Those familiar with biographies of Kafka and monographs on his work will be just as familiar with the frustrations they provoke. The former are typically thin on detail and insight; the latter rarely make for bearable reading. As Reiner Stach, respected Kafka scholar cum biographer, has it:

Most of this material consists of unsupported speculation or academic verbiage. No theory is too far-fetched to have been advocated somewhere by someone … it is impossible to imagine a reader who might reasonably benefit from them … It is striking that the few pearls in the lot – beautifully crafted essays, thought-provoking mind games – are written almost without exception by non-specialists.

On top of this, says Stach, ‘There are innumerable secondary texts in which the gulf between the explanations offered by the author and the interspersed Kafka citations is so huge that a shudder runs down the reader’s back.’

Such judgements may appear harsh, but those who have waded through the great slush of speculative interpretations that Kafka’s work and life have inspired will surely agree; a blanket ban on all publications with Kafka as their subject might have served us well for decades.

Thankfully, Kafka’s diaries and mammoth correspondence have been available for some time. While they are compelling for the most part, and not without lighter moments, to read them is to be drawn into a labyrinth of stray intentions, repetitions, and psychological dead ends. After all of these prolonged and confusing immersions, one could easily be forgiven for throwing in the towel.

Enter Reiner Stach’s monumental three-volume biography (one forthcoming). Having warned us of the perils of all things Kafka-oriented, Stach sticks firmly to the evidence. Kafka’s correspondence and diaries, along with reports from lovers and friends, are the most prominent sources for this comprehensive account; historical documents also shed light on Kafka’s milieu, setting the stage for a curious drama.

‘The result is a text that often shifts gears while retaining a clear focus on Kafka’s social and inner worlds.’

In late June 1912, Kafka, a serious-minded writer and insurance officer nearing his thirtieth birthday, arrived in Weimar with his friend Max Brod. They were eager to see Goethe House. Upon inspection, the house failed to make an impression, but something did catch Kafka’s eye. Margarete Kirchner, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Goethe House’s caretaker, was a beauty, and for the remainder of his stay Kafka could be spied waiting ‘in vain in front of Grete’s sewing school, holding a box of chocolates with a chain and a little heart’.

Kafka
(photograph by Atelier Jacobi)

This treasure of incongruity – the haunted, ascetic hypochondriac that Kafka-admirers know only too well, behaving like any young romantic with a crush – brings Kafka to life. Stach’s volumes swarm with such revelations.

Biographers have long struggled to flesh out the life of a writer who died young and spent most of his life in one city, ‘surrounded by a small, nearly unvarying circle of friends’. Stach’s method has been to research heavily, unearth new sources, sort through the evidence, then highlight each of Kafka’s personal crises. The result is a text that often shifts gears while retaining a clear focus on Kafka’s social and inner worlds.

Stach observes of Kafka’s letters that reading them is much like ‘watching a film in slow motion’, with amplifications and repetitions leading the way. The same applies to sections of Kafka, where Stach inches forward day-by-day, or, while tracing Kafka’s romance with Felice Bauer, letter-by-letter. One month forward, two months back, another forward; the first volume staggers onward to span The Decisive Years (1910–15) before Stach settles into a linear rhythm with The Years of Insight (1916–24).

Stach occasionally takes dramatisation too far. According to him, when Kafka received his first letter from Felice Bauer, he ‘drank in [the] opening lines’. Upon learning that Felice was afraid of the dark, we find him ‘shaking his head in disbelief’. Kafka makes notes in his diary ‘with cold determination’. Nor is Kafka free of hyperbole. Kafka’s struggle to combine his day job with a nightly writing ritual ‘ripped apart his life’; of Kafka’s romantic trials, Stach insists that his conflicting desire for fusion and distance were ‘tearing him apart’.

In The Decisive Years particularly, extended metaphors are rampant. Regarding Kafka’s attempt to forge a relationship with Felice Bauer purely by correspondence, Stach writes, ‘It is as though he had decided in September to dig a tunnel from Prague to Berlin with his bare hands.’ This image is excellent in itself, but Stach jeopardises its potency in the extension: ‘While everyone else was travelling above him, in the bright light of the day, he sought a relationship that was hidden, belonging only to him and Felice ...’ We cringe as Stach continues: ‘He grew weary and had to give up his tunnel, an absurdly short one in view of the vast distance to be covered.’ To proceed further would be suicidal, yet Stach ploughs ahead, fearlessly: ‘The passage finally caved in, and nothing remained of it.’ Soon after, another metaphor intervenes, and the correspondence becomes a ‘shaky bridge of letters’.

At times, whole pages seem to spiral toward disaster, but Stach proves himself a gifted tightrope walker; he wobbles across the span of paragraphs before landing his analogies, much altered, on safe terrain. Another memorable performance comes late in the first volume. Illustrating Kafka’s tortured relationship with writing, Stach asks us to picture him:

as a man who in 1912 has lit a fire in his cellar to keep his house warm. If he puts out the fire, he will freeze; if he does not, soon there will be nothing left to keep warm. The only solution is to shut all the doors tightly, limit the fire to one room, and live as usual in the other rooms, which are kept tolerably warm from the heat nearby. But to accomplish this, he must often go down to the basement to fan the fire and sacrifice to it his most valued possessions.

Kafka could hardly have conceived of his plight in a more distressing or humorous way.

Stach even manages to keep pace with Kafka’s aphoristic turn of mind, presenting little gems like ‘A liar will lie even when speaking the truth’, ‘The moth is stubborn in regard to the flame’, and, ‘A wound does not hurt because it is touched; it hurts because it is a wound.’

If Stach’s idiosyncrasies prove jarring, the quality of research will satisfy most readers. Among other important corrections, Stach debunks the notion that Kafka was psychologically unaffected by World War I; instead, he had regularly ‘seen, spoken to, and negotiated with the maimed and the shell-shocked, and was administratively involved in their lives’. That large chunks of Kafka’s best work were drafted amid political, social and economic upheaval also contradicts the caricature of a paralysed neurotic. Kafka was never so determinable. As Stach notes, ‘A letter that arrived late or a slight cough in the room next door made him falter, yet a world that was falling apart appeared to offer him boundless resources.’

Significant features of Kafka’s manuscripts are also highlighted. It is striking to learn that: ‘The scene in The Trial in which two polite executioners thrust a knife into the condemned man carried Kafka away to the point that, seconds before the death of his hero, he lost his narrative distance and put himself into the action: “I raised my hands,” the manuscript reads, “and spread out all my fingers”.’

Kafka’s agonising relationship with his father is handled sympathetically, from both sides, and his lovers are given more than usual attention.

Refreshingly, Stach shows an aversion to the ‘common notion’ that Kafka’s two-time fiancée, Bauer, ‘was a kind of blank canvas that he filled with all kinds of projections’. He focuses, instead, on her family life, professional success, vulnerabilities, and remarkable generosity. For the first time, we sense how alluring Bauer must have been to Kafka, and the vast difficulties she endured.

For instance, Stach notes that during one of their rare meetings, in a hotel room, Kafka read ‘Before the Law’ aloud to Bauer instead of making love to her. The parable has surely never been so well understood.

In the introduction to The Decisive Years, Stach hopes to achieve ‘an extended look’ at his subject. Since he cannot possibly document Kafka’s whole life nor adequately represent the complexities of his inner world, Stach says, a gaze will have to be enough. But Stach’s achievement is of a higher order. Rather than merely looking, he melds segments of Kafka’s thoughts and experiences into a thickly woven fabric, and charges that fabric with life. The result is a biography of substance and energy, the best yet produced on its subject.