SOURCE: “Max Brod and Herbert Tauber,” in Kafka Problem, edited by Angel Flores, New Directions, 1946, pp. 391-97.

In the following essay, Bergel contrasts Brod's biography of Franz Kafka with the critical analysis of Kafka's works published later by Herbert Tauber.

In 1937 Max Brod published a biography of his friend Kafka as a supplement to the six volumes of Kafka's Collected Works. [Franz Kafka] is rather an accumulation of material for a biography than a fully developed picture of Kafka's life. The richness of source material (unpublished letters, diaries and sketches, fragments of conversations) constitutes the main value of the book; it leaves almost everything to be done in the utilization of this material. There are enough indications, however, to deduce the outlines of an “inner” biography of Kafka if Brod had gone beyond the stage of the merely anecdotal.

Brod is anxious to stress the “healthy” side of...