In the centenary year of Franz Kafka’s death, David Herman unpacks a new book that gives a unique insight into this visionary writer

Franz Kafka, one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century, died almost exactly 100 years ago. To mark this centenary, the Weston Library in Oxford is showing a major exhibition about him and, to accompany it, the Bodleian Library has published a superbly illustrated book of essays, Kafka: Making of an Icon by leading Kafka scholars. These essays open up fascinating new perspectives on the writer's life and work.

In two essays, the book’s editor Ritchie Robertson looks at the importance of Kafka’s Czech background and his complex Jewish identity. “It may come as a surprise,” he writes, “to learn that Kafka’s contemporaries thought him a distinctly local author with a Prague flavour that even German readers outside Bohemia would miss.” Franz Werfel, a Prague friend and fellow writer, wrote of Kafka: “Beyond Tetschen-Bodenbach [Tetschen was the last station on the railway line leading to Germany] no one will understand [him].”

Kafka grew up in a city deeply divided between German- and Czech-speakers. At home, his parents spoke German, but Czech with their servants. Kafka himself wrote in German, but also spoke Czech fluently and read Czech literature and journalism. His family was not especially religious. They only attended synagogue on the main festivals and on the Emperor’s birthday. But Kafka was interested in many different aspects of Jewishness: the new Zionist movement, Judaism and Yiddish theatre.

In the winter of 1911-12, a troupe of actors from Galicia visited Prague to perform plays in Yiddish. Kafka attended some 20 performances, exposing him to the very different Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, which seemed more alive – part of a living tradition. Kafka also attended three lectures by Martin Buber in Prague in 1909-10, which introduced him to Hasidism. He became increasingly sympathetic to Zionism, took lessons in modern Hebrew and, towards the end of his life, planned to emigrate to Palestine, but was prevented by his final illness.

Professor Carolin Duttlinger, in her two essays, shows what a visual writer Kafka was. The recent publication of his drawings has shown us that he was also a gifted artist. His drawings of solitary figures are haunting and anticipate some of the great themes of his writing. “The emphasis,” writes Duttlinger, “is on the body rather than the face.” Crucially, she points out, he was fascinated by new cultural forms, especially film and photography.

Kafka is often associated with images of confinement, but as Duttlinger points out, “Travel is a prominent theme in his novels and short stories, which often feature characters arriving in unknown locations.” In The Man Who Disappeared, Karl Rossmann arrives in America. One of his greatest stories, In the Penal Colony, is set in an unknown island and its protagonist is simply called ‘The Traveller’. Other stories are set in China and Russia and The Castle begins with K arriving in some remote village, on a quest to reach the mysterious castle.

Barry Murnane, also an Oxford academic, contributes two fascinating essays: one on place and landscape in Kafka’s novels and the other on the author himself, animals and humans. Murnane reveals how the books move between “abstract, fantastic spaces and recognisably realistic locations” and how this contributes to the “disorientating effects” of these stories, perhaps especially The Trial, with its famously dark, labyrinthine corridors and archaic locations. This is part of the odd mix in Kafka’s writing of the almost medieval and the very modern – themes that are so important to his novels. The Trial is known for its network of dark offices, courtrooms and other connected sites, which are so important to its later film adaptations.

In his second essay, Murnane focuses on the boundaries between people and animals, most famously with Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa is transformed into a bug. Another story is about a speaking ape, there are singing mice and a creature digging like a mole in the dirt. Often, Kafka’s stories are not about humans at all, but about animals or the boundaries between animals and humans.

A century after his death, a new generation of scholars is producing a very different image of Kafka’s life and work. A new, much more complicated and interesting Kafka is emerging.

By David Herman

Kafka: Making of an Icon is out now, edited by Ritchie Robertson (Bodleian Library Publishing, £35). bodleianshop.co.uk/products/kafka-making-an-icon

The exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon will be shown at the Bodleian Library in Oxford until Sunday 27 October. visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/kafka