Consider, finally, one of Kafka’s fragments:
They were given the choice of being kings or king’s couriers. Like children, they all wanted to be couriers. So now there are only couriers; they dash through the world, and as there are no kings, shout their meaningless messages to one another. They would gladly put an end to their wretched lives, but they dare not because of their oath of loyalty.
Perhaps we might best understand our story as a series of messages that have been lost, deferred, went unheeded, left in abeyance, or arrived too late: Kafka’s letter to his father, his last instruction to Brod, the unheeded calls beckoning Kafka to the Promised Land, the letter inviting Brod to the United States on the eve of the war, Brod’s last will, and Esther Hoffe’s last will.
In Kafka’s imagination, intelligibility will not illuminate our messages until the Messiah comes. And yet the Messiah himself arrives too late. “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary,” Kafka writes.
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What happens to the Law without a lawgiver? Another of Kafka’s great motifs, returning like a refrain, is that the Law, radiant but inaccessible, is guarded by fallible, petty, even unscrupulous gatekeepers: seedy judges, lawyers, officials, priests, and clerks. The representatives of the Law, however powerful, are all of them fallen men. Guardians, however devoted, do not always understand what they are guarding. Walter Benjamin compared Kafka’s students to “pupils who have lost the Holy Writ.” Or at least they read the Holy Writ against the grain.
If the Israeli judges can be understood as the latest of Kafka’s gatekeepers of interpretation, then their verdict might be read as another telling reading—or misreading; as the latest page in the long history of the uses and abuses of Kafka’s literary afterlife at the hands of those who claim to be his heirs.
In centering on the question of who can claim to be Kafka’s true heirs, the trial threw into stark relief the very different ways Israel and Germany remain freighted by their ruptured pasts and by the noble lies on which their healing depended. Each attempted to connect a national “we” with Kafka’s name. Seen through that aperture, the trial offered an object lesson in how Germany’s claim on a writer whose family was decimated in the Holocaust is entangled with the country’s postwar attempt to overcome its shameful past. As we have seen, the trial also reawakened a long-standing debate about Kafka’s ambivalence toward Judaism and the prospects of a Jewish state—and about Israel’s ambivalence toward Kafka and toward Diaspora culture.
Long before the trials in Israel, legion are those who have sought to claim Kafka. What is it about this writer, whose very name has become an adjectival cliché, that allows so many interpreters to appropriate and misappropriate Kafka’s legacy?*
By design, Kafka’s fictions—at once lucid and obscure, precise and dreamlike—both solicit and resist interpretation. They invite interpretation even as they evade it; even as they circle in eddies of ambiguity. Theodor W. Adorno once remarked that Kafka’s fiction was like “a parable whose key has been stolen.”† Kafka himself never supplied the key. “A story-teller cannot talk about story-telling,” he said. “He tells stories or is silent.”
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Kafka’s Czech translator and lover Milena Jesenská once remarked on Kafka’s “terrible clarity of vision.” In what did his powers of seeing consist?
For Max Brod, Kafka saw the incommensurability of the human and divine—or of God’s law and man’s purpose. Kafka’s motifs—revelation and redemption, law and commandment, guilt and sacrifice—fix Kafka’s place as what Brod called a “saint of our time.”
For psychoanalytically inclined interpreters, Kafka charts the dreadful, the incomprehensible and inscrutable beneath the prosaic; he is the herald of Freud’s idea of the uncanny—the familiar re-presented to us in unfamiliar guise. Or he is crippled by an inferiority complex and an inability to assert himself vis-à-vis his father, an indecisive introvert who saw no farther than his own neuroses. Kafka’s visions, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote, represent “the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under.”
For still others, Kafka is a forerunner of angst-ridden existentialists, a kind of Jewish Kierkegaard who stared into the abyss of amorality, absurdity, and the disorienting void of meaning left after the death of God. “Kafka spoke to us about ourselves,” Simone de Beauvoir said. “He revealed to us our own problems, confronted by a world without God and where nonetheless our salvation was at stake.” It is in this sense that Kafka is said to have shaped our conception of the crisis of traditional values in the twentieth century. (In 1941, the poet W. H. Auden said about Kafka: “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”)
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In the ever-expanding firmament of Kafka interpretation, Kafka’s would-be heirs have looked to his writing as a guide to their own perplexities. In “The Prague Orgy,” Philip Roth has a Czech writer tell Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Joseph K.”
To navigate these hazards is to consult what Shimon Sandbank, one of Kafka’s best Hebrew translators and interpreters, calls a “map of misreadings.” The often contradictory interpretations—attempts to develop a usable notation adequate to Kafka’s music—are hidden self-interpretations. Sandbank quotes a remark of the poet T. S. Eliot: “About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.” To which Sandbank adds: “Kafka, I feel, is great enough for these words to apply to him as well, great enough for us never to be right about him.”
In an enigmatic five-paragraph sketch called “The Cares of a Family Man” (“Die Sorge des Hausvaters”), Kafka imagines an encounter between a paterfamilias, a “house-father,” and a strange vagrant creature called Odradek, which “is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.” The family man asks the uninvited creature where he lives. “ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves [Blätter].”
In a case not lacking in ironies, surely the last involves taking a proprietary attitude toward a writer so bound up in the refusal to belong to a fixed abode. Kafka’s marginality, dislocation, and estrangement from life, what the Germans call his Weltfremdheit, are the alpha and omega of his imagination, the wellspring of its multiple metamorphoses. To use the American poet John Ashbery’s phrase, Kafka was on the outside looking out, and he wasn’t about to be conscripted by those on the inside.
Kafka writes in his diary of his “infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things.” In life and literature both, that yearning brought him into a stubborn homelessness and non-belonging. It is not just that the places in his fiction are not named (only the interior landscapes are recognizable). It is that he untethered both himself and his writing from the comforting anchors of national or religious belonging.
Does Kafka’s beguiling writing belong to German literature or to the state that regards itself as the representative of Jews everywhere? In the end, is Kafka a German-language writer who happened to be Jewish, or a profoundly Jewish writer who honed German into a new Jewish language adequate to articulating a Jewish thinking in a world without God and without revelation? Or does Kafka’s body of work resonate beyond any national canon, “obedient to its own laws of motion,” to use his phrase?
Kafka himself, in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer in October 1916, seems to have had a premonition of the contradictory ways he would be claimed. He contrasts two recent articles about his work, one of them by Max Brod:
Won’t you tell me what I really am? In the last Neue Rundschau the writer says: “There is something fundam
entally German about K’s narrative art.” In Max’s article [“Our Writers and the Community,” in Der Jude] on the other hand: “K’s stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.”
“A difficult case,” Kafka concludes. “Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.”
Franz Kafka may have been long ago laid dormant in the ground, and the courtroom commotions long since calmed, but the fallen leaves and loose sheets of his writings, whatever their fixed abode, rustle with us still.
Acknowledgments
For graciously agreeing to speak with me and reply to my queries—in person, by phone, or in correspondence—I thank Shmulik Cassouto, Jan Eike Dunkhase, Karl Erich Grözinger, Eva Hoffe, Elad Jacobowitz, Caroline Jessen, Tom Lewy, Stefan Litt, Dafna Mach, Paul Mauer, Ariel Muzicant, Nurit Pagi, Sa’ar Plinner, Ulrich Raulff, Shimon Sandbank, Sebastian Schirrmeister, Tom Segev, Itta Shedletzky, Dimitry Shumsky, Danny Spitzer, Reiner Stach, Michael Steiner, Ulrich Ott, Sigrid Weigel, and A. B. Yehoshua.
For their discerning comments on drafts of the manuscript, I’m indebted to Tamar Abramov, George Eltman, Matti Friedman, Karina Korecky, Nicole Krauss, and Vivian Liska (and hasten to add that remaining flaws are mine alone).
I’m immeasurably grateful to Deborah Harris, literary agent extraordinaire, for her unfailing encouragement and unstinting faith in this book from the start; and to John Glusman of W. W. Norton and Ravi Mirchandani of Picador for their deft editing.
I also wish to thank the dedicated librarians and staff at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, my home for the last several years.
Footnotes
* The acquisition of Yehuda Amichai’s archives by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, authorized in 1998 by Israel’s state archivist, Evyatar Friesel, created a storm of indignation in Israel when the sale became public after Amichai’s death in 2000. “What people in the world can give up cultural assets like this?” Israeli poet Natan Yonatan said. Rafi Weiser, then director of the manuscripts department of the National Library in Jerusalem, said: “We could probably have prevented the deal by leaking Amichai’s intention to the media. The public pressure would certainly have sabotaged the sale. But we decided to respect his wish and keep things quiet.”
* In 2014, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—which holds papers of British authors Doris Lessing and Graham Greene—acquired the archives of Man Booker prize-winning British author Ian McEwan for $2 million.
* Brod wrote a poem about their time together in Lugano in early September 1911, and later published it with the dedication “To my friend Franz Kafka.”
* Brod’s friend Thomas Mann charitably called the book, which Kafka had read in manuscript, “rich in striking generalizations.”
* The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, writes Peter Fenves, professor of literature at Northwestern University, “can be read as a semi-repressed reflection on what would happen to his own literary legacy if Kafka outlived him.” The New York Times considered the novel “a penetrating study in contrasting genius, taken from historical sources and wrought into a novel of such depth and distinction that it has something of a classical air.” Albert Einstein remarked: “It is without a doubt interestingly written by a man who knows the cliffs of the human soul.” In a November 1913 letter to Martin Buber, Brod explained the novel’s significance: “From the very beginning of my literary development I had before my mind the appeasement of the rational and the irrational, no merger, of course, but the coming together of the two ideals brought to their culmination, therefore my Tycho.”
* Brod intended Arkadia, published by Kurt Wolff, to be an annual journal; his intentions were cut short by the outbreak of World War I, and the 241-page 1913 issue, with its twenty-three contributions, was to be the first and last edition. Its contributors included Robert Walser, Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum, Kurt Tucholsky, and two pieces by Brod himself.
* That contract specified that Unseld would transfer the payment to the bank accounts of Esther Hoffe and her two daughters; each received a third. Unseld also committed to making the manuscript available to the editors of the German critical edition of Kafka’s writings.
* These include the estates, in whole or in part, of Hannah Arendt, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth, Nelly Sachs, and Stefan Zweig. Today the estate of Stefan Zweig is scattered all over the world, including the National Library in Jerusalem, British Library in London, Reed Library of the State University of New York, and the Marbach archive. Marbach also holds the papers of Martin Heidegger (an acquisition Hannah Arendt and Heidegger’s son Hermann made possible in 1969), Erich Auerbach, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, among others; the archives of publishers (including S. Fischer and Ernst Rowohlt) and publishing houses (including Suhrkamp and Piper); as well as the private libraries of Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Siegfried Kracauer, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, and W. G. Sebald.
† In April 2011, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Marbach archives jointly purchased over a hundred letters and postcards written by Kafka to his favorite sister Ottla. Marbach’s own holdings include Kafka’s original manuscripts of The Trial, “The Village Schoolmaster,” “The Stoker,” and “The Rejection”; the nearly complete original typewritten draft of Kafka’s letter to his father (on permanent loan from Hamburg-based publishers Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, who bought it at auction in 1982); two-dozen letters to Grete Bloch; and several letters to Max Brod, Felice Bauer, and Milena Jesenská, among others. Marbach also holds more than 120 letters from Max Brod to various correspondents, including Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Weltsch, Stefan Zweig, and to Marbach itself (two letters dated 1961 and 1967); as well as a 240-page handwritten manuscript of Brod’s debut collection of stories, Tod den Toten! (1906).
* Buber’s lectures would be published as Drei Reden über das Judentum, Rütten & Loening, 1911.
* Lia Rosen would later play at the Vienna Burgtheater, Reinhardt Ensemble Berlin, and in New York’s Yiddish theater, and would star in the movie Der Shylock von Krakau (1913). She emigrated to Palestine in 1928, died in Tel Aviv in September 1972, and was buried not far from Max Brod in Trumpeldor cemetery. Much of her estate (photographs, screenplays, and letters) is now kept at the National Library in Jerusalem (Arc. Ms. Var. 465).
* Shimon Bar Kochba led the Jewish uprising against Rome between 132 and 135 CE until his death in battle at Beitar, in the Judean hills. He was also the hero of a popular 1897 play by the Czech poet and playwright Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853–1912), which draws implicit parallels between the Jews and the Czechs as two beleaguered minorities. In 1910, the Bar Kochba Association counted fifty-two active members.
* Richard Lichtheim (1885–1963) edited the Zionist organ Die Welt from 1911 to 1913, and served as president of the German Zionist Federation from 1907 to 1920. He also served as a Zionist emissary in Constantinople (1913–1917) and Geneva (1939–1946), and wrote a series of volumes on the history of the Zionist movement in Germany.
* In July 1922, a year before writing “The Burrow,” Kafka wrote to Brod: “Dearest Max, I have been dashing about or sitting as petrified as a desperate animal in his burrow. Enemies everywhere.”
* Thieberger, a rabbi’s son, contributed to the Zionist journals Der Jude and Selbstwehr, and participated in the Bar Kochba Association. He would escape Prague to Jerusalem in 1939. Both Thieberger and Langer would leave their personal archives to the National Library of Israel.
* In May 1983, during the first of what would be five visits to Israel, French philosopher Jacques Derrida gave a talk at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” Though she could walk only with great difficulty, Puah, aged eighty and widowed for thirty years, came and sat in the back row.
* Reiner Stach, the only scholar to have consulted the diaries, dismisses their literary significance: “Brod produced little more than a succession of jottings, writ
ten in the kind of postcard language that gave no indication of a will to form or literary authorship.” Kafka’s diaries, by contrast, in which the writer limbered up, served as a “vestibule of literature,” Stach says.
* According to clause 846 of the Mecelle law, if a recipient of a gift says to the donor “I have received the gift,” the gift is considered valid. The current Israeli Gift Law, which came into effect on October 1, 1968, as part of an ongoing effort to update Ottoman laws, stipulates that even if a gift had not been fully delivered or consummated, it becomes property of the recipient upon the death of the donor. Section 6 of the Gift Law, which allows gifts to be given in writing, was not included in the original bill sent to the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). It was added during the second reading of the bill to make it more consistent with civil principles of traditional Jewish law (“Mishpat Ivri”).
* According to Hélène Zylberberg (1904–92), who met Kafka’s sisters in late 1936, Ottla “never accepted the fact that Kafka’s works had been published as the result of someone’s indiscretion. Franz had left a will and his deepest and most sacred wish that all he had written be burned ought to have been obeyed. For this reason, she was angry with Max Brod.” Zylberberg later translated Brod’s biography of Kafka into French (Gallimard, 1945).
* This was not the first time that an Israeli appellate court invoked such a principle. In November 2015, the Jerusalem District Court halted the proposed sale of twelve handwritten pages of drafts of Israel’s Declaration of Independence that had been slated to go on sale at Jerusalem’s Kedem Auction House. The judges said they acted to “ensure Israel’s inalienable assets remained in the public’s hands and are not removed from the country without the government’s consent.” (“We find it strange that the state abandoned this inalienable asset for 67 years, didn’t bother to demand it, although the media and studies reported its existence several times,” the auction house replied. “The state only remembered the drafts when they were put on public auction.”)
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