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Franz Kafka

Alan Bennett once wrote of Franz Kafka: ‘One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself.’ Even so, Bennett gave us Kafka’s Dick (1986), which – alongside a sputtering stream of demythologising critical interventions into Kafka studies ...

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Kafka by Reiner Stach & Kafka by Reiner Stach

by
April 2014, no. 360
Franz Kafka lived in Prague in the early part of the twentieth century, during a period of considerable turmoil. Before succumbing to laryngeal tuberculosis aged forty, he witnessed the disintegration of an empire and the subsequent formation of a republic. Kafka also endured the administrative and domestic realities of a world war and was among millions of Europeans infected with Spanish flu. He barely survived the latter, and while Europe’s political convulsions certainly left their mark on the man, most efforts to bring Kafka’s fiction and life into an explanative relation have failed. Perhaps only Elias Canetti’s slim monograph on Kafka’s letters to Felice, Kafka’s Other Trial (1974), stands as the exception. ... (read more)