About Meditation
- 21. März
- 6 Min. Lesezeit
by Elisabeth Fuchs and Harald Salfellner
“My book, my little book, my pages
have been gladly accepted”
Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
Kafka’s Beginnings as a Writer
The air in the engine room of the Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co. is almost unbearable. The heat of the August day forces its way in from the factory floor, and there is a smell of gas. The foremen and the stokers have been working feverishly for two hours now. They curse: the engine just won’t start! Franz Kafka is standing next to them. He is unable to help, for he knows nothing about how the machines work. But he is nonetheless the “& Co.” on the sign outside the asbestos factory: Dr Franz Kafka, twenty-nine years old, insurance officer, and, for the last six months, non-active partner in this factory belonging to his brother-in-law, Karl Hermann. With its fourteen engines it is at the cutting edge of technology in 1912, and he is the superior of the twenty-five workers employed in the factory. But there are far more important things for him to think about. Kafka’s mind is with his manuscripts, lying on his desk at home, which he has to go over and put in order. A young publisher called Ernst Rowohlt has taken an interest in the texts and wants to print them in book form – Franz Kafka’s very first book of his own.
Kafka had started writing much earlier, when he was still a grammar-school student at the Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium (German Secondary School) in his home town of Prague. These first works consisted mainly of attempts to confront difficulties he was facing, to come to terms with himself as he grew up. None have survived; after all, this young writer had always been so critical of his own work that he would not hesitate to destroy it if he was not convinced it was a complete success. His first more substantial works began to appear when he was studying law – the first version of Description of a Struggle, for example, and then, after he had graduated with a doctorate in law in 1906, the fragmentary Wedding Preparations in the Country. A short time later, some of his short prose pieces were published for the first time as “Meditation” in the magazine Hyperion. From 1908, however, Franz Kafka worked at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt für das Königreich Böhmen (Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia) in Prague, an insurance institute where his time was spent writing letters and reports; it was often the night hours alone that remained for literary work now, since his family expected him to turn his attention to the asbestos factory as often as possible when his afternoons were free.
Even a short time after the plant was founded, Kafka had remarked in his diary that “the factory torments me. Why did I stay quiet when they committed me to working there in the afternoon. No one uses force to make me go, true, but father uses reproaches, Karl silence and my own feelings of guilt. I know nothing about the factory and was standing around useless and impotent during the committee’s visit this morning.”1
Kafka’s First Meeting with his Publisher
How good Kafka must have felt, then, when he was able to abandon the asbestos factory, the insurance office, and the reproachful glances of his family for a change and leave Prague with Max Brod, his friend and even then a well-known writer. The opportunity to do so had presented itself only a short time ago, early in the summer of 1912, when a doctor advised Kafka to take a recuperative cure “of at least four weeks at a well-run establishment […] due to digestive problems, low body-weight, and a series of nervous complaints”.2
At first, Kafka wanted to use this special break to make a short trip to Weimar on holiday with Max Brod, where he hoped to visit such places as Goethe’s house, Schiller’s house, and the famous Großherzogliche Bibliothek (Grand Ducal Library; today Duchess Anna Amalia Library). Brod, however, had more in mind: when the friends stopped in Leipzig on their way to Weimar, he arranged a meeting with the publisher Ernst Rowohlt. Max Brod was aware of Kafka’s extremely critical attitude toward his own literary output; now, he must have thought to himself, was the time to give his friend a helping hand on the way to success. The events that played out in the publisher’s office in Leipzig on the afternoon of 29 June, 1912, are described in Autoren, Bücher, Abenteuer (Authors, Books, Adventure) by Rowohlt’s business partner and Kafka’s future publisher, Kurt Wolff. In his travel diary, Kafka too described that first meeting, observing drily and with a certain amount of disbelief: “R. is fairly serious about wanting a book from me.”3
In the immediate future, though, there was no time to reflect on the full significance of this meeting with the two publishers. There was far too much culture to discover in the city of Weimar; the acquaintance of Margarethe Kirchner, daughter of the custodian of Goethe’s house, too, took up Kafka’s time so that the meeting with the Leipzig publishers fell into the background for the present. Kafka also had a stay of almost three weeks in the Jungborn nature therapy sanatorium in the Harz Mountains ahead of him. He used these weeks of rest to continue with the now lost first version of The Man Who Disappeared, on which he had been working since the previous winter. When his attempts to write failed to progress smoothly, Kafka was again plagued by doubts about his ability as a writer, which cast the planned edition of Meditation into uncertainty. Nonetheless, at the beginning of August, after returning to Prague, he began selecting pieces of work that would be suitable for publication.
The Context
It is evening. The hours of torment in the factory are over, and Kafka is in his room in his parents’ apartment in the street called the Niklasstraße. The droning engines and the stinging smell of gas are far away, and the only sounds are the soft rustle of the pages and the scratch of pen on paper. Kafka is busy extracting passages from his early novella Description of a Struggle and reworking them into self-contained texts. It is already eight years since he began work on the novella. Then, in 1904, Russia and Japan had just engaged in war; the world has not become more peaceful in the meantime. The situation in the Balkans, for example, is becoming ominously tense, so you can sense, even in 1912, that the way that will lead to the First World War two years later has already been laid – at least if, like Kafka, you pay careful attention to developments in world affairs.
Kafka’s own life, too, has changed in the previous eight years. After obtaining his doctorate in 1906, Kafka had first completed his obligatory year of legal work experience, initially at the district court on the Obstmarkt and then, after half a year, at the criminal court on the Karlsplatz, before finally beginning work as a temporary employee at the private insurance company Assicurazioni Generali on Wenceslas Square. A twelve-hour day was not unusual then, and there was little hope of regular writing with only seven days’ holiday each year. Since summer 1908, though, Kafka had been employed at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt and was able to leave work at 2 p.m. every day. The asbestos factory summoned him now and then after 1911, but Kafka nonetheless had more time now to take a walk with his friend Max Brod, to spend the evening discussing literature in a coffee-house, perhaps with Franz Werfel and his circle – and to write at night. Consequently, Kafka was able to return not only to old manuscripts when searching for texts to include in his Meditation, but also to much more recent work such as “The Sudden Walk”, which he had set down in his diary early in 1912.
Notes
1. Franz Kafka: Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcom Pasley, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 327 (hereafter T).
2. Klaus Hermsdorf: Briefe des Versicherungsangestellten Franz Kafka, in: Sinn und Form 9 (1957), p. 665f.
3. Franz Kafka on 29. 6. 1912, T, p. 1023.