Synopses & Reviews
This is the first of a three-volume, definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Eighty years after his death in 1924, Kafka remains one of the most intriguing figures in the history of world literature. Now, after more than a decade of research, working with over four thousand pages of journal entries, letters, and literary fragments, Reiner Stach re-creates the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915. These are the years of Kafka's fascination with early forms of Zionism despite his longing to be assimilated into the minority German culture in Prague; of his off-again, on-again engagement to Felice Bauer; of the outbreak of World War I; and above all of the composition of his seminal works-The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Judgment, and The Trial.
Kafka:The Decisive Years-at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and an original contribution to the art of literary biography.
Review
PRAISE FROM GERMANY FOR
KAFKA: THE DECISIVE YEARS"Astonishingly, there was no good biography of Kafka. Finally, here it is."--Die Zeit
"The first great biography of Franz Kafka . . . exciting and instructive from the first to the last page."--Tagesanzeiger
Review
"In his examination of Kafka during the years he wrote most of his major texts, this excellent biographer is a man facing a man facing a mystery."
Review
"I cant say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stachs book."
Forward Magazine
Review
"This is a masterpiece of inspired biographical writing, an intricate but empathetic portrayal of an elusive author."
Review
"I canand#8217;t say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stachand#8217;s book."
About the Author
REINER STACH is a widely respected writer, editor, and scholar. After working extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works, he devoted more than a decade to researching and writing this biography. He lives in Hamburg.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction 1
PROLOGUE: The Black Star 16
At Home with the Kafkas 21
Bachelors, Young and Old 42
Actors, Zionists, Wild People 54
Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar 71
Last Stop Jungborn 86
A Young Lady from Berlin 94
The Ecstasy of Beginning: "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" 108
A Near Defenestration 119
The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman 134
Love and a Longing for Letters 145
Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues 159
The Bauer Family 169
America and Back: The Man Who Disappeared 175
The Lives of Metaphors: "The Metamorphosis" 192
The Fear of Going Mad 206
Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door 226
1913 231
The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration 242
Invention and Exaggeration 253
Sexual Trepidation and Surrender 266
The Working World: High Tech and the Ghosts of Bureaucracy 281
The Proposal 297
Literature, Nothing but Literature 324
Three Congresses in Vienna 350
Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva 368
Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives 379
An All-Time Low 390
Kafka and Musil 401
Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism 413
Tribunal in Berlin 433
The Great War 444
Self-Inflicted Justice: The Trial and "In the Penal Colony" 464
The Return of the East 484
The Grand Disruption 493
No-Man's-Land 508
Acknowledgments 517
Translator's note 519
Key to abbreviations 521
Notes 523
Bibliography 551
Photo credits 563
Index 565