The little ruin dweller

The Little Ruin Dweller is a work by Franz Kafka from his diaries consisting of several prose fragments . It is about the various impairments caused by educating or supervising persons during Kafka's childhood and adolescence. He contrasts this with the image of the little ruin inhabitant who leads a meager, lonely life, but who is unencumbered by educational efforts.

origin

The fragments consist of entries in the diaries from issue 1, entry from the second half of 1910, and issue 2. Independent publications by the ruin inhabitant cannot be found in the current Kafka editions. However, reference is made to it several times in current biographies.

Form and content

In the diary entries of the first booklet, Kafka starts out five times, linguistically slightly varied, without headings, to a complaint that “his upbringing would have been very bad for him in some ways ... I would have loved to have been that little ruin dweller, burned down by the sun between them Rubble from all sides had seemed to me ” .

He lists a large number of people who would have harmed him.

He wishes to be the little ruin dweller, "listening to the screaming of the jackdaws, whose shadows flew over them, cooling down under the moon."

These two topics are varied in different ways, with the accusation against the people of his childhood and youth becoming increasingly literary.

In the second issue of the diaries the heading “The little ruin dweller” appears. In the following section, however, there is no longer any talk of the ruin inhabitant, but the problem of the bachelor from Kafka's point of view is examined.

reception

• Peter-André Alt : “He (Kafka) varies experiments, tests narrative constructions, tests motifs in ever new attempts, which completely miss the moment of calculated control. The diary shows how painful such literary processes can sometimes develop. The fragment entitled The Little Ruin Resident by Max Brod , with which Kafka struggled in the second half of 1910, seems characteristic. In the end, the draft has six versions, all of which remain fragments. "

• Reiner Stach : “The few sheets offer hardly any autobiographical facts, and only a few childhood memories that Kafka recorded elsewhere can be used to prove that his list of those responsible is aimed at real people. It almost seems as if the inflationary expansion of this list was Kafka's main pleasure, because little by little he can think of more and more guilty parties without revealing the slightest thing about these charges to be brought forward ... "

Web links

• The little ruin inhabitant in the Gutenberg-DE project (text of some fragments, entry from July 19, 1910)

expenditure

• Franz Kafka: Diaries. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, pp. 17-27 and 112-115, ISBN 978-3-10-038150-7 .

Secondary literature

• Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 .
• Reiner Stach : Kafka. The early years. S. Fischer, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-075130-0 .
• Gerhard Neumann : Franz Kafka - Expert of Power , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-446-24069-8

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka. The Eternal Son , p. 163 f.
2. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka. The early years , p. 69.
3. ↑ Kafka. The Eternal Son , p. 163.
4. ↑ Kafka. The early years , p. 69.