Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka.pdf - tywls12ela

Critical Editions II: Will the Real
Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?
Clayton Koelb
I
T WILL BE HELPFUL, as a preliminary step in considering the various
texts of Kafka currently available, to divide his writings into two principal
categories: (A) works published by Kafka during his lifetime; and
(B) everything else he wrote.
The total contents of (A) is surprisingly sparse, comprising all in all under
five hundred pages printed in large format. It includes the following:
(1) Seven publications in book form
(a) Betrachtung (a collection of eighteen short pieces)
(b) Das Urteil
(c) Der Heizer (part of a manuscript fragment Brod
would later publish as the novel Amerika)
(d) Die Verwandlung
(e) In der Strafkolonie
(f) Ein Landarzt (fourteen stories, including the one from
which the volume takes its title)
(g) Ein Hungerkünstler (four stories, including the one
named in the title)
(2) Ten items, all relatively brief, that appeared in various periodicals
(among these are such things as the “Gespräch mit dem Beter”
and the “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen,” excepted from larger
projects that Kafka never completed to his satisfaction).
The works belonging to this (A) category are relatively unproblematic
and require little discussion, since we can safely assume that Kafka
meant these works to be read in the form in which he published them.
Like the works of any important and widely studied writer, these texts
can be compared to the manuscript materials available to us, and we can
make note of changes and occasional errors. In some cases, the materials
from Kafka’s literary estate offer a larger context in which these published
texts can perhaps be better understood. But the texts as published set a