Franz Kafka Das Schloß

by Franz Kafka

180 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2024

About the author

Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as " The Metamorphosis " (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.

Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.

His stories include "The Metamorphosis" (1912) and " In the Penal Colony " (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).

Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors.

Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but after two weeks switched to law. This study offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of doctor of law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.

Writing of Kafka attracted little attention before his death. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories and never finished any of his novels except the very short "The Metamorphosis." Kafka wrote to Max Brod, his friend and literary executor: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod told Kafka that he intended not to honor these wishes, but Kafka, so knowing, nevertheless consequently gave these directions specifically to Brod, who, so reasoning, overrode these wishes. Brod in fact oversaw the publication of most of work of Kafka in his possession; these works quickly began to attract attention and high critical regard.

Max Brod encountered significant difficulty in compiling notebooks of Kafka into any chronological order as Kafka started writing in the middle of notebooks, from the last towards the first, et cetera.

Kafka wrote all his published works in German except several letters in Czech to Milena Jesenská.

Reviews

[Landis Duffett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Start looking up scholarly articles on Kafka's _The Castle_ and you will encounter a cornucopia of allegorical interpretations: the village in the novel represents "society", the castle represents the object of a spiritual quest, K. is a student of Kabbala seeking access to the higher realms, etc. These allegorical readings are all willing to leap over any confrontation with the novel's own problematization of interpretation itself, a thematization that one would think would be a clue to these scholars to slow down (As K. says to Pepi: "Ihr...seid gewohnt, durch das Schlüsselloch zu spionieren und davon behaltet Ihr die Denkweise, von einer Kleinigkeit, die Ihr wirklich seht, ebenso großartig wie falsch auf das Ganze zu schließen" -- "As a habit, you spy through keyholes and that's how you get this way of thinking in which, from a detail, that you actually see, you extrapolate, in a manner as grand as it is false, to the whole."). I will add to this heap of allegorical readings with a reading that is both meta-allegorical and not allegorical at all. It is meta-allegorical in that it does not claim that the elements of the novel "stand for" extratextual entities, but rather claims that the novel, if it is an allegory of anything, is an allegory for interpretation itself. My reading is non-allegorical in that, as an allegory for interpretation, the novel ultimately represents, or better, really, "expresses", the experience of anxiety induced by interpretation. The reader of _The Castle_ is in the same predicament as K., the main character: they are both trying to read their way out of the events that they have entered. K's difficulties in understanding the meaning of officials' words, gestures, and actions are also the reader's difficulties. This is what gives the novel a doubly unsettling, doubly and truly uncanny quality: to read the novel sincerely is to acknowledge that we are joined at the hip with K. at least for the duration of our reading of the novel (but really even beyond it), just as helplessly incapable, just as prone to error and erroneously hopeful interpretations of signs (count how many times the words "Wink" (wave/hint) and "Bedeutung" (meaning) come up in the text) as K. Likewise, in this view, those scholars who posit one-to-one allegorical correspondences have initiated attempts to flee this anxiety of interpretation and settle comfortably into a realm that stops the flux, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. These views all claim to put us in a position "outside" the uncanny co-habitation of K.'s world, but any such successful reading is thereby a misreading since any fixation of meaning is an ignoring of the radical indeterminacy of meaning in the village/castle. What is the novel "about"? This anxiety of not knowing what it is about.