The construction

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The building is an unfinished story by Franz Kafka from 1923–1924 , which was first published posthumously in 1928 in the magazine Witiko and in 1931 by Max Brod . It describes the futile struggle of an animal to perfect its huge earthwork to protect it from enemies. The story is about the entanglement in the compulsive observation of a self-created labyrinth-like system that generates increasing paranoia .

content

The animal and the burrow

The first-person narrator , an unspecified, badger-like animal, has built a diversely designed underground structure. It serves as protection and a well-stocked storage room. The animal is dominated by the idea of ​​being able to protect itself against an enemy of whatever kind by optimizing the structure. At first, the animal is very happy with its structure. It often slumbers peacefully in it and eats from its supplies, but also from the small animals that live in the construction. The silence is particularly beneficial.

However, there are two areas of the building that worried him: the "Burgplatz" and the entrance. Most of the supplies are stored on the "Burgplatz". However, their distribution seems unfavorable to him. There should be several castle places to distribute the supplies, but the animal feels overwhelmed by the necessary construction work. The entrance, which is covered with moss, does not allow unnoticed entry and exit. The animal performs a wide variety of procedures, such as digging research trenches and additional corridors, observing the entrance from the outside for days. However, it does not find a solution that would satisfy its security needs.

The noise

After one of the frequent sleep phases, the animal wakes up and notices a noise, a barely audible hissing. From now on, the animal hopefully devotes all of its energy and attention to finding the cause and eliminating it. This hope is deceptive.

The animal notices that the noise cannot be located, rather it can be heard at the same level in every part of the building. The animal cannot assign this sound to a specific enemy, yet it is obsessed with it. It no longer sleeps and hardly eats anymore. As if under duress, it tries to find out more about the noise. But the sound stubbornly eludes any access. The last sentence with which the narrative breaks off is: "But everything remained unchanged, that -". This sentence is at the end of a page, which suggests that Kafka wrote even more and made an ending. In order to be able to publish the narrative as complete at that time, however, Max Brod changed the supposedly last sentence to: "But everything remained unchanged."

Text analysis

The very first sentences outline the whole story and the condition of the animal: “I set up the building and it seems to have worked well. […] Of course, some ruse is so subtle that it kills itself, I know that better than anyone else […]. ” So a monological, increasingly obsessed stream of language develops to the end.

Is an animal whose pursuit protection, over-eating and comfort (what with Biedermeier and petty bourgeoisie associate leaves), has a labyrinthine created earthworks, which seems to satisfy these needs. Certain shortcomings in the structure are unsettling, but the animal feels symbiotically connected to it. The animal is actually never - as always feared - really attacked, neither when getting in or out, nor inside its den.

A barely perceptible, inexplicable hiss does not come any closer, but seems to be omnipresent, without the animal being able to recognize a reference to itself. It is precisely the apparently lacking causality of the noise that increasingly evokes a deep paranoid panic in the animal . The previous mechanisms of his rational-technical considerations for the improvement of the building are now in vain. The animal gets lost in the labyrinth of its panicked thoughts, just as the enemy should get lost in the labyrinth he has created. The animal observes and analyzes the noise (= the enemy) with excessive attention. But every one of his actions to clear things up comes to nothing, everything remains unchanged.

This conclusion is felt to be final. However, Max Brod writes, referring to Dora Diamant , Kafka's last friend, of a "fighting stance tense to the end in the immediate expectation of the animal and the decisive fight in which the hero will lose".

Interpretative approaches

In 1915, under the impression of war, Kafka visited a trench open to the public with its claustrophobic narrowness and got an idea of ​​trench warfare. It is conceivable that he processed these impressions eight years later in the description of the oppressive underground labyrinth.

Incidentally, in his animal stories, especially in this one, Kafka based himself heavily on the descriptions from Brehm's animal life, here the badger served as a template.

Kafka half jokingly explained to Dora Diamant that she was the “Burgplatz” of his story. So it makes sense to relate the building to Kafka's living and housing conditions at the time. There is the interpretation that the noise does not come from outside, but from the protagonist himself and could thus be an indication of Kafka's progressive pulmonary tuberculosis. Another biographical approach to interpretation establishes relationships between the training of the building and Kafka's work (for a similar see Elf Sons ). After that, the Burgplatz and the entrance labyrinth would correspond to the novel fragments The Castle and The Lost One . The text can also be read as an attempt by Kafka to bring the stream of consciousness that began with authors like James Joyce or Arthur Schnitzler in the sense of Dorrit Cohn's “transparent minds” theory to the level of a narrative lost in worrying brooding.

References to other works by Kafka

One can the building be called a late work of Kafka. The motifs from his other works can be found here, e.g. B. from Das Schloß - namely the futility and failure of an intense striving. The big burrowing animal already appears in the giant mole from the story The Village School Teacher . The description of the irritation caused by noise is given in Big Noise . The inner course of the text, namely a very positive beginning, the quick emergence of doubts and at the end panic and self-loss, is strongly reminiscent of the structure of the narrative The Judgment .

Quote

  • “It doesn't have to be a real enemy that I want to follow me, it can very well be any little innocence, any disgusting little creature that follows me out of curiosity and thus, without knowing it, becomes the leader of the World becomes against me, it doesn't have to be, maybe it is - and that's no less bad than the other, in some respects it's the worst - maybe it's someone of my kind, a connoisseur and appraiser of buildings ... "

reception

  • Bettina v.Jagow / Oliver Jahraus , contribution Els Andringa p. 330: “Here the circles of thought follow, as it were, the unfathomable circles of action of the invisible enemy. The reader follows at the same time the assumed spatial movements of the hostile animal and the hypotheses of the ego. ... That would not, however, explain why the work can be related to so many different areas and move through times and spaces. "

Film adaptations

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: The building. Original version. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2015, ISBN 3-7386-3066-X .
  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version, ed. by Roger Hermes. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Franz Kafka: Legacy writings and fragments 2. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-10-038144-0 , pp. 576-632.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: Der Bau (Kafka)  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge . Franz Kafka. Reclam, p. 146
  2. ^ Peter-Andre Alt: Franz Kafka. The Eternal Son. P. 661, ISBN 3-406-53441-4
  3. ^ Peter-Andre Alt: Franz Kafka. The Eternal Son. P. 659, ISBN 3-406-53441-4
  4. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge . Franz Kafka. P. 151
  5. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge . Franz Kafka. Reclam, p. 147.
  6. ↑ Reiner Stach: Kafka. The years of knowledge. S. Fischer Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5 , p. 12
  7. ^ Peter-Andre Alt: Franz Kafka. The Eternal Son. ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 659.
  8. ↑ Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Norbert Winkler: The diversity in Kafka's life and work. Vitalis Verlag, ISBN 3-89919-066-1 , pp. 86-89.
  9. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge . Franz Kafka. Reclam, pp. 148-151
  10. ↑ Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek: The worried brooding of the creature: Franz Kafka's "The Building" . In: Ders .: depth. About the fascination of brooding. Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2010, p. 267 ff.
  11. ↑ imdb.com: The building