Few writers have shared Kafka’s fate. As the decades passed after his untimely death, he did not go out of fashion, nor was he forgotten or judged to be merely a reflection of his era. Rather, he gradually emerged as a harbinger, as if he had possessed that mysterious sensibility which enables some creatures to predict earthquakes. Undoubtedly, even in his time, there were warning signs, but they were mixed up with different or opposite ones. The West had emerged from the bloodbath of the First World War wounded, but not without hope for the future, restless, yet confident in its strength. Now, in that background noise, Kafka was able to distinguish significant “harmonics.” This is why his books are best read in this time of “vanishing” confidence: they anticipate many of the ailments that afflict us today.
Which ailments? The crisis of the idea of progress and the prevalence of the opposite perception—of a regression imposed by an obscure force, by an absurd and anonymous network of power. The cruelty of man ennobled by reasons of state (how can we forget the calligraphic machine of In the Penal Colony?). The hermetic universe, impervious to our reason, a labyrinth without Ariadne’s thread. The individual innocent-impotent, convicted without judgment by a foul yet unknowable court for a crime that is never revealed to him.
For me, a survivor of Auschwitz, reading Kafka again was a profound experience: a denial of my Enlightenment optimism and a singular way of reliving that distant time of my life.
Il Tempo, July 3, 1983