by Franz Kafka
In general I have sought to keep the interpretative options open and to follow Kafka whenever he chooses to be ambiguous and whenever he flouts conventions. For instance, in describing the mysterious Theater of Oklahama, he avoids straightforward German verbs such as einstellen (to hire), and I have sought to make the English text comparably elusive.36 The same goes for the punctuation, which some readers may find a little unsettling. Kafka employs it rather erratically—for example, some questions are followed by question marks, others not. Here we must keep in mind that, with the exception of the “Stoker” chapter, he never revised the manuscript for publication and that we cannot know precisely what he would have changed had he done so. For stylistic reasons, he preferred to use punctuation sparingly, and I have tried to be comparably thrifty. After all, at least in the original German, the very lightness of the punctuation helped to create prose that is often full of sharply observed detail—as in the first chapter—yet still flows with seemingly miraculous ease.
Max Brod corrected obvious slips, such as a bridge stretching from New York to Boston, a sudden shift in the U.S. currency from dollars to pounds, and conflicting indications as to whether Karl Rossmann is sixteen or seventeen; these editorial corrections were adopted by Edwin and Willa Muir, who used Brod’s edition as the basis for the first English translation (1938). The more recent German-language editors of Kafka’s novels have refrained from making such changes, on the grounds that it is preferable to offer readers as close an approximation as possible of the state in which Kafka left his texts. Although I have usually followed the editors of the German critical edition in retaining idiosyncratic features of the original manuscript, I have silently rectified several minor inconsistencies, such as Kafka’s somewhat erratic spelling of New York (sometimes as one word, sometimes as two, sometimes linked by a hyphen) and Occidental Hotel (in the original the spelling of the former word is generally lowercase), while retaining the names of a tycoon’s son, who is called Mak and subsequently becomes Mack.
The greatest challenge for me as a translator lay in endeavoring to re-create in English a style that would mimic such seemingly disparate traits of Kafka’s prose as its “provocatively ‘classic’ German,”37 its meticulous attention to detail, its “flowing vivacity,”38 and its modernist adherence to the restricted perspective of the main character. Although some critics who are native speakers of German have found Kafka’s style in The Missing Person jarring,39 such criticism fails to acknowledge the startling modernity that is often hidden under its surface conservatism. There certainly is something very modern about the way he tells the story, switching back and forth between indirect interior monologue and an unobtrusive narrator, who occasionally winks to the reader over the hero’s head, thereby alerting us to the irony and humor beyond the awareness of the all-too-earnest young hero.40
Although Brod’s once widely accepted portrayal of Kafka’s works as religious allegories has not aged well, he may not have been too far off in claiming that this novel can yield a new interpretation of Kafka, and also—I would add—a new appreciation of neglected qualities in his writing.
—MARK HARMAN
Elizabethtown College
NOTES
1. Kafka, Letters to Felice (New York, 1973), p. 267. Here, as elsewhere, the cited translations have been modified whenever appropriate. Early versions of this preface were presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference and at Duke University.
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2. Brod sought to make the purported salvation of the young hero the centerpiece of his argument that Kafka was a writer with an ultimately positive faith in man and in the possibility of divine grace. Many subsequent readers have rejected Brod’s sunny insistence that the hero’s “misfortune is kept in check by his child-like innocence and touchingly naïve purity.” See Max Brod, “Nachwort” in Kafka, Die Romane (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 254.
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3. In a passage in his famous letter to his father (1919), Kafka explains that he gave Franklin’s autobiography to Hermann Kafka partly “because of the relationship between the author and his father” (p. 218), and elsewhere in the same letter he connects his own largely imaginary travels to his need to avoid spaces that his father already occupies: “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach” (p. 231). The Basic Kafka (New York, 1979). See also John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York, 2003).
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4. See Amerika in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger et al. (Stuttgart, 1975). The volume includes a characteristically insightful essay by Walter Sokel on The Missing Person. See also Das Amerika der Autoren, ed. Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan (Munich, 2005).
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5. See Heinz Hillmann, who also examines the relationship between The Missing Person and Holitscher’s book, in “Amerika: Literature as a Problem-solving Game,” in The Kafka Debate, ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1977), pp. 279–97. Mark Harman, “Biography and Autobiography: Necessary Antagonists?” in Journal of the Kafka Society 10, nos. 1–2 (1986), pp. 56–62; and Mark Harman, “Life into Art: Kafka’s Self-Stylization in the Diaries,” in Franz Kafka (1883–1983): His Craft and Thought, ed. R. Struc (Waterloo, Ont., 1986), pp. 101–16.
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6. Kafka, Letters to Milena, ed. Willi Haas (New York, 1962), p. 196.
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7. Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York, 1977), p. 98.
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8. See Wolfgang Jahn, “Kafkas Handschrift zum Verschollenen,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1957), p. 549.
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9. The German title, Der Verschollene, presents a challenge for translators, since it is impossible to do justice in English to all nuances of the original. Der Verschollene is both characteristically succinct—consisting solely of a noun derived from the past participle of a verb and the masculine definite article indicating the gender of the missing person—and paradoxical, for it raises a meta-fictional question about the provenance of this story about a youth who has gone missing without trace, especially since the infinitive of the verb in question, namely, verschallen, means “to cease making a sound” or “to fade away.” See Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch (Gütersloh, 1972).
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10. See Camill Hoffmann’s early review of “The Stoker” in Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption 1912–1924 (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 47–49.
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11. Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 123.
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12. For a discussion of the critical reception of Der Verschollene, see Kafka-Hardbuch, vol. 2, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 407–20.
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13. See Mark Harman, “Making Everything a ‘little uncanny’: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of Das Schloß,” in Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, N.Y., 2002), pp. 325–46.
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14. See Mark Anderson, “Kafka and New York: Notes on a Traveling Narrative,” in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York, 1989), p. 149.
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15. Kafka’s pun on the double meaning of the word Laufbahn—“career” or “racetrack”—in a letter about Robert Walser anticipates a comparable conceit in the theater chapter of The Missing Person. See Robert Walser Rediscovered, ed. Mark Harman (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 139–40.
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16. The theater chapter at the end of the novel is prefigured by a brief fragment—probably written in early February 1912—in which Karl corrects the words of a servant who has introduced him as an actor
by saying that he merely wants to become one. See Der Verschollene: Apparatband (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 49, 71–73.
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17. Karl adds that this negative verdict confirms what he has already read about the United States. If Kafka is referring obliquely here to Holitscher or Soukup, he—or at least his hero Karl—is endorsing stinging critiques of the American system. Some early critics detected a strong element of social criticism in the novel. For instance, the philosopher Adorno argued that Kafka’s insight “into economic tendencies was not so alien . . . as the hermetic method of his narrative techniques would lead us to assume.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Boston, 1977), p. 260. One German scholar even asserted that the novel “mercilessly” uncovers “the hidden economic and psychological mechanism of this society and its satanic consequences.” See Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka, trans. S. Z. Buehne (New York, 1968), p. 276. Others rejected the idea that the novel represents a critique of American—or capitalist—society on the grounds that its true theme is “not the reality, present or future, of a civilization far away from Kafka’s Prague, but the growth, both personal and intellectual, of Karl Rossmann.” See Politzer, Parable, p. 124.
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18. While The Missing Person challenges notions of realism in a way those two more conventional portrayals of the robber-baron era do not, its dissection of the American dream can be as caustic as those of Dreiser and Wharton. If Karl Rossmann were a first-person narrator and more given to introspection, he might sound like Wharton’s Lily Bart toward the end: “I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.” Of course, while there is some ambiguity in Wharton’s treatment of Lily Bart’s death, Kafka leaves the ultimate fate of Karl Rossmann entirely unsettled. See Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York, 1990), p. 240.
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19. For an exploration of Kafka’s interest in film, see Hanns Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago, 2002).
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20. Similarly if, as some critics have suggested, the fictional Occidental Hotel owes something to Holitscher’s description of the Atheneum Hotel at Chautauqua, New York, Kafka darkens Holitscher’s uncharacteristically euphoric account of an American grand hotel, where lowly elevator boys converse freely in the lobby with affluent guests. For instance, a graduate of Columbia University and medical student, who was working temporarily as a porter at the Atheneum and was described by Holitscher, may have metamorphosed into the overworked medical student known as “Black Coffee,” from whom Karl Rossmann learns a lesson about the pitfalls of such extreme absorption. Moreover, if there is an echo of Soukup’s caustic description of the ships transporting immigrants across the Atlantic (“a storehouse in which human beings are exported as wares to America”) in the description of the stoker’s quarters in the novel (“a bed, a closet, a chair, and the man were packed together, as if in storage”), Kafka can be said to introduce his own touch—a hint of humor—without thereby eliminating all traces of the social criticism that is far more emphatic in Holitscher and Soukup.
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21. Kafka had read about the Taylor system of work measurement in Holitscher’s travelogue. See Holitscher, Amerika Heute und Morgen, 12th ed. (Berlin, 1923), pp. 292ff.
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22. Ibid., p. 367.
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23. Ibid., p. 338.
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24. As we know from his diaries, Kafka also had conversations in Prague with another American cousin, Emil Kafka (1881–1963), and listened attentively to his description of the Chicago mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck and Co., where he worked. Since he had a relative working at Sears, Kafka must have read with interest Holitscher’s description of the “metallic din” emitted by the Sears, Roebuck building, “which hovers above the coal dust and the Illinois fog like some uncanny music of the spheres, desolate and cold like the whole of the modern world and its civilization” (ibid., p. 308). It’s worth juxtaposing a photograph of the vast Sears typing pool in Holitscher’s travelogue with the description of the busy telegraph room in Uncle Jakob’s business in The Missing Person.
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25. In late fall 1911, when Franz Kafka was working on a draft of his American novel, Otto Kafka took his new American wife, Alice Stickney (daughter of a then-prominent American family and a possible model for the fictional Klara Pollunder), to visit his relatives in Kolin, Bohemia. It’s likely that Kafka heard reports of his relatives’ impressions of these two American visitors. Otto Kafka was evidently fond of a saying one could easily imagine on the lips of Karl Rossmann’s American uncle: “One must learn to obey before one commands.” A no-nonsense, self-confident individual, he never allowed himself to be cowed, even by powerful and well-connected opponents; he sued his business partner, General Coleman T. Du Pont (a former postmaster general and member of the well-known Du Pont industrialist family)—a headline in the New York World, 29 January 1918, read: “Kafka Threatens Du Pont with Suit.” Several years later he sued the Mexican foreign minister, Adolfo de la Huerta—“Names de la Huerta in $2,500,000 Suit” ran a headline in the New York Times, 13 June 1922, p. 21. In a letter dated September 1918 to the assistant U.S. attorney general petitioning for his release from prison, where he was held unjustly on suspicion of being an enemy spy, Otto Kafka mentions that he began life in America “as a porter with a corset concern at $5 a week”; although Karl’s American uncle does not mention having worked as a porter, he does take great pride in the fact that he employs a large number of porters. See Anthony Northey, Kafka’s Relatives: Their Lives and His Writing (New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 52–56.
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26. Borges suggested that Kafka is “closer to the Book of Job than to what has been called ‘modern literature,’ ” and that his work is “based on a religious, and particularly Jewish, consciousness.” See Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 1999), p. 501.
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27. See, for instance, Robert Alter, “Franz Kafka: Wrenching Scripture,” New England Review 21, no. 3 (2000), pp. 7–19.
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28. Rossmann’s hybrid name links him with a large number of hybrid half-human, half-animal or half-insect creatures in Kafka’s fiction, ranging from the bug-man Gregor Samsa to Bucephalus in “The New Advocate,” a lawyer and steed, who in a previous incarnation was the battle horse of Alexander the Great, and also with the narrator of the sketch “The Wish to Be a Red Indian,” who imagines himself riding on the American prairie on a horse that is gradually vanishing underneath him.
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29. As several critics have suggested, that odd theater, with its religious trappings, conjures up Holitscher’s sketch of the charismatic sects in Chicago, where “on Sundays the dear Lord has a different face and a different name at every five paces” (pp. 285–89), and his description of how land is handed out to settlers in Winnipeg, Manitoba (pp. 131–37).
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30. Max Brod, “Afterword,” in Amerika (New York, 1954), p. 299.
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31. Karl’s American uncle uses a similar image to describe the way Karl’s parents have treated him: in banishing him to America, they pushed him outside like a cat that has made a nuisance of itself.
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32. Kafka asserts to Milena Jesenská, a Gentile, in a letter of August 1920, that he and Milena’s Jewish husband “both have the same Negro face.” Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York, 1990), p. 136. For a discussion of Kafka’s self-image as a Jew, see Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York, 1995).
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33.
See Der Verschollene: Apparatband, p. 85.
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34. Kafka is scarcely implying that Karl’s parents are without means, especially since we subsequently learn that Karl’s father has a business that is sufficiently prosperous to employ a considerable number of people. See Letters to Milena, p. 13.
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35. Here Kafka seems to imply that he harbors a comparable feeling toward his own parents; indeed, as Hartmut Binder has pointed out, he used the phrase “poor parents” similarly in a letter to Felice Bauer of 13–14 January 1913, concerning his sister Valli’s marriage: “My parents (here I cannot resist the temptation to call them ‘my poor parents’) were delighted with the festivities.” See Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Kommentar (Munich, 1982), p. 85.
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36. Although Karl Rossmann is interviewed at what seems like a hiring fair, Kafka never once uses the word einstellen (to hire). Instead, in the course of this short chapter he uses the word aufnehmen or variants thereof—i.e., “to be admitted or received”—some thirty times.
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37. Kafka’s German biographer Reiner Stach adds that Kafka’s prose in The Missing Person “makes both things and people emerge in exaggeratedly sharp contours, as though seen under neon light.” This seems just about right. See Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York, 2005), pp. 117–18.
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38. Nicholas Murray, Kafka: A Biography (New Haven, Conn., 2004), p. 224.
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39. For instance, the Prague-born critic Heinz Politzer praised the first sentence in the original German for its controlled and “intricately patterned periods” but censured the second as “artless, not quite coherent, and inconclusive.” Politzer, Parable, p. 123. However, indicting Kafka for being inconclusive surely amounts to condemning Kafka for being Kafka. Besides, modern writers such as Joyce and Beckett have taught us to appreciate the way Kafka can slip into the consciousness of Karl Rossmann without inserting the kind of transitions one would expect in a nineteenth-century novel.