The Lost Writings

As in a children’s game, I can ask myself: which hand am I holding my reason in, no one will be able to guess, because through the wrinkles in my hands, I can straightaway transfer my reason from hand to the other

I have buried my reason happily in my hand, I carry my head upright, but my hand is hanging down, my reason is dragging it down to the ground

Away from here, away! Don’t tell me where you’re taking me. Where is your hand, I can’t find it in the dark. If I were holding it, I think you wouldn’t try and lose me. Do you hear me? Are you even in this room? Perhaps you’re not here

You don’t have to leave the house. Stay at your desk and listen. Or don’t even listen, wait for it to bother you. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it cannot do otherwise, it will writhe in front of you in ecstasies

Where do you want to go? The world begins beyond the boards.”

In this way, the reader is not restricted to discoveries from the later Kafka, but is offered a tour of the great fragmentarian in every epoch.

As a result, we have Kafka as a major twentieth-century author in many languages — even as reading for schoolchildren — but what readers see in all these languages is only the tip of the iceberg, with its gigantic base obscured from sight.

Academic presentation and generally dry-as-dust philological commentaries scare off the lover of literature, who is looking for something to “merely” read and enjoy, not to study the texts or learn in detail of their genesis

This is not the way one would proceed nowadays. So, in 1982, S. Fischer Verlag embarked on a critical edition in which every recorded sentence of Kafka’s is presented in its original context,

Kafka’s friend and first editor, Max Brod, tried to resolve the problem by taking a hand himself, supplying his own titles and cutting away incomprehensible material — all with the aim of presenting actual “works” and of rescuing Kafka from the stigma of a failed author.