“The anguish this book
gives off is at moments almost unbearable; for how can one help but say to
oneself: this hounded creature is I?” André Gide
More than 100 years after
it was written, the entire manuscript of Franz Kafka’s famous novel “The Trial”
is going on show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. It will be displayed page
by page in the order given to it by Kafka’s friend, executor and editor, Max
Brod. The Berlin presentation is based on the 2013/2014 exhibition “The Entire
Trial” at the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach; the manuscript is part of
the collections of the German Literature Archive in Marbach.
Stresemannstraße 111, in
the immediate vicinity of the Gropiusbau (Stresemannstraße 110, then
Königgrätzer Straße), was once the site of the Hotel Askanischer Hof. It was at
the Askanischer Hof, on 12 July 1914, that the legendary conversation took
place between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, her sister Erna and friend Grete
Bloch, after which the engagement between Kafka and Felice Bauer was broken
off. Kafka wrote later in a journal entry that the meeting felt to him like a
“law court in a hotel”. Thus the idea for his novel began to take shape.
He began writing the novel
in August 1914, with the First World War already being fought, and it was
largely completed by January 1915. Today, “The Trial” is regarded as one of
Franz Kafka’s major works. The surviving 171 sheets of the manuscript
contradict the notion that a novel must develop linearly and be narrated from
beginning to end. During the approximately six months that he spent working on
“The Trial”, Kafka, who earned his living as a lawyer at the
“Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt” (workers’ compensation insurance
institution) wrote chapters and chapter sections for the novel in ten different
quarto notebooks, for the most part made up of 40 sheets each. The work, edited
by Max Brod after Kafka’s death in 1924, was first published in 1925 by the
Berlin publishing house “Die Schmiede”.
The exhibition is
complemented by screenings of Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation and
photographs from Klaus Wagenbach’s collection. The photograph selection was
curated by Klaus Wagenbach and Hans-Gerd Koch. Translations of “The Trial” in
more than 60 different languages will also be on display.
The precious manuscript was
purchased at a London auction in 1988 for approximately 3.5 million marks in a
collective effort by the German Federal Government, the Cultural Foundation of
the German Federal States, and the State of Baden-Württemberg, and at the time
was the most expensive manuscript ever to be bought at auction.
Kafka often worked on
several chapters at the same time in various notebooks, alongside diary entries
and drafts of other texts. Just one day after starting work on his novel, he
wrote in his diary: “No sleep at all. In the afternoon I laid on the sofa
listlessly without sleep for three hours; same again at night. This must not
stop me.”
Kafka took apart his ten
manuscript notebooks, added coversheets (fashioned from folded or halved pages
from his typescript of “The Stoker”, a chapter published in 1913 from his
likewise unfinished America novel The Man Who Disappeared), and arranged them
into 16 volumes.
In January 1915, Kafka
abandoned his work on “The Trial”. In September 1915, he published a few pages
of it in the Jewish weekly paper “Selbstwehr”. In 1920 he handed over the
entire manuscript to his friend Max Brod. However, as early as 1921/22 he asked
Brod to burn his work “unread and without remnant”.
Brod did not carry out this
wish and in 1925, one year after Kafka’s death, he published a selection from
the “Trial” manuscript; further editions followed in 1935 and 1946. His view
was that the section “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.” and
the nine volumes with just a coversheet had been completed; he put them in
order, corrected presumed errors in the manuscript, standardised the spelling
and added punctuation. The other six volumes that formed part of the Stoker
typescript, consisting of a total of 19 sheets, remained as unpublished
fragments.
When Brod left Prague in
mid-March 1939, just a few hours before the Wehrmacht invaded, he took the
“Trial” manuscript with him. He travelled to Palestine and after the war he
gave the manuscript to his secretary and partner Esther Hoffe. In 1988, she
decided to sell it. Thanks to an unparalleled fundraising campaign, it was
possible to acquire the manuscript for the German Literature Archive Marbach.
ORGANIZER Berliner
Festspiele / Martin-Gropius-Bau
An exhibition of Martin-Gropius-Bau
and Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.
Image:
Passport photograph,
Kafka about 32 years old,
1915/16
© Archiv Klaus Wagenbach
# franz kafka, the entire
trial
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