The very rich hours of franz kafka | thearticle

Kafka: The Making of an Icon (ed. Ritchie Robertson, Bodleian Exhibition Catalogue, 2024, 174p, $55) is clear, concise and interesting.  It includes illustrations of Kafka, his family and

friends; postcards and letters; manuscripts, printed books and book jackets; maps and tourist sites; Prague streets, rest-cure mountains and North Sea beaches; film stills, theater placards

and movie posters; and works of art based on Kafka’s fiction.  A lively photo shows horses and sleigh carrying fur-coated passengers in a mountain resort, like the transport that brought

Hans Castorp to the sanatorium in The  Magic Mountain. In his “Homage” to Kafka, Thomas Mann wrote that the last portrait of the handsome man “shows a shy, sensitive, contemplative face,

with black curly hair growing low on the forehead, large dark eyes, at once dreamy and penetrating, a straight, drooping nose, cheeks shadowed by illness, and a mouth with unusually fine

lines and a half-smile playing in one corner.” Describing a photo of himself as an infant Kafka remarks, “I don’t know how old I am in this one.  At that time I think I still belonged

completely to myself, and I seem to have been very comfortable with it.  As the eldest, I was constantly being photographed and so there exists a long series of transformations

[Verwandlungen].  From now on it gets worse in every picture.”  The contributor who quotes this doesn’t note that Kafka’s witty account of his own decline uses the same word as the title of

“The Metamorphosis.” Kafka famously declared: “What have I got in common with Jews?  I have hardly anything in common with myself.”  His attitude toward Judaism evolved from boredom and

indifference to ritual in his youth, to interest in the Kabbalah, Martin Buber, Yiddish theater, the Hebrew language, Zionism and even dreams of emigrating to Palestine. One contributor

states that “as an assimilated Western Jew, largely ignorant of Jewish tradition, Kafka felt inferior to the Easterners.”  But Kafka stated that his visit to the Hasidic Rabbi of Grodek had

been like observing “a savage African tribe.”  In fact, the Westernised Jews of Germany looked down on and distanced themselves from the mass of poor East European immigrants.   Kafka’s

conclusion was characteristically cryptic and pessimistic: “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed; he will come only a day after his arrival, he will not come on the last

day, but on the very last.” In his day job as a lawyer for an insurance company, Kafka visited factories and inspected the safety measures taken to prevent accidents.  One contributor states

that “he had an excellent record, and was recognized as an efficient, dedicated and hard-working employee. ” But the writer contradicts himself on the next page by calling Kafka’s insurance

career “relatively undistinguished”.  Kafka was surprisingly athletic, keen on swimming, rowing, hiking, skiing and tobogganing.  This all ended suddenly when he had his first tubercular

hemorrhage in August 1917. The anguished author was twice engaged to Felice Bauer, a businesswoman in Berlin, but was terrified at the prospect of marriage.  One contributor notes that Kafka

thought “his writing required solitude, which would have been impossible in marriage.”  But many authors find it possible to write when married.  He also broke off his engagement to Julie

Wohryzek, but finally found more satisfying relations with the Czech Milena Jesenská who later translated his work, and Dora Diamant, with whom he lived contentedly in Berlin until his

death. Kafka combined a lucid style and enigmatic meaning.  Thomas Mann perceptively observed, “he was a dreamer, and his compositions are often dreamlike in conception and form; they are as

oppressive, illogical and absurd as dreams, those strange shadow-pictures of actual life.”  In his novel America, when Karl Rossmann approaches Manhattan, he sees the Statue of Liberty

holding a sword instead of a torch, which makes the country seem hostile rather than welcoming.  In The Trial, Titorelli’s name combines the names of the Venetian painters Titian and

Tintoretto.  Kafka wrote stories about a gigantic insect, a speaking ape, a singing mouse and a philosophical dog.  In life, as in his fearful story about a mole’s underground hideout, he

was always instinctively thorough about his crevice and burrow. “Kafka’s Castle seems close by and far away, both there and not there,”a realistic representation of fortress and fantastic

architectural creation.  The fictional K. never reaches the mysterious castle and remains stuck in the snow-covered village. J. M. Coetzee emphasised Kafka’s alienation and intensity, and

called the “clownish and evil novel . . . a fantasy of bureaucracy run wild.”  Another author concludes, “From the vivid industrialized cityscape of America, through the labyrinthine

suburban spaces of The Trial, to the shape-shifting snow-covered landscape of The Castle, these spatial regimes produce disorienting, unsettling and at times frightening . . . manifestations

of K.’s unconscious fears, desires and thoughts.” Kafka remarked on Gregor Samsa: “It struck me that [an artist] might want to draw the insect himself.  Not that, please not that!  The

insect itself cannot be depicted.  It cannot even be shown from a distance.”  In his lecture on Kafka, the entomologist and author Vladimir Nabokov met this challenge by drawing a picture of

the brown, six-legged insect and wrote, “he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases.  Gregor the beetle never found out that he

had wings under the hard covering of his back.”  If he’d discovered the wings, he could have flown away and escaped his dark fate. One author asks, “Which artists and artworks did Kafka

engage with?  There is no easy answer to this question.”  But she is not aware that his pen-and-ink drawing Supplicant [Bowing Before a] Distinguished Patron  (c.1901-1907), which satirizes

the rigid social hierarchies in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, is very like the etching by his close contemporary Paul Klee, Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank

(1905), which also portrays two grotesque men bowing obsequiously to each other with the correct, self-abasing cringe. The authors note that visitors to Prague today are confronted at every

step with all kinds of tacky and commercial Kafka souvenirs.  It was not always like that.  When I visited Prague under Communist rule in 1982, the ex-Party Chairman Alexander Dubcek was

working in a garage and Kafka’s books in German or Czech were not available. _ Jeffrey Meyers’ Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway will appear in November 2025 with Louisiana State

University Press.   The Biographer’s Quest will be out in the spring of 2026. _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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