UBC: The Nightmare of Reason
Dec. 23rd, 2008 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984.
I don't know enough about Franz Kafka to be able to tell whether this biography is as good as I think it is. But I found it excellent: lucidly well written, thoughtful, shiningly humane. Pawel sympathizes deeply with his subject, and he's perfectly honest about how hard it is to get an objective look at Kafka, trying to correct for his own self-hatred and despair on the one side and the programmatic hagiography of, for instance, Max Brod on the other. It does not hurt my opinion of this book that Pawel is fiercely feminist; although he does not erect any false front of detachment or objectivity, one of the very few times that something that is very clearly his slips through is this passage (in his capsule biography of Dora Diamant) near the end:
And, as I said in my earlier post, he dedicates his book to Ottla (Ottilie) Kafka (Franz Kafka's youngest and best beloved sister) and Milena Jesenská (Czech translator--among many other things--and Kafka's close friend/lover), both of whom died in the Holocaust because they refused the privilege of escape.* So, yes, I both like and admire Pawel as a biographer and a scholar and a human being, and I think he does an excellent job of showing the odd paradox of Kafka. Kafka's life did not have to be as hard and as sad as it was, and while Pawel demonstrates that, he also demonstrates that, given who and what Kafka was, yes, it did.
---
*Ottla divorced her Gentile husband in order to share her people's fate and died in Auschwitz, and Milena, who was a Gentile, wrote polemics and satires against the Nazis, ran underground rescue operations, wore the yellow star in solidarity--and died in Ravensbrück.
I don't know enough about Franz Kafka to be able to tell whether this biography is as good as I think it is. But I found it excellent: lucidly well written, thoughtful, shiningly humane. Pawel sympathizes deeply with his subject, and he's perfectly honest about how hard it is to get an objective look at Kafka, trying to correct for his own self-hatred and despair on the one side and the programmatic hagiography of, for instance, Max Brod on the other. It does not hurt my opinion of this book that Pawel is fiercely feminist; although he does not erect any false front of detachment or objectivity, one of the very few times that something that is very clearly his slips through is this passage (in his capsule biography of Dora Diamant) near the end:
Nostalgia has sanctified the "world of our fathers" and restored it as a plastic shrine. Whoever bothers to remember the world of our mothers, the world of unremitting toil and struggle, of pain and suffering, of childbed agonies and early death, while the lords of creation argued the fine points of Mishna and Gemara on hallowed premises barred to the tainted daughters of Eve?
(Pawel 437)
And, as I said in my earlier post, he dedicates his book to Ottla (Ottilie) Kafka (Franz Kafka's youngest and best beloved sister) and Milena Jesenská (Czech translator--among many other things--and Kafka's close friend/lover), both of whom died in the Holocaust because they refused the privilege of escape.* So, yes, I both like and admire Pawel as a biographer and a scholar and a human being, and I think he does an excellent job of showing the odd paradox of Kafka. Kafka's life did not have to be as hard and as sad as it was, and while Pawel demonstrates that, he also demonstrates that, given who and what Kafka was, yes, it did.
---
*Ottla divorced her Gentile husband in order to share her people's fate and died in Auschwitz, and Milena, who was a Gentile, wrote polemics and satires against the Nazis, ran underground rescue operations, wore the yellow star in solidarity--and died in Ravensbrück.
