Kafka's Clothes

`One should either be a work of art, or wear one' proclaimed Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century; `I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else' Franz Kafka proclaimed a brief decade later. Between these two claims lies the largely unexplored region in which the European decadent movement turned into the modernist avant-garde. In this original historical study, Mark Anderson explores Kafka's early dandyism, his interest in fashion, literary decadence and the `superficial' spectacle of modern urban life, as well as his subsequent repudiation of these phenomena in forging a literary identity as the isolated, otherworldly `poet' of modern alienation. Rather than posit a break between these two personae, Anderson charts the historical continuities between the young Kafka and the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. The book demonstrates how clothing functions as a semi-private code of meaning in his literary works and the extent to which the aestheticist notion of becoming the work of art haunts Kafka's conception of writing throughout his life. The result is a startlingly unconventional portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century, involving such issues as Jugendstil aesthetics, Otto Weininger's `egoless' woman, the Viennese critique of architectural ornament, the clothing-reform movement, anti-Semitism, and the question of Jewish-German writing.

Mark Anderson is translator and editor of In the Storm of the Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann (Princeton UP, 1986), and editor of Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siecle, Schocken Books, NY, 1989.