Max Brod über Franz Kafka (1968) ENGL SUBS

I knew Franz Kafka from the first year of university, due to a discussion that I will address later. We didn't know each other in high school, but in the literature section of the German Student Club Lese und Rede Halle I met the quiet and reserved Franz Kafka. I gave a lecture on Schopenhauer, because at that time my whole life was under the banner of Schopenhauer, after the lecture Kafka, whom I had not yet met, came up to me and said that he would like to talk to me, and he accompanied me. my home. and immediately he began to ask "then why did you say this and that?" I tried to explain to him... the argument lasted until midnight, or even later.

Do you perhaps remember what his path was with Kafka that first time? Yes, that can be reconstructed very precisely, and I also remember it because Lese und Rede Halle was very close to what today is called National Street but then it was Ferdinand Street, one of the main streets in Prague. And I lived on Schallengasse, which today is called Skorepka, which is simply the Czech translation of the word Schallengasse. And so we went down Ferdinand Street, past Bergstein and then up and down Schallengasse and then back to Ferdinand Street, Kafka himself lived in the ring of the Old Town.

I accompanied him again and again; These were the streets of the Old City. Prague city: winding streets, not thought out according to a sophisticated rational plan, but rather overlapping alleys and alleys in which so many strange people lived. For more than 20 years, for almost half of his too-short life, he maintained a close friendship with Franz Kafka. Therefore, Herr Brod, surely no one better than you to describe it. How was he? How did he open up to you? How did he develop from his student days to his last days? How do you still see it today? Well, for starters he was a thin, very lanky student, maybe a head and a half taller than me, which doesn't mean much because I'm so short, but he was taller than average and with twinkling gray eyes and thick hair. black and externally very neat, very elegant.

Some people want to see him as a bohemian but they never met him. Outwardly he was characterized by marked discretion and dressed elegantly. Did he have a happy disposition? I wouldn't go that far. He was not as depressed as we see him today, but it cannot be said that he had a cheerful character. When you were alone with him or in a small circle, he had a charming wit and wit. But in society at large he remained silent. But privately between the two of us or in our little circle of four, he was very lively and also aggressive when he didn't like something.

He didn't bite his tongue. We know that Kafka's life was full of personal conflicts. His deep conflict with his father became, as you yourself once said, the conflict of his life. Don't we generally make the mistake of taking the neuroses that are condensed in his work and seeing him retrospectively as the prophet and harbinger of an era? Yes, it is true, the conflict with his father was a predominant conflict in his life, but the severity of this conflict is often exaggerated, for example, by the aforementioned Paul Eisner, who has written about it. Fundamentally, Kafka's father was a self-made man, without extensive education but with tremendous natural intelligence, and he loved his son.

But he couldn't identify with him. He had wanted Kafka to also be a businessman and he was the only son in the family and Kafka had no desire or ability to do so. And from there the conflict arose. But, fundamentally, Kafka greatly revered his father, because he always had a good eye for detecting a person's competence, his ability to cope with life, and his vitality. And Kafka Sr. had them in abundance. That he was not an aesthete, that he knew nothing about literature, that was a completely separate matter. Once, when Franz brought her his book, which I think is even dedicated to him, he told her: "Put it on the nightstand." And Franz took it as a kind of expression of contempt, but it really wasn't because he read it before going to bed.

So I think, of course, that it was a consequence of a lack of communication, of resentment, mainly of wanting to force Kafka to adopt a profession that did not suit him. And from there arose his desire to completely distance himself from his family and begin an independent life appropriate to him when he was 25 years old. So he looked for his own apartment where he could live alone and this apartment was not exactly chosen luckily, he caught a cold and maybe this was even the beginning of his lung disease. But Franz felt deep concern for his father.

He had never seen him so worried as when his father was sick and then recovered. I can show you that he was full of tenderness through a story that happens to be about my father. My father was sleeping on the sofa after dinner and Franz, who was visiting me, had to pass by this room and my father must have made some movement while Half asleep and Kafka raised his arms and said "consider me a dream" and snuck away tiptoe towards my room. And this is, then, a clear indication of how for Kafka life, poetry and fantasy merged with each other without the usual limits that are too often accentuated because for him they blended easily and naturally with each other.

He lived as one who writes and wrote as one who lives. But it is true that conflict between father and son, related to the love between father and son, is not unusual. But how did Kafka get to the point where, as you say, this conflict led to a life conflict? For this it seems that something beyond the usual is needed. He took everything very hard. He took it all very hard and his family didn't offer him much help. Perhaps the most important thing to mention in this context is the circle of four friends he grew up with, to which I belonged, the philosopher Felix Weltsch and the blind poet Oskar Baum.

Among us he found relief and relaxation and could be persuaded to read his work aloud without much difficulty. Perhaps I can say something about this remarkable group that is the subject of my new book. I'm very curious precisely about that. So these four three of us finally got married. The blind Oskar Baum was the first to marry when he got a job as an organist after receiving musical training. And that's why he was the first of us to get a job to pay the bills and get married. And then Felix Weltsch got married and I got married.

Kafka remained single. And we would meet in each other's apartment, although this couldn't happen at Kafka's house because he lived with his parents and had a small room for himself where we couldn't all fit. You could say that the four of us were a unique group and I don't know if there is anything similar in the literary world because we really trusted each other without a doubt because we were often critical of each other and because each of us formed individual friendships with each other. one of the others, i.e. Baum with Weltsch and me with Baum, were all paired with each other and often spent time one on one.

But the meeting of the four was really the highlight and took place approximately every 14 days alternating between the apartments. And what must be mentioned here is that we always understood each other without confusion. Kafka's depression is felt in his work, as are his neuroses and his interpersonal conflicts. And the question is whether in the retrospective interpretation of Kafka things are read into his work that were not in his mind at the time of writing, with the result that he is declared ex post facto as a prophet or someone who saw the future very good. clearly. Do you share this point of view or do you have a different opinion?

You are right when you say that many things are read in Kafka. I have already told you privately that in every city there is a prankster who approaches me after I give a lecture with some abstruse and unfounded theory about Kafka. But as far as the idea of ​​being prophetic is concerned, I believe that in this sense nothing was read into his works that was foreign to him. He himself, of course, never aimed to be a prophet or anything remotely like that, nor did he think such a thing. It was conceivable at all. Sometimes I imagine that Kafka came back today and walked among us.

I would be absolutely amazed by the waves created by his short life on earth and would not believe that any of this refers to him as I know him. But about the idea of ​​him being prophetic. There are scenes in The Trial that later came true. There are notes in his diary that are like reports from that war that were written before the war. And once he even depicted a deportation and the pain of the children and the desperation of his parents and then it was interrupted. Sounds like an inspired view of what then happened. You mentioned scenes from The Trial, what scenes do you have in mind?

From the beginning to the beginning "Someone must have slandered K. because one day he was arrested." And after that they don't tell him why they arrested him and they even let him go free. All this reminds you of things that I would rather not mention and not delve into, things that exploded all over central Europe. For example, how the couple who arrests K are described. They look like military figures with tight suits and many pockets and buttons. That didn't exist yet back then. Kafka died in 1924 and yet you see before you practically a member of the SA or the SS.

And all the behavior of these people reminds of what happened next. Now I have what may be an uncomfortable question. You knew Kafka personally. Is it not a burden to you as a literary scholar that you were such a friend of him and therefore might lack the interpretive distance of others who did not know him personally? I don't think it's an advantage not to have known Kafka. We have known each other for 22 years, during which we saw each other daily, sometimes twice a day. It surely allowed me to understand the mystery that is so evident in Kafka, the enigmatic and indecipherable quality that is present in everyone but is especially strong in such a developed person.

How did he really write? Quietly to himself? Or someone? Or did he ultimately want to address the world, the time? He wrote primarily for himself out of an internal compulsion, but what he wrote is, almost coincidentally, of global importance. In short I want to say that he was a strict moralist. A teacher. He did not teach through abstract dogmas but by being sincere, truthful and genuine. Following this path he encountered many problems and many obstacles and that is why some things in his work are so extraordinarily painful, because the impulse towards truth is so strong in him, that is why the conflict posed such a big problem for him.

But the impulse itself was easy and natural. And then the instructions for you to destroy his work: isn't there a contradiction in Kafka himself about the meaning of his work, about what he wanted to achieve with them? Yes... I am a man with the contradictions of him. This is a generally valid statement and also valid for Kafka. In his short but nuanced and graduated life he lived different periods in some he was sure of his mission, once he wrote to me 'I have a purpose' and other times he despaired of it, regarding the assignments that you have mentioned, to destroy his works , he did not write it in a formal will but in a note that he never presented to me, but that I found after his death when I went to his apartment to see what was left.

I can't even date it exactly. The desire to close the door to his writing was not present in the end, because in the end he had a relatively happy moment because he had found in Dora Diamant her suitable partner for life. In 1927 you gave a lecture in Wiesbaden on Franz Kafka. Suddenly one of his listeners came up in the crowd and shouted, "Do you know that our century will be known as Kafka's century?" I want to meet again this young man who went out and then disappeared into the crowd, if he found him I would gladly kiss him, because he expressed what I also feel.

But that does not mean that I agree with the many misinterpretations that today obscure Kafka's image instead of conveying it to people. However, from many letters I receive I have the impression that today's young people who speak German understand Kafka very intimately. I have received really valuable letters that show that for these young people Kafka has become a kind of mentor in their unlimited love for the truth. And in this sense I can accept that man's statement: we live in Kafka's century. And when he says that it is Kafka's century, how would he like Kafka's lessons to be understood in our century?

Be truthful, genuine and ethical. As I have already said, he was a great moralist and in this I see his main importance.