Upon finishing Kafka’s The Trial, the German satirist Kurt
Tucholsky noted, “The reader of a book knows after twenty or
thirty pages what kind of a writer he is dealing with, what
the book is, how it flows, whether it is meant to be taken
seriously, how to classify it. Here you know nothing, you
grope in the dark. What is this? Who is that?” In the case
of Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years, far fewer
than “twenty or thirty pages” are required for an accurate
forecast of the chapters to come.
While Stach’s study is indisputably complete and
Shelley Frisch’s translation from the German is beautifully
wrought, the first pages of Kafka read like a balance
sheet, with Kafka’s existence reduced to “forty years and
eleven months,” with “sixteen years six and a half months in
school and at university, and nearly fifteen years in
professional life” with “about forty-five days abroad.”
And
as for his love life? “He was engaged three times” and
“shared an apartment with a woman for about six months of
his life.” Kafka’s body of work consisted of the “forty
complete prose texts” he left and “3,400 pages of diary
entries and literary fragments.” Here too, Stach explicates
his methodology for relating the events that unfolded in
“the decisive years” (1910–1915) in excruciating detail,
addressing the “hermeneutic horizon” that is to become a
refrain throughout the work, and his persistent excuse for
resisting even the