An ambitious young student

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An ambitious young student is a prose piece by Franz Kafka that was probably composed in December 1914 / January 1915 and was only published in 1994.

A student plans intensively to bring a self-conceived method of horse training to success.

origin

The prose piece was written down in Kafka's “Elberfeldheft”, although the last sentence in this booklet can only be found after a number of other texts. When Kafka started the play cannot be clearly proven. Kafka was probably inspired by a 1914 publication on the thinking horses of Elberfeld .

This prose piece has rarely been interpreted so far.

content

An ambitious young student is interested in the case of the horses from Elberfeld. He would like to conduct his own experiments on this topic. He plans how he could get money to buy a horse, namely continue to receive the donations from his parents, which should continue to think of him as an eager student, but also give tutoring during the day.

He also has precise ideas about his new kind of horse dressage: The dressage should not be done with the whip, as usual, but through permanent attention and instruction during training, which is always carried out at night. The aim is not to strive for short-term individual successes as with other dressage trainers, but rather some kind of higher goal that is not explained in more detail.

In the end, however, the suspicion creeps up on him that as an inexperienced individual he should hardly be right to all connoisseurs.

shape

It is a short, unstructured narrative with no plot and no direct speech. The narrative perspective is distant, the student is the constant object of sober consideration. The language is characterized by long sentences, conditional sentences, nested sentences, sentence sequences separated by commas. You can see in the text how the student tries to build up logical structures of thought that should bring him to his goal, but an obsession is also expressed there. The prose piece contains only planning considerations, not a single real action, the subjunctive II predominates. Structural mechanisms can be seen here, which also emerge in other Kafka works. The very first sentence outlines everything (see quote ). This is known z. B. from Der Verschollene or Der Trial .

On the other hand, everything is negated again with the last sentence. This mechanism is also characteristic of various pieces. See an intersection , the city arms .

Text analysis

The student is ambitious, but as the first sentence already shows, not in his field of study, which is not specified. The thinking horses of Elberfeld drive him, in other words, a subject that can be placed somewhere between behavioral research and vaudeville. The student is hardly characterized in general terms. He's obviously descended from little people, poor provincials. Whether the hardship of studying or the sparse lifestyle drives him to pursue his obsession is also not explained. Maybe it's just being seriously affected by this idea for its own sake.

Here he is quite similar to the two people from Der Dorfschullehrer (also created in 1914), both of whom, as laypeople, have devoted themselves intensively to a scientific topic, but received no recognition. With the said last sentence of doubt, Kafka's failure also seems to be in the air for the ambitious student. But what exactly did he want? Any higher goal of animal education? Something similar to that for the monkey Rotpeter from A report for an academy , where a monkey learns manically obsessively with several teachers at the same time in order to become human-like?

Kafka took up the subject of the student, who deviated from his studies, as early as 1911 in The Urban World . The protagonist there, already older and a delinquent doctoral student, under the influence of his father, without being able to fulfill his wishes, is a sad figure compared to the local student who is serious, self-determined and with a lonely determination dedicated to his cause.

Quote

  • “A young, ambitious student who was very interested in the case of the Elberfeld horses and who had carefully read and considered everything that had appeared in print about this subject, decided on his own to try things out in this direction and from the start it was completely different and in his opinion incomparably more correct to touch than his predecessors. "

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version. Edited by Roger Hermes. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Franz Kafka: Legacy writings and fragments I. Edited by Malcolm Pasley. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-038148-3 , pp. 225-228.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ published by Hans-Gerd Koch Fischer paperback Kafka estate; Note see also Franz Kafka Die Erzählungen Original version Fischer Verlag 1997 Roger Herms ISBN 3-596-13270-3 pp. 548/558
  2. ↑ Roger Hermes (ed.): Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 558.
  3. ↑ http://www.christian-meurer.de/titanicartikel.html
  4. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 . P. 388

Web links