Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  Some Jewish writers internalized the myth of Jewish mimicry. In an essay called “Imitation and Assimilation” (1893), leading cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am argued that “the Jews have not merely a tendency to imitation, but a genius for it. Whatever they imitate, they imitate well.” In The Star of Redemption (1921), the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig writes that Jews, having no idiom of their own, have spoken languages borrowed from their hosts; Hebrew, their holy tongue, belonged to God alone.

  If not mimics, the Jews were seen, and sometimes saw themselves, as mere custodians of German literature and language. In 1912, the Zionist literary scholar Moritz Goldstein published an essay called “The German-Jewish Parnassus” in the prestigious journal Der Kunstwart. It aroused a great deal of controversy. “We Jews are administering the spiritual property of a nation which denies our right and our ability to do so,” he claimed. Decades later, Max Brod, too, spoke of Jews as stewards of the German language. In a letter to Martin Buber, he remarked:

  We Jews treat German quite differently from a real German such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Robert Walser, or even a mediocrity like Hermann Hesse. We merely hold the language in trust, hence in purely linguistic matters we are uncreative.

  Perhaps there was a recognition that to bring Kafka—precisely as a Jewish guardian of German prose, and as a Jew who died before he could fall victim to the Nazis—back into the German fold would be to erase the moral stains of the past, to regain a forfeited standing, and to recover a German language not yet defiled by the nihilistic bellowing of Hitler and Goebbels.* Herein hides another irony with which the story of Kafka’s last trial is salted: the attempt to use the writer who raised self-condemnation into art as a means of self-exculpation.

  West Germans pressed Kafka into service against the immediate National Socialist past. After the “zero hour,” to prove that it had rid itself of Nazi thinking, the guilt-ridden majority literature embraced a cultural symbol of antitotalitarian minority thinking—a Jew from Prague. The Czech writer and Kafka scholar Alena Wágnerová suggests that the passionate embrace of Kafka in Germany has functioned as “an ingenious displacement mechanism” (“ein raffinierter Verdrängungsmechanismus”). Commenting on “the fervent curiosity that broke out among Germans after 1950,” the philosopher (and Hannah Arendt’s first husband) Günther Anders (1902–1992) goes farther:

  Those who were guilty of and complicit in the excessive crimes of the Hitler regime, who knew very well what they had done and yet were not only not charged with or punished for anything, but rather, with few exceptions, continued to live in a self-satisfied and smug manner—they were presumably thankful to have been supplied with an antipodal figure. . . . The idolization of Kafka dissolved the fact that millions of his kinsmen had been murdered ” (emphasis in the original).

  What Anders calls “the Kafka epidemic [Kafka-Seuche],” he adds, “infected those Germans who were the half-hearted accomplices and who wished to prove, also to themselves, that they could accept the guilt imposed on them by the victors at least in the form of literature, and thereby work through their remorse in the form of artistic admiration.”

  The notion that postwar Germans looked to Kafka for feel-good absolution, if valid, might also obliquely throw light on the place of German-Jewish studies at Marbach. At a talk he gave in 2004 in Tel Aviv, Mark Gelber of Ben-Gurion University said:

  Scholars who visit the archives sign their names in the guest book daily upon arrival, noting also their home city or country, the date, and the specific topic of research. Visitors, if they care, have some sense of the identity of the other colleagues and what they might be researching, thus facilitating conversations during coffee breaks and the like. During an extended research visit in Marbach in 2003–2004, I could not help but notice the egregiously disproportionate number of scholars working in the area of German-Jewish literary studies. Although I did not keep an exact record, and even though it may seem at first ludicrous, it would probably be fair to say that about one-third to one-half of the visiting scholars during this period were working on some aspect of the poetry of Paul Celan or another topic related to German literature and the Shoah. Another quarter, perhaps, were working on topics related to a major figure or topic in German-Jewish literary or cultural history; for example, Kafka and Walter Benjamin seem to be very popular right now. . . . The study of German literature seemed to have been displaced by German-Jewish Studies at the very altar of one of its central temples.

  During the trial in Israel, Germans regarded Israelis as latecomers to Kafka studies. But in another sense the Germans themselves were burdened by belatedness. From World War II until the 1980s, Kafka’s Jewishness was virtually ignored in Germany. Günther Anders, writing in German in 1951, offers a representative example: “To claim Kafka as the continuator of the Jewish religion and Jewish theology is completely and absolutely off the mark.”

  The first German conference to address Kafka’s Jewishness was convened by Karl Erich Grözinger and Hans Dieter Zimmermann in Frankfurt in 1986. The Stuttgart-born scholar Grözinger (b. 1942) argued, as he would subsequently put it in his book Kafka and Kabbalah, “whenever Kafka speaks of judgment, sin, atonement and justification, he is working from the direct context of a Jewish theology.” Grözinger tells me that many leading German scholars, including Hartmut Binder, declined to come to the groundbreaking conference. Those who did attend were dismayed by what they heard. “They acknowledged that Kafka was a Jew, but didn’t know how to interpret his Jewishness,” Grözinger says, “and resisted the notion that the great German writer would be snatched from their hands.” It was as though they feared Kafka would be Judaized or “Jewified.”

  German literary critics have worked assiduously to rehabilitate Kafka and claim him as their own. In his monumental studies published in 1958 (Franz Kafka and Die Weltkritik von Franz Kafka), Wilhelm Emrich argued that Kafka completed German classicism, and “poetically renewed the classical legacy of German humanism that he adored and honored throughout his life.” Beginning in the 1960s, a popular edition of Kafka’s stories (Sämtliche Erzählungen, edited by Paul Raabe) sold a million copies in Germany.

  Today, the German weekly Die Zeit publishes a supplement on the history of German literature for high school students, divided into the standard periods: Middle Ages, Baroque (1600 to 1720), Enlightenment (1680 to 1789), Sturm und Drang (late 1760s to early 1780s), Weimar Classicism (1772 to 1805), Romanticism (1790s to 1880s), Biedermeier (1815 to 1848), and so forth. Only one writer merits his own category. In between Moderne and Expressionismus, Kafka perches permanently in the German canon.

  Kafka once said that Jews and Germans “have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs.” And yet Kafka almost never mentions Germany in his letters or diaries, and when he does it is with indifference. Although he briefly lived in Berlin with Dora Diamant, and although all his publishers were in Germany, Kafka was neither German nor non-German. “I have never lived among German people,” Kafka remarked to Milena Jesenská. (Of the correspondence with Milena, only Kafka’s letters to her remain. She gave them to their mutual friend Willy Haas in 1939, shortly before the Gestapo arrested her and deported her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Shortly after Kafka’s death, she had asked Brod to burn her letters to Kafka.) “Kafka wrote in German, of course,” Philip Roth notes, “but he was not a German in any way. He was, to the core, a German-speaking citizen of Prague and a son of Prague Jews.”*

  In his life, as in his afterlife, Kafka would often be defined with a reductive simplicity that belied the complexities of his own self-definition. In the last months of his life, Kafka wrote from Berlin to his sister Elli:

  Recently I had an amorous escapade. I was sitting in the sun in the Botanical Garden . . . when the children from a girls’ school walked by. One of the girls was a lovely long-legged blonde, boyish, who gave me a coquettish smile, turning up the corners of her little mouth and
calling out something to me. Naturally I smiled back at her in an overly friendly manner, and continued to do so when she and her girlfriends kept turning back in my direction. Until I began to realize what she had actually said to me: “Jew.”

  We might say that this Jew was precariously suspended between impossibilities. Jewish writers, Kafka once wrote to Max Brod, “live beset by three impossibilities: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, and the impossibility of writing differently. And we could add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing at all.” Kafka neither purposed nor proposed to untangle that knot of impossibility.

  12

  Laurel & Hardy

  King Solomon Hotel, Tel Aviv

  March 1939

  K. continuously had the feeling he was losing himself or had strayed farther into foreign parts than anyone before him, into a foreign world in which even the air was nothing like the air at home, in which one might suffocate on the foreignness. . . .

  —Kafka, The Castle

  Just after Max Brod arrived in Tel Aviv, several groups came to greet him in his temporary lodgings in the King Solomon Hotel. The first was a delegation of Hebrew writers. One of them, sixty-three-year-old Russian-born poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, pulled him aside. “You’ve heard enough speeches for now. But maybe you’re in need of a little money?” The truth is that Brod had to live from loans until his money transfer arrived via London, and his two “lifts”—shipments of his books, furniture, and beloved piano—arrived from Prague.

  The second group was a delegation from the flagship Habima theater (founded in Moscow in 1917, established in Tel Aviv in 1931, and officially recognized as Israel’s national theater in 1958). Habima had attracted Brod’s attention years earlier, in February 1928, with its first-rate performances in Prague of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky. Its representatives now offered Brod a job.

  Brod was fifty-five when he arrived in Tel Aviv. In his three-piece suits, worn with a certain dated dignity, the most prominent representative of the last generation of Prague’s Jewish authors cut a solitary figure on the city’s boulevards. Safe in Tel Aviv but grieving for a lost world, Brod pinned on his lapel a memento of his youth: a gold-red-black ribbon from the German Student’s Union where he first met Kafka. Prague, though now flooded by blind nationalism, was still in his heart, in ways both loud and voiceless.

  Brod’s day-to-day reality had little in common with the lofty Zionism he had espoused in Prague. He complained about the sun-scourged city’s “cruel humidity,” and sensed that his Central European sensibilities were at odds with Tel Aviv’s literary climate. In Prague he had found it easy to make a reputation. Here he found it hard to fall into the Hebrew stride, to find a way to join the Middle East with Mitteleuropa, and so did not become a vibrant presence in Tel Aviv’s literary circles. Ever the resourceful networker, Brod did meet the brightest stars in the Hebrew firmament—S. Y. Agnon, Natan Alterman, Haim Hazaz. He befriended the poet Shin Shalom and the writer Aharon Megged (a literary editor at the Davar newspaper). He kept in touch with Martin Buber and light-heartedly suggested Buber be appointed Israel’s foreign minister. Yet like writers who lived in Israel but wrote in German (including Werner Kraft, Ilana Shmueli, Ludwig Strauss, and Schalom Ben-Horin), he did not feel plugged into the main action; he could not reprise his old role as a public intellectual. The acoustics had changed.

  In one of his poems, Robert Lowell writes: “You can’t carry your talent with you like a suitcase.” In Prague, Brod’s talent had been accustomed to acclaim. In Tel Aviv, Brod’s books met by and large with indifference. Some of his historical novels, like The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, had appeared in Hebrew even before he came to Palestine. But none of his philosophical or religious works, which Brod considered to be the core of his writing, were translated into Hebrew. In 1942, Brod complained of this to the Israeli critic and translator Dov Sadan:

  Concerning your question why I neither had my Paganism, Christianity, Judaism nor my The Miracle on Earth; or the Jewish Idea and its Realization published in Hebrew, I can tell you that I would like nothing better than a Hebrew edition of my books! But all the attempts I have made here with Hebrew publishers have failed. It truly is not my fault but theirs!

  In a 1948 letter to Shin Shalom, Brod complains of neglect at the hands of Hebrew University: “I was invited by the universities in Zürich and Basel to lecture on Kafka (an invitation the likes of which the university in Jerusalem never entertained!)” Brod complained to Shin Shalom that however warmly he was greeted as a person, as an author he was treated coolly by the Hebrew literati: “Only when I do nothing, e.g. on my 60th birthday, do people find me delightful.”

  Hebrew literature—then still under the Romantic spell of Y. H. Brenner and M. Y. Berdichevsky—was itself out of step with European literature, which had long put Romanticism behind it. Much later, in the mid-1960s, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek appointed Brod to the jury of the Jerusalem International Book Fair Prize (together with the Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky and the Jewish Alsatian poet Claude Vigée). But on the whole, the Israeli republic of letters showed scant interest in Jewish writers like Brod who did not write in Hebrew. “He was a foreigner here,” Aharon Appelfeld said of Brod.

  It didn’t help that Brod struggled with the language. * He found it easier, he reports in his memoir, to talk about the arts in Hebrew than to shop for vegetables in the old-new tongue. To the end of his life, he transliterated his Hebrew into Latin characters. In a handwritten note to a Mr. Cohen in the state archives, for instance, Brod writes: “Ledaavoni hagadol, hineni assuk joter midaj. Bilti-efshari li leharzot al Kafka” (To my great regret, I am too busy. It is impossible for me to lecture on Kafka). He did the same whether he was composing little poems for Esther Hoffe’s daughters or preparing notes for his Hebrew lectures. Habima’s star actress Hanna Rovina, known as the “First Lady of Hebrew Theatre,” approached Brod after a joint appearance in Haifa, where they read works of Stefan Zweig: “Your essay was excellent, your Hebrew is beautiful. Just one thing is disturbing: one can see your eyes moving from left to right.”

  But Brod refused to be remaindered by the past. Neither in Prague nor now in Tel Aviv did the self-declared “Jewish poet of the German tongue” regard Hebrew as the only adequate language for Jewish literature.

  Some writers, “strangers in a strange land,” are crippled by emigration and exile. Others find their true measure in the gap between “over there” and “here.” Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Voltaire’s Candide, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Heinrich Heine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale (Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen) were each created in exile. “A loss of harmony with the surrounding space,” the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz writes in an essay called “On Exile,” “the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all.”

  Brod’s prolific productivity continued unhindered in the new country. He adapted his novel Reubeni for the stage, and directed its premiere at Habima on June 1, 1940. He wrote a tragedy in four acts in 1942 about the biblical King Saul (a version he reworked with the poet Shin Shalom was published in 1944). Together with the composer Marc Lavry and Shin Shalom (pseudonym of Shalom Joseph Shapira), he created a two-act libretto for the first Hebrew opera in history, Dan the Guard, which debuted in 1945. He authored a historical novel about the desperate love of Judas for Jesus (Der Meister [The Master], published in German in 1951 and in Hebrew in 1956 under the title Achot Ketanah). He devoted himself to writing a two-volume philosophical work (Diesseits und Jenseits [Here and Beyond], 1947).* He also authored the first comprehensive study of music in Israel (Die Musik Israels, 1951).

  He wrote a regular column (called Pinkas Katan, or Small Ledger) on arts and culture in the Hebrew trade-union newspaper Davar, where he reviewed Hebrew productions of Shakespeare, and occasionally remarked
on his continuing devotion to Kafka’s legacy. “I wanted to establish a Kafka archive,” he writes in his November 14, 1941, column, “and in addition a Friends of Franz Kafka’s Work that will disseminate his writings, deepen our understanding of them, and publish his still unpublished manuscripts. None of these plans have yet come to fruition, apparently because of the war.”

  _____

  Closer to his heart, Brod accepted the position of dramaturge at Habima. His modest starting salary: 15 Palestinian pounds a month. Much of his job involved reviewing submissions and writing rejection letters. In April 1945, for instance, he writes to the theater critic and playwright Gershon K. Gershuni: “I’ve read your play, Banner of the Uprising [Nes Ha-Mered] with great interest, but I regret that it is impossible to produce; these terrible events are too close to us, and we don’t yet have the necessary distance in time from them. For this reason, the Theater has in principle decided not to stage plays about the Warsaw Ghetto for the time being.” Brod also seems to have been flooded with unsolicited plays on biblical themes. “After rejecting five plays named ‘Moses,’ ten ‘King Ahabs,’ and a dozen ‘Ezras,’ I wished to hang on my door a sign that it is preferable to read the Bible in the original than getting excited over its staged versions.”

  Despite the resistance of the clique that ran the theater, Brod widened its horizons in the postwar years beyond folksy plays by Jewish writers like Aharon Ashman, Sholem Aleichem, and S. Ansky. Before Brod joined the theater, Habima had only two of Shakespeare’s plays in its repertoire: The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. Now Brod invited the director Julius Gellner from London to stage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1949) and King Lear (1955). British director Peter Coe directed Julius Caesar (1961). Tyron Guthrie, another English director, mounted Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (1947). Austrian-Swiss director Leopold Lindtberg put on Brecht’s Mother Courage (1951).