From Brehms Tierleben to “A Report to an Academy”: Franz Kafka’s Animal Story Read as a Critical Commentary on Writing About Nature

Abstract

Under the influence of cultural (literary) animal studies, a kind of paradigmatic shift has taken place among the Kafka studies community. No longer is it seen as self-evident that one can only understand the animals in Kafka’s stories as symbols or allegories for human existence or behavior. The biological, zoological, or evolutionary knowledge incorporated into Kafka’s representations of animals has become increasingly obvious, so much so that the animal as animal and the human–animal relation have now been revealed as central topics. Joining these new perspectives, this chapter goes one step further by asking whether and how far Kafka’s animal stories are part of a German tradition in nature writing. Brehms Tierleben, a popular work of German natural history by Alfred Edmund Brehm, which has not yet been discussed as a work of nature writing, was a major source for many of Kafka’s animal stories. In the case of Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”), for example, it will be shown that the story can be read as both a critical comment on Alfred Brehm’s writing about apes and as a literary deconstruction of contemporary nature writing in general.