A writer’s trials

In 2nd volume of biography of Franz Kafka, Reiner Stach seems unable or unwilling to integrate own research in discussing Kafka’s complex Jewish identity.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
A statue of Franz Kafka in central Prague 521 (photo credit: REUTERS)
A statue of Franz Kafka in central Prague 521
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Does a biographer offer more penetrating insight if his background is similar to that of his subject, or if he comes from an entirely foreign realm? German writer Reiner Stach, born in East Germany in 1951, became infatuated with Franz Kafka as a young man. Stach was particularly intrigued with the letters Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer, which perhaps mirrored Stach’s own difficulties with women and intimacy. This early infatuation prompted Stach to devote decades of his life to studying Kafka and writing his definitive biography. He has already produced two stellar volumes and a third, dealing with Kafka’s earliest years, is forthcoming. This review examines his newly published second volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight, which is exquisitely wrought, painstakingly researched and covers Kafka’s final years.
There is a glaring blind spot throughout Stach’s narrative that will make some readers uncomfortable.
Stach seems to view Kafka as some sort of “special” Jew. It is almost as if Stach unconsciously separates Kafka from his Jewish self while simultaneously presenting us with mountains of evidence to the contrary. Stach reveals Kafka’s love of Hebrew, his embrace of Zionism, and his fleeting but passionate interest in various forms of Orthodoxy.
Kafka frequently fantasized about leaving for Palestine and was troubled by the anti-Semitism surrounding him in Prague as World War I beckoned. Stach seems unable or unwilling to integrate his own research in discussing Kafka’s complex, turbulent and sometimes ambivalent Jewish identity.
Stach remains eerily silent on anti- Semitism and the Nazi tragedy that would eventually take three of Kafka’s sisters and two of the women he loved years after his own premature death from tuberculosis.
Stach sheds no tears for the Jewish people, but he does have empathy for Kafka. This hinders some of his interpretations. For example, when discussing the troubled family relationships of the Kafka family, which included Kafka’s bullying merchant father and his cold and distant mother, he seems unable to pick up on some of the subtle nuances of family dynamics familiar to Jews whose familial dysfunction was often being fueled by hostile outside forces.
Stach continually makes the imaginative leaps necessary to probe Kafka’s tortured psyche. He wants to understand him and is impressed by Kafka’s relentless quest to search for his own personal truth.
Kafka was born in 1883. He spoke and wrote in German, and lived in Prague during the last gasps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stach shows us a divided Kafka; often at war with himself. He cherished solitude, and longed for a soul mate. He hated living at home, but couldn’t summon the courage to leave. He was needy and dependent, yet remained a step removed from even those closest to him. Kafka, says Stach, mastered the art of not being fully present; even at his job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where he was a valued employee for decades.
Stach writes movingly about a special week Kafka spent with Felice Bauer in Marienbad. Miraculously, his usual free-floating anxiety dissipated and he approached a state of happiness he had never known. But it quickly dissipated and the fear returned.
Stach tries to figure out what went wrong and confesses that in many ways Kafka and the genesis of his many fears remain impenetrable.
Stach shows us repeatedly how the key metaphor in all of Kafka’s most famous works, such as The Trial, The Castle, and The Hunger Artist, is the dizzying hierarchy of authority thrust between people and their destinies; in other words, their utter helplessness and powerlessness before the forces that confront them. His writing, says Stach, is timeless and combined with a formal unity and precision that demonstrate his imaginative brilliance. His language grabs us and forces us to surrender.
When Vaclav Havel spoke at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1990, he described what Kafka meant to him and his words movingly express Reiner Stach’s own life quest to understand Kafka. Havel said: “I sometimes feel that I’m the only one who really understands Kafka and that no one else has any business trying to make his work more accessible to me.
And my somewhat desultory attitude to studying his works comes from my vague feeling that I don’t need to read and reread everything Kafka has written when I already know what’s there. I’m even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and I were a better writer than I am, I could have written his works myself.
“What I’ve just said may sound odd, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. All I’m really saying is that in Kafka I have found a portion of my own experience of the world, of myself, and my way of being in the world. I will try, briefly, and in broad terms, to name some of the more easily defined forms of this experience.
“One of them is a profound, banal and therefore utterly vague sensation of culpability, as though my very existence were a kind of sin. Then there is the powerful feeling of general alienation, both my own and relating to everything around me, that helps to create such feelings; an experience of unbearable oppressiveness, a need constantly to explain myself to someone, to defend myself, a longing for an unattainable order of things, a longing that increases as the terrain I walk through becomes muddled and confusing.
“I sometimes feel the need to confirm my identity by sounding off at others and demanding my rights. Such outbursts, of course, are quite unnecessary, and the response invariably fails to reach the right ears, and vanishes forever into the black hole that surrounds me.
“Everything I encounter displays to me it’s absurd aspect first. I feel as though I am constantly lagging behind powerful, self- confident men whom I can never overtake, let alone emulate.
I find myself essentially hateful, deserving only mockery.”