Similar to Kafka’s other protagonists Karl is faced with authority figures who make reasonable and unreasonable demands and whilst Karl can object to these demands and try to wriggle out of them, in the end he has to submit. Karl is adrift, abandoned by his parents, in a strange land and has to make his own way. The novel follows Karl’s peregrinations through America, though he doesn’t travel far from New York. Anyway, the opening paragraph is certainly enticing and I was surprised, given my previous lack of enthusiasm for the book, to find it an excellent, and humorous, read. Kafka had never been to America but he read a lot of travel literature so we must assume that he knew that Liberty does not hold a sword. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

Here’s the first paragraph.Īs Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. It should be noted that America was unfinished, it was abandoned by Kafka around 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. My Penguin copy makes use of the 1938 translation by Willa and Edwin Muir together with an introduction by Edwin Muir and a short postscript by Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, both of which were informative. I remember finding Amerika a bit dull in comparison to the other novels but recently I had begun to wonder what I’d make of it now-so I thought I’d read it for this year’s German Literature Month.

The Trial was the first book that I read by Kafka which was then followed with The Castle, Amerika (I’m sure the copy I initially read retained the Germanic title though it must have been the same translation as here) and a few short stories including Metamorphosis, of course. Although I would class Franz Kafka as one of my favourite authors I haven’t read anything by him for many years and I know very little about his life.

Amerika kafka