Amerika

AMERIKA (THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED)

FRANZ KAFKA was born of Jewish parents in Prague in 1883. The family spoke both Czech and German; Franz was sent to German-language schools and to the German University, from which he received his doctorate in law in 1906. He then worked for most of his life as a respected official of a state insurance company (first under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then under the new Republic of Czechoslovakia). Literature, of which he said that he ‘consisted’, had to be pursued on the side. His emotional life was dominated by his relationships with his father, a man of overbearing character, and with a series of women: Felice Bauer from Berlin, to whom he was twice engaged; his Czech translator, Milena Jesenská-Pollak, to whom he became attached in 1920; and Dora Diamant, a young Jewish woman from Poland in whom he found a devoted companion during the last year of his life. Meanwhile, his writing had taken a new turn in 1917 with the outbreak of the tubercular illness from which he was to die in 1924. Only a small number of Kafka’s stories were published during his lifetime, and these are published in Penguin as Metamorphosis and Other Stories. He asked his friend, Max Brod, to see that all the writings he left should be destroyed. Brod felt unable to comply and undertook their publication instead, beginning with the three unfinished novels, The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). Other shorter works appeared posthumously in a more sporadic fashion.

MICHAEL HOFMANN was born in Freiburg in 1957 and came to England at the age of four. He went to schools in Edinburgh and Winchester, and studied English at Cambridge. He lives in London and Hamburg, and teaches part-time in the English Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors, including Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Durs Grünein and Thomas Bernhard. Penguin publish his translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories and Ernst Jünger’s World War I memoir, Storm of Steel. He edited the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry, published in 2006.

Amerika

The Man Who Disappeared

Translated with an Introduction by

MICHAEL HOFMANN

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This translation and Introduction first published as The Man who Disappeared (Amerika) 1996
Published in Penguin Books under the current title 2007
2

Translation and Introduction copyright © Michael Hofmann, 1996
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

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EISBN : 978–0–141–91131–1

CONTENTS

Introduction

Bibliography

Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)

INTRODUCTION

Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), is the Cinderella among Kafka’s three novels: the earliest begun and earliest abandoned; the last to achieve posthumous publication (as Amerika), edited by Max Brod, in 1927; the least read, the least written about and the least ‘Kafka’. That said, I agree with Edwin Muir, whose English translation first came out in 1928, that it is ‘the most purely delightful of Kafka’s books’, and there is a weightier case to be made for it as well – not that delight should be lost sight of in the search for meaning.

It seems that Kafka worked on a version (which is now lost) of Der Verschollene from 1911 into the summer of 1912. It went slowly, and he was never happy with it. Then, following the writing of Das Urteil (The Judgement) in a single night (22–3 September 1912), he embarked on a second version, which went swimmingly. Brod reports on his friend’s progress:

I quote from my diary notes of the time. 29 September: ‘Kafka in ecstasy, writing all night. A novel set in America.’ 1 October: ‘Kafka in incredible ecstasy.’ 2 October: ‘Kafka, continuing very inspired. A chapter finished. I am happy for him.’ 3 October: ‘Kafka doing well.’ On the 6 October he read me The Judgement and The Stoker.

By 17 November he had completed six chapters and thought he could finish the novel by Christmas, when he had a week off. In the event, things happened differently. For three weeks, he was distracted by Metamorphosis, experienced increasing difficulties with the novel, and finally put it aside on 24 January 1913. In June, the first chapter, The Stoker, was published as ‘a fragment’ by Kurt Wolff, and there was some talk of putting it out in another volume, along with The Judgement and Metamorphosis, to be called perhaps Die Söhne (The Sons) – a suggestion of how Kafka expected to be read. When his copy of The Stoker arrived, Kafka read it aloud to his parents and noted:

Exuberance, because I liked The Stoker so much. In the evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than myself, reading aloud to my most reluctantly listening father. Many shallows, in amongst obviously inaccessible depths.

Kafka didn’t take up the manuscript again until October 1914, when he completed the ‘“Up, up!” cried Robinson’ section (from ‘This was most unfair’), and worked on the two final fragments before finally giving up, this time for good. Some of his subsequent judgements were spectacularly harsh – as with all his work – but he never actually destroyed The Man Who Disappeared, and the time came when he thought his revulsion came from incapacity, and it turned on himself: ‘strength apparently (already) beyond me today.’ In 1920, reading Milena Jesenská’s translation of The Stoker into Czech, he approved of her rendition of ‘in his exuberance, and because he was a strong lad’, while suggesting she should leave it out altogether, so little sympathy did he have left for his strikingly young, forthright, cheerful and brave hero.