Kafka

The Years of Insight

Reiner Stach, Shelley Frisch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691165844, 9780691147512
• eBook ISBN: 9781400865451
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Telling the story of Kafka's final years as never before—the third volume in the acclaimed definitive biography

This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924—a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka's personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation.

In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger Artist to The Castle.

A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: The Ants of Prague
• Chapter One: Stepping Outside the Self
• Chapter Two: No Literary Prize for Kafka
• Chapter Three: “Civilian Kavka”: The Work of War
• Chapter Four: The Marvel of Marienbad
• Chapter Five: What Do I Have in Common with Jews?
• Chapter Six: Kafka Encounters His Readers
• Chapter Seven: The Alchemist
• Chapter Eight: Ottla and Felice
• Chapter Nine: The Country Doctor Ventures Out
• Chapter Ten: Mycobacterium tuberculosis
• Chapter Eleven: Zürau’s Ark
• Chapter Twelve: Meditations
• Chapter Thirteen: Spanish Influenza, Czech Revolt, Jewish Angst
• Chapter Fourteen: The Pariah Girl
• Chapter Fifteen: The Unposted Letter to Hermann Kafka
• Chapter Sixteen: Merano, Second Class
• Chapter Seventeen: Milena
• Chapter Eighteen: Living Fires
• Chapter Nineteen: The Big Nevertheless
• Chapter Twenty: Escape to the Mountains
• Chapter Twenty-One: Fever and Snow: Tatranské Matliary
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Internal and the External Clock
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Personal Myth: The Castle
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Retiree and Hunger Artist
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Palestinian
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Dora
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Edge of Berlin
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Last Sorrow
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Note
• Key to Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photo Credits
• Index