A Hunger Artist

A Hunger Artist is a story by Franz Kafka, in the newspaper The New Rundschau was first published in 1922. It is also the title for the 1924 anthology published by the author, which still contained three other prose. Three of the four stories have an ironic view of the artist's life to the content, with circus figures were chosen in two cases each.

Before and after the turn of the century the use of jugglers and acrobats, ie representatives rather half- silk arts, in literature was very common. See Frank Wedekind, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine.

It is a bitter irony of Kafka texts that artists and audience can not understand. Set the artist drives inner compulsion; the audience wants to short-term entertainment. The mouse Josefine from Kafka's last story is their audience away in their self-forgetfulness.

• 3.1 interpretive approaches
• 3.2 Outlook

Anthology

The anthology A Hunger Artist was published in 1924 as Kafka's last book, which was published before his death. In addition to the story A Hunger Artist, it contains the short stories First Sorrow, A small woman and Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.

A Hunger Artist ( The story )

Content

First A hunger artist living in times in which there is in the public a lot of interest in his art. In its lattice cage he is examined by the interested audience of hunger on day of hunger and admired. However, for the hunger artist the continuing starvation " the easiest thing in the world." He suffers from the fact that one does not believe him, possibly even under him, sent secretly to eat, or at least deliberately gives him the chance. Moreover, his impresario insists that he should end the hunger after forty days. He opens the cage and it provides him food ready. The hunger artist feels absolutely misunderstood, he knows that he can starve much longer. Due to the persistent non Got one he gets an ever bleaker mood.

But times are changing and the Hungerkünstlertum comes out of fashion. The hunger artist is no longer the attraction. He became separated from his impresario and is now in one of the many lined with straw cages of a circus beside the animals. Here he is hungry and on, noticed by viewers barely.

Workers discover it sometime very small under his straw. Before he dies, he tells them his last words, the real reason of his starvation. He could not help it, because he had food that tastes him, not found. Had he found it, he would have " fully eaten like all ". He is buried with the straw together.

In his cage a young powerful Panther is inserted, which becomes the new attraction instantly.

Formation

The story originated within a few days in the spring of 1922, while the work itself took the castle to a halt at the novel. The choice of the theme, namely starvation as art, liked the former readers in the face of post-war poverty (especially the famine in Russia) have appeared rather cynical. Kafka's interest in the circus and other forms of showmanship have been studied in the literature as an important historical emergence of correlations of the narrative. For example, the real hunger artist Giovanni Succi has been touted as a possible model for Kafka's fictional character.

Narrative perspective

This story of a fanatical ambition is - like Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk - characterized by a strong irony. With an ironic pathos is proclaimed: "Try to tell someone the art of fasting! Who does not feel it, which you can not make them understand it. "Here you can hear sighs of Goethe's Faust: " If hers does not feel, do not hunt her werdets ".

Also ironic is the mention of the number 40 in connection with the hungry days. It is the number that is mentioned in the Old and New Testament several times and also in connection with starvation. Here the discrepancy between expectations and reality of the hunger artist is particularly clear; he wants himself " surpass to the incomprehensible ".

Text analysis

In its construction the hunger artist is like the stories of the judgment and Construction. Since the beginning of the description of success and satisfaction in the heyday of Schauhungerns. Quick follows the swing of negatives, the lack of understanding and limiting the famine to the taste of the superficial audience. The end result is the death and at the same time appears to point to a different vitality.

Interpretive approaches

The hunger artist can be seen as a symbol for the artist par excellence. The art that the audience sees as a service that must be achieved with difficulty, is a need, almost a compulsion, which corresponds to its nature entirely, like nothing else in its existence for the artist. Art is for the (hunger ) artists the " easiest thing in the world," which has for him therapeutic character. What would be other strict asceticism, is an all-natural as being for him.

Ambivalent is the attitude of the ( hunger ) artist to the audience. On one hand, he basks in its popularity and also want to understand his audience. On the other hand, it is precisely the public taste, which causes the impresario only to starve every 40 days. The well-known problem of the artist is to adapt to the art world.

Entirely free of the (hunger ) artists is only when notice of him no more audience. One can here think of Kafka himself, who had provided many of his writings not for a readership, but for destruction. But what a pitiful figure of the ( hunger ) Artists recently. It is used by workers disposed of more than buried. Shortly before his death, he tells them the secret of his starvation, namely, that he never found the food that tasted good. The workers can not but appreciate and consider him insane.

But not at the end of his increasingly spun existence shows the discrepancy between the (hunger ) artists and its surroundings. Even in his professional heyday there was between him and the people of his environment ( the impresario, the two maids of honor, the guards ) a strained relationship, which is characterized by mutual incomprehension. In particular, the incompatibility with the two ladies is described in detail - Kafka's relationship with women and close bond. Here we see the artist who wants to live in isolation from all respects only his art and it even takes an inhumane life in purchasing.

View

With the last sentences of the story another story is opened; it comes to the new inhabitants of the former cage of the ( hunger ) artist, a young panther, which symbolizes the powerful, animalistic freedom. Greater the difference between the two cage dwellers could hardly be. The public has now finally a real new attraction. The meat ravenous predator is in complete contrast to the hunger artist (and also a vegetarian Kafka ) and yet also his doom draws significantly. Although the narrator postulates regarding the Panthers: " He lacked nothing. " But the description of the beast, the tosses, and whose body is tight fitted to the breaking point, reminiscent of the unfortunate animal out of an intersection. The Panther " seems " not to miss the freedom. But fact is that a predator is cooped up in a terminated lowing container. One thinks here necessarily to the Panther poem by Rilke from 1902 or the monkeys Rotpeter from A Report to an Academy. The wishes of the hunger artist was not the cage in the way. This cage is already a very misguided place for the Panthers but with its basic needs freedom, even if there is enough food available.

Quote

• " No one was really able to spend all the days and nights at the hunger artist continuously as a guard, so no one could from his own experience to know if was really hungry continuously flawless; only the hunger artist himself could know that, so he just be that of his hunger completely satisfied spectator at the same time. "

Reception

• V. Jagow, O. Year in (p. 538): "As much as the art of the hunger artist is physically authenticated, ultimately tells the story not of a physical triumph, but of a social failure. Between these two poles of the tension of the story goes. "

Expenditure

• Franz Kafka: A Hunger Artist. Four stories. Publisher The Forge, Berlin, 1924. ( First edition )
• Franz Kafka: All narratives. Edited by Paul Raabe. Fischer -Taschenbuch -Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1970, ISBN 3- 596-21078 -X.
• Franz Kafka The narratives. Original Version, Edited by Roger Herms. Fischer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3

Secondary literature

• Peter- André Alt: Franz Kafka: The eternal Son. A biography. C. H. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4.
• Bernd Aurochs: A Hunger Artist. Four stories. In: Manfred Engel, Bernd aurochs (ed.): Kafka manual. Life - Work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0, pp. 318-329, esp 322 f
• Manfred Engel: To Kafka's art and literary theory. In: Manfred Engel, Bernd aurochs (ed.): Kafka manual. Life - Work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0, pp. 483-498, esp 487 f
• Bettina von Jagow, Oliver Year in Kafka 's Guide Life -works effects. Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6.