Franz Kafka: January 2020

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Franz Kafka
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1/30/2020 Franz Kafka | Modernist Archives Publishing Project
FRANZ KAFKA
Gender
Male
Occupation
Writer
Birth Date
1883CE Jul 3rd
Birth Place
Prague, Czech Republic Franz Kafka in 1906
Wikimedia (Public Domain)
Death Date
1924CE Jun 3rd
Death Place
Kierling, Austria
Relationships
Max Brod : Editor Friend
Willa Muir : Translator
Edwin Muir : Translator
Maria Jolas : Editor
Eugene Jolas Editor Translator
:
Milena Lover Translator
https://www.modernistarchives.com/person/franz-kafka 1/12
Jesenská :
Kurt Wolff : Editor
Philip Rahv : Editor
Business
Relationships
Secker & Warburg : Publisher
Authority Record
http://viaf.org/viaf/56611857
Authored By:
Ben Streeter
Edited By:
Anna Mukamal
Helen Southworth
Biography
Books, Franz Kafka said, “must be the axe for the frozen sea
inside us” (Letters 16). Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. The
oldest son of Hermann and Julie Kafka, he had three sisters,
Valli, Elli, and Ottla, and two brothers who died in infancy. His
father was a wealthy Jewish Czech businessman who did not
support Franz’s literary aspirations. Kafka’s con ict with his
father would become the main theme of his writing (Rabate
64), in which he was able to express things that he could not
say directly to his father (Letter to His Father 69). Kafka was
intolerably burdened by his father’s unfavorable judgments, and
it was clear to his best friend, Max Brod, that Kafka remained
“unable to free himself from his father despite his critical

attitude toward him” (22-3).
He started publishing in his mid-twenties in literary periodicals:

the bimonthly Hyperion (1908-1909), the Prague-German
newspaper Bohemia (1909-1911), and the Herder-Blätter
(1912), a short-lived journal sponsored by the B’nai B’rith
society to promote Jewish culture and co-edited by Willy Haas,
a school friend of Kafka and Brod. Another friend of Haas, with
whom he later co-founded a weekly paper in 1925, was Ernst
Rowohlt, who started the Rowohlt publishing company in
Leipzig in 1908, published Kafka’s rst book, Meditation, in
1912. The company was renamed the Kurt Wolff publishing
company in November 1912. Wolff was a German publisher
who later established Pantheon Books in 1942. His archive is
held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University.
In 1913, an annus mirabilis for modernism in which Proust

published Swann’s Way, Kafka published “The Judgment” in
Arkadia, an anthology edited by Brod and published by the
Munich-based Kurt Wolff and a second book, The Stoker, with
the same publisher, won a signi cant literary award, the
Theodor Fontane Prize, named after Fontane, a major German
th
novelist, journalist, and critic of the 19 century. In “The
Judgment,” a father sentences his son (Kafka) to death (Diaries
215).
During World War I, an important German expressionist

monthly published in Leipzig, Die weissen Blatter, published
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in October 1915. The publication
was co-founded in 1913 by Kurt Wolff and Erik Ernst-
Schwabach, who was the founder of the journal’s parent

company, Verlag der Weissen Bücher (Stach Decisive 405).
“Verlag” is German for publishing company. Kurt Wolff also
published The Metamorphosis in book form in November 1915,
followed by The Judgment as a book in 1916. That year, Robert
Musil visited Kafka in Prague.
Although Kafka published his rst books less than a decade

after his rst writing in periodicals, he continued to publish in
monthlies and weeklies throughout his career. The literary
journal Marsyas published Kafka’s stories “An Old Manuscript”
and “A Fratricide” in 1917. The magazine was founded by the
playwright Theodor Tagger.
Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in September 1917. In

October and November, Der Jude published “Jackals and
Arabs” and “A Report to an Academy.” The German monthly
was started in 1916 by co-founders who later played a big role
in Kafka’s publication history. One of them was German-Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber, who met Kafka in 1913 and later
offered him an editorial position. Kafka declined (Medin 22).
The other was Salman Schocken, a longtime advocate of
Kafka’s who founded the Schocken publishing company in
Berlin in 1931.
Schocken published many of Kafka’s works, including his

diaries and Before the Law in 1934, as well as other German-
Jewish writers such as Walter Benjamin and the Buber-
Rosenzweig translation of the Bible (Poppel 20-49). The
publishing house was con scated by the Nazis in late 1938. It
was reopened as Schocken Books in New York in 1946, with
Hannah Arendt as a senior editor and plans for new editions of

Kafka.
In 1919, Kafka published two books with Kurt Wolff, In the

Penal Colony and A Country Doctor. He also wrote the
unpublished Letter to His Father. Kafka’s rst works to appear
in a language other than German were Czech translations
published in the Prague literary weekly Kmen (“the stem”) on
the advice of Milena Jesenská, Kafka’s lover and translator;
Kmen published “The Stoker” in 1920 (Stach Insight 330). In
1921, the weekly German newspaper Karpathenpost published
Kafka’s “From Matlarhaza.” The paper was founded in 1880 and
published in Kežmarok in what was then Austria-Hungary.
“A Hunger Artist” rst appeared as a story in 1922, in a quarterly

German literary magazine founded in 1890, Die Neue
Rundschau. Kafka left The Castle un nished in 1922. In April
1924, Prager Presse, a German newspaper published by the
Czech government, published “Josephine the Singer, or the
Mouse Folk.”
Kafka died on 3rd June, 1924, in Kierling and was buried on

11th June in the Jewish cemetery in Prague-Strasnice. A
th
memorial service was held on 19 June at the Little Theater in
Prague. Kafka had enjoyed the theater, and though his ctional
aims were serious, at his readings, he and his audience were
prone to laughter (Harman 301).
After his death in 1924, A Hunger Artist was published as a

book by Verlag Die Schmiede, an avant-garde literature
publishing house in the 1920s in Berlin that also published
works by Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Rudolf Leonhard.
Kafka was translated into English for the rst time in transition,
an in uential modernist journal cofounded in Paris in 1927 by
Maria and Eugene Jolas and distributed at Shakespeare and
Company. It was the rst journal to publish excerpts by James
Joyce of what would become Finnegans Wake. Eugene Jolas
translated Kafka’s “The Judgment” for transition in 1928.
After Brod handled the publication of The Trial (1925) with

Verlag Die Schmiede, as well as The Castle (1926) and Amerika
(1927) with Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s books were translated into
English and published throughout the 1930s. Kafka’s
translators, Willa and Edwin Muir, convinced Martin Secker to
publish The Castle in 1930 (Mellowm 310-12).
Secker started the Secker publishing company in 1910. It

became Secker & Warburg in 1936, when it was purchased by
Frederic Warburg. Known for being both anti-Fascist and Anti-
Soviet, Secker & Warburg's publications included the works not
only of Kafka but also of Norman Douglas, George Orwell, C. L.
R. James, Colette, and Thomas Mann. The archives of Secker &
Warburg are split between the University of Reading, the
University of Illinois, and the Lilly Library in Indiana.The Hogarth
Press published both Edwin Muir and his wife Willa Muir. Edwin
Muir also championed Kafka as a critic. Secker trusted the
Muirs after they had translated a bestseller, so the Muirs then
translated The Trial (1937) and Amerika (1938) for Secker. The
Muir translations were long held as the authoritative version of
Kafka in English, but scholars have since scrutinized their
translations (for more on the Muir translations, see Harman).
In the United States, Philip Rahv was an early champion,

publishing essays about Kafka in The Southern Review and The
Kenyon Review in 1939. In 1937, Rahv founded the Partisan

Review. For the inaugural issue of his new periodical, Rahv
edited and published the rst essay about Kafka to appear in
an American little magazine (Ackerman 109). In the following
years, Rahv and the Partisan Review published three Kafka
short stories (1939-1942), a section from Kafka’s diaries
(1946), and essays about Kafka by Max Brod (1938) and
Hannah Arendt (1944).
Schocken Books in New York reissued the Muir translations in

1946 and commissioned translations of Kafka’s diaries and
letters in the 1950s. With growing international recognition,
scrutiny over Max Brod’s translations and edits grew. As early
as 1940, Salmon Schocken said in a memo that new
translations would be required. But Brod refused to allow
access to the Kafka manuscripts in his Tel Aviv apartment
(Samuelson).
New editions of Kafka’s posthumous works became possible in

1956, when Brod allowed access to Kafka’s papers
(Samuelson). The threat of war prompted Brod to move most
of the archives, including The Castle, to a Swiss vault. While
Kafka had instructed Brod to destroy his papers, Brod’s
ambition was to edit his friend’s texts into classics of so-called
world literature. As the renowned Kafka scholar and translator
Mark Harman has noted, Brod was always “discovering” new
Kafka material, announcing in the late 1960s that he had found
a new Kafka story. When asked where Brod found the new
Kafka piece, he simply said: “Why, here in my desk, of course!”
(11-2).
In 1961, Kafka’s heirs granted permission to Oxford’s Malcolm

Pasley to deposit Kafka’s archives in the Oxford Bodleian
Library. The manuscript of The Trial remained with Brod until
1968, when he left it to his heiress. She sold it in the late 1980s.
A German library purchased it in 1988 at Sotheby’s for $2
million. A 2016 court ordered that Kafka’s remaining papers be
transferred from Brod’s heirs to the National Library of Israel in
Jerusalem.
A new edition of The Castle, translated by Mark Harman and

based on the restored text, was published by Schocken Books
in 1998. Harman’s translation of The Castle won the Modern
Language Association’s inaugural Lois Roth Award for
outstanding translation in 1998. Two more new translations
based on the restored text were issued by Schocken in 2008:
Amerika, also translated by Mark Harman, and The Trial,
translated by Breon Mitchell.
Recent scholarship on Kafka has looked at the narrative

techniques used to produce estrangement in Kafka, comparing
them with those of Maurice Blanchot. Another focus of recent
scholarship on Kafka has been the law, speci cally applying the
work of Jacques Derrida to understand the boundaries of law
as a discipline, as it relates to the adjacent disciplines of
literature and philosophy.
Works Cited
Ackermann, Paul. “A History of Critical Writing on Kafka”. The

German Quarterly, 23.2, 1950.
Adler, Jeremy. "Stepping into Kafka's Head". Times Literary

Supplement, October 13, 1995.
Brod, Max. “Kafka: Father and Son”. Partisan Review, 1938.
Harman, Mark “‘Digging the Pit of Babel’: Retranslating Franz

Kafka’s Castle”. New Literary History, 27.2, 1996.
Kafka, Franz. Diaries, 1910-1923. Translated by Joseph Kresh

and Martin Greenberg, Schocken Books, 2000
---. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, Penguin Random

House, 2016.
---. Letter to His Father. Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne

Wilkins, Random House, 2015
Medin, Daniel. Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M.

Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald, Northwestern UP, 2010.
Mellown, Elgin. “The Development of a Criticism: Edwin Muir

and Franz Kafka”. Comparative Literature, 16.4, 1964.
Selected Bibliography
Caputo-Mayr, Marie Luise and Julius M. Herz. Franz Kafka: An

International Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Literature.
G. Saur, 2000.
Duttlinger, Carolin. The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka.

Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Richard T. Gray, R. V. G., Rolf J. Goebel, and Clayton Koelb. A

Franz Kafka Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press, 2005.
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Years of Insight, Princeton University

Press, 2013.
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years, Princeton University

Press, 2013.
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Early Years, Princeton University

Press, 2017.
Full Bibliography
Franz Kafka — Archival Material
The Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK
The German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar, Germany
The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem
Franz Kafka — Publications
Amerika: the missing person: A new translation, based on the

restored text, trans. Mark Harman, Schocken Books, 2008.
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser
and Eithne Wilkins, Exact Change, 1991.
The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell, Oxford University Press, 2009.
The Castle: A new translation, based on the restored text, trans.

Mark Harman, Schocken Books, 1998.
The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken, 1976.
Franz Kafka Diaries 1910-1923, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin

Greenberg, Schocken Books, 2000.
A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick, Oxford

University Press, 2012.
Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, rans. James
Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth, Minerva, 1992.
Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, Penguin Random House,

2016.
Letter to His Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins,

Random House, 2015.
Letters to Milena, ed. Willy Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern,
Minerva, 1992.
The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson,

Oxford University Press, 2012.
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick,

Oxford University Press, 2009.
The O ce Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and

Benno Wagner, trans. Eric Patton with Ruth Hein, Princeton
University Press, 2008.
The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell, Oxford University Press, 2009.
The Trial: A new translation based on the restored text, trans.

Breon Mitchell, Schocken Books, 1998.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - 17:00
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Article · January 2020

WG Sebald View project

Research Assistant, Stanford University View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

“unable to free himself from his father despite his critical

He started publishing in his mid-twenties in literary periodicals:

In 1913, an annus mirabilis for modernism in which Proust

During World War I, an important German expressionist

Schwabach, who was the founder of the journal’s parent

Although Kafka published his rst books less than a decade

Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in September 1917. In

Schocken published many of Kafka’s works, including his

Hannah Arendt as a senior editor and plans for new editions of

In 1919, Kafka published two books with Kurt Wolff, In the

“A Hunger Artist” rst appeared as a story in 1922, in a quarterly

Kafka died on 3rd June, 1924, in Kierling and was buried on

After his death in 1924, A Hunger Artist was published as a

After Brod handled the publication of The Trial (1925) with

Secker started the Secker publishing company in 1910. It

In the United States, Philip Rahv was an early champion,

Kenyon Review in 1939. In 1937, Rahv founded the Partisan

Schocken Books in New York reissued the Muir translations in

New editions of Kafka’s posthumous works became possible in

In 1961, Kafka’s heirs granted permission to Oxford’s Malcolm

A new edition of The Castle, translated by Mark Harman and

Recent scholarship on Kafka has looked at the narrative

Ackermann, Paul. “A History of Critical Writing on Kafka”. The

Adler, Jeremy. "Stepping into Kafka's Head". Times Literary

Brod, Max. “Kafka: Father and Son”. Partisan Review, 1938.

Harman, Mark “‘Digging the Pit of Babel’: Retranslating Franz

Kafka, Franz. Diaries, 1910-1923. Translated by Joseph Kresh

---. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, Penguin Random

---. Letter to His Father. Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne

Medin, Daniel. Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M.

Mellown, Elgin. “The Development of a Criticism: Edwin Muir

Caputo-Mayr, Marie Luise and Julius M. Herz. Franz Kafka: An

Duttlinger, Carolin. The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka.

Richard T. Gray, R. V. G., Rolf J. Goebel, and Clayton Koelb. A

Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Years of Insight, Princeton University

Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years, Princeton University

Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Early Years, Princeton University

Franz Kafka — Archival Material

The Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK

The German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar, Germany

The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem

Franz Kafka — Publications

Amerika: the missing person: A new translation, based on the

The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Castle: A new translation, based on the restored text, trans.

The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken, 1976.

Franz Kafka Diaries 1910-1923, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick, Oxford

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, Penguin Random House,

Letter to His Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins,

The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson,

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick,

The O ce Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and

The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Trial: A new translation based on the restored text, trans.

1/30/2020 Franz Kafka | Modernist Archives Publishing Project

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