Franz Kafka died in 1924, having published a few stories and fragments. To a circle of friends—Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Felix Weltsch, Gustav Janouch—his remembrance was deep-etched. His shy, riddling irony, the probing innocence of his speech and manner, had cast a spell. But at large the word kavka meant no more than jackdaw. Less than twenty years later, when Kafka himself would have been in his late fifties, Auden could write, without seeking to provoke paradox or shock:
Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.
And from the vantage of his dogmatic certitude and prodigious labor, Claudel could say: “Besides Racine, who is for me the greatest writer, there is one other—Franz Kafka.”
Around a man who, in his own lifetime, published half a dozen stories and sketches there has grown up an immense literature. To Rudolf Hemmerle’s Franz Kafka: Eine Bibliographie (Munich, 1958), which already included some 1,300 works of criticism and exegesis, one must add the valuable check-list of “Biography and Criticism” in Franz Kafka Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), Harry Järv’s Die Kafka-Literatur, and the listing of most recent articles and studies in Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Mr. Järv’s catalogue fills close to 400 pages, and shows that from Brazil to Japan there is hardly a major language or literary culture without its Kafka translations and commentaries. The Soviet Union offers a significant exception. Returning home from western Europe, Victor Nekrasov, one of the most mature voices among the younger Russian writers, declared that nothing had shamed him more, or been more revealing of Soviet parochialism, than the fact that he had not previously heard of Kafka. The very name has become a password to the house of literacy.
To some of Kafka’s early admirers there is something distasteful in this tumult of critical voices. They scorn the dispersal through renown of a recognition and treasure once shared by a passionate few. In his haughty essay on “The Fame of Franz Kafka” Walter Muschg, himself a master of withdrawal, mourns that “even so solitary a poet as Kafka cannot avoid being distorted to a fantastic shadow on the wall of time.” Through the posthumous publication by Max Brod of the three novels (two of them clearly incomplete), a publication carried out against Kafka’s professed intent, the cabalistic values and intimacies of Kafka’s art have been made common ground. To those who remember the man’s strange, secretive radiance, the present image is both exaggerated and dimmed. Glory brings its darkness.
Kafka himself gave support to those who see in his work an essentially private, fragmentary achievement:
Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, all my friends, seize upon something I have written, and then surprise me with a signed and sealed publisher’s agreement. I don’t want to create awkwardness for them, and so, in the end, things get published which were, in fact, no more than private sketches or diversions. Private vestiges of my human weakness are printed and even sold, because my friends, Max Brod in the lead, have set their minds on making literature of them, and because I am not strong enough to destroy these testimonials (Zeugnisse) of my solitude.
But at once, in characteristic subversion and qualification of his meaning, Kafka added: “What I said here is, of course, exaggerated.”
We cannot act today as if the weight of Kafka lay with the early stories and shards of expressionistic prose. The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), Amerika (1927), and the tales published in 1931 have given to the modern imagination some of its principal shapes of perception and identity. In the terms of Kafka’s parable, we must make certain that the Chinese walls of criticism do not imprison the work, that the messenger can pass through the gates of commentary. The former privacies, the sense of initiate possession, are unrecapturable. Nor should one obscure the crucial fact: Kafka throws so large a shadow, he is the object of so serried a critical enterprise, because, and only because, the labyrinth of his meanings open out, at its secret, difficult exits, to the high roads of modern sensibility, to what is most urgent and relevant in our condition. It would be absurd to deny the deeply personal quality of Kafka’s maze; but being marvelously at the center, it compels many approaches, many trials of insight. That is the force of Auden’s claim. The contrast between the generality of statement and classic form in Dante or Goethe and the covert, idiosyncratic mode of Kafka denotes the tenor of the age. We hear a shaping echo to our speech in a code full of silence and despairing paradox.
Political glosses on Kafka are often naïve; they fail to discriminate between the partisan and the prophetic. Yet, with time, it has become obvious that much of Kafka’s “transrealism,” his edging of reality out of focus so as to produce the economy and logic of hallucination, is derived from a precise, ironic observance of local historical circumstance. Behind the nightmare exactitudes of Kafka’s setting lies the topography of Prague and of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its decline. Prague, with its legacy of cabalistic and astrological practices, its compactness of shadow and spire, is inseparable from the landscape of the parables and fictions. Kafka had a keen sense of the symbolic resources gathered in reach; during the winter of 1916–17 he lived in the Zlatá ulička, the Golden lane of the Emperor’s alchemists, and there is no need to deny the associations between the castle on Hradŏany Hill and that in the novel. Kafka’s phantoms had their solid local roots.
Moreover, as Georg Lukács has argued, there are in Kafka’s inventions specific strains of social criticism. His vision of radical hope was somber; behind the march of proletarian revolution he saw the inevitable profit of the tyrant and demagogue. But Kafka’s training in law, and his professional concern with industrial accidents and compensation, gave him a sharp view of class relations and economic realities. Central to The Trial is the portrayal of a malevolent yet ultimately powerless bureaucracy. With its foreshadowings in Bleak House, the novel is a daemonic myth of red tape. The Castle is more than a bitter allegory of Austro-Hungarian bureaucratic feudalism; but that allegory is implicit. And as Mr. Politzer shows, the sense of the industrial machine as a destructive, abstractly evil force haunted Kafka and found terrible realization in “In the Penal Colony.” Kafka was heir not only to Dickens’ mastery of emblematic distortion, but also to his anger against the sadistic anonymities of bureau and assembly line.
Kafka’s true politics, however, and his passage from the real to the more real, lie deeper. He was, in a literal sense, a prophet. The case is one to which the vocabulary of modern criticism, with its wariness and secular presumptions, has imperfect access. But the key fact about Kafka is that he was possessed of a fearful premonition, that he saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering. The Trial exhibits the classic model of the terror state. It prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers. Since Kafka wrote, the night knock has come on innumerable doors, and the name of those dragged off to die “like a dog!” is legion. Kafka prophesied the actual forms of that disaster of Western humanism which Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had seen like an uncertain blackness on the horizon.
Seizing on a hint in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Kafka portrayed the reduction of man to tormented vermin. Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, which was understood by those who first heard the tale to be a monstrous dream, was to be the literal fate of millions of human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed. “In the Penal Colony” foreshadows not only the technology of the death-factories, but that special paradox of the modern totalitarian regime—the subtle, obscene collaboration between victim and torturer. Nothing written about the inward roots of Nazism is comparable, in exact perception, to Kafka’s image of the tormentor plunging, suicidally, into the cogs of the torture-engine.
Kafka’s nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis. But that does not diminish its uncanny relevance, the proof it gives of the great artist’s possession of antennae which reach beyond the rim of the present and make darkness visible. The fantasy turned to concrete fact. Members of Kafka’s immediate family perished in the gas ovens; Milena and Miss Grete B. (who may have borne Kafka’s child) died in concentration camps. The world of east and central European Judaism, in which Kafka’s genius is so deeply at home, was scattered to ash.
No less than the Prophets, who cried out against the burden of revelation, Kafka was haunted by specific intimations of the inhuman. He observed in man the renascence of the bestial. The walls of the old city of order had grown ominous with the shadow of near ruin. Cryptically he remarked to Gustav Janouch that “the Marquis de Sade is the veritable patron of our age.” Kafka came on Buchenwald in the beech wood. And beyond it, he discerned no necessary promise of grace. Mr. Politzer concludes of “In the Penal Colony”:
The real hero of the story, the “peculiar piece of apparatus,” survives in spite of its ruin, unconquered and unconquerable. Kafka did not find an end to the visions of horror which haunted him.
Or as Kafka put it, in an aphorism written down in 1920: “Some deny misery by pointing to the sun, he denies the sun by pointing to misery.”
This denial of the sun is implicit in Kafka’s ambiguous view of literature and his own writing. His diffidence evokes the Old Testament motif of the stammerers afflicted with God’s message, of the seers seeking to hide from the presence and exactions of the Word. In 1921 he spoke to Brod of
the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing differently. One could almost add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing.
That fourth impossibility proved the supreme temptation. Mr. Politzer analyzes, with masterly tact, the intricate game Kafka played with his legacy. “All these things without exception are to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible.” Brod countered: “Let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.” Kafka retained Brod as executor of his will, yet reiterated the plea that all but his few published writings should be destroyed. Even the printed works were ambiguously damned:
should they disappear altogether, this would correspond to my real wishes. Only, since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who so desires from keeping them.
Mr. Politzer argues that Kafka’s ideal of formal and stylistic perfection was so rigorous that it allowed for no compromise. The incomplete novels and stories were imperfect, and should therefore perish. Yet, at the same time, the act of writing had been to Kafka the only avenue of escape from the sterility and endosedness which he suffered in his personal life. He sought, in irreconcilable paradox, “a freedom beyond all words, a freedom from words,” which could be achieved only through literature. “There is a goal, but no way,” wrote Kafka; “what we call the way is hesitation.” In the most illuminating reading yet proposed of “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (one of Kafka’s deeply veiled legends), Mr. Politzer shows Kafka’s equivocation on the artist’s necessary silence. The narrator is uncertain: “Is it her singing that enchants us, or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her frail little voice?”
But we may go farther. Kafka knew Kierkegaard’s warning: “An individual cannot assist or save a time, he can only express that it is lost.” He saw the coming of the age of the inhuman and drew its intolerable visage. But the temptation of silence, the belief that in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent, was near to hand. The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance of language as creator and bearer of humane, rational truth. Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life. This apprehension was not Kafka’s alone. The fear of the erosion of the Logos, of the gain of letter on spirit, is strong in Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos and the polemics of Karl Kraus. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Broch’s Death of Virgil (which may, in part, be read as a gloss on Kafka’s dilemma) are pervaded by the authority of silence.
In Kafka the question of silence is posed most radically. It is this which gives him his exemplary place in modern literature. Should the poet cease? In a time when men are made to pipe or squeak their sufferings like beetles and mice, is literate speech, of all things the most human, still possible? Kafka knew that in the beginning was the Word; he asks us: what of the end?
It is here that Kafka’s Judaism is of immediate relevance. Many aspects of that Judaism have been explored by critics and biographers. Little more need be said of Kafka’s indebtedness to the Gnostic and Chassidic traditions, of his vivid, though fitful, interest in Zionism, of the uneasy nostalgia for the emotional cohesion of the eastern Jewish community which made him say to Janouch:
I should like to run to the poor Jews of the Ghetto, kiss the hem of their garment, and say nothing. I should be totally happy if they would silently suffer my nearness.
Kafka’s proud, prophetic statement that those who “strike at the Jew kill Man” (Man schlägt den Juden und erschlägt den Menschen) is well known. But the more difficult task remains to be done: the placing of Kafka’s achievement and silences in the context of the relationship of the Jewish sensibility to European languages and literature.
Mr. Politzer’s study is an indispensable preliminary. Though it is thin in its treatment of the vexed problem of the sources of Kafka’s manner (Robert Walser is referred to only once), it goes further than any previous inquiry in showing Kafka’s scrupulous craftsmanship and technical means. No responsible reading of Kafka can ignore what its author argues of the arrangement of the novels, of the successive stages of composition, and of Kafka’s habits of work. This ingenious, patient study has brought into just prominence Kafka’s métier.
But Mr. Politzer’s judgment lacks critical and philosophic insistence; it does not press to the core. Kafka’s linguistic situation was precarious. The condition of the German-speaking Jewish minority in Prague enforced a characteristic sense of isolation and labyrinthine complexity. Kafka’s German grated on Czech ears; often he felt guilty because he was not using his talent toward the renascence of Czech literature and national consciousness, and that guilt is poignant in the encounter with Milena. Yet at the same time his Jewishness affronted the rising pressure of German nationalism. Kafka noted wryly that the German spoken by students and businessmen who came to Prague from Germany was alien to his own, that it was, inevitably, “the language of enemies.” By abdicating from the Czech milieu and speaking German, the Jewish middle class was hoping to assert its emancipation, its partnership in liberal European values. Kafka sensed that such hope was vain.
Beyond the local circumstance lay the more general crux. The European Jew had come late to secular literature, to the realm of “truthful lies” which is poetry and fiction. Everywhere he found languages which had sprung from historical realities and habits of vision alien to his own. The very words belonged to the heritage of Slavonic or Latin Christianity, as did the high places of power and esteem. Where it relinquished Hebrew and passed through Jüdisch-Deutsch to the use of the European vernaculars, the eastern Jewish sensibility had to slip into the garb and glove of its oppressors. Languages codify immemorial reflexes and twists of feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall, contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of sky and land in which a civilization ripens. An outsider can master a language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with its undefined, subterranean motion. Schoenberg developed a new syntax, a convention of statement inviolate by alien or previous usage. The Jewish writers of the romantic period and the twentieth century were less radical. They strove to weld the genius of their legacy, the uniqueness of their social and historical condition, to an idiom borrowed.
The relation between the Jewish writer and German was peculiarly tense and problematic, as if it contained forebodings of later catastrophe. As Theodor Adorno says of Heine:
The fluency and clarity which Heine appropriated from current speech is the very opposite of native “at-homeness” (Geborgenheit) in a language. Only he who is not truly at home inside a language uses it as an instrument.
Kafka’s diary for October 24, 1911, bears tragic witness to the alienation he felt within his own idiom:
Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no “Mutter,” to call her “Mutter” makes her a little comic.… for the Jew, “Mutter” is specifically German, it unconsciously connotes together with Christian splendor Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comic but strange.… I believe that it is solely the memories of the Ghetto which preserve the Jewish family, for the word “Vater” does not approximate to the Jewish father either.
We can read Kafka’s last story, “The Burrow,” as a parable of estrangement, of the artist unhoused in his language. However much he seeks to guard himself within the mastered intimacy of his craft, the haunted builder knows that there is a rift in the wall, the “outside” is waiting to pounce (geborgen and verborgen express the deep linguistic kinship between being safely at home and safely hidden). Kafka was inside the German language as is a traveler in a hotel—one of his key images. The house of words was not truly his own.
That was the shaping impulse behind his unique style, behind the fantastic nakedness and economy of his writing. Kafka stripped German to the bone of direct meaning, discarding, wherever possible, the enveloping context of historical, regional, or metaphoric resonance. He drew from the fund of the language, from its deposits of accumulated verbal overtones, only what he could appropriate strictly to his own use. He set puns in strategic places, because a pun, unlike a metaphor, echoes only inward, only to the accidental structure of the language itself.
The idiom of “In the Penal Colony” or “The Hunger Artist” is miraculously translucent, as if the richness and tint of German historical and literary precedent had been effaced. Kafka polished words as Spinoza polished lenses; an exact light goes through them unblurred. But often there is a cold and thinness in the air. Indeed, Kafka may be seen as admonitory to the Jewish genius of the likelihood that it is in Hebrew, not in the borrowed dress of other tongues, that a Jewish literature will strike root.
The extremity of Kafka’s literary position together with the shortness and torments of his personal life make the representative stature and centrality of his achievement the more notable. No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our time. Kafka remarked, in 1914: “I find the letter K offensive, almost nauseating, and yet I write it down, it must be characteristic of me.” In the alphabet of human feeling and perception that letter now belongs unalterably to one man.