About the Book
Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night. These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit.
In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.
Table of Contents:
Preface ix Abbreviations for Kafka Citations xix Kafka and the Ministry of Writing by Stanley Corngold 1 Kafka's Offi ce Writings: Historical Background and Institutional Setting by Benno Wagner 19 DOCUMENTS Chapter 1: Speech on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the Institute's New Director (1909) 51 Commentary Chapter 2: The Scope of Compulsory Insurance for the Building Trades (1908) 54 Commentary Chapter 3: Fixed- Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery (1909) 74 Commentary Chapter 4: Inclusion of Private Automobile "Firms" in the Compulsory Insurance Program (1909) 80 Commentary Chapter 5: Appeal against Risk Classifi cation of Christian Geipel & Sohn, Mechanical Weaving Mill in Asch (1910) 90 Commentary Chapter 6: Mea sures for Preventing Accidents from Wood- Planing Machines (1910) 109 Commentary Chapter 7: On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors (1911) 120 Commentary Chapter 8: Workmen's Insurance and Employers: Two Articles in the Tetschen- Bodenbacher Zeitung (1911) 145 Commentary Chapter 9: Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge (1912) 170 Commentary Chapter 10: Risk Classifi cation Appeal by Norbert Hochsieder, Boarding House Own er in Marienbad (1912) 194 Commentary Chapter 11: Letters to the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague (1912-15) 213 Commentary Chapter 12: Criminal Charge against Josef Renelt for the Illegal Withholding of Insurance Fees (1913) 225 Commentary Chapter 13: Second International Congress on Accident Prevention and First Aid in Vienna (1913) 249 Commentary Chapter 14: Accident Prevention in Quarries (1914) 273 Commentary Chapter 15: Jubilee Report: Twenty- Five Years of the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute (1914) 301 Commentary Chapter 16: Risk Classifi cation and Accident Prevention in War time (1915) 322 Commentary Chapter 17: A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German- Bohemia (1916) 336 Commentary Chapter 18: "Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public" (1916/1917) 346 Commentary Wraparound:From Kafka to Kafkaesque 355by Jack Greenberg Chronology 373 Notes 379 About the Editors 393 Index 395
About the Author :
Stanley Corngold is professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University. Jack Greenberg is the Alphonse Fletcher Professor of Law at Columbia University. Benno Wagner is a professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Culture at the University of Siegen in Germany.
Review :
Honorable Mention for the 2008 PROSE Award in Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Association of American Publishers One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009 "The Office Writings, however, convincingly suggests that his job was also integral to his writing, and that his literary production was not an escape from the alienation of daily life to that 'dreamlike inner life' but a striving to reconcile the two."--Alexander Provan, The Nation "Kafka himself complained constantly that his day job at the Prague Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute oppressed his artistic calling; this volume's editors beg to differ. In the hands of Kafka scholars Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner and the legal scholar Jack Greenberg, the 18 briefs collected here comprise more than a record of the author's years in the insurance business. By reading between his legal writings and his fiction, the editors argue that Kafka's dual identities are inextricable: the writer is informed by the lawyer, the lawyer by the writer. Franz Kafka is the Franz Kafka we know not in spite of his day job, but rather because of it."--Rachel Sugar, The National (Abu Dhabi) "[T]he texts have impressive sociological merit: They provide a compelling picture of what life was like for an early twentieth-century bureaucrat who took his work seriously, believed in it, and did it well... But ultimately, the value of The Office Writings lies less in the potential connections to Kafka's fiction than in the fundamental disconnect."--Ben Kafka, Bookforum "Cognizant that some readers might be put off by the legal writing style, Corngold (German & comparative literature, Princeton Univ.), Jack Greenberg (law, Columbia Univ.), and Benno Wagner (literature, media, & culture, Univ. of Siegen, Germany) provide ample and rich analyses that demonstrate the close link between Kafka's profession and his literary creativity and oeuvre. This scholarly book is indispensable to an understanding of Kafka. Highly recommended."--Ali Houissa, Library Journal (Starred Review) "This event--finally, the translation and publication of the last known scrap of Kafka's work left untranslated, and unpublished--brings us to the subject of this series: how Kafka's office writings influenced his fiction, and what that influence means. Kafka's office writings, as presented here, cannot be read on their own ... but, instead, must be read as companions, to demystify the three novels and stories (which are anything but boring). Taken together, though, both workaday fact and masterwork fiction create a network of connections that exposes not just the concerns of a single writer, but also that of a singular culture--the culture of the Office, which has imposed itself on what used to be our lives."--Joshua Cohen, Nextbook.org "This handsome volume fills a void in Kafka studies and rectifies the unbalanced image of Kafka as a tortured genius who labored in an insurance office by day and wrote fiction by night... A fascinating read for scholars of Kafka and modern Central European literature."--M. McCulloh, Choice "The editors--Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner--have done a masterful job in making the drafts of speeches, letters, internal reports and newspaper articles relevant."--Raymond Johnston, Czech Business Weekly "These writings reveal Kafka the man at his best. For that reason, Franz Kafka: The Office Writings makes a significant contribution to understanding the enigmatic Franz Kafka."--Jefferson M. Gray, Federal Lawyer
