Nicolas Mahler Komplett Kafka
[Completely Kafka]

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is constantly being rediscovered. Although the author had ordered his good friend Max Brod to destroy his works, Brod instead made sure that they lived on posthumously. Today, Kafka is known as a visionary modern writer whose narrative cosmos leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. In fact, just a few years ago his drawings were subject to extensive exploration.

Given that Kafka’s darkly enigmatic stories also contain a great deal of (absurd) humor,
it is only fitting that the Austrian comic artist and cartoonist, Nicolas Mahler, has chosen to tackle Kafka’s life and work on the 100th anniversary of his death: “Complete Kafka” is the resonant title of his new book. Yet, can one do justice to the complexity of the German-Jewish writer from Prague within the span of a 100 pages, while also preserving his humor? “Mahler”, as the illustrator calls himself for short, proves it can be done and delivers a solid and entertaining introduction to Kafka’s biography, his thinking and to his most important works.

This is not the illustrator’s first artistic encounter with world literature: whether Marcel Proust’s “Search for Lost Time”, James Joyce's “Ulysses” or Robert Musil's “Man without Qualities” - Mahler, who was born in 1969, has “transformed” all of these milestones of modernism into compact comic versions. He contrasts their monumental narrative with bits of poignant and satirical hyperbole. In 2021, he also created a subtle “comic biography” of the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard. Mahler's interpretations of literary classics are favorites of the arts section of the newspapers and creates apt distillations with their own artistic value. Not least because of his unmistakable minimalist, caricature style, Mahler also holds a firm place in the German-language comic scene. His trenchant black humor with its distinctly Austrian style fits perfectly to his bizarre little manikins which aptly expose human weaknesses.
“Komplett Kafka” can certainly be seen as a highlight in Mahler's series of literary adaptations. Formally, it is not a pure comic, rather it is a biographical narrative with illustrations and cartoons. Mahler succinctly sums up Kafka’s life, occasionally commenting on it with subtle irony, but mostly allowing Kafka to speak for himself. The illustrator looks at Kafka the man, his roots in the German-Jewish community in Prague, as well as the self-doubt that plagued him his entire life. This tendency is best reflected, among other things, in the famous “Letter to his Father”. While Kafka himself is depicted as a thin line with elephant ears, Mahler portrays his father Hermann as a monstrous, powerful golem, the renowned Jewish mystical figure. The biographical passages are often interrupted by cartoons and comic sequences that humorously interpret Kafka's novels and stories such as “The Metamorphosis” or “Hunger Artist”. Mahler detects a relationship between Kafka’s novel “The Castle” and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s vampire film “Nosferatu”, both of which were made around 1922. For each quotation used, Mahler also lists the respective source in the book’s appendix.

Mahler draws on Kafka’s diaries and letters as well as Max Brod’s memoirs. His portrayal of Kafka’s desperate and tragicomic efforts to form a relationship with his fiancée Felice Bauer is particularly touching. The zealous letter writer appears to us today as a flawed human being. Particularly amusing are the quotes from critical reviews that were written by Kafka’s contemporaries, who mostly failed to recognize his genius and condemned, “The Metamorphosis” as “lacking fantasy and boring”. Mahler also mentions the fairly unknown and unauthorized sequel to the story, which was written in 1920 by the “fan” Karl Brand. In his version, Gregor Samsa, who had been transformed into a beetle, has a happy ending in that he metamorphoses back into a human again.

Mahler’s vivacious pen and ink drawings, executed with thick brushstrokes, skillfully quote and parody Kafka’s own drawings, which were often abstracted studies of individual characters. The Austrian enjoys disrupting Kafka’s abysmal world with bits of silliness. The profound anguish that marked Kafka’s life, which was plagued by illness, and which can be seen in many of his texts is rendered bearable through Mahler’s ironic and lovingly empathetic look at the torments of his soul. In “Complete Kafka”, the writer of the century lands on the dissecting table of a humorist whose illustrations are no less ingenious than his subject.