blantland

Dr. Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday in the Kierling Sanatorium, near Klosterneuburg bei Wien. Few people knew him here, for he was a recluse, a wise man in dread of life. He had been suffering a lung disease for years, and although he worked to cure it, he also consciously nourished it, and fostered it in his thoughts. He once wrote in a letter: when heart and soul can’t bear it any longer, the lung takes on half the burden, so that it is distributed a little more evenly-and that’s the way it was with his disease. It lent him an almost miraculous tenderness and an almost horribly uncompromising intellectual refinement. 

Physically, however, Franz Kafka loaded his entire intellectual fear of life onto the shoulders of his disease. He was shy, anxious, meek, and kind, yet the books he wrote are gruesome and painful. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, tearing apart and destroying defenseless humans. He was too clairvoyant, too intelligent to be capable of living, and too weak to fight. He was weak the way noble, beautiful people are, people incapable of struggling against their fear of misunderstanding, malice, or intellectual deceit because they recognize their own helplessness in advance; their submission only shames the victor. He understood people as only someone of great and nervous sensitivity can, someone who is alone, someone who can recognize others in a flash, almost like a prophet. His knowledge of the world was extraordinary and deep; he was himself an extraordinary and deep world.

He has written the most significant books of modern German literature, books that embody the struggle of today’s generation throughout the world-while refraining from all tenderness. They are true, stark, and painful, to the point of being naturalistic even where they are symbolic. They are full of dry scorn and the sensitive perspective of a man who saw the world so clearly that he couldn’t bear it, a man who was bound to die since he refused to make concessions or take refuge, as others do, in various fallacies of reason, or the unconscious-even the more noble ones. 

Dr. Franz Kafka wrote “The Stoker”, the first chapter of a wonderful, still unpublished novel (which has appeared in Czech in Neumann’s Červen); “The Judgement,” the conflict of two generations; “The Metamorphosis,” the most powerful book in modern German letters; “In the Penal Colony”; and the collections Meditation and A Country Doctor. The last novel, Before the Law (The Trial), has been in manuscript form, ready to print, for years. It is one of those books which, upon reading, leaves the impression of a world so perfectly portrayed that any further comment is superfluous. All of his books paint the horror of secret misunderstandings, of innocent guilt between people. He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscience he could hear even where others, deaf, felt themselves secure.

paolo veronese, the triumph of virtue over vice, c. 1554-6