Franz Kafka experiences a renaissance on the centenary of his death
Published: Wednesday, May 29th 2024, 10:50
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Franz Kafka's stories and novels are part of the canon of world literature - and inspire films and comics. He himself did not live to see this. On June 3, 1924, Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 40.
If Franz Kafka were to walk through his Prague today, he would be amazed: there is a streetcar decorated with quotes from his texts. An eleven-metre-high sculpture of his head weighing several tons rotates there. An exhibition called "Kafkaesk" is running in a gallery. And in the bookshops of the Czech capital, tourists buy his books in all the world's languages.
Almost unknown during his lifetime
When Kafka died 100 years ago, on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna, he was far from world fame. His novel fragments "The Trial", "The Castle" and "The Missing Man" had remained unpublished. We have only Kafka's close friend Max Brod to thank for the fact that we can admire these works today. He ignored the last wishes of his fellow writer: Kafka wanted Brod to burn everything completely.
On the 100th anniversary of his death, Kafka is more present in television, cinema and theater than he has been for a long time. "Kafka would be shocked if he could witness what is happening right now," said his biographer Reiner Stach a few days ago at the Prague Book Fair. At the end of his life, Kafka considered himself a failed writer because he left behind many fragments and never finished any of his novels. "If he were to experience this now, it would turn his balance sheet completely upside down," said Stach.
Kafka's magnum opus "The Trial" begins with one of the most famous first sentences in world literature: "Someone must have slandered Josef K., because without him having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning." Right from the start, the reader is drawn into a mysterious world of justice. Why is Josef K. arrested? Why is he still allowed to go to work? But instead of going for a resolution like a crime novel, everything becomes even stranger with every page - right up to the execution in a quarry.
Key to understanding
"The Trial" has been published in a new annotated edition to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, edited by Kafka expert Stach. He sticks to original spellings such as "verläumdet" instead of "verleumdet". He goes into religious and psychological interpretations of the text - only to come to the conclusion that the search for the "only suitable key to this novel" has proved to be a mistake.
Andreas Kilcher, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at ETH Zurich, is also looking for a key to understanding Kafka's texts. In his recently published book "Kafka's Workshop. The Writer at Work", he begins by asking how Kafka's texts work. Kilcher, who allowed his book to mature over two decades and also incorporated suggestions from Reiner Stach, among others, assumes that Kafka was an attentive contemporary who described himself as a "greedy" reader. According to him, Kafka closely followed the important discourses around 1900, for example on psychoanalysis, Marxism, Zionism or occultism, and used them like building blocks or fragments from which he constructed complex, fractured and enigmatic texts.
Behind the dark facade of his texts, Kafka often concealed a biting sense of humor. "Was he a cheerful person?" his companion Max Brod was once asked in a television interview. "That's saying too much! He wasn't as depressed as he is seen today, but you can't call him cheerful," was the subtle reply. It is just one of many scenes that illustrator Nicolas Mahler depicts with sharp strokes in his comic biography "Completely Kafka".
Humorous elements
"Due to his outstanding powers of observation and his ability to perceive things from different perspectives, there are many comic moments in his writings," says Mahler. His aim was to bring out the humorous elements in Kafka without producing a parody. Mahler was helped by the fact that Kafka had a lesser-known talent: "I studied Kafka's drawings for a long time and incorporated them into my own drawings."
All that remains of Kafka's birthplace not far from Prague's Old Town Square is the entrance portal, which was used during reconstruction after a fire. The writer's German-Jewish parents ran a haberdashery business and struggled to climb the social ladder. Kafka had the burden of being the only son, who studied law and later worked at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Kafka only devoted his free time - and often entire nights - to his real passion, writing.
It is the tragedy of his life that the eternal bachelor only found the woman who really seemed to suit him shortly before his death at the age of just 40. It was Dora Diamant, whom Kafka met at a Jewish vacation camp in Graal-Müritz. She came from the area around Lodz. The world of orthodox Eastern Jews fascinated Kafka. Dora accompanied the terminally ill tuberculosis sufferer during his last weeks in Kierling.
In the end, laryngeal tuberculosis made swallowing painful and almost impossible. Nevertheless, Kafka was still working on correcting the galley proofs for his story "The Hunger Artist" the day before his death. Stach calls this a "cruel paradox" in his biography of Kafka: "the story of a man who no longer wants to eat, recorded by a man who can no longer eat."
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