Children on the country road

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Children on the Landstrasse is a story by Franz Kafka that was written in 1903 and published in 1913 as part of the anthology Consideration .

content

A childish narrator is picked up from his parents' house by a crowd of other children on a summer evening. Although he is tired, he queues up and takes part in their exuberant games in the natural surroundings. When night finally falls, the children run back to the village. But the narrator says goodbye to his comrades and runs back into the forest alone. His destination is the distant city, which is said to be where "the fools who don't sleep" live.

shape

At the beginning in particular, the text is organized less psychologically than cinematographically. The focus is on capturing collective dynamics that superimpose individual motivation. The scene looks like a film because it focuses on snapshots of movement without illuminating intentions or causality. The narrator is interested only in the gestures of those who run, but not in the cause of their actions.

Text analysis

What is unusual for Kafka is the narrator's involvement in a community of friends and the presentation of the plot in a beneficial nature. The language and actions of this group of friends are characterized by naivety and optimism. The togetherness is invoked again and again with the shout “Come!”. The dialogues are presented in a staccato rhythm. But the narrator is latently different from the others. Significantly, he uses a word incomprehensible to his friends, namely “grace”, an abstract word. The others only express themselves in very specific requests.

Although he seems to enjoy the activities together, the narrator repeatedly expresses his tiredness. You'd think he's tired of childish games without really knowing it himself. His sentence: "If you mix your voice with others, you are caught like a fishhook" shows that he feels the community as restricting.

When the crowd of children goes back to the village, he looks electrified. He says goodbye to the others euphorically with a kiss and handshake and quickly sets off on his own in the city to see the sleepless fools. The fools are a symbol for beings with exciting otherness. It seems that the young narrator seeks their closeness because he secretly attributes himself to them more than the familiar crowd of children.

Relation to other Kafka figures and approach to interpretation

The fools are comparable to the Nobody from The Trip to the Mountains or the childlike helpers from the fragment of the novel Das Schloss . It is an opposite world to the lonely Kafka bachelors. One encounters the ambivalence of interpersonal closeness and demarcation, of belonging and alienation, which appeared more frequently in early Kafka works.

This prose piece could be read as the author Kafka's striving for isolation in his nocturnal writing in a longed-for other place and as an escape from the family structure, which in this text describes the parents' garden as being fenced off with a grid.

A crowd of children also appears in Kafka's novel fragment Der Verschollene , albeit in a way that is unfavorable for the protagonist Karl Rossman, as the children help prevent Karl's escape from an uncomfortable situation.

expenditure

  • Children on the country road (contemplation). In: Bohemia , Prague December 25, 1912 [first printing].
  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Ed. Paul Raabe , Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg 1970. ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: The stories , original version Fischer Verlag, Roger Herms, 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 / Main 1996, ISBN 3-10-038152-1 , pp. 9-14.

Secondary literature

  • Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 .
  • Peter-André Alt: Kafka and the film . Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58748-1 .
  • Daniel Berg: Franz Kafka: "Children of the Landstrasse". Development and understanding. Bochum German studies. Universitätsverlag N. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1995. ISBN 3-8196-0346-8 .
  • Barbara Neymeyr : contemplation. In: Manfred Engel , Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - Work - Effect , Stuttgart, Weimar 2010, pp. 111–126, esp. 124 f. ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 .
  • Hans Geulen : Franz Kafka: "Children on the country road". Try and risk an adequate interpretation. In: Hans Jürgen Scheuer, Justus von Hartlieb, Christina Salmen, Georg Höfner (eds.): Kafka's “contemplation”. Readings. Frankfurt a. M. 2003, pp. 5-15.
  • Hans Glinz: Methods for objectifying the understanding of texts, shown on Kafka's "Children of the Landstrasse" , In: Yearbook for International German Studies , 11, 1969, pp. 75-107.
  • Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus : Kafka Handbook Life - Work - Effect , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 .

Web links

Wikisource: Children on the Road  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alt Kafka / Film p. 50 ff.
  2. ↑ Alt Kafka / Sohn p. 256
  3. ↑ Alt Kafka / Sohn p. 257
  4. ↑ by Jagow p. 404
  5. ↑ On the street in front of Brunelda's house; see. Franz Kafka: The Lost One; Roman, in the version of the manuscript, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-18120-9 , pp. 210ff.