Franz Kafka, Letter to Max Brod, Aug. 1907, in Briefe 1900-1912, edited by Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt aM: Fischer, 1999), 53. As some of the dates have been corrected in this new edition, references are to it; date and page number are given in brackets after each quotation. The translations are in the main entirely my own, but I am indebted to Franz Kafka. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (London: Calder, 1978).
2.
Max Brod, Franz Kafka.Eine Biographie (Frankfurt aM: Fischer, 1963); first published 1937.
3.
Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York : Vintage Books, 1985), 171.
4.
Ronald Hayman, Kafka A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Peter Mailloux, A Hesitation Before Birth: The Life of Franz Kafka (Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London and Toronto: Associated University Press , 1989).
5.
Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka Eine Biographie seiner Jugend 1883-1912 (Bern : Francke, 1958).
6.
Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Handbuch, 2 vols (Stuttgart : Kroner, 1979), Vol. 1, Der Mensch und seine Zeit, 325.
7.
Frederick R. Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991 ).
8.
Ibid., 206.
9.
Ibid., 207.
10.
Hayman gives the passage in full: 'But every castle of happiness is erected upon a foundation that is partly sand, and the sand collects and runs out under the walls, slowly perhaps - it may be, imperceptibly - but it runs, gram by grain' (Hayman, op. cit., 60).
11.
Karl argues that Kafka is A and Hedwig X but that they swap roles at the end. He even genders X where Kafka had not, at one point paraphrasing the fable: 'A feels that X is destroying him with her letters' (Karl, op. cit., 208). His feminization of X only serves to highlight that for Kafka both were male.
