The Authors of Tales of Terror

Kafka’s world is nearly always an enclosed space, a man made world devoid of landscapes, oceans, mountains, rocks, and blades of grass. It begins with the animal level, that is, at a level at which independent movement exists and which now is directed at man.

Kafka’s characters are not specific individuals; they often lack a proper name. And “powers” would be much too meaningful and strong a term for that which asserts itself in the movement. There are no coherent sequences which directly and unambiguously point to ward physical destruction, or which could be presented in that manner. Destruction may well be the result; but the action never leads up to it as a goal that is superimposed from the outside. What Kafka shows is the gradual displacement of the individual, a continuous process without climax, no single phase of which the narrator is able to explain; for he, too, like the reader is affected by the incomprehensibility of the phenomenal world which is strange and dreamlike.

Wolfgang Kayser

1906 - 1960