A sad Kafkaesque review of Kafka’s biography by Reiner Stach (in three volumes)
Reiner Stach’s monumental biography of Franz Kafka is far too long and far too short. So, let’s make this review as short as possible, as a counterpoint perhaps, but likely to end up rather long.
Clearly, to my mind at least, Volume Three The Years of Insight is the decisive one; Stach should not have given this adjective to the Second Volume as The decisive years. Since the last volume covers the years 1916 – 1924 (and with brief notes as to what happened thereafter), we cover the historical cataclysms of WWI, the independence of Czechoslovakia, the beginnings of the Weimar Republic, and of course Kafka’s tragic spiral into death by tuberculosis, not to speak of his writings of the time, like The Castle – and what about his most dedicated carers Dora and Robert! The first two volumes are insignificant on that count, even though the biographical details are as mind-numbing as in the third, even more so. Stach also spends an inordinate time on the question of Kafka’s concepts of being Jewish, not giving much credence to Kafka’s oft quoted ‘What have I in common with Jews? I barely have nothing in common with myself.’ The most awful consequences of being Jewish – only a couple of decades after Kafka’s death - are in fact summarised at the very end when Stach lists the victims of Nazi extermination as including all of Kafka’s three sisters, as well as Julie and Milena.
Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend, who escaped the Nazis with Kafka’s writings in his suitcase, and who always looms large and is treated by Stach with some ambiguity as Kafka’s sometimes inept literary executor, actually becomes less pronounced towards the end of Kafka’s life. This may also have something to do with Stach’s troubles accessing Brod’s literary executors, which points to Stach’s obsession to unearth every last bit of information, however insignificant it may be. Kafka, the consummate letter writer, left a vast trail of communications that are the fodder of Kafka scholars all over the world, testifying, if anything – and Stach on occasion pours scorn on them – that these letters are being dissected for even the minutest clues for the interpretation of Kafka’s works that have become the great iconic novels and short stories of world literature. Not that Stach is blameless in this regard (p.104): he discovers on a postcard written by Kafka to Felice from the hotel named Schloss Balmoral (note the Anglophile name) where they stayed in Marienbad, that he had mis-spelled Schloss (castle) as Schoss ((woman’s)lap) and then corrects it by inserting the ‘l‘. The savvy reader will of course immediately jump to Kafka’s later, most famous novel Das Schloss/Schloß (The Castle) and wonder ‘so what?‘. Stach leaves it to the reader to psychoanalyse this little gem of a faux-pas since he has already educated us over and over about Kafka’s seemingly complicated sexuality and celebrated love life. So why would the word ‘castle’ bring up the association with a woman’s ‘lap’ (in German it could be the ‘lap’ of any gender, and it does not have a particularly sexual reference (as perhaps in English) by dint of the German spelling similarity? Maybe if we dig deep, even the English saying of ‘My home is my castle’ can have a hidden (Freudian) association with a woman’s womb (or genitals), made explicit, for example, in Māori culture where a marae (the meeting house) has a distinct female entrance. Did Stach discover this archetype in a spelling mistake? If we now associate this concept with a ‘castle’ in particular – as in Kafka’s novel – we can further speculate that Kafka’s presumed difficulties with intimacy and sex with women are reflected in this mysterious, impenetrable (sic) castle of the said novel. Far-fetched?
But let’s speculate a bit further, along with Stach (p.430): prior to starting work on The Castle, Kafka had made some notes about S(ex) – such abbreviations were normally reserved for names – as quoted by Stach:
“S. keeps working away at me, torments me day and night; I would have to get over my fear and shame and likely my sorrow as well to satisfy it.”
Apparently, Kafka told Max Brod that he had been to a brothel (as on various occasions before) but had failed to find even a hint of the easing of tension he was longing for. Brod wrote in his diary of Kafka’s worries:
Torment of the sexual organs.
First it may come as a surprise that Kafka frequented brothels – even recommended by his father who thought it better than being seduced by a low-class Jewish harlot who would have married Franz for his money alone. Even Brod, the serial philanderer, was shocked. Stach, on the other hand, makes no judgements or even tries to analyse what it means to have sex with prostitutes, only to transfer this to a literary interpretation:
But the coldness he had experienced spilled over into the world of The Castle: just eight days after what appears to have been the final time he slept with a prostitute, Kafka took a room in Spindelmühle and got down to work. In his novel, sexuality would symbolize the most profound human alienation and the futile hope to be rescued by others.
What exactly does Stach mean? That sex with prostitutes is alienating? In my book, it probably is. But what about (admittedly fleeting) sex with the women he is in love with (Felice, Julie, Melina, Dora and even a dark hint, his sister Ottla)? Occasionally it sounded like heaven once he got over his ‘fears’ (e.g. Melina especially seems to have had that gift to assuage his ‘fears’). Obviously, this is in stark contrast to Brod’s womanising (while being married) and is contrary to an even Jewish imbued sexual ideology, espoused by Georg Langer who was working on a book about The Eroticism of the Kabbalah, noting that ‘three things have a transcendental element: the sun, the Sabbath, and sexual intercourse’.
Stach on the other hand attributes Kafka with a deep understanding of the feminine character, a trait that was apparently appreciated by likes of Milena who is said to have remarked that Kafka understood her better than her husband. Kafka, as a very good listener did not put his male Eros before empathetic communication, allowing for the feminine EROS to develop slowly and with no doubt delicate outcomes. Men like Brod who pursued sex as the first aim were of course very successful because they acted on a primeval drive that can be quite addictive for both sexes. Stach (p.441) comes to the conclusion that in The Castle K. dreams of the gaze of a “girl from the castle” and would do anything for her, a purely romantic notion of the Kafka variety that is both unique and commonplace.
A Freudian psychoanalysis of Kafka in terms of his sexuality and love life is of course linked to another central Freudian theme, namely the Oedipus Complex. Stach gives over some continuous twenty pages of close analysis of Kafka’s (in)famous Letter to His Father without ever mentioning the Oedipus Complex, which to me seems like an obvious connection. Kafka’s father Hermann was an overbearing figure who treated his only son badly. Kafka’s fear and loathing alternated with a dutiful love and respect, to the effect that Kafka could not explain this fear to his father verbally because of being afraid to say so, hence his extraordinary letter begins:
You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, in part for the very reason that I am afraid of you … (p.293)
While Hermann treated everyone like dogs, especially his employees, with the exception of himself, there is an element of the sign of the times, the extremes of patriarchy, the absolute dictatorship that will not allow disobedience even when the orders are legally out-of-order. On the other hand, it is not as though Hermann disinherited his son and sent him packing (to America) or beat him up with the strap – Kafka’s parents, father and mother, were by and large supportive of his studies and his vocation as an insurance lawyer and supported him financially in his darkest hours. Submitting to Jewish tradition to vet prospective marriage partners for their son and daughters was unpleasant but not out of this world, even when Franz wavered again and again in his marriage plans. Perhaps this was a consequence of Hermann waging a psychological war on his son, insisting that a real man, a real son, gets married to a suitable woman, has a family, does well in business and personal dealings. Franz’s dabbling in writing and his love of literature was anathema for Hermann, considering such tendencies as manly weaknesses, close to being a dreaded effeminate homosexual. Hermann indoctrinated his son early on with physical activity like swimming and drinking beer, so much so that Franz adopted the extreme version of physical wellness Lebensreform, that ended in many ways, decades later, in the racist Nazi obsession with physical fitness and genetic purity. Adopting a rigid vegetarian life-style and Fletcherizing his food, sleeping with all windows open even when it gets very cold in Prague, all this was looked upon by Hermann with utter disdain (while Franz’s mother reluctantly but dutifully prepared all the vegetarian meals for Franz alone) even though he found no arguments against his own dogma of physicality. The worst attack suffered by Franz was his father’s advice that sexual energies should be released by frequenting brothels – while waiting for the virgin from a well-to-do Jewish family to start a family of his own, sex thus nominally up-graded to procreation alone. If the dirty sex drive cannot be suppressed in marriage, one can continue to frequent brothels or have extramarital affairs. Franz was horrified, developing a fear of sex as much as a fear of his father. Why this was so is however not quite clear. Other men like his friend Max Brod developed along the lines of what Franz’s father saw as the norm, not that Max had a father like Franz, as far as it is known. In my view this came about as Franz, in his obsession of the physical wellness lifestyle did not turn him into a muscular hulk but rather into a tall, very thin, wispy youth who must have looked quite comical to the average gaze of the girls in his circle of acquaintances. Only a lowly shop girl from his father’s business managed to seduce him, with echoes of his father’s warnings that such low-class girls are only after his money, using sex as a cheap feminine inducement. Comparing a voluptuous, soft female body with his hard, fit, thin, ascetic counterpart, with his genitals assuming a disproportionate dimension, must have been a shock to the system from which he did not recover, lest the woman-in-love-with-him assured him absolutely and patiently that there is absolutely nothing wrong with his body (and his confused, fearful mind). And all this because of his father? Reason to commit ‘symbolic parricide’ as some commentators claimed? Stach seems to steer the letter towards a literary ‘as though’ narrative, ‘not an accurate description of reality’. But Franz does make some fairly ‘realistic’ claims against his father, for example:
But being who we are, marrying is barred to me because it is your very own domain.
Franz cannot conceive of marriage as exemplified by the union between his father and mother. There is speculation about whether or not this letter was ever delivered to his father. The consensus seems to be that it was not. As such it was a cathartic self-analysis that continued for the rest of his life, being imprisoned in the cage of his own making:
… he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned. (p.310)
Kafka was now writing about himself in the third person, the Olympic point of view, an extraordinary gift to look at himself from the outside.
But let’s forget about Oedipus and sex (now that we have your attention) and turn to Stach’s treatment of Kafka’s philosophies – in the plural as they are difficult to pin down. While Kafka was of course familiar with the tenets of Judaism – but did not fully approve of the Zionism of his time apart from romantic visions of going to Palestine with the women he was in love with – there were evidently other world views that had a stronger attraction, foremost being those of Kierkegaard. According to Stach (p.236), Kafka saw himself in Kierkegaard and his ’radical privileging of individual experience’. Indeed, part of Kafka’s charm was that he treated everybody as his equal, and also expected to be treated as such – on the latter score bringing him in great conflict with his father. Kierkegaard’s fascination with the Abraham story ready to sacrifice his son – as the ultimate test of individual submission to God – was however not quite shared by Kafka who wrote to Robert Klopstock about it in a ‘humorous, subversive, and playful approach to the myth’ (Stach, p.237), noting also that Kafka hardly ever used the word ‘God’. This stance is also nicely put by Kafka:
Life on earth cannot be followed by a life beyond because life beyond is eternal and therefore cannot have a temporal connection to life on earth.
Kafka the writer was of course more interested in the philosophies of other writers he admired – blood relatives he called them – like Grillparzer, Dostoevsky, Kleist and Flaubert. Grillparzer seems the odd one out, the revered Austrian dramatist (a contemporary and friend of Beethoven), as he is not noted as presenting any particular world view other than being a classicist with an emphasis on the individual – something that chimed with Kafka (who also liked theatre in general). Grillparzer also was a lifelong bachelor and somewhat of an oddball socially – again something Kafka could identify with. Dostoevsky, Kleist and Flaubert don’t need to be analysed here (Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas has always been a bit of a mystery to me, while serving as a model of resistance to the aristocracy, the novel also seems to suggest that rebellion is counterproductive), as they were admired by many a writer, Kafka included. In general, while Kafka did not represent any philosophy, one might however see him as a forerunner of Zen with his line of:
The woods and the river – they swam past me while I swam in the water.
While Stach missed the Zen aspect, he is correct in saying that Kafka was not interested in abstract knowledge, rather in a personalized experience of knowledge that ‘can penetrate to the core of reality’ (p.134). He does not allow himself to be pinned down, even by his closest cultural influences:
I have not been guided into life by the deeply sinking hand of Christianity, as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the last corner of the Jewish prayer shawl flying by, as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning. (p.243)
Even so, Kafka did have a sense of his greatness (‘I am … a beginning’) despite his perennial denials to the contrary, and despite his inability to shake off his domineering, cruel father. And not that all such fathers subdued their sons and made their lives a misery, as some such sons sought to break free and became even more domineering and cruel than their fathers, cf. Alfred Andersch, The Father of a Murderer (Der Vater eines Mörders), i.e. Heinrich Himmler, the looming history that Kafka, through his early death, escaped (but saw the early beginnings when he was in Munich and read the news about a certain Adolf Hitler).
Which brings me to what I consider probably the most valuable part of Stach’s biography, namely the cataclysmic historical context, seen from Kafka’s point of view. With Vol. 2 leading up to WWI, the view from Prague as a second-rate satellite of Vienna and Berlin was clouded by the propaganda of the Habsburg dynasty as a benign, fatherly (sic) power that sought to protect its vast citizenship from evil non-Austrian extremist nationalists. The assimilated Jews of Prague, like the Kafkas, went along with that line, rooting for country and Kaiser, even if only it suited their business interests. Again, it is Vol. 3 that carries all that is a tragic history from which we have not recovered to this day, and worse, not learning from it but repeating it with potentially even far more horrific, species extinction consequences.
Stach opens Vol. 3 with the chapter entitled ‘The Ants of Prague’, based on Kafka’s diary entry that read:
Sight of people swarming like ants in front of and inside the trench.
This after having inspected the mock army trench display as a popular attraction. This after he had invested 2,000 kroner of his savings in Austrian War Bonds, promising a high interest rate. Since trench warfare in WWI became the defining image still played out in tiresome movies today, it seems an awful irony that a display trench in Prague should have been a sort of local tourist attraction. Kafka’s prescient take of them (and himself) as ‘ants’ seems equally ironic if not tragic, as these ants got stuck in the mud and were sacrificed as canon fodder. Reading a potted history of WWI, one is easily misled by the manoeuvres of the large powers as a sort of chess game that became increasingly lopsided by cornering two kings (Austrian and German Kaisers) whose armies were wiped out like insubstantial black pawns by clever white knights and bishops. The movers and shakers became tabloid figures in Prague while the erstwhile euphoria turned to alarm and then into total disaster.
In May 1915 Kafka is reassessed for military service owing to the decreasing cannon fodder that gets shredded in the trenches (Stach informs us that by that time one fifth of the Austrian army of 5 million had been killed or otherwise incapacitated, many as cripples). Despite his weak constitution he is of course declared fit, and Kafka is ready and willing to join the front, were it not for his superiors at work who declare him as essential staff in a wartime economy. Kafka’s death wish seems odd but might be explained by his realization that death might be preferable to the looming disaster, not to speak of his personal problems. Eastern Jews from Galicia, fleeing the Russian armies, had arrived in Prague in large numbers. Food was hard to come by – not that Kafka was too concerned about it what with his frugal vegetarian diet, and anyway his family was rich enough to get everything from the burgeoning black market – and the mood of the Prague populace, especially amongst the Czech and Jewish, had darkened. The Austrian Germans increasingly fell for the propaganda that Czech and Jewish citizens were undermining the war effort, in an effort, by the Czechs mainly, to gain independence from the hated Austrian German domination. Jews began to seriously consider Zionism as an escape to the promised land, Palestine. Kafka thought the whole situation absurd. Felice was baffled since Franz’s often declared ‘physical condition’ prevented him from marrying but now seemed good enough to want to become a frontline soldier. Betrayal upon betrayal, all round. Nothing makes sense. A kind of civilian war had come to Prague.
Kafka’s boss wouldn’t let him join the army, so he stayed at work at the Insurance Office, with a new added task to raise funds for the many invalid soldiers roaming the streets of Prague. Since Kafka knew all about workplace injuries, the crippled casualties of war were yet another dimension which he described as follows:
Soon after the outbreak of war, a strange apparition, arousing fear and pity, appeared in the streets of our cities, He was a soldier returned from the front. He could only move on crutches or had to be pushed along in a wheelchair. His body shook without cease, as if he were overcome by a mighty chill, or he was standing stock-still in the middle of the tranquil street, in the thrall of his experiences at the front. We see others, too, men who could move ahead only by taking jerky steps; poor, pale, and gaunt, they leaped as though a merciless hand held them by the neck, tossing them back and forth in their tortured movements.
Such dispassionate description is as awfully powerful as Kafka’s later torture story In the penal colony. Events grind on:
Germany declares war on Russia – Swimming in the afternoon.
Italy also declares war. By 1916, Stach notes that the war had caused the brutal dissolution of ethical constraints. By the time of the 1916/1917 winter people began to starve. Kaiser Franz Joseph remained in splendid isolation. When he died in November of 1916, the writing was suddenly on the wall. Dissolution. Tragically this was also Kafka’s time of dissolution: the onset of TB. Franz Kafka now saw everything more clearly with death in the distance. He even asserted himself against his father who called his behaviour ‘abnormal’. Franz retorted (p.221):
Abnormal behaviour is not the worst thing, because normality is, for instance, the World War.
Armistice with Russia. In March 1917 the Tsar had been forced to abdicate. Then the Tsar and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks. Lenin reigned supreme. Jewish Bolshevism became a catchword, so there was great excitement in Prague amongst the many Jewish refugees. In Germany rabid anti-communism merged with anti-Semitism. Acculturated Jews in Prague stuck to the middle ground until there was another momentous development, namely the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. The Prague Zionists, propelled by Buber, including Max Brod, saw the road to salvation. This was predicated on the total defeat of the Central Powers. The subsequent birth of Israel would bring no end of suffering to the Palestinians, to this very day. It is doubtful that Kafka would have emigrated to Israel even if he had survived the holocaust – preferring America, like Felice and her husband.
By 1918 the situation in Prague worsened considerably. The Czech majority targeted both Germans and Jews. Daily street brawls between German and Czech students made it dangerous to venture out for black-market shopping, and for Kafka to make the short trip to his work. From Vienna we have a report from Milena Jesenska-Pollak who had moved there from Prague with her wayward husband (p.326):
There is no fuel, no coal, no wood, no coke … There is nothing to heat the place, nothing to eat …
Milena also reports that there is only one loaf of bread per person per week, and it is hardly edible (‘yellow, hard, old, mouldy’). We also learn that Franz Werfel (who had praised Kafka’s Metamorphosis sky-high) was living in Vienna at the same time, and in November 1918 took part in the Red Guards’ attempted coup d’état. Red Vienna, however, was the moniker for the subsequent rule of the Social Democratic Workers Party, that ran the Vienna municipality from 1918 to 1934, setting new standards of social harmony. Milena eventually writes reports from Vienna for the Prague Tribune, and as we have learned before, Milena translated Kafka’s The Stoker which appeared in the Prague literary weekly Kmen in May 1920 (the editor is a communist).
In 1918 another catastrophe arrived: the Spanish flu. Kafka caught it and with his already diagnosed TB came close to death. By mid-October, in Berlin and Vienna there were 200 deaths per day. There was an even more deadly wave of the Spanish flu in 1919, with estimates of over 20 million deaths worldwide. Compare this with COVID19 that claimed about 7 million world-wide (in NZ in July 2025 the weekly death toll from COVID was still around 10). Censors in Austria and Berlin had suppressed death statistics, by hunger or influenza. The armies of the Central Powers were not just weakened, they were finished. There were open mutinies. Czech soldiers made their way home on their own. Kafka witnesses from his balcony the Czech attempt to declare the Czech Republic, only to be thwarted by a massive contingent of the Austrian military. It would not last long.
On 28th of October 1918 armistice was declared. Austria had in a roundabout way agreed to Czech independence, as demanded by US President Wilson. Again, from his balcony Kafka heard calls of ‘Long live Masaryk, long live Wilson, down with Habsburg’. Habsburg flags were replaced by Czech and American ones. The Czech Republic was declared. There was no intervention. It all went quite peacefully. The national council of Jews – now as part of Czechoslovakia – (with Brod as co-vice chair who kept Kafka well informed) reminded the newly established Czech government of Wilson’s assurances that national minorities, Germans included, must be given protection and treated as equal citizens. Brod who had promoted Czech authors gained the confidence of the Czech administration. Kafka was most impressed (he too fared well, especially when his work was translated into Czech by Milena Jesenska-Pollak, his other great love). Kafka was also fluent in Czech and so escaped the redundancies of German management at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, now under a new Czech name.
While the ethnic Germans in Prague succumbed fairly quietly, this was a different story in an area known as the Sudetenland where ethnic Germans were the majority (this is where my ancestors come from). They demanded either accession to German Austria – as they had been in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire all along – or to Germany. Obviously, the Czech administration did not allow for it and political tensions rose. Reminding these Germans of Wilson’s dictum of guaranteed equal Czech citizenship with continued rights to administer their German lands under a bilingual structure – and reminding them of the total defeat of the German and Austrian empires – the Sudetendeutsche grumbled but had to accept. Of course, as we know, this did not last long. When Hitler came to power, Sudetendeutsche agitators raised the Nazi flags and demanded accession to fascist Germany. Chamberlain unfortunately agreed. I have no idea if and how my ancestors supported Konrad Henlein (born 1898, the same year as my grandmother) and his Nazi-aligned Party. Not that all Sudetendeutsche were on his side. At the formation of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetendeutsche were roughly dived 50/50, i.e. pro-Czech vs anti-Czech. My mother was married to an ethnic Czech, and as such I assume her extended family were on the Czech side. Nevertheless, at the end of WWII practically all ethnic Germans were expelled from their homeland. My grandmother, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became a Czech citizen in 1918, became a German Sudetendeutsche citizen under German occupation, and finally became a German refugee in Bavaria. One wonders what Kafka would have made of this story.
In any case, Franz had already suggested to Ottla to attend an agricultural training institute in Friedland – situated in Sudetenland – a town he knew quite well from his visits as an insurance inspector. Franz contemplated going with Ottla but hesitated because of the tense political situation there (as described above). Why he had recommended Friedland for Ottla is not clear, but she did not come to any grief while studying there.
Czechoslovakia was now allied with France, Russia and to some degree with Britain. The Americans soon lost interest. Kafka went to Schelesen, near Prague, instead of Feiedland, to convalesce yet again.
An interesting historical interlude is unearthed by Stach when he tells the story of Kafka’s sister Elli to whom he recommended a liberal school for her daughter in Hellerau (Dresden). When they went there to inspect the school, a teacher called Lilian Neustätter, advised them not to enrol her daughter (no reason given). Then comes the punchline: Lilian Neustätter is the lover and future wife of the new headmaster, Alexander S. Neill. Stach does not even bother to say that A. S. Neill (BTW same age as Kafka) became famous as a liberal educator with his Summerhill school. Who would have thought?
Another lesson in history comes from Brod’s appearance in Munich in April 1920, where he and Wolff attended Brod’s play The height of feeling at the Kammerspiele. While Brod was received well elsewhere in Germany, here in Bavaria’s capital of Munich he was met with jeers and heckling. Why? Because he was a Jew. Stach (p.342) notes that in the audience there must have been quite a few who had applauded the murder of Gustav Landauer, and two months earlier attended the proclamation of Adolf Hitler in the Hofbräuhaus. The reader may not have heard of Gustav Landauer, unless one is a dedicated anarchist, nor may the reader be familiar with the short-lived history of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (1918 -1919). Stach only mentions Buber who lamented the death of Gustav Landauer, his friend, as a sort of very misguided ideology on the part of Buber:
He totally failed to recognise, Buber said about his murdered friend, that the bloodstream of this alien ethnic organism differs in every respect from his and ours ….
Stach is even more surprised that Kafka, in relation to Buber’s remarks, wrote to Brod:
Perhaps the Jews are not spoiling Germany’s future, but it is possible to conceive of them as having spoiled Germany’s present …
To Stach that sounds like blaming the victims. Obviously, Buber’s misguided if not racist ‘blood’ theories resonate to this very day, while Kafka’s take is in a somewhat different vein, so to speak:
From early on they have forced upon Germany things that might have come to it slowly and in its own way, but which was opposed to because they came from strangers.
There is some truth in the observation that the avantgarde in Germany (and around the world) had always been heavily populated by Jewish intellectuals, artists, scientists, philosophers and of course writers of Kafka’s genius, giving the impression that Jews in general have some sort of extra genetic endowment – which is of course total nonsense, i.e. it is not by nature but by nurture. The history of the Jews is one where one has to be on alert, as a perennial minority to compete with a suspicious majority. I think this is what Kafka was trying to say. Here in NZ, students from minority Asian migrant families typically outperform the majority white student population, precisely because they have to work twice as hard to make the grade.
Gustav Landauer, however, was a Jew who included himself as an equal of all of humanity, neither superior nor inferior, an anarchist and pacifist who saw no ‘blood’ differences, as in fact everyone should know, ‘blood’ being a substance that is the same for every living human being (and even in cockroaches that used to be humans like Georg Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis). Kafka who did not subscribe to Buber’s Zionism, neither subscribed to a radical intellectual like Gustav Landauer – even though he admired both of them in some way.
Further to Landauer (whom I admire) and the Bavarian/Munich Soviet Republic, having lived in Munich as a student and a bit of an anarchist in the early 1970s, and with Kafka’s own adventure in Munich to be told later, I would have liked a bit more information from Stach in these matters, even if only to note that intellectuals such as the economist Lujo Brentano, the conductor Bruno Walter and the writers Heinrich Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke formed the Rat der geistigen Arbeit (Council of Intellectual Work) with Mann as its chairman. Imagine something like this happening today and imagine for it to last forever and a day!
History grinds on, as tragedy and as farce. Kafka’s personal tragedy had reached the point of instructing Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished writings, since his death is now on the cards. As we know, Brod did not comply. In the meantime, by 1921/2, ironically-tragically Kafka’s decline in health met with an increase of his literary fame, what with the elocutionist Ludwig Hardt reciting his work all over Germany and Austria.
Also in the meantime, anti-Semitism in Hungary and Czechoslovakia increased to degree that by 1922 German National students at the German University of Prague refused to accept their diplomas from Jewish professors. Robert Klopstock, Kafka’s loyal young friend dared not to return to his native Hungary lest he be killed there.
Stach also provides an interesting history of the German publishers Wolff and Fischer with the latter gaining ascendancy to end up as the behemoth it is today. Any aspiring writer will know about the often convoluted and disheartening publishing processes or worse, the lack of it. Brod, the ultimate networker amongst all the publishers, always did his best to promote Kafka who in turn was reticent to promote himself even in the slightest, often finding good arguments why he should not be published at all (nevertheless he was always very happy when he did get published). One often wonders if it is just good luck to be published or if there is some good reason for it, i.e. the publisher recognizing a literary talent versus all the manuscripts that are rejected as not deserving. Brod who relentlessly published in every medium known to mankind, or so Stach seems to suggest occasionally, never achieved the literary acclaim that was awarded to Kafka who seemed not to care at all to be published (and wanted all his unpublished work burnt after his death). Literature moves in mysterious ways! Stach unearths a literary gem by the lesser-known Franz Blei who characterized Kafka in his 1922 Bestiary of Modern Literature as follows (p.474):
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 above noted increases of anti-Semitism reached a new height when in Germany with the murder of Walter Rathenau in June 1922. Stach, with non-German readers in mind, could have provided a bit more historical context, noting at least that the responsible Freikorps operating out of Munich were also the ones who murdered many of the Bavarian Soviet Republic some two years before Rathenau’s murder. Stach only records Kafka’s sarcastic comment (p. 483):
Incomprehensible that they let him live as long as he did.
Stach then engages in some historical analysis concerning the Zionist escape plans: Palestine. He notes that by 1922 only 11% of the 3 million people living in Palestine were Jewish. Only 3% of the arable land was Jewish owned. When Hugo Bergmann, who had emigrated to Jerusalem from Prague, returned in 1923 for a lecture tour speaking of ‘The Situation in Palestine’ Kafka learned that it was not a rosy picture. Stach explained this as a typical British colonialist mindset, i.e. leaving the two main protagonists, Arabs and Jews to sort it out amongst themselves. Conditions were harsh, wages were low, and the German-speaking Jews were a minority amongst the mainly eastern European immigrants. Obviously not a destination for a now retired lawyer like Kafka. Besides, Jewish immigrants with TB were sent straight back home.
When in 1923, to the surprise of everybody, Kafka moved to Berlin to be cared for by his last love-of-his life, Dora Diamant, hyper-inflation had taken hold in Germany, in particular in Berlin. The exchange rate between US Dollar and Deutsche Mark was being calculated first in millions and then in billions. The extreme economic woes suffered in Germany are often explained as consequences of the harsh reparations demanded from the allied victors of WWI. In January 1923 the French occupied the Ruhr region, the industrial powerhouse of Germany, carting off anything valuable. Berlin was suffering from hunger as much as during the war. Social disparities grew to alarming proportions. Stach tells us that there was ‘aggressive begging, holdups in broad daylight, spontaneous mobs and looting and violent confrontations with the police …’. Kafka and Dora survived with generous help from Prague. Kafka lived in relatively secure conditions in Steglitz but was not far from the Jewish Scheunenviertel where police could hardly contain the mobs looting form Jewish shops, businesses and even private residences. The only thing still working at Kafka’s residence was, strangely enough, the telephone – a machine that Kafka detested.
In December 1923 the German currency reform brought hyper inflation under control. Austerity in government spending saw millions of public servants lose their jobs. Nevertheless, a new publication house in Berlin called Die Schmiede seemed promise and deliver generous royalties for prospective writers. Kafka negotiated a good contract but never saw the money as Die Schmiede went bankrupt by 1925. As such Kafka’s meagre pension needed to be supplemented from his Prague donors. Kafka’s health further deteriorated during the ice-cold Berlin winter (when my future wife – we married in Wedding, a district so called – first arrived in West-Berlin in 1977 it was winter and the thermometer was minus 23 degrees Celsius, the coldest day we ever experienced in our life). Kafka returned to Prague with his retinue of carers. Finally, there was a last move to a sanatorium in Austria. History comes to a standstill. Dora and Robert see to Kafka’s every need in his hour of need. Kafka died in June 1924. Stach like many other biographers (see my next review of Roger Hickin’s biography of Peter Olds) unfortunately count down the year, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds with whatever was the ‘last’ time/words/word as a morbid sequence of inevitability – one that reads like a medical horror story.
More importantly, Stach, in his epilogue briefly informs us about the really horrible facts of life and death, like what happened to Franz’s three sisters, being murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, together with a long list of relatives, friends and acquaintances. One should never succumb to Stalin’s saying that ‘one death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a mere statistic’ however true it seems in our age of constant death and destruction.
Did Stach, in the end, shed a few tears, as I did? Does Stach, the ultimate biographer, stay in the shadows (like Kafka) or is he now a celebrity amongst Kafka scholars, basking in the light? In a wide ranging 2015 interview with SZ he said the following:
Als ich zum Beispiel das Sterbekapitel schrieb, konnte ich tagelang nicht aus dem Haus. Es wäre undenkbar gewesen, mit irgendwem Mittagessen zu gehen und über Tagespolitik und Wetter zu reden. Ich versuchte mich in die Situation eines Menschen zu versetzen, der in einem Sanatorium unter Höllenquallen um sein Leben kämpft. Und ich hatte nach der langen Arbeit des biografischen Schreibens tatsächlich das Gefühl, einen nahen Menschen zu verlieren.
https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/literatur/es-hatte-sich-einiges-aufgestaut-81047
There is also a caption that reads ‘Ohne Empathie ist jeder Biograf verloren’. This is fair enough for Kafka but what about biographies of Hitler and his henchmen (cf. Andersch’ less than empathetic story about Himmler’s father, cited above) ? And even if the subject is a good man like Kafka, too much empathy can spill into sycophancy. My 2006 biography of Noam Chomsky (long before he was implicated with Epstein) was very sympathetic/empathetic as I agreed with most of his linguistics, politics and philosophy, hence some reviewers accused me of the crime of hagiography, especially the ones who disagreed with Chomsky on every count. Presumably there must be some literary critics and hacks who dismiss Kafka as third rate or worse, but they must be very few, hence Stach does not have to contend with any of them. Occasionally he upbraids writers like Canetti of getting the wrong end of the stick, especially in Kafka’s treatment of Felice. Still, Canetti was an admirer of Kafka. Personally, I find Kafka’s behaviour – as detailed by Stach – on the neurotic side but I too am a great admirer of Kafka’s literary output. Maybe Stach is close to Kafka in his personality, maybe too close?
Shelley Frisch, the translator in her introduction in Vol.1 makes the observation that in her extensive experience of translating biographies, Stach achieves something extraordinary, i.e. telling ‘what it is like to be Kafka’. I am not sure if this means anything in particular, as she praises Stach for his ‘beautiful’ style of writing as an exercise of self-promotion, i.e. by implication she too translates beautifully – which I presume she does by and large. Maybe Kafka, Stach and Frisch all share a certain personality trait that makes them very compatible – to good but sometimes uncritical effect.
Finally, a few words on Kafka’s literary output as somewhat divorced from Stach’s biography. Obviously in a biography of a writer there must be plenty of space given over to providing details on both the genesis of the oeuvre and a critical appraisal of it. Equally obvious to me is the dictum that every reader of Kafka’s literary works must make up their own mind about the merits or otherwise of what they have read, not as literary scholars or students of literature, but as an individual communication with Kafka the writer. As such I have nothing much to say, only to pick out two short stories.
As Stach makes the point that Kafka’s Metamorphosis has become a virtual Kafka brand, one is of course interested in what Kafka’s own evaluation was – apart from downplaying practically all of his literary output; interestingly the Metamorphosis story suffers from what most of his writings suffer from, namely a good ending. This is a big ask as all of his narratives are so compelling from the beginning, reaching multiples highlights as the stories develop, only to peter out in a lesser light. Maybe Kafka should have stopped the Metamorphosis story line when the maid disposed of Gregor’s dead, metamorphized body. Nevertheless, as Stach found out, Kafka’s contemporary Franz Werfel was so blown away by the story that he wrote:
Dear Kafka, you are so pure, new, independent, and perfect that one ought to treat you if you were already dead and immortal.
In the penal colony was too ‘painful’ for his publisher Wolff, what with Kafka replying in his typical humble understatements with a dose of the crux of the matter, one that Wolff is incapable of comprehending:
Your criticism of the painful element accords completely with my opinion, but then I feel the same way about almost everything I have written so far … To shed light on this last story, I need only add that the painfulness is not particular to it alone but rather that of our times in general …
The parable of In the penal colony is as unpalatable as any depiction of real torture, execution, death sentence, total war and whatever insane brutality has been inflicted upon humanity throughout history, and now in WWI in Kafka’s backyard. In In the penal colony the executioner cum judge is so convinced of his torture machine that he is ultimately impelled to carry out his own sentence of death/suicide by it (indeed every executioner should give it a try himself). Given the tropical setting and the executioner speaking French, one wonders if Kafka had read about the penal colony in New Caledonia where the French communards were imprisoned and no doubt tortured. Has Kafka lived long enough to witness the Nazi horrors he no doubt would have recognised the sick inventiveness of the gas chambers as a parallel of his story. The technical details escape most renditions of such horrors. For example, imagine the technical preparation of administering lethal injections, as done in some US jurisdictions. The hypocrisy of denial is ever present. When Kafka read this story to an audience (Rilke included) in Munich (his only public reading outside Prague), there were reports of overly sensitive (hypocritical?) souls fainting and having to leave the auditorium. Reviews were damning and Kafka typically agreed, saying with a heavy dose of sarcasm that he shouldn’t have read his ‘dirty, little story’. Equally he noted Rilke’s remarks that Kafka’s Stoker had been lauded by him but that In the penal colony and Metamorphosis did not have the same effect. Kafka concludes, again with a dose of subtle irony (if not sarcasm):
This observation may not be easy to understand, but it is perceptive.
Had Kafka lived to see his literary fame go stratospheric, he might have been bewildered at the turn-around. Had his readership finally understood what he was writing about? Or was it just the fascination of his personal life that engendered a flood of biographies, collections of letters, the women in his life? Had his posthumous success, especially in North America, anything to do with the burgeoning Jewish-influenced literature, with the likes of Roth, Bellow, Salinger, Mailer and Miller? Or anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals like Chomsky, Finkelstein and Beinart? Or was it just the zeitgeist that chimed with Kafka, the angst that pervades much of the new world? Stach in his epilogue seems to disagree, offering his own conclusion (p.575):
His world no longer exists. Only his language lives.
Surely a possible interpretation as well. Stach, who dug so deeply to unearth many a gem but also a bit of detritus, deserves his reputation as the ultimate biographer of Kafka, as does the translator, Shelly Frisch, whose impeccable US-English is as scholarly as Stach’s original German – or so I assume (although I have a particular interest in the art of translation, I am not sure I will embark on the somewhat ‘painful’ task to read all three volumes in German as well, and subsequently comment on matters of translation if not exegesis).
Was würde Herr Dr. Franz Kafkas Zu- und Widerspruch dazu sein?
