Franz Kafka biography by Reiner Stach explores young writer’s fears

The final instalment in a biography of the gifted Czech writer reveals the fears and inspirations that shaped him.

Franz Kafka was scarred by his father’s cruelty. Picture: Alamy

The young man transformed into a monstrous cockroach while asleep in his bedroom at night; the hunger artist performing dutifully in his cage; the remote penal colony, with its death machine that inscribes a fatal sentence on a condemned man’s skin; and the mysterious Trial, above all, the opaque, relentless trial of the bank officer Jozef K.

Where do they come from, these dark dreams in narrative? What explains them — what distinctive features in the background of their creator, Franz Kafka, what tensions within his society or family, what aspects of his schooling, his early friendships and first experiences?

All these different elements are presented in detail and probed with subtle, forensic care in Kafka: The Early Years, the first volume of Reiner Stach’s three-part biography, which, by a suitable piece of Kafkarna, appears, due to archival access problems, only after the prior publication of its two sequels. Now the portrait is complete. We can trace, through Stach’s measured narrative, the full course of Kafka’s brief life, stretching from his birth in the dying days of the Hapsburg empire in 1883 to his death from tuberculosis in 1924, just as the shadows of Nazism were beginning to take form. The result is not merely a biography of painstaking thoroughness but a piece of psychological investigation and literary detective work without clear parallel. It gives its readers a new Kafka. It explains much that has long seemed obscure; yet, by paradox, the more its author-hero is grounded in his context, and the more we grasp of the initial sources of his imagination, the more unfathomable his gifts become. The haze clears; he stands alone.

Franz Kafka monument in the Jewish quarter of Prague. Picture: Alamy

No stereotypes or easy assumptions about his milieu or cultural influences help much in situating Kafka. Indeed, we would scarcely read him with such care and attention if he were simply a product of his multiplicit times — a German-speaking Jew coming of age in the new capital of Czechoslovakia, leaving the high bourgeois era for the travails of the 20th century and the looming Great War. Stach is emphatic on this point. Kafka was radically different from his contemporaries: different in the degree of his linguistic skill, in his flair for literary form, above all in his scorn for standard cultural fashions.

His writing was magical in a sense that was utterly unlike the alleged magic of Prague, because every one of his lines passed through the filter of a daunting, often ice-cold intellectual alertness and an unyielding reflexivity saturated with imagery. Kafka was not merely captive to the city of his birth like thousands of others; he was bound and compelled to get to the bottom of the mystery of this attachment.

This unending quest for clarity and self-awareness gives his stories, letters and diaries a tone one rarely finds in the works of the time. His tales are wholly free of schmaltz and sentiment; there is nothing in them of the melancholy murk of Central European tradition. They seem brightly lit and sharply drawn. The uncanny lurks close at hand, but it is real; there is nothing ghostly or indistinct about its presence. The accepted contours of the world are what must be questioned and redefined.

Given this authorial flavour, and Kafka’s desire to know himself through words and use writing as his private guide rail for making sense of things, it is natural that Stach looks to psychology and gives great attention to the most Freudian-seeming of Kafka’s texts, the book-length undelivered letter in which the details of his relationship with his overbearing father are anatomised. Hermann Kafka was a successful merchant, driven, straightforward, well-built. His eldest child and only son was tall, thin and almost dandyish in his refined fragility. They were virtual opposites and in constant opposition. But the handwritten, hundred-page “Letter to His Father” was not a conventional analysis of troubles within a family so much as a description of “a real relationship’s fantasized dimensions”, first drafted in the hope that confession and filial candour might lead to “mutual enlightenment” and then finished off in despair. There was nothing to hope for: Kafka had nothing in common with his father.

“The way I am,” he wrote, “I am (apart, of course, from my fundamental disposition and the influence of life itself) as the outcome of your upbringing and of my compliance.

“That this outcome is nevertheless distressing to you, indeed that you unconsciously refuse to acknowledge it as the outcome of your methods of upbringing, is due to the fact that your hand and the material I offered were so alien to each other.”

Kafka knew himself: he was reflective, he was introspective, he saw the way that episodes of confrontation sank deeply into him. The crucial night when his father refused his “whimperings” for water and shut him out on the apartment veranda had scarred him.

“Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting vision that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason and drag me out of bed into the night — and that I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.”

The impact of this scene resonated through Kafka’s life, but he understood it had not caused the anguish and the anxiety that ruled him so much as brought those feelings to the surface of his mind and “exposed an unconsciously existing distress that ran much deeper”. Here, then, in the after-echoes of a childhood episode, is the key theme that sounds constantly in Kafka’s writings: a sense of breakage that has no name, no cause, no ending. It is this void in the heart of his being, Stach argues, that spurs him on to write — and thus makes him into what he is, and drives him to transform himself. The procedure he adopted can be simply expressed: Kafka anticipated exclusion. His traumatic expulsion by his father was not so much the cause of his sufferings as an expression of them, and therefore an event to be faced. The “letter”, which is composed with all the gravity and style of a piece of literature, is much more than a recitation of his ordeal. In its pages, Kafka takes charge: “The once-abandoned child, caught up in passive sorrow, regains interpretive authority over his own life.”

For Stach, it is precisely Kafka’s need to tell the story of his life and being that drives him to provide an accurate, unsparing portrait of himself. Literature, then, could be seen not as the escape path he took to flee from life but the only way back he found into the surrounding world.

That world, in all its vivid, fast-shifting contours, is richly painted in this volume, just as in the two books that cover Kafka’s later years. Fine-grained chapters delve into the dress conventions of the Bohemian capital, the elaborate sociology of the coffee houses where aspiring writers and artists gathered, the complex, changing relationship between the native language of the country, Czech, and German, the language of the social and economic elite.

For the young Kafka, German was the language of authority, the language of law, and force. It was his familial tongue, his medium of expression, yet Czech was the language spoken to him by those who cared for him in childhood, and time and again at critical moments in his life words of telling, tender affection are spoken to him in Czech, by friends and strangers, by lovers and servants.

“I have never lived among the German people,” he wrote once to Milena Jesenska, the great flame of his adult years, who was herself a native Czech speaker: “German is my mother tongue and is therefore natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate.”

The divide between the two cultures of Prague was thus mirrored in Kafka’s mind. It was on his lips and in the words he spoke, it was a split between worlds that expressed itself around him every day. The city itself was changing, though. Not only were Czech political forces assuming control of the nation’s destiny, the heart of old Prague was being refashioned in those years. The medieval Jewish ghetto, close to where the Kafka family lived, was levelled and replaced with smart avenues lined with apartment buildings. The tide of modern technology was celebrated at a Jubilee exhibition that served as a rallying point for Czech industry and Czech national pride.

Darker accents were also being heard. A gathering by German students late in 1897 provoked a counter-surge of Czech nationalist riots targeting German shops, clubs and businesses in the heart of the capital. The Jews of Prague became a target. There was looting and large-scale damage to property, and even if this “December Storm” of violence subsided quickly and had nothing of the flavour of an anti-Semitic pogrom, it was Kafka’s first experience of collective violence against Jews, and it came when he was just 14. The school he attended was ransacked by the rampaging mobs and stayed shut for five days; his parents were in terror lest their shopfront and home be attacked.

The Prague riots and upheaval have made little mark in the historical record, and are now quite overshadowed by the bleak annals of the mid-20th century, but Stach gives the episode a degree of prominence. For Kafka, in its wake, there was now something unstable and menacing in the settled order of his social world. He was also increasingly prey to insecurities and anxieties about his performance at school. For all his brilliance as a student, he feared examinations, and, as he confesses in his letter to his father, he even cheated on one occasion to be certain of a pass.

This particular incident is fleshed out by Stach in his charming little book of offcuts from the main biography, Is That Kafka? — a compendium of 99 “finds” that serve to complicate the standard image of the author as a gloomy isolate. Kafka and his fellow conspirators were daunted by the difficulty of their looming Greek exam. They needed to see their teacher’s notebook with the list of questions. They hit on an effective ploy: the oldest, most worldly of their number seduced the teacher’s housekeeper, procured the crucial notebook and copied out the vital questions. The upshot: good grades — and, for Kafka, a lingering, guilty anguish that emerges in his writings as a constant fear of tests, examinations, assessment and judgment.

What kind of young man was he, on the edge of adulthood, both shy and flirtatious, retiring and flamboyant, convinced that life’s fixed prison trapped him and at the same time sure that he could use the powers of his ideas and thoughts to fight free? His close friend in those early years, Hugo Bergmann, saw in Kafka an unbending power of the will: “Since your childhood, you have been unconsciously searching for a mission in life. You could swing up to the sun and stretch your dreams all the way to the sky. What could cripple your strength? And you were always on your own and that’s how you got the strength to be alone.”

Stach sees both an inner resolve in his subject and a capacity for soaking up whatever scraps and stray details life brought his way. Kafka was agile-minded, of course, but he was also empirical; he gathered vast mounds of information and took it into himself, and that gift lent his later works “the illusory impression of meteoric originality, utterly without grounding in experience”.

This assessment helps explain the consistent method of the biography. Each of the three volumes pays close attention to events in the public sphere in Prague, dwells on their impact on Kafka and traces their echoes and resurfacings in the letters, diaries and stories of his later years. The looming bulk of Prague’s Hradcany reappears in the pages of The Castle, just as Kafka’s holiday trip to Riva provides the backdrop for his short story of the wandering Hunter Gracchus. Almost every geographic feature of the novels can be paralleled in the humdrum experience of the Prague day-to-day. Kafka himself liked to interweave place and reflection, as if seeking to staple the free flow of his ideas to specific circumstances. He left clues in his dairies for those who read him in later times.

“One day, many years ago,” he wrote in 1920, “I sat on the slope of the Laurenziberg, feeling decidedly sad. I was considering 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 …” — then he continues, qualifying, modifying, shifting eventually into the third person: “But he could not wish in this fashion, for his wish was not a wish, but only a vindication, a bourgeois rendition of this nothingness, a hint of playfulness he wanted to lend to the nothingness, into which he had scarcely taken his first few conscious steps at that time, but already felt it was his element. It was a sort of farewell he was then taking from the illusory world of youth …”

This famous passage, so typical of Kafka in its wanderings and revisions and repeated questionings that fall back upon themselves, so unforgiving in its self-scrutiny, stands for Stach at the centre of the quest for his subject. He glosses it in detail.

At one of the most beautiful spots in Prague, with the Vltava River and the panorama of the city at his feet, Kafka came upon the central wish of his life and recognised its consequences.

The view of life he was developing needed to be expressed in written words, and even then it fell short as a way of seeing the world:

It was not religion or philosophical theory, but literary works that made him realize that the full life he was yearning for and the nothingness over which every living being was hovering (himself in particular) were not mutually exclusive notions. The contrary: fleeting phenomena required heightened concentration, and the prospect of black nothingness intensifies any details that are seen.

Austere doctrine! Such were the ideas taking form in Kafka’s head as his student years began, and he entered on a course of legal studies, remaining all the while loyal to his love of writing, which he could indulge at the Reading and Lecture Hall of German Students in the heart of town. It was here, in the autumn of 1902, that he met the “remarkably eloquent and extremely striking” self-appointed prodigy of Prague letters, a man who would play a vital part in his future life and afterlife — Max Brod, then just 18 and already on the path of celebrity and fame.

For novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick, Brod is to be viewed as Kafka’s indispensable “confidant and champion, first reader and first listener”. For essayist Walter Benjamin, by contrast, Kafka’s friendship with the utterly mediocre Brod was one of the biggest mysteries in his unfathomable life. One thing is beyond doubt: without Brod, who revered Kafka and adored his work, and became, eventually, his literary executor and refused direct instructions to destroy his unpublished manuscripts, we simply would not know Kafka’s name today. Brod wrote the first biography of his friend and prepared Kafka’s posthumous works for publication, tidying, prettifying, interpreting them with a faintly religious slant. Their friendship, for all its waxing and waning, was indisputably the key bond of Kafka’s life; it runs through Stach’s three volumes like a red thread.

The paradox is worth dwelling on an instant. Brod, in the scheme of things, was a creature wholly of his own time and no other: a self-promoter, a networker, a fashion-courting boulevardier. Yet on first meeting Kafka he was struck. He had, somehow, the capacity to see Kafka in a true light. Brod swiftly swung into action, talking up his protege. He began urging editors to print Kafka’s early works. The pair exchanged ideas and shared experiences and confidences; they travelled together through Switzerland, Italy and France.

In due course, Brod introduced Kafka to Felice Bauer, the long-suffering fiancee who became recipient and preserver of Kafka’s most profound correspondence. Stach gives a subtle account of this strange literary friendship and its utility for Kafka, who needed a close, companionable foil yet was inclined to limit and control even his closest social contacts with deliberate care. He was already set on his path — the road of self-transcendence through writing.

Here he is, towards the end of a well-known letter to the polymathic Oskar Pollak, setting out his credo: writing was a way to open up man’s knowledge of the world. “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, why are we reading it? So it makes us happy? My God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if need be. What we do need are the books that affect us like a calamity that causes us great pain, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”

What is this doctrine? A plea for writing as chemical solvent; for writing as magic balm; as therapeutic cure of the mind’s disquiets? Or something more, something wordless, elusive, beyond the reach of anything but metaphor. Kafka was already formulating this picture in his 20th year. When he died of consumption, aged only 40, he had spent his best efforts in fulfilment of his quest. He had his literary models and heroes, of course — Friedrich Hebbel, Thomas Mann, above all Gustave Flaubert, the cool, affectless Flaubert of the Education Sentimentale, a book he persuaded Brod to read with him in the original French. It was a novel, he confided in a subsequent, somewhat telling letter to Felice, that “for many years has been as dear to me as are only two or three people; whenever and wherever I’ve opened it, it has startled and absorbed me completely, and I’ve always felt like the spiritual son of this author, albeit a weak and awkward one”.

The man “made of literature” is taking form. As the first volume of Stach’s masterpiece of immersive biography draws to a close, its interplay between Kafka’s internal dramas and the unfolding political events of Central Europe well-established, Kafka’s private diaristic writings come to dominate the narrative.

From this point in his life on, the confidential record of his passing ideas and intimations provide a matchless portrait of his mind and heart. He included everything in his notes and sketchings. These are the fragments that stand behind much in the life-narrative Stach has shaped, and they convey to an uncanny degree the way Kafka felt and understood the experiences of his life. They contain the elements that went into his creative furnace:

Everything that was on his mind, with varying degrees of fictionality: microscopic sensory impressions, observations about his family, the street, the music hall and cinema, spontaneous pictorial notions, memories, dreams and daydreams, perceptions about his own body and those of others, physical and gestural anomalies, also soliloquies, drafts of letters, memorable literary passages and excerpts, and lead-ins to expansive reflections and narrative texts.

Stach portrays the diaries and notebooks as a “vestibule” of literature, its doors open to the reality Kafka was experiencing, its inner reaches leading away from life towards the transformations of art. The diaries are thus a kind of writing school with a single pupil, a school where Kafka could seek to transform his sense of his own incoherence into a mosaic, fragments brought into a whole.

The book draws to a close that is just a beginning: Kafka, fresh from a trip with Brod to Paris, is resting up at the Erlenbach naturopathic sanatorium on the shores of Lake Zurich, a stay that presages the long sojourns he would spend at health clinics across Central Europe during his slow descent to death. An elderly lady with a deck of solitaire cards happens to be in the near-deserted reading room with Kafka and sees him making his entries in his diary, recording impressions, memories, the passing details of the scene around him. “What are you writing there, anyway?” she asks him. And so we end, in fitting fashion, with the answers to that question still ahead, and Kafka’s journey through words towards self-mastery just beginning to take flight.

Nicolas Rothwell is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Quicksilver.

Kafka, The Early Years

By Reiner Stach

Translated by Shelley Frisch

Princeton University Press, 564pp, $79.99 (HB)

Is that Kafka? — 99 Finds

By Reiner Stach

Translated by Kurt Beals New Directions Press, 312pp, $24.95

METAMORPHOSIS

A poem by Claire Potter

I wake inside a spider at the pivot of a web. It feels like a graduation from my

previous state until the breeze starts up and my webbed skirt starts to give. I cling to

the silk threads, tilting backwards and forwards as though pinned to a warbling

rocking chair. It is in this fashion that I notice other pendulate spiders bemoaning

the breeze, many are spread-eagled across the hedgerow or pulled in tangents

between the maple and the ivied wall. Things quieten, the breeze softens. Stasis

proffers a garden full of spiders doing patchwork.

I peer out from my lacy steeple. My eyes dissect ‘IL ov eN ew Yo rk 20 07’ on a

discarded mug — cross-eyed, the sun rotates in a wheel of sixteen. I’m whispering a

name — Rumpelstilzchen? But of course I wonder about nothing other than the wind

or the rain, or perhaps the fly or the bee around whom I will wrap my golden thread

turning the benumbed form into a warm spindle — into a feast made innocent

again.