Distant friends: Three case studies on friendship in modernity (Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka) (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Austria, German text)

My dissertation Entfernte Freunde. Drei Fallstudien zur Freundschaft in der Moderne (Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka) re-examines the claim that friendship as a productive force in German literature and thought has declined since the mid-19th century. Through readings of correspondences, diaries and works of the three quintessential modern authors—Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka—I show that friendship has not disappeared but is being continually worked through against the backdrop of debates about friendship since antiquity as well as the obsolete tradition of affective friendship constitutive for German literature and politics in the 18th century. Here, friendship was the culmination of subjectivity and humanity. Intimacy and understanding provided a model for a new society and a moment of transcendence. The loss of metaphysics coupled with the emergence of radical finitude will put “modern” friendship to the test.; Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka negotiate a finite friendship, which offers no transcendence and has to end. Friendship becomes an eschatology, a study and experience of that which does not last forever, yet still is a necessary constellation for productiveness, albeit an utterly concrete and specific one. Therefore, I approach friendship in modernity through ‘case studies’, singular manifestations at the intersection of life and work.; Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is addressed to Wagner, who at that time is more a father than a friend. With Human, All-Too-Human , Nietzsche starts rethinking the traditional concept of friendship as a future possibility to free it from the notions of a common past and present realization. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is unthinkable without his friend Fließ. But through the discovery of the unconscious, the friend is deconstructed as ghostly revenant of past familial constellations, which would have to be dissolved for friendship not to be a repetition. Kafka's early narrative Description of a Struggle provides the name for all these friendships and for his friendship with Brod. While relationships become utterly agonal and incompatible with the time of writing, the friend is the necessary window to the world. Kafka's last will is the testament to modern friendship, which appears through the traces of its disappearance as a community without commonality.