In the late summer of 1917, following the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within a decade, Franz Kafka went to stay with his sister in the Bohemian countryside. During this unexpectedly calm period in an otherwise perennially besieged life, he wrote a series of aphorisms. One of them runs: “The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.”
He might have been describing the path to the true Kafka, which writers, biographers and academics have been attempting to chart ever since he died. Even Reiner Stach, author of the definitive Kafka biography, chose to end that nearly 2,000-page work on a note of uncertainty, quoting the Prague writer Johannes Urzidil, who said Kafka’s intimates could theorise about what his work meant, but none could say how he came to write it.
