The Stoker
- Mar 29
- 2 min read
from the book Franz Kafka: A Life in Pictures by Hartmut Binder
About two weeks after Kafka had temporarily given up on his draft of The Man who Disappeared, he read what he had written to date and came to the incontrovertible conclusion that only The Stoker, the first chapter of the novel, derived from inner truth and was thus worthy of publication. Kurt Wolff, who had learned of this, therefore wrote to Kafka on 2 April 1913: “I would like to ask you most cordially and as a matter of great urgency to be so kind as to send me the first chapter of your novel to read as soon as possible, which you and Herr Dr Brod are of the opinion could perfectly well be published on its own.” Kafka answered Wolff’s amicable letter by return of post, on 4 April, promising to send the manuscript he had asked for straight away as it was already largely transcribed, but saying that he didn’t know if it could be published as it stood because it was “probably too incomplete after all […] it is and remains a fragment”.
Kafka must have been as good as his word, because only four days letter, Wolff got in touch with him again to say that he had since received and read the manuscript, and offering to publish The Stoker in his series Der jüngste Tag [Judgement Day], which he intended to be a forum for young and particularly expressionistic authors. Kafka was in “full and very glad” agreement with this, although as he later admitted to Felice Bauer, he didn’t entirely like the way that “any useless artistic output” [could be given] “a non-existent unity”.
