When I first encountered Franz Kafka, as a high school student in the mid-1950s, there was a real romance of Kafka in the air. People talked about him with hushed reverence then, as some sort of modern saint: His books were infernos—but sorry, no paradise, because in the modern world God Is Dead, haven’t you noticed, stupid?—allegories of sin and grace, sublime but doomed quests for the Holy Grail. Allegory was the correct way to read him, because although his fiction was full of realistic detail, it existed on a plane of pure spirituality far beyond the crude world of readers like us, teenagers worried about getting into college and getting laid. We were told Kafka had no politics at all, he was Above or Beyond Politics. Yet his works in those Cold War days were also weapons against communism, because all his visions of tortured and mutilated people were accurate prophecies of the Evil Empire. As for his bio, the fifties Kafka was a neo-Sebastian born out of his time, stretched on the rack of this rough world, crushed by his cruel family, by his enslavement in a bureaucracy, by banal women who wanted him to have not only sex but children; no wonder the poor man died young! This romance actually says less about Kafka than about the grim life of the fifties—and about why we needed the sixties.
Since the sixties, new dimensions of Kafka have opened up. Writers of the Prague Spring era (Milan Kundera, Jiří Gruša, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, Václav Havel, and others) gave him a political identity as a socialist humanist, a precursor of 1956 and 1968, a fighter for human dignity against the perpetrators of Trials and the residents of Castles. They also showed how funny he was, how he saw that futility and absurdity could be comic as well as tragic facts of life. American Jews like Philip Roth, Morris Dickstein, Leonard Michaels, and Woody Allen placed Kafkaesque comedy in an Eastern European Jewish tradition, the “low” comedy of shlemiels, shlimazls, luftmenshen, and other chronic victims of power.
In 1984, Ernst Pawel published The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, one of the great biographies of recent years. Pawel, a Jewish refugee who worked for insurance companies on both sides of the Atlantic, may have been the first student of Kafka who actually understood his work. He showed that although Kafka described himself as a helpless shlemiel on the job, in fact he was a superachiever: He used bureaucratic procedures to transform the Czech system of workmen’s compensation into a system of accident prevention; he learned how mines and factories worked from the inside, fought the bosses, forced big changes, helped save thousands of workers’ lives; he was probably the inventor of OSHA, and one of the most creative bureaucrats of the century. He worked through the night not because he was enslaved by routines but because he mastered the routines in a way that could change the world.
Pawel also showed how Kafka, who grew up surrounded by pogroms, was engaged with Judaism all his life, running with Yiddishists in the 1910s (he made a speech, addressed to Germans, “On the Yiddish Language,” which ended with the admonition, “You understand Yiddish much better than you suppose”) and with Socialist Zionists in the twenties (one of his last fantasies was to end his life as a waiter in a cafe in Tel Aviv). He was involved with Martin Buber, writing some brilliant existentialist Jewish parables. And, while the fifties romance of Kafka had portrayed him as somehow too pure for sex, Pawel showed him and his friends getting it on, down and dirty, in the Prague cabarets and whorehouses where West End boys met East End girls. There is a marvelous photo in The Nightmare of Reason of Kafka as a student, in a high collar and a derby, “with Hansi, the ‘Trocadéro Valkyrie,’” putting on the ritz. What a thrill to discover that this man who portrayed himself as a walking shadow was really there, that he was active, resourceful, and admired in the world, that he even (sometimes) could have a good time. The post-sixties Kafka stank of profane vitality like you and me.
But if Kafka was so healthy, why was he so obsessed with sickness? In fact, you can’t read three pages of his collected letters or diaries without encountering riffs on somebody’s dread disease, usually the author’s own. Like Webster, he was “much possessed by death.” Whoever knew him knew his hypochondria, which he always joked about but never shed. He vacationed at health spas and lived with the dying. He was a connoisseur of disease long before he got sick. (He came down with tuberculosis in 1917 and died from it in 1924.) It’s likely he spent most of his adult life convinced he was dying and likely, too, that this belief somehow gave him strength to live. Sander Gilman tries to untie these knots in his provocative and fascinating new book, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. Gilman, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is a historian of medicine as well as a critic of Central European, especially Jewish, literature and life. He is fluent in many languages, at home in many cultural genres, overflowing with energy. Sometimes it seems he writes a book a year, including Jewish Self-Hatred (1986), The Jew’s Body (1991), and Freud, Race and Gender (1993). He sounds proud to be a Jew, yet uncertain what Jewishness ultimately means. And he is a child (born in 1944) of the romantic sixties.
The particular sixties and post-sixties romance that Gilman’s readers should recognize is the romance of paranoia. This romance thrived abundantly in the endless speculations about President Kennedy’s assassination, but also in the music of the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads Steely Dan; in movies like Blow-Up, The Passenger, and The Conversation; in the fiction of William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. Paranoid social science flourished in the circles around Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault. Much in Gilman reminds us of Foucault: He thinks language is the essence of being; he believes doctors and their diagnostic debates are the key to history; he is a brilliant excavator of obscure texts, which he invests with vast, dire meanings; he often threatens to crush the reader with metaphysical gravity, to submerge us in ontological gloom. But he does not press a metaphysico-political agenda upon us; indeed, his writing is driven by wheels within wheels of irony, so that it is often hard to know what Gilman is up to. He is a distinctively weird writer, which makes him and his subject a perfect match.
In The Jewish Patient, Gilman argues that “Kafka’s illness(es) came to define his sense of self” and that illness furthermore was “the axis on which he and his world turned.” In fact, says Gilman, Kafka’s “discourse of illness” is actually talk about “specific differences among human beings.” Kafka leans unconsciously on a structure of stereotypes that were created or transformed by the virulent and growing anti-Semitism of his time. “These stereotypes shaped Kafka’s sense of himself so intensely that he … may well have been unaware of their historical specificity.” So much fin de siècle talk about health and disease was racialized, and Kafka, usually far beyond the awareness of his contemporaries, often falls back on “the discourses of his time.” When he talks about health and disease, his own or other people’s, he is talking in code, and the code is usually about Jews.
Gilman locates Kafka within a number of fin de siècle controversies about Jews: the cliché dualism of “Eastern” and “Western” (Western Jews strong, healthy, Enlightened, but empty within; Eastern Jews dirty, ragged, illiterate, diseased, but “authentic”); arguments about kosher laws, Jewish ritual slaughter and circumcision (were they healthy or harmful, meaningful or meaningless in modern times); arguments about syphilis and TB (whether Jews were more or less susceptible, and what had they done to deserve this); arguments about whether Jews could speak or write “authentically” in German (or French, English, Russian, etc.); racist theories of “degeneration,” in which Jewish brains, beauty, strength, and creativity were all interpreted as symptoms of degeneracy; accusations of ritual murder, often the first act in massacres and pogroms; the Dreyfus Affair, that rehearsal for Nazism, which brought together and acted out every Jewish fear. Kafka read the papers closely and had plenty to say on all these topics, and some of what he said was luminous and visionary.
Gilman is very well read in the history and literature of anti-Semitism, and brilliant at taking language apart. He shows the amazing extent to which racist anti-Semitism dominated European—and, incidentally, American—public discourse in Kafka’s lifetime. Anti-Semitic images and themes seem to have been embraced uncritically by nearly everybody. Gilman walks us through this talk and highlights its plasticity: Jews were condemned for being more sickly than “normal” Europeans, but also condemned when they appeared healthier (e.g. immune to TB), and condemned again when their health stats were identical with those of the goyim. With sadly few exceptions, the most “advanced” physical and social scientists of the fin de siècle not only joined the chorus but even took the lead.
Ironically, as Gilman shows, many Jews themselves, including those who fought heroically against various oppressors, shared their enemies’ belief that there was something basically wrong with them. Max Nordau, medical doctor, Zionist pioneer, and author of the landmark book Degeneration (1895), is an outstanding example. Gilman finds a similar affinity at many points in Kafka’s work. On the other hand, much of Kafka’s writing radiates Jewish pride. He only sometimes believed that there was something basically wrong with the Jewish people; what he never doubted was that there was something basically wrong with him.
One part of himself that Kafka always hated, and punished, was his body. He was about six feet tall and weighed around 130 pounds, with black hair and piercing eyes. “I am the thinnest person I know,” he wrote. Calvin Klein, another scrawny Jewish boy, would have loved Kafka’s body (can’t you see him in black-and whites on a bus billboard?), but Kafka himself didn’t get much naches from it:
Nothing can be accomplished with such a body … My body is too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire … Everything is pulled apart.
Gilman shows how Kafka regularly put his body on trial, convicted and condemned it. This anorexic’s life sentence was a dread series of increasingly spartan diets: no meat or fish or sugar or spice, and every morsel of food to be chewed a dozen times (known as “Fletcherizing”). Such a diet not only kept him thin and thinner but insured that whoever sat down to eat with him ate their hearts out.
Pawel was the first to catalogue Kafka’s eating disorders and to locate his strange diets in the context of his obsessions about his health. Kafka’s food taboos were a grim parody of the kashrut laws—his father’s father had been a kosher butcher—except that kashrut diets bound Jews together and created solidarity among them, while Kafka’s diets served to isolate him ever more. Gilman argues that as lonely as Kafka may have felt, or made himself, it was always a Jewish loneliness. A brilliant graphics researcher, he reproduces some turn-of-the-century racist catalogues of “Jewish types,” where Kafka is a perfect fit for “the diseased.” (Another type in one of the racist picture galleries uncannily resembles Marcel Proust.) The acme of the “diseased Jew” was the anorexic, tubercular Sarah Bernhardt, a heroine of Kafka’s, and Proust’s, and my grandmother’s, and probably millions of Jews—always ill, obsessed with her health, looking as if she were sinking from week to week, yet knocking people out with an uncanny vitality, and destined to live into her late seventies.
Many Jews, especially young ones, were sick of these types. They feared not only that Jewish sickliness kept them from being accepted as healthy “normal” Europeans but also that they, too, could get sick someday. (As it turned out, Hitler would save them the trouble of growing old.) Gilman, ever ingenious in his scholarship, excavates a 1914 article, “The Jewish Patient”—this is where he gets his subtitle—from the Prague Zionist Journal Self-Defense. The article, a petulant complaint against Jewish hypochondria, features scenes of vaudeville-shtick-like encounters between Jewish patients and their doctors. Specimens:
DOCTOR: How long have you been sick?
PATIENT: My friend, I came into this world with my illness.
DOCTOR: How is your stomach?
PATIENT: Since I eat, how should my stomach be?
When Kafka laughed, this is the sort of thing he laughed at. Gilman understands, as did Kafka and Freud, but as the impatient young Jews of 1914 did not, how Jewish hypochondria could be a vital means of self-defense.
One of Gilman’s best chapters is an essay on the Dreyfus Affair, the event “which more than any other focuses the anxiety of assimilated Jews about their physical integration into the world where they find themselves.” Frederick Karl, in his recent study of Kafka, sees the affair as “the archetypal court case in the background of The Trial.” This is so obvious, how come nobody said it before? Gilman focuses on Dreyfus’s body and its disintegration under torture. He mounts Dreyfus on the grid of the stereotypical dualism between “Western” and “Eastern” Jews. Thus Dreyfus metamorphosed from what people saw as the strong, healthy body of a “Western” Jew into what they saw as a bent, twisted, ragged, diseased body, the alleged body of an “Eastern” (or a “Wandering”) Jew. Anti-Semites had always said the integration of Jews into Western European life was shallow and phony, and that they were really all Polish beggars and ragmen “underneath”; the torture machines of Devil’s Island were supposed to prove their point. (Gilman reproduces Dreyfus’s own diagram of the one used on him.) In the short run, the cruelties backfired. News photographs of Dreyfus in prison horrified even people who had thought he was guilty, but who now compared his suffering to Jesus Christ’s. We can imagine how this incident might have stirred Kafka’s imagination and helped lay the foundations for the death machine of “In the Penal Colony.” At the same time, we can imagine how it might also have stirred other Europeans, who dreamed of mass murder by machine. Who knows? Where Gilman is at his best, lack of hard evidence doesn’t seem to matter. He isn’t doing forensics, it isn’t the O.J. trial; we already know everybody’s guilty, including of course people who weren’t born. He’s presenting a luminous poetic vision of the twentieth century, and it doesn’t hurt if some of the garden paths are imaginary, because we know the toads are real.
One of Gilman’s most provocative themes, but a deeply problematical one, is the Jew’s allegedly “stolen” language. Anti-Semites everywhere have always disparaged Jewish writers on the ground that “they” have no right to “our” language and that what passes for their creativity is actually a form of cancer or murder. In French, this was the theme of a flood of virulent polemics aimed at Proust. In his lifetime Kafka was not a special target in German, but we know he felt guilty of everything, and he was especially susceptible to the tirades of the great Viennese critic and Jewish anti-Semite Karl Kraus, self-appointed defender of the “purity” of the German language against Jewish “pollution.” Kafka often agreed: He should be writing in some language more “authentic,” more “his own.” But what? At different moments in his life, Kafka was both a Yiddishist and a Hebraist. Yiddishism and Hebraism shared the metaphysical belief that it was “authentic” for Jews to talk only with one another, and somehow “inauthentic” to talk with anybody else.
Gilman seems to express a curious sympathy for this belief. Now I can understand it as a defense mechanism—just like hysteria and hypochondria—in a world where, God knows, Jews have so often been horribly attacked. But as an idea, as something to be taken at face value, it strikes me as not only a great mistake but a moral outrage. If the great modern revolutions mean anything, and I believe they do, then everybody has the right to speak to the whole world, and the only thing “authenticity” can mean is putting your thoughts and feelings across in ways the world can understand. Kafka always knew that, in German, he was one of the great writers in one of the world’s great literatures, and that his voice was getting across to plenty of total strangers. He was proud of this, and there’s no way on earth he would have given it up.
Gilman clearly loves the German language, yet seems willing, even eager, to see Jews give it up. What drives him to this? It’s hard to know. But at the book’s very end he makes a great leap from a paranoiac vision to an apocalyptic one, where all modern history leads up to the moment of total polarization of Germans and Jews, the Shoah, the Holocaust.
His last chapter, “Kafka Goes to Camp,” starts with a glimpse of Kafka at a Jewish vacation camp in Germany in July 1923. It is a heart-rending moment: Now that he knows nothing can save him, he realizes how much he really wants to live. He sees some poor Polish-Jewish children singing and dancing, and his heart leaps up. Then—jump-cut—we are suddenly thrown from health camps to death camps, where, Gilman says, Nazi doctors will infect people with TB to study their pain. There, any of those twenties children still alive will be tortured and killed, along with Kafka’s sisters and his lover Milena Jesenská, and there Kafka too would have been killed, if only he had lived long enough. Through unnamed inexorable processes,
camps set up to protect Jewish children are replaced by camps set up to infect them. Thus the fantasies about the Jewish body in the medicine of the fin de siècle become the horror of the Shoah.
Gilman ends his book with the view from the crematoriums. From there, any attempts by Jews to seize life—those poor kids dancing, Kafka falling in love or writing words—are judged with a heavy irony that is very close to contempt: The Shoah has, and is, the last word.
In the years after World War Two, some impressive people—Elie Wiesel, Theodor Adorno, George Steiner—took that view. They spoke as if the Nazis had won the war; they were the last to leave a sane world, and they were turning out the light. At least we knew the dark places they were corning from. But what’s Gilman’s excuse? He was born in the United States just when his dread story ends. He has grown into middle age, as I have, in an America filled with horrors, but with no death camps, and some nice stuff mixed in. He starts the book with a page of epigraphs: Kafka was too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, or Christian. Then he asserts, in bold type, “and then comes me.” But then he doesn’t come. There’s a total absence of presence, of subjectivity; over three-hundred pages the author remains a missing person. The ontological gloom that haunts The Jewish Patient is one of its unsolved mysteries.
It is clear that Gilman loves Kafka, but he thinks Kafka did something terribly wrong. What was his original sin? Apparently it was Modernism:
[Kafka] moved from a language marked by the discourses of his time to one that he and his contemporaries saw as “modern,” and therefore, they hoped, universal, transnational, and infinitely interpretable in the ideological strife of their age.
Again,
Kafka … needs to efface any reference to an external world [the world of anti-Semites] that questions his control over his language and his body. And the high modern … encourages this effacement in its striving for seeming universals and its reduction of its characters to types.
So Kafka’s modernism was a shrinking (“reduction”) of literary values, a form of repression (“effacement”), of bad faith, of the whole pathology of “Jewish self-hatred.” Gilman writes as if he knows how Kafka should have written, but alas, he doesn’t tell. In treating Kafka’s language as something degenerate, Gilman ironically proves one of his larger points: that it’s desperately hard for Jews to talk about themselves without sounding like anti-Semites.
Gilman uses one more sinister-sounding word for Kafka’s original sin: to deterritorialize. He gets this clunky word from the French critics Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but he uses it in his own special way:
I use the term “deterritorialization” to mean the creation of a seemingly universal discourse … This discourse replaces and represses those discourses that demean or denigrate one’s ability to command the language of the high culture with which one identifies.
Once more, Gilman deploys loaded words—“represses,” “seemingly universal”—to disparage Kafka’s modernism without ever confronting him directly. If he did, he would have to say why he thinks Kafka’s vocabulary is only “seemingly,” not authentically, universal; why his language “represses” rather than (say) “surpasses” the racist discourse that Gilman knows so well; why Kafka was merely “replacing,” and not, as he thought, creating; why Gilman uses the verb to “deterritorialize,” which implies that only the territorial is real, in place of a more familiar verb, to “universalize,” a key word in the liberal socialism that Kafka believed in all his life. Even when he felt that he was guilty, Kafka believed that other people were innocent, and his greatest works were affirmations of their rights.
I see where I am going now: toward a new romance of Kafka. This is the Kafka of 1989, who works at his respectable job to tear down the walls. Gilman himself observes that “the adjective ‘kafkaesque’ now exists in all the languages of Europe and the Americas.” I bet so able a linguist could find it in Asian and African languages as well. Kafkaesque experiences are what happen to people who claim their human rights and are referred to departments that can’t be found. Some people were making those claims, and running into that trouble, in Kafka’s lifetime. A lot more people around the world are confronting their Castles, including their interior ones, today. The fact that they do so, and recognize Kafka as a guide, shows not only that twentieth-century modernism has plenty to be proud of, but that Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient, was healthier than he thought.
This essay originally appeared as “Kafka Family Values” in the Nation, November 20, 1995.