Customer Reviews

The Nightmare of Reason

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This is the best biography of Kafka available in the English language. It is not a starchy academic biography removed from the living currents of an author's life. Pawel understood all the factors in fin de siecle Prague that combined to produce the century's greatest writer. This biography concentrates on everything that was vital to Kafka's background, from his anguished relationship with his father to his private yearning for the tradition of his ancesstors. That this book has been allowed to go out of print is a shame.

Mr. Pawel's book is an articulate account of Kafka's tortured life. Though the details are interesting, it is the manner in which these details are presented by Pawel that makes this book such a pleasure to read. Pawel's style is commendable and his insight is impressive. A worthy tribute to a giant of modern literature.

I would like to focus in this review on the final pages of this outstanding and moving biography. In it Pawel tells the story of two of the great loves of Kafka's life, Milena Jesenka and Dora Dymant. In these stories we see how Kafka who somehow more deeply than any other writer conveys anxiety in loneliness, was very much loved and respected in his own lifetime. The heroic Milena Jesenka whose courage in helping people throughout her terrible time in Ravensbruck Concentration camp where she died on May 17, 1944 is related by her friend Margeret -Buber- Neumman's outstanding memoir of their time there.She understood and was devoted to the genius Kafka. Dora Dymant was with Kafka through the painful last months of his life. Her sacrifice, devotion and love of him knew no limit.They dreamed together of traveling to 'Palestina' and beginning a new life together. She loved him with a total and true love, and remained devoted to his memory throughout her life. We owe the fact that Kafka's works were not destroyed, and in fact became known to the world through the devoted action of his best friend, writer and biographer, Max Brod.
This book is written with deep human feeling and sensibility.
I want to close this review with Milena Jesenka's obituary for Kafka which appears towards the end of the book.
" Dr.Franz Kafka , .. writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday in the Kierling Sanitorium at Klosterneuberg near Viena. Few knew him, for he was a loner, a recluse wise in the ways of the world, and frightened by it. For years he had been suffering from a lung disease, which he cherished and fostered even while accepting treatment.. It endowed him with a delicacy offeeling that bordered on the miraculous, and with a spiritual purity uncompromisingto the point of horror... He wrote the most significant works of modern German literature' their stark truth makes them seem naturalistic even where they speak in symbols. They reflect the irony and prophetic vision of a man condemned to see the world with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable and went to his death."
I believe with the years many readers would substitute for the phrase 'most significant works in modern German literature' the phrase 'most significant works in world literature'.

Kafka lives again through choice selections from his private writings and letters, organized chronologically and put into historical context. This book is a beloved companion on those nights of bleakest despair. As good as Kierkegaard's diaries.

I really enjoyed this bio. Unfortunately my copy was very used and progressively fell apart as I neared the end. Would like to buy a decent (whole) copy for keeps.

Photographs of Franz Kafka at age thirty and age forty appear in the center of the book. Through the years, nothing has been subtracted from the world's consciousness of his genius. He was born in a Prague still solidly embedded in the middle ages. His father, Hermann Kafka, had clawed his way out of poverty. In 1848 full citizenship rights had been granted the roughly four hundred thousand Jews within the Hapsburg Empire. Hermann did not have to exaggerate the hardships of his youth.

The world of Freud was the world of Kafka. Kafka, named for the emperor, felt that his childhood had crippled him. Family life focused on his father's drygoods store. Hermann had a booming parade-ground voice. Kafka denounced school as the conspiracy of the grown-ups. He had life-long difficulty over face-to-face meetings with authority figures. Over ninety per cent of the Jewish children in Bohemia received their education in German. For eight years Franz attended the German National Humanistic Gymnasium. Among other things, pupils were trained to work in a bureaucracy. They did many pointless tasks.


Kafka noted that to him writing was a form of prayer. In his age literature had taken the place of faith, ritual, and tradition. The productivity of writers in Austro-Hungary was staggering. The western Jews faced a dilemma. The sons, who seemed to be out of the business game, wrote. At the university Franz moved from philosophy to chemistry to the study of law. In 1902 he met Max Brod at a student society called the Hall. Brod recognized Kafka's genius. He came to believe Kafka would become the most important writer of his time. Brod had zest for life. The young Kafka was a striking combination of innate nobility and tact. He was both a middle class Jewish law student, at least until his graduation in 1906, and an underground hermit.

Franz Kafka once compared insurance to the religion of primitive man. The Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute was part of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. Kafka's superiors claimed he had exceptional faculty for conceptualization. He was granted Civil Service tenure in 1910. Franz became a vegetarian, he practiced body-building, and sought to break his creative paralysis. He began in 1910 to keep detailed notebooks. The diaries inspired him to develop working methods.

In the fall of 1910 Kafka went to Paris with Otto and Max Brod. He was ill, but returned the following year and had better luck. In 1911 he attended a lecture of Karl Kraus and in the same year he met Kurt Tucholsky. Kafka became fascinated with the Yiddish theater. Subsequesntly he became interested in Jewish history and studied Hebrew. He also followed the affairs of the Zionists and the agricultural settlers in Palestine. In 1912 he gave a speech on the Yiddish language. The speech has been preserved by the notes taken by Elsa Taussig, Max Brod's wife.

He read voraciously. Writing justified his life and his not living his life. Kafka's first novel was AMERIKA. Kurt Wolff became his publisher. In 1912 as he was preparing his manuscript he met Felice Bauer through Max Brod. The courtship lasted five years. Felice preserved the leters. His unfinished novel, THE TRIAL, arose from his involvement with Felice Bauer. Later he had tuberculosis and he determined that the illness was a reason for him to terminate the relationship.

By 1921 Kafka could not longer meet the physical demands of his job. Visits by old friends tired him and depressed him. He corresponded with another friend, Milena, and wrote THE CASTLE his most elaborately autobiographical work. At some point in 1922 he pleaded with Milena not to write him again. His letters to her have also been preserved. In the end, Kafka, who feared death, surrendered to Dora Dymant. He stayed in a sanitorium near Vienna. Dora joined him there. He died in 1924 of tuberculosis of the larynx, (hungry and thirsty).