A closer look at the young Kafka

Kafka: The Early Years. By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press; 564 pages; $35.

POOR Franz Kafka. His lifetime being misunderstood by his family has been followed by an even longer literary afterlife being misunderstood by the world. According to a new biography by Reiner Stach, Kafka was not the neurotic, world-removed writer of, say, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1960s story, “A Friend of Kafka”, in which a friend says Kafka’s inhibitions “impeded him in everything”. Nor was he scarred solely by a difficult relationship with his overbearing father, an idea that Alan Bennett’s play “Kafka’s Dick” toyed with in the 1980s.

In “Kafka: The Early Years”, the last instalment of a mighty, three-volume biography, Mr Stach pursues close description of Kafka’s life and times rather than the “critical biography” approach combining biography and textual interpretation. What Mr Stach uncovers in this volume—written last because of a long struggle over access to documents—are the formative experiences of a Kafka who becomes new and surprisingly relevant.

“Readers…will find myths about Kafka exploded,” writes Shelley Frisch in her translator’s preface. Mr Stach himself lauds “the many pieces of the mosaic discovered by others”, a half-century of academic discovery (about Kafka’s first-rate work as an insurance clerk, for example) that Mr Stach now brings to a wider audience. Yet even those immersed in the specialist work benefit from the illumination that Mr Stach’s detailed digging brings.

Kafka wrote his famous “Letter to His Father” in 1919, in which he took his father, Hermann, to account for his boorish ways with his son, who became beset by guilt and fear of punishment. But, as Mr Stach vividly shows, loneliness, not humiliation, was Kafka’s first formative experience. Until he was four, his father and mother were busy in the family haberdashery shop 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week. Kafka learned that social relations were fraught and unstable—with great consequence for literature.

In Mr Stach’s telling, this insecurity was compounded by threats that the observant and highly sensitive Kafka found in the world: an education system based on rigorous exams, and the risk of failing them; a society beset by tensions between Czechs and Germans, in which Jews were often the scapegoats; and new-fangled machines like aeroplanes, which both delighted and terrified the young author.

According to Mr Stach, guilt and punishment preoccupied Kafka from 1912—the year he wrote “The Metamorphosis”, a groundbreaking story—until early 1915. But later works posed a new question: “What do people have to do to be accepted by a group—and why are some never accepted?” For the biographer, this is precisely the theme of “The Castle”, an unfinished novel that Mr Stach calls Kafka’s most brilliant work, written two years before he died of tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40.

In today’s age of backlash against globalisation, the arc that Mr Stach draws between “The Early Years” and Kafka’s later life takes on a new significance. It traces the life of a misunderstood German-speaking Jew in a city run first by an Austrian emperor, then by assertively nationalist Czechs. “We move from guilt to the question of identity,” Mr Stach says. “The question, ‘Who am I?’ is, after all, closely linked to, ‘Where do I belong?’”

The bloody climax of nationalism that followed makes Kafka’s story not a little poignant: he found a true home neither in life nor in death. The difficulty of writing “The Early Years” was a symptom of this. Mr Stach spent years trying to persuade the Israeli heirs of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, who left Prague for Palestine in the 1930s, to let him read Brod’s diaries. Though he will not say how, Mr Stach got hold of copies of three volumes, rendering new insights about Brod’s and Kafka’s world.

The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the Brod manuscripts should be placed in the National Library. This is good news for the public, but ensures that Kafka will remain rootless: his and Brod’s manuscripts will be scattered between Germany, Britain and Israel. And rootlessness breeds indifference. Vienna has neglected the sanatorium where Kafka died. Berlin has left commemoration of Kafka’s time there to private initiatives. And the Czech government sees Kafka more as a tourist magnet than as a cultural icon. Mr Stach concludes that “No state feels responsible for him. That’s absurd.”