Word: kafka
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...Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, at the age of 41. In crippling distrust of himself, he had published almost nothing, and he died little noted, leaving instructions to burn all his work. His closest friend disobeyed his will and published Kafka's three unfinished novels, his letters, diaries, parables and tales. These included The Trial, The Castle and Amerika-in effect, the chief body of his work. The generation that has passed since then has been deeply marked by the friend's good sense in preserving these records of a genius that at first seemed obscure...
Critics of two cultures have pronounced Kafka's novels both "pre-fascist" and "proto-Communist" Freudians have found in them classical symptoms of angst; theologians have seen a cold and brilliant statement of Kierkegaard's "either/or" maxim and Karl Earth's "theology of crisis.'' And like Freud's, his name has become an easy tag, employed by essayists and parlor annotators: Kafkaesque now suggests the small man confronted by a high and nameless menace, the humble man, anxious to cause no trouble, who finds that his heart has withered, the defeated man who wanders...
...Impossibility of Crows. In the most trenchant and lucid study of Kafka yet written, Poet and German Scholar Heinz Politzer conducts a tireless search into Kafka's style and imagery for clues that tie the emptiness of the heart to the disfigurement of the world outside. In Kafka's dream landscapes and ghostly characters, he finds threads to the commanding theme-man's search for an absolute from which he has become estranged by an impersonal society...
...fault is partly man's own, as Kafka sees it, because the lonely life is a breeding ground for new and universal crimes: torpor, mediocrity, the avoidance of the dare of love. In The Trial, the absolute appears as The Law; in The Castle, as the warder who never appears; in Amerika, as a promise extended but never fulfilled. The bitter loneliness Kafka suffered, Politzer says, was in quest for "the hope beyond hopelessness,'' "the glimmer of light Kafka knew existed...
Politzer spent 20 years with his study, and that was too long. But he is perceptive in ferreting out the "perplexing parables" of Kafka's style. Driven by visions of horror and forebodings of doom, Kafka's great obsession was man's alienation from himself, from other me, from the absolute. "The crows maintain." he wrote, "that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of this, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heavens simply means: the impossibility of crows." Heavens that possess crows must stop being heavens; laws that touch...