Understanding Franz Kafka by Allen Thiher (review)

Driven by different causes and battling for different stakes, the last couple of years have witnessed an inordinate popular attention directed to two titans of German intellectual history: in 2017 the quincentenary of the dissemination of Martin Luther's ninety-five theses was commemorated, inspiring a profusion of volumes appraising him and his reformation of Christianity. The current year saw an equally engrossing, albeit indirect, focus around the figure of Franz Kafka, due to the long yet impassioned legal battle over the rightful inheritor of his literary estate. As decompression from this international litigation, Allen Thiher's Understanding Franz Kafkainadvertently helps recenter our gaze on what really matters: the author's body of work.

As series editor James Hardin declares in the preface, Thiher's monograph is part of a series with an explicit intention, audience, and methodology. Designed both for students and engaged lay readers, it is meant to "provide introductions to the lives and writings of prominent modern authors and explicate their most important works" with particular emphasis given to the "sociological and historical background of the writers treated" (ix). Underlaid by a "judicious literary assessment of the major works in the most compact, readable form," the series is impelled by an obliging purpose in that it ultimately hopes to "increase knowledge and understanding of European and Latin American cultures and will serve to make the literature of those cultures more accessible" (ix).

Thiher's own overture introduces the first chapter as well as the book as a whole, outlining how he intends to execute the series's mission while also shifting the emphasis away from purpose and toward hermeneutical considerations. For him, the prospect of understanding Kafka hinges on not overly restrictive definitions of the terms "contextual" and "personal." Thiher presupposes that textual meaning is contingent upon contextual attentiveness, yet he is quick to stress that context comprises both the biographical and historical dimension. This twofold awareness has a dual effect—namely, to confirm the validity of the historical-cultural paradigm in contemporary literary criticism, and to repudiate what he sees as the limited interpretive mode of psychological determinism that reduces Kafka's fictions to "putative dramas played out in [his] psyche" (1). In Thiher's view, then, the "personal" would not just encompass the inner world but also everything that impinges on it: inter alia, domestic and social relationships, education, occupation, and spiritual concerns.

Along with its overall preformationist design, Thiher designs a structure in which different components mirror each other: just as the opening paragraph announces the basic operations of the first chapter as well as of the whole book, the first chapter both stands as a discrete entity and contains in ovothe entirety of that which follows. Similarly, the first chapter is primarily devoted to a biographical sketch of Kafka that progresses chronologically—even if punctuated by necessary asides describing the hybridity of and complex power dynamics coloring Kafka's immediate social environment. The extensive literary treatments that constitute the bulk of the work follow a linear chronology, with each subsequent chapter organized around and focusing on a set of pieces according to either their date of publication or to the time Kafka was preoccupied with them. Yet, in this procedure Thiher employs a temporal heuristic insofar as he divides Kafka's literary career into three distinct periods, the first of which is described by the search for artistic voice and that culminates in the Durchbruchcomposition of "Das Urteil" (1912). Interestingly, apart from the indication of new productions and in different generic forms, Thiher does not lend a distinguishing characteristic to the second and third periods, but he does suggest that Kafka's debilitating condition and waxing sense of mortality expedited and made increasingly urgent literary creation—even as the latter constantly doubted his skill in so doing.

Thiher has already published numerous works on Kafka, which in part contributes to his ability to smoothly weave in and out...