Prague Jews, insurance civil servants and writer Dr. Franz Kafka left behind classic works such as "The Castle", "The Lawsuit", and "Metamorphosis". He was known as a pioneer and master of Western modernist literature along with the French writer Marcel Proust and the Irish writer James Joyce.
Guangxi Normal University Publishing House published "Kafka's Biography: Early Years" in June this year outlines Kafka's growth process. At first glance, his early life was ordinary and uneventful: he was born in a middle-class family in a big city, studied and fell in love step by step, got a seemingly enviable doctorate and a boring white-collar job; Under this ordinary appearance, it is the father's arbitrariness, the alternating city of old and new, and the strict society that establish the three motifs of writer's power, fear, and loneliness, and hatch Kafka's magical style.
Kafka's Biography: The Early Years
[de] Reiner Stacher
Translated by Ren Weidong
Published by Guangxi Normal University Press in June 2022
There is an authoritative, unkind father
Kafka's father and mother
These remarks, which were very reluctant to hear but stored in detail in memory, convinced Kafka early on that it was precisely in the civic environment that the relationship between parents and children was primarily a power relationship: even if the parents did good deeds, they were intended to have a side effect: to consolidate their absolute dominance over their children and to make this power sustainable for a long time. This kind of power— which Kafka experiences every day— is more firmly rooted in their moral accounts than affecting the unstable love of their children. Therefore, parents consciously put pressure on this account by constantly talking about the contradiction between their own responsible life struggles and their children's seemingly carefree lives. But their psychological strategic calculations rarely force children to feel genuine gratitude, but rather cause them to feel guilty—and the harder their path has been, the more persistent and deeper the guilt in their hearts.
That's why Kafka's father would tell the story of the long-past suffering in a flaunting tone and enjoy it, as if it were all a great achievement. "Who knows that today?" He shouted over and over again, "What do the children know! No one has ever endured all this suffering! Can any child understand this today?" However, at least one of his children understood.
— The Biography of Kafka: The Early Years Chapter 3 The Giants: The Kafka Family from Wassek
One night, I cried and cried for water, not because I was thirsty, half probably for the sake of anger, and half for the sake of relieving myself. After your few harsh threats didn't work, you dragged me out of bed, pulled me onto the balcony, locked the door, and left me standing alone in my vest for a while. I don't want to say that you didn't do it right, maybe you didn't do it, you couldn't be quiet that night, I just wanted to use it to illustrate the way you were educated and how it affected me. After that, I obeyed, but my heart was hurt by it. Asking for water without a doubt was taken for granted, and being pulled outside was so frightening that my nature could never associate the two. Many years later, I would imagine that the giant, my father, the supreme authority, would come and drag me from bed to the balcony in the middle of the night, and I was nothing in his eyes, and this imagination tormented me all the time.
Kafka's experience on the "balcony" (such an inner courtyard-facing veranda is often seen in Prague's residences) is quite well seen as a key scene in his psychological biography. The mere image of the almost naked child, standing in the darkness of his parents' locked door, is enough to immediately illustrate the three fundamental motifs of Kafka's world: power, fear, loneliness, and their interconnectedness. The power of the "supreme authority" is feared, not only because of its absolute, including physical superiority, that any resistance is futile, but more importantly, it is unpredictable. You don't know why, and you don't know when or how it's going to explode. The only thing Franz can be slightly sure of is that this power is not aimed at physical suffering. Because, despite his father's repeated threats to beat him—sometimes even yelling, whitening his face, and untying his pants strap to use as a whip—he hardly really used violence. But he would take advantage of his filling the room to isolate, despise, and expulse Franz—usually in satirical and reproachful language, and at least once threw Franz out.
The father has the power to make the son feel lonely: this is the core of the decades-long confrontation between father and son, and this is the part for which the father is directly responsible. However, there is no concealment in "To the Father", this scar, when Franz was two or three years old, was already very deep, and no one could heal it.
— Kafka's Biography: The Early Years Chapter 6 Remembering Freud
Earned a vanity JUD title and a boring white-collar job
Kafka's doctoral examination records
Kafka spent eighteen years as "Mr. Doctor": he would be greeted in the street, called this in his office, and written on the letter desk, and he did not feel bored or glaring. It is unimaginable to abandon this title, it will cause embarrassment like using "you" to call each other prematurely in a relationship, and it will definitely not make people think that he is humble, on the contrary, it will make him appear arrogant and even arrogant. After all, this title is granted, acquired, it means an increase in rank, a redefinition of social hierarchy, so it is definitely not a personal matter. In addition, it is not only Kafka himself whose status has been raised, but also his family, including his future wife: now that there is a Doctor in the family and his circle of friends are also Doctors, this means that the high educational expenses invested before are now finally being paid off – on the premise that as many people as possible know. Franz Kafka is pleased to inform you that he received his Juris Doctorate from the Royal Deutsche Charlie Ferdinand University in Prague on Monday, June 18 this year.
——— Kafka Biography: The Early Years, Chapter XX, The Doctor of Laws, looking for a job
Kafka later repeatedly complained that his office work was ghostly in character, based solely on its degree of abstraction. Dealing with hazard levels and risk percentages, determining premium amounts, and negotiating legally and rhetorically with unwilling entrepreneurs —these remained at the forefront of his work until the end of his career. Mostly boring routines, but this statistical exchange with reality through data tables also has a ridiculous side, which Kafka did not ignore and later gained literary inspiration from it. Therefore, the absurd distribution of documents in the novel "The Castle" comes from the daily experience of mechanization in the institution, which has to deal with thousands of documents every day. Kafka must have imagined that even the ancient gods might have been exhausted by the archival management of his country, leaving him with no time to see his kingdom: "Poseidon sat at his desk and calculated..."
——— Kafka Biography: The Early Years Chapter XXIII The Extraordinary Assistant
I made a close literary friend and a talented editor
Max Broad, 1902
Brod learned many years later that Kafka also wrote literature... But of course, his curiosity was awakened: Kafka, this polite and uncompromising aestheticist, this perfectionist, really dared to try... It was the beginning of a lifelong game, and it went on to rack the brains of the literary research community for more than a century: from that time on, Brod wanted to see the text, but Kafka either did not hand it over or hesitated, giving it to him page by page.
— Kafka Biography: The Early Years Chapter 17 The Circle of Friends: Utitz, Wilshire, Fanta, Bergman
Seeing a friend's work a thousand times better than his own, and it is his own life to encourage this friend to write, this kind of sad and joyful experience is undoubtedly painful for Broad. And the kind of second-hand honor he's enjoyed for decades is completely unthinkable without a deep sense of frustration as a basis.
— Kafka's Biography: The Early Years, Chapter 15 Friend Max
Kafka's belief in literature, he had an axe that split the frozen sea in the human heart
A fragment of the first draft of A Description of a Struggle
If we read a book that can't wake us up with a punch in the head, then why should we read it? Or as you wrote in your letter, in order to make us happy? My God, we would be happy without books, the kind of books that make us happy, and if necessary, we can write them ourselves. The books we need are those that affect us like misfortune, which can make us very miserable, like the death of a man we love him more than we love ourselves, like we are driven into the forest, far from everyone, like suicide, and a book must be an axe that can split the frozen sea in our hearts. I think so.
—Kafka's Letter to Oscar Pollack, 27 January 1904
Author: Reiner Stacher
Editor: Zhou Yiqian