Kafka

Reviewed by: Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach Francis Michael Sharp Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years. Translation by Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. 581 pp. Originally published in German in 2002 (Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidung), this second volume of a three-volume Kafka biography was translated into English and brought out in hardback by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2005. The paperback English version was published in 2013 by Princeton University [End Page 133] Press. The last volume of the series chronicling the final years of Kafka’s short life appeared in Germany in 2008; the English version, Kafka: The Years of Insight, in 2013. The first volume covering his childhood was published in German in 2014; the English translation is forthcoming. The years covered in this phase of his life (1910–1915) found the writer living in a physically and psychologically uncomfortable situation in the family home in Prague, helping run the family business while writing drafts of several works of fiction that would later become masterpieces of world literature. The conflict between his literary aspirations and his domestic expectations intensified when he met and became engaged to the Berlin native Felice Bauer. Stach has mined the thousands of pages of Kafka’s diary entries during these years as well as the letters of the couple to chart the course of this tumultuous relationship, one that in the end was undermined by Kafka’s constant vacillations. Based on this voluminous source material as well as the correspondence and diary entries of family and friends such as Max Brod, Stach is able to follow the shifts in incredible detail, at times from one day to the next. Stach’s solid academic preparation—his dissertation on Kafka as well as his collaborative work on the definitive edition of the writer’s collected works—prepared him well for this monumental task. But it is not only scholarly preparation, organizational skills, and lucid writing that bring life to the pages of this biography. Stach displays a deep and empathetic understanding of his subject’s inner turmoil, as evidenced by his mood swings and the contradictory messages to his fianceé, of the painful emotional split between Kafka’s conviction that he should marry, for example, and his anxiety about being able to fulfill the role of husband, either sexually or as a writer increasingly convinced that a marital bond would destroy his artistic destiny. Excruciatingly thorough, yet permeated with doubt and ambivalence, the eighteen-page letter in which Kafka proposes marriage is indeed a “curious” document, as Elias Canetti wrote in Kafka’s Other Trial, which Stach also cites (304). Yet Kafka’s diaries and letters are the written reflections of lived experience. The biographer’s empathetic insight into this experience as well as his familiarity with the numerous other literary voices that he cites enable him to re-create this subjective reality in much the same way that writers of fiction give life to their characters. Moreover, for contemporary readers accustomed to other expectations and “parameters of happiness” (2), Stach recognizes that Kafka’s life is likely to seem fundamentally deficient in almost every way: socially, politically, [End Page 134] domestically, sexually, psychologically, and so on. His brilliance as a biographer, however, is to temper this impression by embedding Kafka’s life in its historical context, a context shaped by social, familial, cultural, and political forces, forces that naturally shaped the lives of every citizen in the final turbulent phase of the Habsburg monarchy. Stach lends further authentication to the attitudes, hopes, and desires expressed in the personal documents by capturing the atmosphere of time and place, the Zeitgeist that moved millions in Central Europe. In the book’s prologue (16–20), he begins his story with the broadest perspective imaginable by describing a recurrent celestial event in 1910 that held much of the planet’s population in awe and anxiety. He literally reaches to the stars by following Kafka and two of the lesser lights in the literary firmament— Max Brod and Franz Blei—as they hike together up to higher ground on the evening of May 18, 1910, in order to view the return of Halley’s Comet

Art · Art history · Biography · German · Linguistics · Literature · Classics · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy