Kafka: The Early Years

by Reiner Stach, Shelley Frisch (Translator)

Overview

The eagerly anticipated final volume of the award-winning, definitive biography of Franz Kafka

How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach’s narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka’s life. The book’s richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.

The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka’s wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest—his predilection for the back-to-nature movement—stemmed from his “nervous” surroundings rather than personal eccentricity.

The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691178189
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Pages:	584
Sales rank:	596,994
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on his three-volume biography of the writer. The other volumes are Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight (both Princeton). Shelley Frisch's translations of those volumes were awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. Her many other translations from the German include Karin Wieland's Dietrich & Riefenstahl, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Table of Contents

Translator’s Preface ix

1 Nothing Happening in Prague 1

2 The Curtain Rises 7

3 Giants: The Kafkas from Wosek 26

4 Julie Löwy 38

5 Losing Propositions 46

6 Thoughts about Freud 58

7 Kafka, Franz: Model Student 77

8 A City Energized 90

9 Elli, Valli, Ottla 113

10 Latin, Bohemian, Mathematics, and Other Matters of the Heart 122

11 Jewish Lessons 150

12 Innocence and Impudence 171

13 The Path to Freedom 184

14 To Hell with German Studies 204

15 Friend Max 222

16 Enticements 236

17 Informed Circles: Utitz, Weltsch, Fanta, Bergmann 248

18 Autonomy and Recovery 268

19 The Interior Landscape: “Description of a Struggle” 284

2 Doctor of Law Seeking Employment 302

21 Off to the Prostitutes 325

22 Cafés, Geishas, Art, and Cinema 335

23 The Formidable Assistant Offi ial 350

24 The Secret Writing School 370

25 Landing in Brescia 391

26 In the Heart of the West 407

27 Ideas and Spirits: Buber, Steiner, Einstein 420

28 Literature and Tourism 437

Acknowledgments 463

Key to Abbreviations 465

Notes 467

Bibliography 531

Photo Credits 549

Index 551

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Advance praise for Kafka: The Early Years: "Kafka: The Early Years completes a masterful trilogy. One feature puts it at light-years' distance of superiority to anything previously written about Kafka's early years: Stach had unique access to Max Brod's notebooks, part of a celebrated cache of documents bearing on his friendship with Kafka. Far more fully than any other Kafka biographer, Stach gives us what Hegel calls ‘the concrete vitality of the full individual.' "—Stanley Corngold, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka

Advance praise for Kafka: The Early Years: "Kafka: The Early Years is a remarkable conclusion to a momentous biography. It covers what is in many ways the most important and interesting period of Kafka's life, for these are the years during which he was shaped by the world around him and when his character emerged. This is an entertaining, informative account that has no equivalent among the many previous biographies of Kafka."—Mark M. Anderson, author of Kafka's Clothes

Editorial Reviews

"Belongs in the company of the masterpieces of literary biography. . . . [C]omprehensive but raised above mere competency through astonishing architectural beauty. Thanks to the superb work of Stach's translator, Shelley Frisch, the trilogy also stands out in English at the sentence level, for the unbroken clarity, verbal ingenuity, and unflagging momentum of its prose."

Open Letters Monthly

"Praise for the previous edition: A definitive biography of a rare writer. . . . [M]asterful."

The Economist

One of CHOICE’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017

Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association

From the Publisher

"This is the eagerly awaited final volume of Stach's critically acclaimed three-volume magnum opus, a magisterial work. . . . Drawing on an unusually wide range of sources, materials, and historical documents—including an important cache of as yet unpublished documents from Max Brod’s literary estate, entangled until two years ago in high-profile legal wrangling in Israel—Stach assembled a treasure trove of factual information, new details, and discoveries along with insightful observations about the complex personal circumstances of Kafka’s upbringing, education, and early professional career as an insurance lawyer during a tumultuous era of intense intellectual, cultural, socioeconomic, and political foment."

Choice

09/19/2016
German biographer Stach completes his massive three-volume life of the literary giant Franz Kafka (1883–1924) with a long-awaited account of the prodigy’s life before 1910, enriched by Frisch’s able translation. Kafka’s eerie short stories and novels have electrified readers for generations, but Stach’s portrait of the young Kafka contradicts the legend of their source in an alienated, detached enigma. Readers meet instead a likable, brilliant young insurance lawyer with, as Stach puts it, abundant perfectionism and self-doubt. Stach explores the Kafka family’s complicated relationship to Judaism; Kafka considered converting to Christianity in his youth, but decided not to. He was fond of shop girls and prostitutes, and Stach goes so far as to recount his first sexual experience. The book reveals that Kafka was intrigued by airplanes and the new medium of cinema. Sigmund Freud’s bold ideas and Prague’s heady pre-WWI intellectual circles, which included the young physicist Albert Einstein, serve as backdrops. The Max Brod archives on which Stach’s project depended were litigated for decades. Brod, Kafka’s close friend and literary executor, famously refused to destroy the writer’s work as instructed and published it instead. Brod’s detailed reflections, which dominate much of this final volume, will chiefly interest Kafka scholars, but all Kafka devotees will find this biography’s insights deeply fulfilling. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-07-26
The final installment in German scholar Stach’s magisterial three-part biography (Kafka: The Years of Insight, 2013, etc.), covering, in appropriately Kafkaesque nonsequential fashion, the writer’s childhood and youth.A preface by Frisch, the superb translator of all three volumes, explains that the peculiar order was dictated by lack of access to the archives of Max Brod, close friend and literary executor, whose extensive diaries concerning the crucial years of Kafka’s formative literary efforts only became available recently. Stach makes astute use of this material to assess the complicated relationship between Kafka and the gregarious, ambitious Brod, who could never understand why his talented friend was so reluctant to publish and agonizingly slow to produce. Stach’s examination of the years before the men met at university in 1902 suggests a few reasons, most having to do with the pressure to achieve placed on young Franz by his overbearing father, Hermann. This analysis is sometimes swamped by the enormous amount of background on everything from anti-Semitism as a function of rising Czech nationalism to the nature of education in the late 19th-century; these and other highly relevant subjects could have been covered more cogently. However, the abundance of detail enables Stach to paint a vivid picture of the history and culture of Prague, Kafka’s hometown and lifelong residence. His portrait of the artist is intimately knowing: Kafka seizes our attention as a man neurotic yet deeply self-aware, frail yet devoted to swimming and hiking, always holding himself at a social remove yet a frequent visitor to Prague’s wine bars and coffee shops. Most importantly, the author makes palpable Kafka’s perfectionist striving for a prose of surreal clarity, “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” The inaugural book, on the remarkable half-decade that produced The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and “In the Penal Colony,” is still the best, but this slightly overstuffed volume completes an indispensable work about a key figure in 20th-century modernism.

Kirkus Review