This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of
Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's
life, from 1916 to 1924--a period during which the world Kafka had
known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects
the latest findings about Kafka's life and works, draws readers in
with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups
of Kafka's personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of
a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation. In
these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet
his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity
with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost
the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of
a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague.
The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and
made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began
to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser
and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories
and A Hunger Artist to The Castle. A door seemed to open in the
form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena
Jesenska. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably
ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However,
his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final
period of his life became the years of insight.
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