The Missing Person

Franz Kafka

The Complete Works of Franz Kafka 25권 · Continental Press

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Originally conceived under the working title "Der Verschollene" in 1912, this work would later be published posthumously by Max Brod in 1927 as "Amerika." Der Verschollene (The Missing Person) was the original title Franz Kafka intended for the novel. Der Verschollene literally translates to "The Missing Person" or "The One Who Is Missing". Kafka began working on the manuscript between 1911 and 1914, but he never completed it. When Max Brod published the text posthumously in 1927, he chose to title it Amerika, believing it better reflected the novels setting and themes of the immigrant experience in the United States. "The Stoker" (Der Heizer), which is the first chapter of the novel, was published separately in Kafka's lifetime in 1913 as a stand-alone story. This led to some confusion about whether Kafka had envisioned the novel taking on that title, so this work and its first chapter have been translated under many names. In this modern translation, we use the original intended title of the most mature version of this work. Kafka abandoned the unfinished manuscript in 1914, leaving behind a novel that traces the misadventures of sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann, exiled to America after a scandal involving a household servant. The text draws on popular American adventure novels and travel accounts that circulated in Prague, though Kafka never visited the United States himself. Unlike the claustrophobic European spaces of The Trial and The Castle, this novel unfolds in a dreamlike version of America where scale and possibility expand to surreal proportions. Karl encounters a series of substitute father figures - the Ship's Stoker, Uncle Jakob, and the Head Porter - each offering and then withdrawing protection in ways that echo Kafka's relationship with his own father. The America of the novel functions as a funhouse mirror of European social hierarchies, where servants might become millionaires and millionaires might vanish into poverty overnight. This fluid social landscape both attracts and terrifies Karl, who never quite learns to navigate its unpredictable currents. The manuscript ends with Karl joining the "Nature Theater of Oklahoma," a mysterious organization that promises to employ everyone who applies. This final section shifts the novel's tone from social realism toward allegorical fantasy, suggesting either salvation or deeper delusion for its protagonist. The theater's unlimited acceptance contrasts sharply with the rejection and exile that drive the rest of the narrative. Kafka's America emerges as a space of perpetual movement where identity remains permanently unstable - a prototype for later literary explorations of American mythology by European writers. The text's unfinished state leaves Karl suspended between Old World guilt and New World possibility, embodying the immigrant's permanent state of cultural limbo. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.

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A Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, Kafka's work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. His writings, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial," explore themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and guilt, and are influential in modernist literature.