Kafka’s Silent Bookshelves
Kafka’s bookshelves were invisible ones: the kind you carry in your head. I cannot imagine him in a book-lined study: it is easier to picture him inhabiting a cell, with a few worn volumes and a mind always returning to Goethe, to Flaubert.
In Franz Kafka: A Biography, Max Brod records, almost incidentally, the names of those writers who lived longest in Kafka’s imagination. It is a kind of secondary pleasure, tracing the faint afterimages of those readings: Heinrich von Kleist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse, Gustave Flaubert, Johann Peter Hebel, Theodor Fontane, Nikolai Gogol, Adalbert Stifter, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Walser, Søren Kierkegaard, Ernst Weiss, August Strindberg, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Blaise Pascal, Aleksandr Herzen, Peter Kropotkin, Božena Němcová.
Some names linger more clearly: others are shadows, writers Kafka read deeply yet whose works remain difficult to approach in English, like Rudolf Kassner or Wilhelm Schäfer. The silence around these figures seems fitting: another untranslatable element in Kafka’s world.
>Where's the Karl May? We know Kafka was a fan.
>Unmentioned in Brod's book, perhaps read during one of the less active periods of their friendship.
>Thank you for setting this out, Anthony. Very interesting!
>Welcome, Jen. Next year will include a Goethe period for me, also need to read more Mann.