Max Brod (1884–1968)

This was a nearly flawless biography of Kafka by his dear friend Max Brod, who was the one reason that much of his work was saved. The fact that Brod had such a close relationship to the author allows him to understand his friend and explain his motives, purposes, and intellect. You get a better grasp of the character and personality of Kafka than any other source could bring. I only bring down the rating slightly because of Brod's style, which is a bit stiff at times. Nevertheless, a thrilling biography and one for the books. Read this if you want to know more about Kafka- it will enlighten you.

4.5 stars.… (meer)

Max Brod’s biography of Franz Kafka is an important source for anyone interested in the life and personality of the writer. After all, Brod was Kafka’s life-long friend and supporter. They had met in 1902 at the university, and Brod remained close to Kafka until the latter’s death 22 years later. What’s more, Brod had enormous regard for Kafka’s writing. Not only did Brod play a key role in getting his friend’s fiction published during Kafka’s life, but he served as Kafka’s literary executor after the latter’s death. It is due to Max Brod’s efforts that we have Kafka’s 3 novels, his (previously) unpublished short fiction, his diaries, and much of his correspondence. Whereas Kafka had requested that such work be destroyed upon his death, Brod did not comply – much to the benefit of Kafka’s lasting legacy.

This is not to say that Brod’s biography is flawless. Much to the contrary, it offers a one-sided perspective on Kafka, one distorted in several respects, and for multiple reasons. One was Brad’s love and friendship for Franz, which led him to depict his friend in terms that are largely positive. Second is the march of time; Brod did not attempt his biography until 13 years after Kafka’s death, and his recollection of details was often inaccurate, as we now know by reference to other sources. Third, Brod sometimes reached conclusions that are not well-based. A key example is his (naïve) acceptance of psychiatrist Gustav Janouch's published transcripts of detailed conversations he supposedly had with Kafka. In vol. 2 of his biography (p. 274), Reiner Stach casts serious doubt on these supposed conversations. Another example is Brod's acceptance of the assertion that Kafka had unknowingly fathered a child (by a woman whose name he does not reveal). Fourth -- and perhaps most important-- Brod had his own agenda in promoting a particular social and religious interpretation of Kafka’s work. In this book, this agenda is especially evident in Brod’s interpretation of Kafka’s novel The Castle, a heavy-handed theological interpretation that most modern critics do not support. As we now know, in publishing Kafka’s diaries, Brod omitted certainly passages for self-serving reasons, as revealed in vol. 2 of Reiner Stach’s massive biography. He likewise edited out portions of Kafka's correspondence that did not match Brod's Zionist agenda. To what extent Brod’s portrayals of Kafka in this work have similarly been biased is difficult to judge. Such issues suggest that this biography is best read with a level of skepticism. Nevertheless, it offers a unique and valuable portrait of Franz Kafka, an enigmatic figure whose life, like his writing, challenges every attempt at deep understanding.

In Chapter 1 (“Parents and Childhood”) Brod sketches Kafka’s background and early life, for which he relies heavily on his subject’s diaries and his infamous “Letter to My Father”. Thus, this chapter is less a biography than an autobiography of Franz himself, with his necessarily self-focused and highly subjective perspective.

In Chapter 2 (“University”), the reader begins to get a sense of what Franz was like in person, in contrast to the perspective one might gain from his fiction. “I have experienced over and over again” (writes Brod), “that admirers of Kafka who know him only from his books have a completely false picture of him. They think he must have made a sad, even desperate impression in company too. The opposite is the case. The richness of his thoughts, which he generally uttered in a cheerful tone, made him… one of the most amusing of men I have ever met, in spite of his shyness, in spite of his quietness.” Regarding what motivated his writing, Brod notes: “His hopes and fears were directed towards quite other things than literary reputation, which was not exactly unpleasant to him but unimportant.” “In company he is cheerful, full of humor, unsurpassable for his witty observations; with his conversation it is the same; it could and should all be written down.” Beyond these personal impressions, Brod draws heavily on that his subject’s letters and diaries in his portrayal of the young author.

The title of Chapter 3 -- “To Earn One’s Living, or to Live One’s Life?” – captures the protracted conflict between the life Kafka wanted to lead vs. the one he was obliged to lead, due to family obligations and economic circumstances. He notes that much of Kafka’s knowledge of the world and of life came from his experience in the office… “coming in contact with workmen suffering from injustice and from having to deal with the long drawn-out process of official work and the stagnating life of files. Whole chapters in 'The Trial' and 'The Castle' came from… the atmosphere Kafka breathed in the Worker’s Accident Institute.”

Chapter 4 (“Up to the Publication of Contemplation”) portrays Kafka’s early attempts at publishing, along with the holidays the two spent together, including their 1910 trip to Paris. Among the anecdotes, he mentions Kafka’s passion for a promiscuous barmaid named Hansi, of whom Kafka once said (according to Brod) that “whole cavalry regiments had ridden on her body.” Quoting from an essay that he wrote in 1921, Brod asserts that “Kafka writes, alongside the general tragedy of mankind, in particular the sufferings of his own unhappy people, homeless, hunted Jewry… (an interpretation that some, but not all. later critics would support). Such works as “The Trial” and “The Penal Colony” Brod considers to be “documents of literary self- punishment, imaginative rites of atonement” – a valuable insight to be sure.

Chapter 5 (“The Engagement”) focuses on his five-year relationship with Felice Bauer, which yielded two marital engagements but (of course) no marriage. Brod quotes liberally from the letters Franz wrote to Felice as well as Kafka's diary, in which he wrestled with the question of whether we should or ever would actually marry. On this issue, Brod offers some telling quotes from Kafka's diary: “I must be alone a great deal. All that I have accomplished is the result of being alone.” “Everything that is not connected to literature I hate; it bores me to carry on conversations (even when they are connected with literature.). Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, and the truth out of everything.” In a reflection that helps reveal why Kafka was unable to bring himself to marry, the author states: “Single, I might perhaps one day really give up my job. Married, it would not be possible.”

Chapter 6 (“Religious Development”) focuses on Kafka’s growing interest in Judaism (including his fantasy of moving to Palestine). Aspects of this chapter are among the least reliable passages in the book, given Brod’s biases and his own sociopolitical goals. Other aspects of this chapter deal with Kafka’s more mature writings, including “The Castle”, to which (as discussed above) Brod gives a theological interpretation. Of “The Trial” Brod notes that when Franz read the first chapter to he and his friends that they “laughed immoderately… and he myself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.” Clearly Brod and his friends saw tragicomic elements in Kafka’s writing that modern readers commonly fail to recognize.

Chapter 7 (“The Last Years”) deals with Kafka’s final years, as he gradually succumbed to the tuberculosis which was to take his life. Interestingly, Brod notes after Kafka’s funeral (where his coffin had been laid to rest at 4 PM), they returned to the Old Town Square to see that the great clock (allegedly) had stopped at precisely 4 PM.

Finally, in Chapter 8 (“New Aspects of Kafka”), Brod reflects on the massive amount of commentary and interpretation to which Kafka’s writings had been put – already (since this book was written in the late 1950s). He notes that the literature on Kafka contained “many absurdities and contradictions”. Kafka’s efforts (he explains) “were directed towards inner perfection… it was not that he did not care what the world thought of him, rather he simply had not the time to worry about it.”

Critics have long recognized the problematic nature of Brod's biography. Walter Benjamin states that it testifies to a “lack of any deep understanding of Kafka’s life,” one great riddle of which is, indeed, Kafka’s choice of such a philistine for a best friend. Milan Kundera marvels that Brod "was astute enough to preserve Kafka’s novels for posterity", yet did so in ways "sentimental, vulgar and politically tendentious". In a 2010 essay in the New York Times, Elif Bautman asserts that "the received image of Brod in Kafka studies is a well-meaning hack who displayed extraordinary prescience, energy and selflessness in the promotion of his more talented friend, about whom, however, he understood nothing and whose dying wishes he was thus able to ignore."

Clearly the Brod biography is flawed and unreliable, yet with such caveats in mind, a valuable document nonetheless. This biography is supplemented with reminiscences of Kafka by two who knew him (Rudolf Fuchs, Dora Geritt), a chronology, and several photographs of Kafka from throughout his life.… (meer)