Kafka

This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period...

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This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.

Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.

Introduction 1
PROLOGUE: The Black Star 16
1 At Home with the Kafkas 21
2 Bachelors, Young and Old 42
3 Actors, Zionists, Wild People 54
4 Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar 71
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Introduction 1
PROLOGUE: The Black Star 16
1 At Home with the Kafkas 21
2 Bachelors, Young and Old 42
3 Actors, Zionists, Wild People 54
4 Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar 71
5 Last Stop Jungborn 86
6 A Young Lady from Berlin 94
7 The Ecstasy of Beginning: "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" 108
8 A Near Defenestration 119
9 The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman 134
10 Love and a Longing for Letters 145
11 Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues 159
12 The Bauer Family 169
13 America and Back: The Man Who Disappeared 175
14 The Lives of Metaphors: "The Metamorphosis" 192
15 The Fear of Going Mad 206
16 Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door 226
17 1913 231
18 The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration 242
19 Invention and Exaggeration 253
20 Sexual Trepidation and Surrender 266
21 The Working World: High Tech and the Ghostsof Bureaucracy 281
22 The Proposal 297
23 Literature, Nothing but Literature 324
24 Three Congresses in Vienna 350
25 Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva 368
26 Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives 379
27 An All-Time Low 390
28 Kafka and Musil 401
29 Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism 413
30 Tribunal in Berlin 433
31 The Great War 444
32 Self-Inflicted Justice: The Trial and "In the Penal Colony" 464
33 The Return of the East 484
34 The Grand Disruption 493
35 No-Man's-Land 508
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 517
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 519
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 521
NOTES 523
BIBLIOGRAPHY 551
PHOTO CREDITS 563
INDEX 565
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