Kafka and his world

Kafka. Nicholas Murray. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. vii + 440 pages. ISBN 0-316-72479-3.

Where exactly does Franz Kafka belong? This was a question which occupied this most alienated of modern masters to the point of distraction; it was a question which proved artistically fruitful, if often personally painful. It is a question which the biographer of Kafka must address with some thoroughness. Mr Murray proves in this book how stimulating personal history can be as a way into general history. The reader will be enlightened on many fascinating minutiae of European history that are not already likely to be familiar even to its more studious devotee. For what we have in this history is a uniquely complex set of worlds within worlds, as experienced by a German-speaking Jew in what was then the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prague.

The tensions and complications of the German-speaking Jew's 'ghetto without walls' are clear from the very beginnings of Kafka's cultural existence. His father, a well-to-do shopkeeper always searching for a more distinguished address, read German newspapers and attended a German club, but all the servants in the household were Czech-speaking. A kind of caste system was in operation. Hermann Kafka, an extremely driven man from poor rural origins never ceased to berate his son with tales of childhood poverty and comments on how easy life was for young Franz. Hermann felt that siding with the German-speaking elite was the best way to get on. Yet even he, like many other Jewish businessmen, feared popular resentment of the elite and claimed falsely in a census that the language spoken at home was Czech.

These tensions were to make a deep impression on Kafka who was sensitive, articulate, but reserved from an early age. He was unusual in his ability to speak Czech with some fluency; he would not accept with his father's readiness the pragmatic cultural compromises adopted by so many among Prague's Jewish community. An early episode of bad-temper and conflict with one of the household servants illustrates the self-consciousness and internal turmoil experienced throughout his life. Dragging his feet and weeping at one moment at the prospect of arriving, at the next at the prospect of being late, young Kafka creates a public scene, while the cook, charged with taking him to school, exchanges glances with a fellow Czech of similarly low social status. Who does this over-sensitive, bad-tempered son of the elite think he is? This was a question that the whole of Prague asked itself more recently, when there was great debate over whether to name a city square in his honour. A fitting irony for a writer who was at once so rooted and so alienated.

Kafka's internal strife produced work of universal appeal. But the biographer must deal, as Mr Murray comments, with 'a particular man in a particular place at a particular time'. It is astonishing to discover the extent of his correspondence, especially in the letters he exchanged with Felice Bauer, with whom he had a long and tortured affair. These run to around six hundred closely printed pages. This is considerably longer than any of his fictional works; inevitably his life turns out to be far more diverse and diffuse than his art, but this biography does achieve that most important result: it sends us back to the art with renewed interest and enthusiasm.

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