Reiner Stach aims “to explain how a consciousness that is set thinking by everything could evolve into a consciousness that set everyone thinking.” Less satisfying, however, is Stach’s answer to the question of why he has no predecessors writing auf Deutsch. His theory centers on the relative lack of movement in Kafka’s life. Kafka, as Stach writes:
Stach has good reason to brace for failure. But he also shows how much Kafka’s positions on his “burning issues” did, in fact, develop, how much they shifted and evolved over the years—hence the titles “the decisive years” (1910-1915) and “the years of knowledge” (1915-1924), the latter of which is scheduled to appear in English in 2012. Or rather, Stach does this brilliantly, producing as engaging a literary biography as I have read, one that is every bit as good as Leon Edel’s magnificent, multi-volume account of Henry James’ life.
Moreover, Stach is an astute reader of Kafka’s fiction, and his interpretations generally both point to the connections between life and text, and demonstrate why those links don’t hold out the key to revealing the text’s meaning. Finally, through thick biographical description, Stach shows how Kafka was able to create works that were seen by his circle as being about distinctively Jewish problems, and by other readers as being about “the human condition.” He also effectively addresses the issue of why Kafka was so committed to doing things that way:
It may be that at the end of Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (The Years of Knowledge) we get a deeper, if less direct, explanation as to why this magisterial work is the first major German Kafka biography. Stach concludes the book with an epilogue that is about the effect of the Holocaust on what had been Kafka’s life world. We are told that if Kafka had managed to survive tuberculosis and, unlike his three sisters, the camps, “he would have recognized nothing at the end of the catastrophe. His world no longer existed. Only his language lives.”
Writing the life of Kafka is, among other things, a special kind of memorialization, one that may be especially difficult to carry out in his language. After all, Kafka is not the only great, much-discussed German-Jewish author of his era whose German biography was either written just recently or remains to be written. This group includes Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kracauer, and a host of others. Maybe, then, the Holocaust has mattered in Kafka studies as much as the myth-busters say, just not in the way that it is supposed to. ~Paul Reitter
