1911 On this day Franz Kafka attended a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. It was, on the face of it, an epic collision of contemporary philosophy and of modernist literature. Kafka, aged 27, was already well into his (very private) writing career and had, in 1910, begun to keep a diary. Steiner (1861–1925), like Kafka a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire by upbringing, had carved out a (very public) religio-philosophical doctrine he termed ‘Anthroposophy’. His Outline of Esoteric Science had recently been published. Steiner was then embarked on building a palace of art (bringing together music, painting, drama, dance, architecture and literature) called the Goetheanum. His enthusiastic, quasi-spiritualist ideas would leave a lasting imprint on European education. It’s not clear that they had any lasting effect on Franz Kafka.
Kafka attended the lecture less as a potential convert than as a novelist, observing rather than listening; merely seeing what Steiner was doing, as if he (Kafka) were at a theatre rather than a lecture. He recorded his observations in his diary:
Rhetorical effect: relaxed discussion of the objections of opponents, the listener is amazed by this strong opposition, further development and enlivening of these objections, the listener falls into worry, sinks entirely into these objections as if there were nothing else, now the listener takes a response to be impossible and is more than satisfied with a fleeting description of the possibility of defence.
This rhetorical effect corresponds, incidentally, to the commandment of the devotional spirit. – Continual gazing on the surface of one’s extended hand. – Leaving out the final point. In general the spoken sentence begins at the speaker with its great capital letter, in its course bends as far as it can out to the listeners, and turns back to the speaker with the final point. But if the final point is left out, then the sentence, no longer held, blows directly onto the listener with the entire breath.
Were ever the semaphorics of a lecture better caught?