FRANZ KAFKA REMAINS the most widely read German author of the twentieth century, and it is worth seeking some precision as to why this is so. W. H. Auden famously called him “the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs” — yet he is an improbable Shakespeare: in his slender authorized corpus (he completed none of his three novels) there is no grand vision, no narrative culminating in usable meaning. Indeed it is the absence of these totalities that is the key to Kafka’s enduring actuality. The century he uncannily anticipated was defined by the crisis of secular modernity: unable to maintain the guarantees of universal scientific and social progress, modernity has been convulsed by totalizing world views, such as fascism and religious fundamentalism, offering the very psychological stabilization that modernity resists. Kafka’s spare, lucid, yet ultimately enigmatic texts confront, from countless different perspectives, the vulnerability of a modern psyche seeking refuge in the materiality and conventional assumptions of the present.

Because Kafka’s best friend Max Brod possessed special authority as his literary executor, Brod’s view of Kafka’s stories as existentially religious gained canonical status in the 1920s and 1930s. But the more closely these texts were read, the less religious coherence they seemed to offer. They were perhaps definable as allegories or parables — but what did they allegorize, how could their “truth” be translated? Gradually it became evident that whatever worldview came to dominate the Western intellectual scene — existentialist, structuralist, postmodern — Kafka’s writing seemed to respond eagerly, as if pioneering the new trend. To be sure, the “religious” reading could never become obsolete; Kafka’s strategic use of Christian and Jewish motifs is unmistakable. But religious “truth,” even one accessible only by negation of the world as presented, became ever less plausible. The decisive turn in twentieth-century Kafka studies, to which the present volume is obviously indebted, was the inversion of the modernist purification of language, so important to Kafka himself — the reactivation of the biographical dimension he had so rigorously excluded.