A PART FROM THE STORIES Kafka published in his lifetime, his most influential works were edited and published by Max Brod, his close friend and executor, in the years following his death in 1924. Central to his reputation were the three novels: Der Proceß (The Trial, published 1925), Das Schloß (The Castle, 1926), and Der Verschollene (The Missing Person, originally titled Amerika by Brod, 1927). Since many of Kafka’s other stories were more or less fragmentary and sometimes embedded in diary entries, editorial decisions were always many and difficult. Brod acknowledged that he made compromises: for example, Kafka’s first story “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a Struggle) exists in two versions; Brod initially published a “blended” text (1936), but later endorsed the special publication of the two versions on facing pages (1969).

With the importance of establishing reliable, scholarly versions of Kafka’s texts becoming self-evident, a critical edition of all of them was projected by the S. Fischer Verlag of Frankfurt am Main, and the first two volumes, one containing Das Schloß and the other being an Apparatband to that novel, that is, an exhaustive presentation of variants and crossed out phrases, appeared in 1982. (This Apparatband is the focus of Mark Harman’s essay in the present volume.) The other stories and novels were published in hard covers in the same way; then, in 1994, Fischer published a paperback edition of all the fictional texts, compiled by Hans-Gerd Koch without the variants but with some necessary annotation and crossreferencing. This version of the Critical Edition is both convenient and widely used by scholars. A brief description of this edition follows:

Volume One: Ein Landarzt und andere Drucke zu Lebzeiten (A Country Doctor and Other Publications During His Lifetime).

Contains all the texts Kafka published himself, including those not collected in book form:

Betrachtung (Meditation, 1912), a collection of short fictions, some written as early as 1904, several previously published in magazines. A group of five had appeared in 1910 in the Prague journal Bohemia, under the title Betrachtungen.

“Der Heizer” (The Stoker, 1913), separate publicaton of the opening chapter of the unfinished novel Der Verschollene.