Franz Blei was an essayist, playwright and translator from Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. He was also noted as a bibliophile, a critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

, an editor

Editor in chief

An editor-in-chief is a publication's primary editor, having final responsibility for the operations and policies. Additionally, the editor-in-chief is held accountable for delegating tasks to staff members as well as keeping up with the time it takes them to complete their task...

 and publisher, and a fine wit in conversation. He was a friend and collaborator of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

.

Life

He was the son of a shoe-maker, and trained as an architect. After spending several years trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, in 1941 he settled in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.

Work

He translated into German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 work by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

, Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 and Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

 among others and also published his own monograph on the paintings of the symbolist Felicien Rops

Félicien Rops

Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...

. He was also a prolific editor of small-press journals.

Kafka said of him: "Franz Blei is much cleverer, and greater, than what he writes." (Janouch, 1971. "Conversations With Kafka").

Amethyst and The Opals

From December 1905 - November 1906 he was the editor of the private magazine Amethyst (pub. Hans von Weber) and then The Opals, which were available by subscription only and were mildly pornographic. The journals featured the artwork of Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....

 and Felicien Rops

Félicien Rops

Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...

, texts by Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...

 and also erotic prose from translated texts by Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

 and classic erotic plays and poems from around the world. Only 800 numbered copies were produced of each issue, and the young Kafka had a subscription. The Opals was the first to publish Carl Einstein

Carl Einstein

Carl Einstein , born Karl Einstein, was an influential German Jewish writer, art historian, and critic.Regarded as one of the first critics to appreciate the development of Cubism, as well as for his work on African art and influence on the European avant-garde, Einstein was a friend and colleague...

's Bebuquin, the first German expressionist novel. These literary small-press journals, known about by Kafka scholars for many decades, became the basis for a silly season

Silly season

The silly season is the period lasting for a few summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. This term was known by the end of the 19th century and listed in the second edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and remains in use at the start of the 21st...

 press story in 2008, in The Times of London, when a novelist promoting a new book claimed to have discovered Kafka's 'secret pornography stash' among his archived papers.

Hyperion

From 1908 to 1909 he co-edited the short-lived journal Hyperion

Hyperion (journal)

Hyperion was a bimonthly literary magazine published out of Munich by Franz Blei and Carl Sternheim. Between 1908 and 1910, twelve booklets in ten editions appeared....

with Carl Sternheim

Carl Sternheim

Carl Sternheim was a German playwright and short story writer. One of the major exponents of German Expressionism, he especially satirized the moral sensibilities of the emerging German middle class during the Wilhelmine period.-Biography:Born in Leipzig to a Jewish banker and his Protestant wife...

, which was the first to publish work by a young Franz Kafka. The first issue published a short fragment of Kafka's story "Description of a Struggle

Description of a Struggle

"Description of a Struggle" is a short story by Franz Kafka.-Origins:"Description of a Struggle" is one of Kafka's earliest stories that was not destroyed and is usually the earliest included in collections of his work...

". More substantial extracts of the work were published in the final issue of Hyperion in the spring of 1909. Extracts from another seven Kafka works were also published in the magazine.