A pictorial biography of Franz Kafka including hundreds of photographs that were never published before. Kafka scholar Franz Wagenbach reconstructs a personal history of the Czech writer by making visibile the world in which Kafka lived and by bringing together visual materials on the figures who dominated his personal and emotional horizon.
Wagenbach began to assemble the photographs collected in this book out of dissatisfaction with the surfeit of Kafka interpretations whose speculative nature increase in direct proportion to their authors' ignorance of the historical, personal, and linguistic circumstances in which Kafka's work came into being. Until the mid 1950s, Kafka was a write who seemed to have come from some no man's land. This was especially true in France and England, the very countries initially responsible for fostering Kafka's international reputation.
In addition to attempting to graphically depict the specifics of Kafka's life between 1883 and 1924, Wagenbach's book serves as a visual aid for illustrating the discrepancy between historical context and literary interpretation. It presents photographs of building taken at the very time Kafka lived in them, pictures of people at the age they were when Kafka met them, and images of locations from the years in which Kafka visited them, thus broadening the scope of the conventional literary and historical perspective to include the so-called everyday world.
The Book
Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Paperback, 221 pp. 25 x 21 cm. Translated from the German by Arthur S. Wensinger
Contents
- A brief chronology of Kafka's Life
- Family and Childhood
- Gymnasium and University
- Prague, Capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia
- Trips, Friendships, Family Relations
- The Workers Accidents Insurance Company
- The Year 1912
- The First Books
- To Live or to Write, 1912-1917
- The Final Years, 1917-1924
- German and Czech Versions of Place Names Used in This Book and
- Appendix
- Partial List of Sources
- Illustration Credits
- Acknowledgements
Edition
First American edition. In format this English-language edition of Wagenbach's Franz Kafka: Bilder aus seinem Leben is nearly identical with the German original. The Foreword and the introductory texts to each section are direct translations of the original. Two substantive additions have been made: a number of quotations from Kafka's letters, diaries, and notebooks, and texts that are illustrated withing the photographs (documents, letters, newspaper articles, passages from Kafka's works...) were provided in English translation in the captions or the Appendix.
Condition
Very good paperback. Clean interior, tight book block. No writing or marks. The covers, however, are warped at the edges (see picture of back cover). Cover corners show signs of wear. Lamination on back cover shows to weak spots. Spine is intact (one very slight crease) Else a very good, nice, clean copy.