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- Herausgeber: onomato
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
The stories by Franz Kafka, illustrated by Hanna Koch, resemble fairy tales, enabling children to discover the beauty of this prose. But that is not all: The stories by the renowned writer also appear in a new light for young people as well as for adults of all ages. The stories: The Bucket Rider, Before the law, The Stork in the Room, Wish to Be an Indian, Eve and Adam, House Pet, The Trees, Poseidon
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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The Bucket Rider 5
Before the Law 17
The Stork in the Room 29
The Wish to Be anIndian 45
Eve und Adam 47
House Pet 48
The Trees 49
Poseidon 50
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The Bucket Rider
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Coal all used up; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing cold; the room blown full of frost; outside the window, trees rigid with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who wants help from it. I must have coal; I can’t freeze to death; behind me the hard-hearted stove, before me the hard-hearted sky; so I must ride a sharp path right in between and seek help in the middle from the coal merchant.
But he has stopped caring about my usual pleas; I must give him exact proof that I don’t have a single speck of coal dust left, and that to me he is like the very sun in the sky.
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I must come like a starving beggar with a death rattle, planning to perish at his doorstep, which makes the master’s cook decide to give me the last coffee grounds, just as the merchant must hurl a shovelful of coal into my bucket, feeling furious, but keeping to the Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!”
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The way I arrive has to decide the matter, so I ride there on the bucket. As a bucket rider, my hand on the handle, the simplest kind of bridle, I make my weary way down the stairs; but at the bottom my bucket rises up, splendidly, splendidly; camels kneeling low on the ground, then shaking themselves under their drivers’ sticks, don’t rise more beautifully. We move along the frozen-solid streets at an even canter; often I’m lifted up to the height of the houses’ second stories; never do I sink down to the level of their front doors.
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And I hover way up high in front of the merchant’s vaulted cellar, where he crouches way down at his little table and writes; to let out all the extra heat, he has opened the door.
“Coal merchant!” I call out in a voice burned hollow by the cold and cloaked in smoky clouds of breath, “please, coal merchant, give me a bit of coal. My bucket is so empty that I can ride on it. Be so kind. I’ll pay you when I can.”
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Before the Law
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Before the law there is a doorkeeper.
A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and asks to enter the law.
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But the doorkeeper says that he cannot let him enter now. The man thinks it over, then asks whether he will be allowed to enter later. “It is possible,” the doorkeeper says, “but not now.”
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Since the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man bends down to look inside through the gate. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says, “If you think it’s so tempting, just try to go in even though I said not to. But know this: I am mighty. And I’m only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall there are doorkeepers, though, one mightier than the other. The mere sight of the third one is more than even I can bear.”
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“Surely everyone tries to reach the law,” the man says, “how is it that in all these many years, no one besides me has asked to enter?” The doorkeeper realizes that the man has come to his end, and, in order to get through to the man’s failing hearing, he shouts at him, “No one else could enter here, because this entrance was meant only for you. I will now go and close it.”
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The Stork in the Room
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This story appears in Kafka’s “Octavo Notebook C” of the complete critical edition as an untitled fragment. It was probably written in March 1917, in the cottage Kafka’s sister Ottla rented on Alchimistengasse in Hradčany, the castle district of Prague. The title stems from a suggestion by Reiner Stach.
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When I came home in the evening, I found a large, an ultralarge, egg in the center of the room. It was almost as high as the table and bulged out to the sides in the same proportion. It rocked softly back and forth.
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Curious as I was, I put the egg between my legs and carefully cut it in two with my pocketknife.
It was all ready to hatch. Crackling, the shell fell apart and out jumped a storklike bird, still featherless and beating the air with his overly short little wings.
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“What do you want in our world?” I felt like asking, as I squatted down in front of the bird and gazed into his anxiously blinking eyes. But he left me and hopped along the walls, half fluttering, as though on sore feet.
“One helps the other,” I thought, unpacked my supper on the table and beckoned to the bird on the other side of the room as he pushed his beak between my small set of books.
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If one were only an Indian, ready on the spot, atop a dashing horse, tilted in the air, trembling ever so briefly, again and again, over the trembling ground until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, until one threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and barely saw the land ahead as a smoothly mowed heath, the horse’s neck and horse’s head already gone.
The Wish to Be an Indian
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There was a need for the serpent: Evil can lead a human astray, but not become a human.
Eve and Adam
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After Adam was driven out of Paradise, his first house pet was the serpent.
House Pet
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For we are like tree trunks in the snow. They seem to lie flat, and all it would take is a little prod to push them away. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly joined to the ground. But see, even that only seems so.
The Trees
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Poseidon
Poseidon was sitting at his desk and doing his calculations. Managing all the bodies of water made for endless work. He could have had as many helpers as he wanted, and did in fact have many of them, but since he took his job very seriously, he went through all the calculations again, so the helpers were not much help.
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It can’t be said that the work gave him pleasure; he actually did it only because it was his to do. Yes, he had often tried to get more cheerful work, as he called it, but when he was given various offers, it turned out that nothing suited him as well as the job he had been doing.
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