Franz Kafka

(Narodni Listy, June 6th 1924)

Dr Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday in a sanatorium close by Klosterneuburg/Vienna. Only few people know him here, because he was a solitary, a knowing man, frightened by life; for years he had been suffering from a lung disease and though he had gotten medical treatment for this disease he consciously nourished and promoted it with his thoughts. “When soul and heart cannot bear the burden, then the lungs take half of the burden on themselves so that the weight is equally distributed” he once wrote in a letter, and that was what his disease was like to him. It gave him an almost magical tenderness and a surprisingly merciless mental subtlety; as a human being he had been putting all his intellectual fear of live on the shoulders of this disease. He was timid, scared, tender and good, but wrote brutal and hurtful books. To him the world was full of demons, that destroy and break an unprotected person. He was too clairvoyant, too wise, to be able to live, too weak to fight with the same weakness as the noble, beautiful people who don't avoid the fight because of fear of misunderstanding, unkindness and moral lies, though they know in advance that they are powerless and who are defeated in a way which exposes the winner. He knew people like only a man of extraordinary sensitivity can, a man who is lonely and prophetically sees through a person by just as much as a flicker in the other's face. He knew the world in a particular and deep way, and was himself a particular and deep world. He wrote books that are among the most significant ones of young German literature; the fight of today's generation is contained in them, yet without tendentious words. They are so truthful, naked, and painful that they are naturalistic even when something is expressed symbolically. They are full of the dry sarcasm and sensitive astonishment of a person who has seen the world so clearly that he couldn't bear it and had to die, because he didn't want to retreat and escape, like others, into some, though subjectively true, unconscious intellectual fallacies. Dr Franz Kafka wrote the excerpt “Der Heizer”, the first chapter of a beautiful novel, that isn't published yet, “Das Urteil”, a generation conflict, “Die Verwandlung”, the strongest book of modern German literature, “In der Strafkolonie”, “Ein Landarzt”, and the sketches “Betrachtungen”.  The last novel, “Vor dem Gericht”, is a manuscript waiting for years now to be published. It is one of the books that after reading leave the impression of a world that was captured completely, no word needs to be added. All his books describe the horrors of secret misunderstandings and unindebted guilt between people. He was a human being and fighter of such tender consciousness that he also felt something where others, less sensitive people, felt safe.