Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach, Shelley Frisch (Translator)

From the Publisher

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.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

… this fine book helps us better understand that apparently inexhaustible strangeness. Right now Kafka even seems a useful counter-example to the ongoing cult of celebrity authors and bright, edgy writing. He destroys more than he publishes, he takes art as serious and life-changing; he views writing as a vocation of dissatisfaction, unhappiness and sacrifice. As he writes to Bauer: "I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else." This certainly sounds grandiose and exaggerated, but in Kafka's case it's also true.

Publishers Weekly

We know Kafka better than almost any other literary figure. His tormented psyche has been on view for decades, not only from his great stories and novels but also from countless letters and diary entries, his own as well as those of lovers, and his friend and editor, Max Brod. Oddly, he has not commanded a great biography. German editor and author Stach enters the breach with the first volume of a planned trilogy, now published in an excellent English translation. Stach begins with a superb meditation on the art of biography, including the pitfalls of the empathy a biographer establishes with his subject. He picks up Kafka's life not in childhood, but in 1910, the fitful beginning of his literary career, and follows it only until 1915. But these were the years when Kafka produced some of his greatest works, including "The Metamorphosis" and The Trial. We see the writer in all his torments, but also his moments of triumph, however fleeting. Most impressive is Stach's recounting of the creation of his subject's writings. The biographer is not deluded by the simplicity of Kafka's prose. His language was elegant and finely honed and, in personal relations, could be used to great manipulative effect. Stach's own writing is wonderfully expressive, a trait that hopefully will be carried through in the next two volumes. 32 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Choice Magazine

"This is a masterpiece of inspired biographical writing, an intricate but empathetic portrayal of an elusive author." —E.Williams

Forward Magazine

"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."

Washington Post Book World

"I can’t say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stach’s book."

—Michael Dirda

Library Journal

Surprisingly, there has never been a definitive biography of Franz Kafka, the Prague-born German-language novelist and enigmatic figure of early 20th-century literature. Stach, a German writer and scholar, remedies that deficit with this masterly work, which, while not yet comprehensive (it is the first of a projected three-volume study), seeks to give the reader the experience of "what it was like to be Franz Kafka." To that end, the author concentrates on what he considers the decisive period in the relatively short life of his subject. Relying on more than 4000 pages of Kafka's diary entries, letters, and literary fragments, he raises the curtain in 1910, the threshold of the author's major creative period that extended beyond the outbreak of World War I to 1915. This 35-chapter volume offers an eclectic array of themes and commentaries on Kafka's life and work and includes both extensive notes and two 16-page black-and-white photo inserts. Though only the first volume, The Decisive Years can stand by itself as a distinguished and original contribution to the study of Kafka. Highly recommended for large public libraries and all literature and academic collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/05; for another illuminating study of Kafka the man, consider Nicholas Murray's Kafka, an LJ Best Book of 2004.-Ed.] Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

At Home with the Kafkas

The guiding principle of every community is
accepting others in order to be accepted.

-Franz Grillparzer, Diary

I SIT IN my room in the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment. I hear all the doors slamming; their noise spares me only the steps of the people running between them; I can still hear the oven door banging shut in the kitchen. My father bursts through the door to my room and passes through, his robe trailing; the ashes are being scraped out of the stove in the next room; Valli asks, shouting one word after the other through the foyer, whether Father's hat has been cleaned yet; a hushing sound that aims to be friendly to me raises the screech of a voice in reply. The apartment door is unlatched and makes a grating noise like a scratchy throat, then opens wider with the singing of a woman's voice, and finally closes with a dull manly bang, which is the most inconsiderate sound of all. Father is gone; now the subtler, more diffuse, more hopeless noise begins, led by the voices of the two canaries. I had been thinking about it earlier, and with the canaries it now occurred to me again that I might open the door a tiny crack, slither into the next room like a snake and in that way, on the floor, ask my sisters and their governess for peace and quiet.

Kafka called this prose piece "Great Noise." He jotted it down in his diary on November 5, 1911, and about a year later published it in a Prague literary journal, for the "public flogging of my family,"1 since the circumstances depicted in it had not changed in the slightest. It is unlikely that Hermann Kafka ever saw with his own eyes the mark that his trailingrobe left on German literature. Although Kafka's father was a stocky man and not yet sixty years old, no one was allowed to "excite" him. His blood pressure was out of control, he had respiratory and cardiac problems, and he did not appreciate humor at his own expense. Kafka's three sisters were sure to have greeted their author's copies with a flurry of giggles. "Valli" was there in black and white; Kafka had not even disguised the name of his middle sister.


The text had been written on a Sunday, and the few friends who knew the details of Kafka's life at home probably had a flash of recognition that this was the typical Sunday noise. Any other morning on the fourth floor of the apartment building at Niklasstrasse 36 in Prague was ruled by the dictates of the tenants' jobs. No one had the leisure to sit still at the table and record the acoustic events.


Mornings in the Kafka household typically began at about 6 A.M. The tedious and noisy manual labor was of course left to a servant girl: removing the ashes from the kitchen stove, preparing breakfast, heating the living room, and preparing warm water for washing. Still, Kafka's youngest sister, Ottilie, known as Ottla, had to get up just afterward. The daily morning chore that had fallen to her for years needed to be taken care of right after a quick breakfast. She hurried over to Zeltnergasse-near the Altstädter Ring, about a kilometer away-with a set of keys to unlock Hermann Kafka's fancy goods store. The staff began arriving as early as 7:15.


Once Ottla had left the house, it was high time for Kafka to get out of bed. His small unheated room was poorly situated: between his parents' bedroom and the living room. On the one side there were clattering dishes; on the other he heard his mother whispering and the inconsiderate, loud yawning of his father, who tossed and turned in the creaking bed. Yet another problem was the door to the hall, which had panes of ornamented matte glass. Whenever somebody turned on the light outside, it shone inside as well.


Kafka's apartment was cramped and congested. His father's booming voice resounded throughout the apartment. Visitors were always greeted by the entire family, and a conversation in private required special arrangements if one did not want to be limited to surreptitious gestures. Nonetheless, there are no indications in Kafka's remarks that anyone actually suffered from this lack of privacy-apart from Kafka himself, of course. On Sunday mornings he was always overcome by slight nausea (a feeling he could not mention in his story) when he saw his parents' rumpled bedsheets only a few steps from his own bed. Yet he was in no position to complain: after all, he was the only family member to have his own room; his three sisters, Elli, Valli, and Ottla, had had to make do with a single "girls' room." Elli got married in the fall of 1910 and left the apartment. Kafka continued to share his living space with five adults (including the servant girl). The inhospitable atmosphere of the morning routine made him think more and more about putting an end to this situation.


There was no point trying to stretch out and luxuriate in bed for a last few minutes before getting up. The infamous canaries in the adjoining room (who were always replaced by new ones when they died) added to the ruckus, and Kafka dashed off to the bathroom to begin his fastidious routine of washing, combing his hair, and shaving. He treasured the luxury of having his own bathroom, which had been one of the primary factors in selecting this apartment. As the Kafkas knew from experience, there were plenty of lodgings in Prague that required occupants to carry in water; the tedious dealing with buckets and washbasins was both strenuous and time-consuming, and would hardly allow Kafka to maintain his rigid hygienic standards unless he began each day much earlier.


The efficient layout of the bathroom did nothing to change the fact that his morning routine was a long-drawn-out procedure. Rarely did he find the time to linger at the breakfast table longer than strictly necessary. Breakfast consisted of pastries, milk, and stewed fruit. At the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, an official's workday began at 8 A.M., and the distance to Kafka's office was at least twice that to his parents' shop. Kafka brought along a roll with nothing on it. Since the elevator was so slow, he rushed down the four flights of stairs, several steps at a time, raced through the narrow streets of the Old City of Prague with remarkably long strides, said a quick hello to the porter of the institute as one of the last to arrive, and sprinted up the stairs to his department, again four flights. One of Kafka's colleagues later recalled: "It often happened that I saw him shooting into his office at a furious pace."2 You could set your watch by Kafka: a quarter after eight.


He remarked years later that "the immediate proximity of the working world" was inexorably bringing his literary productivity to a standstill.3 If his parents had ever seen this diary entry, they would have had difficulty construing its meaning. Their life was their working world. Not that they failed to draw a clear distinction between their private and public spheres; quite the contrary. This line of demarcation was strictly observed, as far as we know; no employee of their fancy goods store ever entered the proprietor's apartment, and never were financial problems discussed within earshot of the household help. However, the Kafkas ran a family business, in two senses of the term: the business belonged to the family-with the tacit expectation that this would remain the case indefinitely-and the family belonged to the business. It was taken for granted that Kafka's grandfather, Jakob Löwy, would still help out, even though he was over eighty years old. If legal representation was needed, the Kafkas consulted attorneys to whom they were related. Their daily schedule was so fully internalized to coordinate with the opening times of the store that Kafka's parents never felt comfortable in the forced idleness of brief vacations or stays at health resorts. They took time out not from the business but for the business. Even during midsummer weekends, when the family rented a vacation house in the vicinity, Hermann Kafka sometimes continued to work at the store for a few hours before joining the others.


Kafka's writings do not shed much light on the economic fortunes of the business, although his parents talked about it incessantly for as far back as he could remember. It grew slowly but steadily, yet there must have been worrisome slow periods; we can only speculate as to the causes. It was a sensitive business niche, because they dealt wholesale with nonessential items: parasols, walking sticks, gloves, handkerchiefs, buttons, fabrics, handbags, fine lingerie, muffs . . . accessories that people dispensed with when times were difficult; robust sales of these items were therefore good indicators of the standard of living as a whole. In the fall of 1912 the Kafkas succeeded in relocating the business to one of Prague's most prestigious addresses: the Kinsky Palace on the Altstädter Ring, the same building in which Kafka had gone to school. The move to this building took them only right around the corner, barely a hundred yards away. However, hanging out one's shingle on the central square in the Old City signaled an increase in symbolic capital, which soon paid off in hard cash.


© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2002
English translation copyright © 2005 by Shelley Frisch

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This is a translation of Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidungen.