The Nightmare of Reason

Meer over het boek

To look at the modern world is, to some extent, to look at it through Franz Kafka's eyes. For the writers and readers who have followed him, Kafka is the preeminent writer and consciousness of the twentieth century. In <i>The Nightmare of Reason,</i> Ernst Pawel has captured what is essential in Kafka and has described, evenly and dispassionately, the interplay of work and life. Kafka is a modern myth. Not only his work, but the distortions in previous biographies—particularly <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219318.the_first" title="the first" rel="nofollow noopener">the first</a>, written by Kafka's great friend Max Brod—make this so. Pawel's achievement is to place Kafka in his time and to portray a man whose life was far more moving than the myths that have arisen around it. <i>The Nightmare of Reason,</i> as well as chronicling the life of the writer, is also a brilliant evocation of a milieu. The Prague of affluent Germanized Jewry, the intellectual ferment of Central Europe before the First World War, and brilliant, doomed Austria-Hungary itself and its collapse are woven into Pawel's account. <i>The Nightmare of Reason</i> is informed by psychological insights but does not depend on them. Indeed, Pawel is concerned to present not the Kafka of legend—that helpless, neurasthenic clerk—but rather a man who moved about in the world, who was a most reluctant but surprisingly effective business executive, and who was in some ways as typical of his age and class as, in others, he transcended them. Pawel has taken nothing at face value, and his readings of such problematic issues as Kafka's Judaism, his relations with his parents, the stormy engagement to Felice Bauer, and his affair with Milena Jesenká are immensely revealing and persuasive.