, like Kafka, legal adviser to a Prague insurance firm; and,
tragically, “like those of Kafka’s three sisters, my parents’ lives ended in German camps.”
However, these echoes from long ago

would not have convinced me of writing on a topic so far removed from my field, history, but for
very specific and hardly mentioned issues that I considered important enough to be brought up in
a small biographical essay.

One is reminded of the boy who cannot but speak out as the emperor swishes past in his invisible
new clothes—except that in this case the royal personage is only too eager that no one should see
the fancy outfit he is secretly wearing.

Friedländer bases his case mostly on internal evidence from the fictional writings, but he also
follows up some excisions that Max Brod made in the published versions of the letters and the
diaries. There is for instance an entry for February 2, 1922, which, Friedländer writes, Brod
“censored in the English translation” but left unaltered in the German. Here is what Kafka wrote,
with the “censored” passages in square brackets:

Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-
jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least
in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering
glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that
towards evening he wanted to go home with me.

There are also some admiring glances thrown in the direction of a couple of handsome Swedish
youths. It is hardly a damning testament. What is perhaps most significant is the fact that Brod
felt it necessary to make these quiet elisions, since it suggests he had definite suspicions about
his friend’s sexual inclination.
Friedländer follows the Kafka scholar Mark Anderson in thinking it “highly improbable that
Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.”5 Nor does he for a moment seek
to suggest that the “imagined sexual possibilities” Kafka may have entertained are a key to
unlock the enigmas at the heart of the Kafka canon. All the same, once this particular genie is out
of the bottle there is no forcing it back inside. Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would
account for some of the more striking of Kafka’s darker preoccupations, including the disgust
toward women that he so frequently displays,6 his fascination with torture and evisceration, and
most of all, perhaps, his lifelong obsession with his father, or better say, with the Father—the
eternal masculine. For surely poor old Hermann Kafka, small-time businessman and purveyor of
fancy goods, could not have fitted into the shoes, indeed, the nine-league boots, that Kafka
fashioned for him in the story he considered his first real artistic success, “The Judgment,” in
which a father condemns a son to drown himself, and in the never-to-be-delivered “Letter to His
Father,” during the long toils of which the son declared: “My writing was about you; in it, I
merely lamented what I was unable to lament at your breast. It was a deliberately drawn out
farewell from you.” Here, as so often throughout Kafka’s writings, we see, in one of
Friedländer’s rare lapses into near psychobabble,

an evolution in the symbolic significance of paternal authority from its most fundamental
psychosexual function (in a Freudian sense) to its preeminent social function as representing
tradition and the law.

Kafka’s repeated cries of self-disgust are striking, and frequently border on the hysterical.
Writing to Milena Jesenská he offers one of his loveliest and most terrifying metaphors—“No
one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—what we take to be the song of angels
is their song”—but precedes it with a tortured admission—or is it a warped form of boasting?
—“I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity.” And this from
an obsessively fastidious teetotaler and semivegetarian whose elegant blue suits and spotless
linen were so often commented upon by friends and acquaintances. Kafka certainly carried some
dark trouble deep inside him.

His secretiveness, his drive toward an “obscure lucidity,” are evident not only in his life but also
in his work and in his working methods. In a fascinating study of the original manuscript of Das
Schloss (The Castle), the Kafka translator and scholar Mark Harman has traced the process by
which Kafka cut and edited the work so as “to preserve an aura of ineffable mystery by making
everything sound [as Kafka wrote] ‘ein wenig unheimlich’ [a little uncanny].”7

The unedited version of the novel was begun in the first person, but part-way along Kafka
changed his mind and went back through the pages and switched from “I” to “K.”8 K’s character
and motivations are spelled out quite openly, too much so for the author, who in revising the
manuscript, Harman writes, “consistently crossed out sentences and passages that reveal a high
degree of self-awareness on his hero’s part.” Reiner Stach, following Harman’s lead, points out
that

Kafka would surely have undermined the mysterious, parabolic, or allegorical structure of The
Castle if he had had his protagonist appear explicitly as a Jew or a writer, although this double
experience of exclusion clearly underlay his dogged battle for village and castle.
As Harman writes, we can attribute many of the deletions “to Kafka’s often-expressed dislike of
psychology. However, instead of entirely eliminating psychology, Kafka buried the workings of
his hero’s psyche in the interstices of his writing.”

In the end, none of this mattered, as Kafka ventured steadily into a hitherto unknown realm. In
March 1922 he wrote in his diary, “Somewhere help is waiting and the beaters are driving me
there.” By then, however, fate had him firmly in its sights. Five years previously, in the summer
of 1917, Kafka had suffered his first pulmonary hemorrhage. He greeted the onset of illness with
relief—death, after all, would solve so many things—describing it to a friend as “special…you
might say an illness bestowed upon me.”

There is undoubtedly justice in this illness; it is a just blow, which, incidentally, I do not feel at
all as a blow, but as something quite sweet in comparison with the average course of the past
years, so it is just, but so coarse, so earthly, so simple, so well aimed at the most convenient slot.

Sickness was to free him at last, from the demands of life, from himself, and even from
literature. He told Max Brod, “What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the
ultimate things.” He had much to write, in the short time left to him, yet his endeavor now would
not be purely literary but, in the deepest sense, moral. In “At Night,” one of his late fragments,
he wrote—and repeated, word for word, in a letter to Felice Bauer—“Someone must watch, it is
said. Someone must be there.” From now on he would be both sentinel and witness, and his
achievement would be transcendent. In the last story that he completed, “Josephine the Singer, or
the Mouse Folk,” he describes Josephine’s piping song, which here “is in its right place, as
nowhere else,” and which despite the thinness of the music expresses essentials:

Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be
found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet
springing up and not to be obliterated.

1. 1

Brod, though mistaken in some things—his representation of Kafka as a religious writer,

for instance—was ever commonsensical. He largely had the measure of his friend, and
even after Kafka had been diagnosed with tuberculosis did not hesitate to write to him
with a flat rebuke: “You are happy in your unhappiness.”  ↩

2. 2

In the matter of originality of approach one should mention Pietro Citati’s Kafka (English
translation 1990) and Robert Calasso’s K. (English translation 2005). These are not
biographies but deeply perceptive and poetic meditations on the unique phenomenon that
Kafka represented.  ↩

3. 3
 It is a shame to relegate praise of Shelley Frisch’s translation to a footnote, but on the
other hand one wants to single out the clarity and unemphatic beauty of her language.
Stach could not have hoped for a better English version than this, and it is apt to quote
here his remark on Kafka’s own approach to language: “Standard German remained the
only medium Kafka respected, and he never deliberately went beyond its limits, and
certainly not for mere effect—yet the journey within this medium took him into
uncharted territories.”  ↩

4. 4

Stach writes: “A biographer cannot dispense advice, and perfunctory long-distance

diagnoses of human relationships that go back generations or even epochs are among the
vilest side effects of the historical leveling that has become prevalent along with the
discursive predominance of psychology.”  ↩

5. 5

“Whatever homoerotic drives may have informed Kafka’s sexuality, he was most
probably not a practising homosexual who simply ‘translated’ biographical experience
into coded literary form.” See Mark M. Anderson, “Kafka, Homosexuality and the
Aesthetics of ‘Male Culture,’” in Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, edited by
Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 80.  ↩

6. 6

“I find every newly-wed couple going on their honeymoon a revolting sight, whether I
relate myself to them or not, and if I want to arouse disgust in myself, I need only
imagine putting my arm round a woman’s waist.” Quoted in Anderson, Gender and
Politics, p. 96. On the other hand, Reiner Stach is adamant that “Kafka’s female
characters…are representatives of power and of a knowledge that is not acquired by
social status but conferred on every female person; these are prototypes of a myth of
femininity.”  ↩

7. 7

See Harman’s “Making Everything ‘a little uncanny’: Kafka’s Deletions in the

Manuscript of Das Schloss and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing Process,” in A
Companion to the Work of Franz Kafka, edited by James Rolleston (Camden House,
2002). This essay was translated into German by Reiner Stach and published in Neue
Rundschau, which, under the editorship of Robert Musil, might very well have published
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” for the first time—it appeared instead in Die weissen
Blätter in 1915. Central Europe was, and is, a small world.  ↩

8. 8
In January 1922, as Kafka was embarking on the composition of The Castle, he arrived
one snowy evening in the health resort of Spindelmühle in the Riesengebirge near the
Polish border. At the Hotel Krone, where he was expected, he found he was listed in the
hotel directory as “Dr. Josef Kafka.” ↩