A starving artist

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A Hunger Artist is a story by Franz Kafka that first appeared in 1922 in the newspaper Die neue Rundschau . At the same time, it is the title of the author's anthology, published in 1924, which contained three further prose texts. Three of the four stories each have an ironic view of the artist's life as their content, with circus characters being chosen in two cases.

Before and after the turn of the century, the use of jugglers and artists, i.e. representatives of the more semi-silky arts, was very common in literature. See Frank Wedekind , Rainer Maria Rilke , Charles Baudelaire , Paul Verlaine .

As is often the case in Kafka texts, artists and viewers cannot understand each other: the artist is driven by inner compulsion; the audience wants short-term entertainment. Even the mouse Josefine from Kafka's last story is far from her audience in her self-forgetfulness.

Publisher's cover 1924

Anthology

The anthology Ein Hungerkünstler was published in 1924 as Kafka's last book to be published before his death. In addition to the story A Hunger Artist , it contains the short stories First Suffering , A Little Woman and Josephine, the Singer, and The Mice People .

A Hunger Artist (The Tale)

content

A hunger artist initially lives in times when there is a keen public interest in his art. In his lattice cage he is examined and admired with interest by the public from hunger day to hunger day. For the hunger artist, however, constant starvation is “the easiest thing in the world”. He suffers from the fact that he is not believed, possibly even accused of eating in secret, or at least deliberately giving him the opportunity to do so. In addition, his impresario insists that he should stop starving after forty days. He opens the cage for him and provides him with food. The hunger artist feels absolutely misunderstood, he knows that he can go hungry for much longer. Because of the constant lack of understanding, he gets an increasingly gloomy mood.

But times are changing and starvation art is going out of style. The hunger artist is no longer the attraction. He separates from his impresario and is now in one of the many straw-lined cages of a circus next to the animals. Here he continues to hunger, hardly noticed by the audience.

At some point, workers discover it very small under its straw. Before he dies, he tells them in his last words the real reason for his starvation. He could not do otherwise because he had not found the food he liked. If he had found her, he would have “eaten himself full like everyone else”. He is buried with the straw.

A young, powerful panther is placed in its cage and immediately becomes a new attraction.

Emergence

The story was written within a few days in the spring of 1922, while work on the novel Das Schloss stalled. The choice of subject, namely starvation as an art, might have seemed rather cynical to readers of the time, given the postwar poverty (especially the famine in Russia). Kafka's interest in the circus and other forms of showmanship have been examined in literary studies as important historical origins of the story. For example, the real hunger artist Giovanni Succi was also traded as a possible model for Kafka's fictional character.

Text analysis

The structure of the hunger artist resembles the stories The Judgment and The Building . At the beginning there is the description of success and satisfaction in the heyday of starvation. The turn into the negative quickly follows, the lack of understanding and the limitation of the hunger period to the taste of the superficial audience. At the end there is death and at the same time there is an indication of another vitality.

Interpretative approaches

The hunger artist can be seen as a symbol for the artist. The art, which the audience sees as an achievement that has to be achieved with great effort, is a need for the artist, almost a compulsion, which corresponds completely to his being like nothing else in his existence. For the (hunger) artist, art is the "easiest thing in the world", which for him has a therapeutic character. What would be strict asceticism for others is a completely natural being for him.

The attitude of the (hunger) artist towards the audience is ambivalent. On the one hand, he basks in his popularity and also wants the understanding of his viewers. On the other hand, it is precisely the taste of the public that causes the impresario to starve for 40 days at a time. The well-known problem of the artist who is supposed to adapt to the art world.

The (hunger) artist is only completely free when no audience pays him any more attention. One can think of Kafka himself, who intended many of his writings not for readership but for destruction. But what a pitiful figure is the (hunger) artist in the end. He is more disposed of by workers than buried. Shortly before his death, he tells them the secret of his starvation, namely that he never found the food that he liked. But the workers cannot appreciate that and consider him insane.

But the discrepancy between the (hungry) artist and his environment does not only become apparent at the end of his increasingly spooky existence. Even in his professional heyday, there was a tense relationship between him and the people around him (the impresario, the two ladies of honor, the guards), which is characterized by mutual incomprehension. In particular, the incompatibility with the two women is described in detail - Kafka's relationship with women and close ties. Here you see the artist who, detached from all references, only wants to live his art and for that even accepts an inhumane life.

This story of fanatical ambition is - similar to Josefine, the singer or the people of the mice - marked by strong irony. It is announced with ironic pathos: “Try to explain the art of hunger to someone! If you don't feel it, you can't make it understandable. ”Here you can hear Goethe's Faust sighs :“ If you don't feel it, you won't hunt it down ”.

Just as ironic is the mention of the number 40 in connection with the days of hunger. It is the number that is mentioned several times in the Old and New Testaments and also in connection with starvation. Here the discrepancy between the demands and the reality of the hunger artist becomes particularly clear; he wants to “surpass himself to the point of incomprehensibility”.

outlook

Another story opens with the last sentences of the story; it is about the new resident of the former cage of the (hunger) artist, a young panther who symbolizes the powerful, animalistic freedom. The difference between the two cage residents could hardly be greater. The audience finally has a real new attraction again. The flesh-tearing predator is in total contrast to the hunger artist (and also to the vegetarian Kafka) and yet his fate is clearly evident. The narrator postulates with regard to the panther: “It was missing nothing.” But the description of the wild animal, which throws itself around and whose body is barely equipped to tear apart, is reminiscent of the unfortunate animal from A Crossbreed . The panther “doesn't seem” to miss freedom. But the fact is that a predator is cooped up in a cramped container. One inevitably thinks of Rilke's panther poem from 1902 or the monkey Rotpeter from A Report for an Academy . The cage did not stand in the way of the hunger artist's wishes. For the panther, however, with his elementary need for freedom, this cage is already a completely wrong place, even if enough food is offered there.

Quote

  • “Nobody was able to spend all the days and nights at the hunger artist as a watchman, so nobody could know from their own experience whether the hunger had really been famished without interruption; only the hunger artist himself could know that, so only he could be the spectator completely satisfied with his hunger at the same time. "

reception

  • v. Jagow, O. Jahraus (p. 538): “As much as the art of the hunger artist is physically authenticated, in the end the story tells not of a physical triumph but of a social failure. The story's arc of tension runs between these two poles. "

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: A hunger artist. Four stories. Verlag Die Schmiede, Berlin 1924. (First edition)
  • 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, edited by Roger Herms. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime . Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 315–377, ISBN 3-10-038154-8 .
  • Franz Kafka: Stories: Before the Law, The Judgment, The Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, Blumfeld, Report for an Academy, The Hunter Graccus and much more. Bridge of ideas, Braunschweig 2016, ISBN 978-3-96055-025-9 .

Secondary literature

  • Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 .
  • Bernd Auerochs: A hunger artist. Four stories. In: Manfred Engel , Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 318-329, esp. 322 f.
  • Manfred Engel: On Kafka's art and literary theory. In: Manfred Engel, Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 483-498, esp. 487 f.
  • Bettina von Jagow , Oliver Jahraus : Kafka Handbook Life-Work-Effect. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 .
  • Reiner Stach: Franz Kafka. The years of decisions. Frankfurt am Main 2002.
  • Thorsten Carstensen and Marcel Schmid (ed.): The literature of life reform. Cultural criticism and optimism around 1900. Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3334-4 .

Web links

Wikisource: A Hunger Artist (anthology) (1924)  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: A Hunger Artist (1924)  - Sources and full texts

Example interpretation:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The eternal son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , pp. 647, 644, 664.
  2. ↑ Peter-André Alt, p. 647.
  3. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge Franz Kafka . Reclam, p. 138.
  4. ↑ Walter Bauer Wabgnegg: Monster and machinery, artists and art in Franz Kafka's work. In: Wolf Kittler, Gerhard Neumann (ed.): Franz Kafka. Correspondence. Freiburg 1990. pp. 316-382.
  5. ^ Astrid Lange-Kirchheim: Messages from the Italian hunger artist Giovanni Succi. New materials for Kafka's “Hunger Artists” . In: Freiburg literary psychological discussions. Yearbook for literature and psychoanalysis. Volume 18: Size Fantasies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, pp. 315-340.
  6. ↑ Peter-André Alt, pp. 649–651.
  7. ↑ Peter-André Alt, pp. 649–651.
  8. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge Franz Kafka. Reclam, p. 139.
  9. ↑ Peter-André Alt, p. 652.
  10. ^ Carsten Schlingmann: Literature Knowledge Franz Kafka. Reclam, p. 140.