Kafka

The Decisive Years

Reiner Stach, Shelley Frisch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691147413
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691233567
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

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.



Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue: The Black Star
• 1. At Home with the Kafkas
• 2. Bachelors, Young and Old
• 3. Actors, Zionists, Wild People
• 4. Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar
• 5. Last Stop Jungborn
• 6. A Young Lady from Berlin
• 7. The Ecstasy of Beginning: “The Judgment” and “The Stoker”
• 8. A Near Defenestration
• 9. The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman
• 10. Love and a Longing for Letters
• 11. Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues
• 12. The Bauer Family
• 13. America and Back: The Man Who Disappeared
• 14. The Lives of Metaphors: “The Metamorphosis”
• 15. The Fear of Going Mad
• 16. Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door
• 171913.
• 18. The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration
• 19. Invention and Exaggeration
• 20. Sexual Trepidation and Surrender
• 21. The Working World: High Tech and the Ghosts of Bureaucracy
• 22. The Proposal
• 23. Literature, Nothing but Literature
• 24. Three Congresses in Vienna
• 25. Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva
• 26. Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives
• 27. An All-Time Low
• 28. Kafka and Musil
• 29. Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism
• 30. Tribunal in Berlin
• 31. The Great War
• 32. Self-Inflicted Justice: The Trial and “In the Penal Colony”
• 33. The Return of the East
• 34. The Grand Disruption
• 35. No-Man’s-Land
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Note
• Key to Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Photo Credits
• Index