Kafka: The Early Years by Reiner Stach (review)

As a Kafka scholar I believe I know a lot about the author who has been the subject of so much of my own research and writing over the past forty years, but having now read the long-awaited last volume of Reiner Stach's three-part biography—the volume that actually covers the first part of Kafka's life—I have a much richer understanding of Kafka's formation. The book is astonishing in its breadth and depth. The amount of thought and research that went into this biographical study is evident on every page.

Stach has written that his biography strives to give us an idea of "what it was like to be Kafka." That is different from other biographies that merely tell you about his life. What is also different is that Stach had access to the diaries of Max Brod, which were only made available in 2015. Indeed, this is the reason why this volume, which deals with the early part of Kafka's life, is the last of the three to be written and published. Kafka: The Decisive Years appeared in German in 2002 and in English translation in 2005, and Kafka: The Years of Insight appeared in 2008 and in English in 2013. All three volumes are precisely and readably translated by Shelley Frisch, whose "Translator's Preface" in this volume helps to explain Stach's approach to biography as well as her own views on the challenges of translating both Kafka and nonfiction works.

Stach knows how to tell a good story, and the life of Kafka is a great subject. Kafka: The Early Years deals with Kafka's life up to the year 1911. The reader is also given insights into the history and the reasons behind the national sentiments prevalent in Bohemia, and more particularly the city of Prague, when Kafka was young. Many of the unresolved conflicts that remained open wounds and eventually led to the Great War have their origins (going back even to the Thirty Years' War) in the region that was Kafka's home and help to clarify what it meant to be a German-speaking Jew growing up in a mostly Czech environment at the end of the nineteenth century.

"What it was like to be Kafka"—what does that really mean? For me, the explanations of life in the Kafka home are a great example of this method. We are presented with a description of life as it was lived at the time; for example, what Julie Löwy Kafka's householding would entail and what exactly was expected of her as a Jewish wife of a certain class. We also see Franz's mother dealing with her husband's temper, thus often dismissing servants who came and went and thus adding to little Franz's feelings of instability and establishing patterns in his mind about the nature of relationships.

As in the other two parts of Stach's Kafka biography, each of the chapters is introduced by an epigraph—and the cleverness of these little adornments should not be overlooked. The first chapter of this "first" and final part points to the mammoth undertaking of the three-volume oeuvre when it begins with lines from "Going Under," a song by the American rock band Devo: "Think you heard this all before/Now you're gonna hear some more." Stach must have delighted in finding just the right quotation for the subject of each chapter, and more than anything, this garnish conveys to us readers the sense of Stach's true enjoyment with his explorations into Kafka's life. This biography is never dull.

Stach's work dispels many of the myths surrounding Kafka, for example that he was not a good Czech speaker. Actually, for Kafka Czech was a "second native language," which he certainly used in his professional career and might even have committed to writing in, had he not been pushed the other way by ambition when he began high school...