115 Reiner Stach Reinerstach'skafka

book reviews / comptes rendus 115 Reiner Stach Kafka: The Years of Insight. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2013. xii, 682 pp. $35.00. Reiner Stach’s Kafka:TheYearsofInsight is the third and final volume of a defini- tive biography of the great Central European writer. First published in Germany in 2008 as Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnisse (Kafka: The Years of Recognition), it covers the final years of Kafka’s life from 1916 to 1924, from the terrible years of the Great War (1914–1918) to the writer’s death from tuberculosis in Kierling sanatorium. In these years Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant in a company dealing with the insurance claims of injured workers exposed him to its terrible realities. These were also the years of mass civilian hunger, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its replacement by an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918. Kafka witnessed all these cataclysmic events in the city of his birth, Prague. Although he rarely left his natal city – apart from brief visits to Berlin, where his on-and-off fiancée Felice Bauer resided; a reading trip to Munich, and spells in the Bohemian spa-towns of Marienbad and Zürau – Kafka seemed to experience the horrors of his time with a peculiar intensity. As Reiner Stach demonstrates in his subtle, sensitive and exhaustive examination of Kafka’s day-to-day life in this city, the political and economic realities of the time are indirectly treated in some of the most important texts that Kafka wrote during these years – texts such as the “An Imperial Message” in which the link between the ruler and his subjects is irrevocably dissolved, a symbolic echo of the death of Emperor Franz Josef i in 1916 and the imminent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. As Stach deftly explores, Kafka’s texts are at once political and existential, resonating with their times and yet suggestive of many other contexts. These short texts would culminate in his last great novel The Castle (1921–1922), written during the years of political transition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the newly established Czechoslovak Republic presided over by President T.G. Masaryk. Although the Bohemian Jews of Prague adapted to the new political order, Kafka’s novel explores the illusory foundation of the new political system symbolized by the immense castle – more like a small city than a castle – set in the snowy landscape of the countryside. Here Kafka deconstructs the opposition between city and countryside established by nineteenth-century Czech literature. Inverting the idealized rural idyll of Božena Němcová’s country novel Granny (1855), written during the repressive years of Austrian reaction to Czech national aspirancy, Kafka’s Castle reveals the nightmare at the heart of such utopian fantasies in the guise of a vast bureaucratic machine to which the doomed protagonist k has © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/22102396-05001017 116 book reviews / comptes rendus no access. Kafka equally had no illusions about the Zionist utopian aspirations of his Jewish friends and writers like his literary executor Max Brod. In Stach’s astute reading of “A Report to an Academy” – the memoirs of an ape driven by force to deny his own nature and adopt human habits – “the story could be read as a parable of how civilization works or as a searing indictment of the unnaturalness of middle-class restraints, but also as the history of Jewish assimilation and self-alienation” (p. 179). For Brod the Jewish interpretation was the only one, but Kafka’s story deliberately resists a narrowly tendentious reading. It is sometimes overlooked how Kafka’s preference for allegory and allusion was in large part a reaction to the engagé nature of much Prague writing (Jewish-German as well as Czech). It was not simply the case that Kafka wished to escape the straitjacket symbolized by the provincial city of his birth; he above all desired to disentangle himself from the divisive ethnic discourses that accompanied its transformation from the second city of a vast empire to the capital of a small, central European democracy. If Kafka effaces the topographical contours of Prague from his mature writings, it is not simply the impulse to escape the city in his imagination if not in reality, but also the constrictions and barriers such an ethnically and religiously fraught city imposed on him. In short, Kafka’s project was impossible without Prague; but it is equally the case that Prague was impossible without Kafka’s searing analysis of it. Perhaps the seminal event of Kafka’s life was not this immense political turmoil that swirled around him but a domestic occurrence that took place at 4a.m. on Saturday, August 11, 1917. Kafka awoke with a strange sensation in his throat. He got out of bed, put the light on and noticed clotted blood on his handkerchief. This was the prelude to a haemorrhage, the first serious indication of the tuberculosis that would kill him seven years later. Kafka was clearly predisposed to the illness, but, as Stach examines, his enforced life of drudgery in an insurance office, recurrent insomnia, and self-imposed asceticism – including writing through the winter in the bare small house on the Alchimistengasse rented by his sister Ottla – all contributed to his early death. In a powerfully brief epilogue to his book Stach traces the fate of Kafka’s family and associates in the years after his death. Although his parents were spared the horrors of World War ii, the war and the Holocaust destroyed the life he had known and most of the people associated with it. His three sisters died in gas chambers, Elli and Valli in Chelmo, Ottla in Auschwitz. Kafka’s uncle Siegfried Löwy, the country doctor, escaped deportation by committing suicide. Of the four women Kafka had known most intimately, two died in concentra- tion camps: Julie Wohryzek was murdered in Auschwitz while Milena Jesenská, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 50 (2016) 87–117.

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