Kafka, the decisive years
Reiner Stach (Author), Shelley Laura Frisch (Translator)
This is the second volume (but the first volume written) of a planned three-volume, definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Eighty years after his death in 1924, Kafka remains one of the most intriguing figures in the history of world literature. Now, after more than a decade of research, working with over four thousand pages of journal entries, letters, and literary fragments, Reiner Stach re-creates the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915. These are the years of Kafka's fascination with early forms of Zionism despite his longing to be assimilated into the minority German culture in Prague; of his off-again, on-again engagement to Felice Bauer; of the outbreak of World War I; and above all of the composition of his seminal works-The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Judgment, and The Trial
collective biographies
vi, 581 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780151007523, 0151007527
60419722
At home with the Kafkas
Bachelors, young and old
Actors, Zionists, wild people
Literature and loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar
Last stop Jungborn
A young lady from Berlin
The ecstasy of beginning: "The judgment" and "The stoker"
A near defenestration
The girl, the lady, and the woman
Love and a longing for letters
Exultant weeks, little intrigues
The Bauer family
American and back: The man who disappeared
The lives of metaphors: "The metamorphosis"
The fear of going mad
Balkan War: the massacre next door
1913
The man who disappeared: perfection and disintegration
Invention and exaggeration
Sexual trepidation and surrender
The working world: high tech and the ghosts of bureaucracy
The proposal
Literature, nothing but literature
Three Congresses in Vienna
Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva
Grete Bloch: the messenger arrives
An all-time low
Kafka and Musil
Matrimonial plans and asceticism
Tribunal in Berlin
The great war
Self-inflicted justice: The trial and "In the penal colony"
The return of the East
The grand disruption
No-man's land
Translated from the German