A dream

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A dream is a story by Franz Kafka that appeared in the volume Ein Landarzt in 1920 . It is a dream sequence which, as a first approximation, can be about the nearness of death, but also about the writing activity. The friend Max Brod tried to convince Martin Buber to publish this piece as a contribution to Jewish thought in Jewish Prague magazines. It was finally published in the Prager Tagblatt .

content

Josef K. dreams of going for a walk in a cemetery. He is magically drawn to a fresh burial mound. There are two men with a tombstone. A third, recognizable by his clothes as an artist, writes with a pencil in gold letters on the gravestone: "Here rests". He doesn't get any further, K.'s attention seems to irritate him. The artist can only manage a weak "J". When he furiously stamps into the earth of the burial mound, K. finally understands. It slides down under the tombstone. “While he was being picked up by the impenetrable depth below, his head still erect, his name chased above the stone with mighty decorations. He woke up delighted by the sight. "

Text analysis and interpretation approach

There are several ideas for classifying this dream story : According to Alt, it was created in the context of the novel The Trial using the main character Josef K. there as an independent narrative. According to Eschweiler , it is a chapter that can be assigned to the fragment of the novel.

And like the novel, this dream seems to have a fatal outcome for K. But K. is not negatively affected by his supposed end in the grave, neither in his dream nor when he wakes up. This connection actually makes the narrative appear as a possible element of The Process : On the one hand, the orderly, pedantic K. enables the supposed artist to carry out his activity, to fulfill his assumed assignment; on the other hand, in K's eyes, his destiny is fulfilled when the pure and beautiful gold letters find a continuation of his name in "mighty ornaments".

The cemetery, which is in itself a gloomy place, does not associate anything frightening here. The ominous cemetery bell is silent on a sign from the artist. Overall, the scenery is presented with a positive choice of words, such as “beautiful day”, “a lot of jubilation”, “delighted”. The description of the unreal dream elements is also full of vital dynamics: sliding “like on a rushing water” to the tempting grave mound, the “gravestone in the air”, the golden writing chasing over the gravestone from an “ordinary pencil”, sinking Ks in the grave, "turned on its back by a gentle current".

The story could be understood as a self-portrait of Kafka, the author dominated by the depth of the night, who lives in the letters and separates life from himself. Because the writing is dead letter. It is the medium of grief, melancholy and death because it does not create a presence, but only an approach to being. According to this interpretation approach, writing and the stagnation of writing would be the real subject of this story; just as it may have been Kafka's big problem in his work. His literary works have often developed out of dreams and twilight states that eluded his will and his intellectual grasp.

However, if one looks at the narrative in the context of the novel The Trial , it becomes clear that K. - as with all other encounters - creates meaning by interpreting and interpreting and that the longing for death against the background of the question of guilt raised in the first sentence of the novel understand is through would break with the death of K. the process , he received the opportunity of a - viewed subjectively extreme - statements that question. The artist's writer's block would only be due to the fact that the framework conditions are not yet right and the necessity of (free) death is a taboo subject between them.

reception

  • Stach (p. 138): If one took Brod at his word, then with Kafka's dream one could at best have illustrated the opposite (of Jewish thinking), namely the surreal intensification of a narcissism which no community can save from lustful self-destruction.
  • v.Jagow (p. 507): The dream serves as a frame for a story in which the paradigm of dream, writing and death reflects on the conditions for the creation of art.

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka. All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka The Stories Original version Fischer Verlag 1997 Roger Herms ISBN 3-596-13270-3
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 295-298.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stach p. 137 ff.
  2. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka. The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 625.
  3. ↑ SvS 626th
  4. ↑ SvS 314th

Web links

Wikisource: A dream  - sources and full texts