Kafka’s artistic individuality becomes understandable through its tense connection with European Jewish traditions—as the property of an eternal son, who sees himself at the beginning and at the end of all traditions. Franz Kafka saw his life and writing as one unit which founded his identity. His fragile self-image remained tied to the ups and downs of his literary output. Peter-André Alt’s biography links the narrative of his life with comprehensive interpretations that explore Kafka’s work and its psychological underpinnings. It shows the author as an observer of his time by examining his relationship to Prague’s German literature and European modernity, to psychoanalysis and Zionism, philosophy and Jewish spiritual tradition, anthroposophy, natural healing, cinema and theater. He is the loafer and the loner, the traveler and the coward, the ascetic and the lover, the ecstatic and the skeptic, the terror specialist and the master of irony. Kafka’s life is not interpreted as a source, but rather as a mirror of his literary work. Thus, the world of his stories and novels acquires an enthralling as well as uncanny consequence to the lines of how his life unfolded.

• ‘A great success.’ - Oliver Pfohlmann, die tageszeitung

• The 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death falls on 3 June 2024

• Peter-André Alt’s brilliant and renowned biography

• A special edition in embossed paperback

• ‘Alt has created a new type of biography in the rugged and almost boundless landscape of Kafka literature.’ - Gerhard Neumann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung