Safranski (who is quite the public intellectual in Germany) gives us a brand new book about Kafka and fires up a discussion: What kind of writing abouSafranski (who is quite the public intellectual in Germany) gives us a brand new book about Kafka and fires up a discussion: What kind of writing about Kafka do we need in the year 2024, 100 years after his death? There are whole libraries worth of publications about the life, times, alleged intentions, and aesthetic principles of, IMHO, the greatest German-language writer who ever lived, why still write about Kafka, and under which framework? (Sure, the currently most obvious answer is to cash in on the centennial, but you know what I mean.)
And a lot of the criticism Safranski received stems from the lack of clarity regarding the book's aim: While some critics claim that "Writing for His Life" (the subtitle "Um sein Leben schreiben") does not add enough new insights to the canon of Kafka research, I'd maintain that it never even intended to do that. This is pop science for a broad audience that hasn't spent hundreds of hours devouring Kafka's complete works and his biographies and professorial exegesis and writing papers about the guy - and don't think I'm mocking these nerds, no, I'm in fact one of them. But there was a day when I started learning about Kafka and I found him mesmerizing but also highly enigmatic, so I needed a gateway in. Safranski does provide such a gateway in. And frankly: There is nothing worse than literary snobs who rip into more light-weight writing about complex authors in order to defend a superiority they imagine for themselves. "Keep the plebs away from Kafka!" - oh, come on, you're ridiculous. Storytelling is about sharing and connection, not your fragile egos. Congratulations that you know something about Kafka, now sit down and shut up.
As the subtitle suggests, Safranski wants to tell Kafka's story from the viewpoint of him feeling compelled to write: Kafka, the insurance lawyer, almost suffered from the all-encompassing urge to create literature, and feared that it will keep him from really living - he described himself as a man who consists of literature (I love that dude, but he was quite the heady drama king). From that general starting point, Safranski gives a short depiction of Kafka's life, heavily focused on his relationships with women, and intertwines this biography with often rather lengthy re-tellings of his major works plus the most commonly accepted interpretations. That's what Safranski does, not more, but also not less.
So yes, for well-read Kafka aficionados, this is not the book, because it's not supposed to be. This slim volume is not here to give an all-encompassing deep dive into what Kafka does. The thing with Kafka is that there are numerous ways to read his texts, so there is not the interpretation, but an unusually broad corridor of what motifs and plotting might mean. That's the fascination of Kafka, the psychological complexity of his frequently nightmarish literary visions. But before studying the four trillion ways to interpret The Metamorphosis, maybe newbies should start with a gateway in that doesn't amp up the ambiguity and thus the disorientation to the max.
And yes, Safranski's book is also dubiously paced, but oh well, I think that as a starting point, it's well done. I want more people to dare and read Kafka, without fear of "not getting it". And if you can learn one thing about Kafka from Safranski's book, it's that for him, it was not about getting literature and intellectual masturbation, it was about loving literature.
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