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This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.
Introduction 1
PROLOGUE: The Black Star 16
1At Home with the Kafkas 21
2Bachelors, Young and Old 42
3Actors, Zionists, Wild People 54
4Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar 71
5Last Stop Jungborn 86
6A Young Lady from Berlin 94
7The Ecstasy of Beginning: "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" 108
8A Near Defenestration 119
9The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman 134
10Love and a Longing for Letters 145
11Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues 159
12The Bauer Family 169
13America and Back: The Man Who Disappeared 175
14The Lives of Metaphors: "The Metamorphosis" 192
15The Fear of Going Mad 206
16Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door 226
171913 231
18 The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration 242
19Invention and Exaggeration 253
20Sexual Trepidation and Surrender 266
21The Working World: High Tech and the Ghostsof Bureaucracy 281
22The Proposal 297
23Literature, Nothing but Literature 324
24Three Congresses in Vienna 350
25Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva 368
26Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives 379
27An All-Time Low 390
28Kafka and Musil 401
29Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism 413
30Tribunal in Berlin 433
31The Great War 444
32Self-Inflicted Justice: The Trial and "In the Penal Colony" 464
33The Return of the East 484
34The Grand Disruption 493
35No-Man's-Land 508
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 517
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 519
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 521
NOTES 523
BIBLIOGRAPHY 551
PHOTO CREDITS 563
INDEX 565
Description
This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.
