Kafka: The Years of Insight, Riener Stach, c. 2013.

Kafka: The Years of Insight, Riener Stach, c. 2013. 833STA.

Cast of characters as they are introduced:

• Franz Kafka
• Cynthia Ozick, 1999, essay in the New Yorker, "The Impossibility of Being Kafka."
• Max Brod, closed friend; friendship began in childhood
• Felice Bauer, fiance, spurned
• Felice's mother
• Toni Bauer, Felice's sister
• Erna Bauer, Felice's sister
• Greta Bloch, close friend of Felice's
• Felix Weltsch: friend of Kafka's; unfit for service
• Oskar Baum: friend of Kafka's; unfit for service
• Ottla: Kafka's youngest sistre
• Gregor Samsa: hapless hero of "The Metamorphosis"
• page 30
  

Carpathian Mountains: range of mountains forming an arc across central Europe, stretching from the far eastern Czech Republic and Austria in the northwest through Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania to Serbia in the south.

Begins 1914. Outbreak of war.

 

A year later, 32-y/o Dr Kafka, unmarried Jewish official at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, had not yet seen the war firsthand.

Neurotic hypochondriac. Self-devouring introspection out of touch with reality.

He himself said it "impossible too be Kafka."

Was he also solipsistic?

Closest friend: Max Brod.

July 12, 1914: engagement with Felice Bauer ended; devastating for Kafka. Kafka henceforth considered that date a catastrophe. Had caught him completely unawarees. 

He never let her see the manuscript he was working on: The Trial. In it, Kafka portrayed Felice and her close friend Grete Bloch in a bad light. 

The second catastrophe at about the same time: war breaks out in Europe.