Kafka's Amerika

‘Amerika’: Kafka’s New World

It is easy to see why America as a concept would have fascinated Kafka, who never traveled the Atlantic, though many of his relatives had made the journey and entered family lore. Some of what he knew about the New World appears to have come from the pens of Charles Dickens (whose family melodramas he grotesquely parodied) and the fantasist Karl May, whose invented stories of frontier life thrilled a couple of generations of German-reading children. In Kafka’s America, for instance, San Francisco is in the East and a bridge links New York to Boston….