Franz Kafka The Man Who Disappeared read by Peter Simonischek [00:00:00] - Chapter 1: The Stoker [01:12:50] - Chapter 2: The Uncle Creation Between the end of 1911 and August 1912, Kafka wrote a first draft of The Man Who Disappeared, which remained unfinished and with which he was so dissatisfied that he discarded it completely. The manuscript has not survived; Kafka probably destroyed it. On September 25, 1912, he started again from the beginning. Only two days earlier, he had succeeded for the first time in putting a story (The Judgement) on paper in a single nightly sitting. Kafka fell into a productive frenzy that lasted about four months: despite his professional obligations and despite the excessive correspondence with Felice Bauer (up to three letters a day), he worked on literature almost every night and completed seven chapters of The Man Who Disappeared. This work was only interrupted by The Metamorphosis, which he also completed at a brisk pace. Although Kafka probably had the last chapters of The Man Who Disappeared clearly in mind, from the end of January 1913 he was no longer able to maintain the necessary concentration. It was not until the autumn of 1914 that he took up the manuscript again and wrote the chapter on 'The Natural Theater of Oklahoma'. The novel remained unfinished, however. Sources Kafka's ambition was to portray the "most modern" America. However, as he himself had never set foot on American soil, he had to rely on secondary sources: travel books, lectures, photos, reports from relatives, and probably also impressions from the cinema. The Man Who Disappeared is the only work of Kafka's that is based on targeted and extensive research. This was the only way to paint a reasonably realistic picture of a hectic mass society, with strikes, election campaigns, traffic chaos, piecework, and gigantic factories. The Man Who Disappeared is also the only one of his works that Kafka himself attributed to literary influences. He mentions the name Charles Dickens several times in this context, and in his diary he even describes the first chapter (The Stoker) as a "smooth imitation of Dickens". Theme and form The story of 16-year-old Karl Rossmann, who is disowned by his parents and sent to America, takes the form of a drama of stations, with each station representing a further social decline. In this way, Karl comes into contact with representatives of the most diverse social classes, from corporate bosses to prostitutes. The reader is thus presented with a cross-section of American society. At the same time, however, the novel is interspersed with the interrogation and court scenes typical of Kafka, which stand in strange contrast to the country's displayed modernity. In fact, the core motif of the lonely, disowned son is already familiar from The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, although it is set in a completely different context and milieu there. In this respect, Kafka's view of America is very subjective, literary, and even 'European'. Kafka himself naturally saw this close relationship between his texts. He even suggested combining The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, and The Stoker, the first chapter of The Man Who Disappeared, in a volume entitled Sons. However, The Man Who Disappeared stands out from most of Kafka's other works with its sophisticated narrative technique. The plot is almost exclusively told from the protagonist's point of view (a process that was then completed in The Trial), but at the same time the text offers a wealth of hidden details and clues that help the reader reconstruct, or at least imagine, what is going on behind the back of the unwitting hero.