The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka

Rating:
Summary: a good read
Review: I really enjoyed this bio. Unfortunately my copy was very used and progressively fell apart as I neared the end. Would like to buy a decent (whole) copy for keeps.

Rating:
Summary: Good to know someone (who) has known this suffering...
Review: Kafka lives again through choice selections from his private writings and letters, organized chronologically and put into historical context. This book is a beloved companion on those nights of bleakest despair. As good as Kierkegaard's diaries.

Rating:
Summary: A combination of innate nobility and tact
Review: Photographs of Franz Kafka at age thirty and age forty appear in the center of the book. Through the years, nothing has been subtracted from the world's consciousness of his genius. He was born in a Prague still solidly embedded in the middle ages. His father, Hermann Kafka, had clawed his way out of poverty. In 1848 full citizenship rights had been granted the roughly four hundred thousand Jews within the Hapsburg Empire. Hermann did not have to exaggerate the hardships of his youth.

The world of Freud was the world of Kafka. Kafka, named for the emperor, felt that his childhood had crippled him. Family life focused on his father's drygoods store. Hermann had a booming parade-ground voice. Kafka denounced school as the conspiracy of the grown-ups. He had life-long difficulty over face-to-face meetings with authority figures. Over ninety per cent of the Jewish children in Bohemia received their education in German. For eight years Franz attended the German National Humanistic Gymnasium. Among other things, pupils were trained to work in a bureaucracy. They did many pointless tasks.


Kafka noted that to him writing was a form of prayer. In his age literature had taken the place of faith, ritual, and tradition. The productivity of writers in Austro-Hungary was staggering. The western Jews faced a dilemma. The sons, who seemed to be out of the business game, wrote. At the university Franz moved from philosophy to chemistry to the study of law. In 1902 he met Max Brod at a student society called the Hall. Brod recognized Kafka's genius. He came to believe Kafka would become the most important writer of his time. Brod had zest for life. The young Kafka was a striking combination of innate nobility and tact. He was both a middle class Jewish law student, at least until his graduation in 1906, and an underground hermit.

Franz Kafka once compared insurance to the religion of primitive man. The Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute was part of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. Kafka's superiors claimed he had exceptional faculty for conceptualization. He was granted Civil Service tenure in 1910. Franz became a vegetarian, he practiced body-building, and sought to break his creative paralysis. He began in 1910 to keep detailed notebooks. The diaries inspired him to develop working methods.

In the fall of 1910 Kafka went to Paris with Otto and Max Brod. He was ill, but returned the following year and had better luck. In 1911 he attended a lecture of Karl Kraus and in the same year he met Kurt Tucholsky. Kafka became fascinated with the Yiddish theater. Subsequesntly he became interested in Jewish history and studied Hebrew. He also followed the affairs of the Zionists and the agricultural settlers in Palestine. In 1912 he gave a speech on the Yiddish language. The speech has been preserved by the notes taken by Elsa Taussig, Max Brod's wife.

He read voraciously. Writing justified his life and his not living his life. Kafka's first novel was AMERIKA. Kurt Wolff became his publisher. In 1912 as he was preparing his manuscript he met Felice Bauer through Max Brod. The courtship lasted five years. Felice preserved the leters. His unfinished novel, THE TRIAL, arose from his involvement with Felice Bauer. Later he had tuberculosis and he determined that the illness was a reason for him to terminate the relationship.

By 1921 Kafka could not longer meet the physical demands of his job. Visits by old friends tired him and depressed him. He corresponded with another friend, Milena, and wrote THE CASTLE his most elaborately autobiographical work. At some point in 1922 he pleaded with Milena not to write him again. His letters to her have also been preserved. In the end, Kafka, who feared death, surrendered to Dora Dymant. He stayed in a sanitorium near Vienna. Dora joined him there. He died in 1924 of tuberculosis of the larynx, (hungry and thirsty).

Rating:
Summary: Best Bio
Review: This is the best biography of Kafka available in the English language. It is not a starchy academic biography removed from the living currents of an author's life. Pawel understood all the factors in fin de siecle Prague that combined to produce the century's greatest writer. This biography concentrates on everything that was vital to Kafka's background, from his anguished relationship with his father to his private yearning for the tradition of his ancesstors. That this book has been allowed to go out of print is a shame.