Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  “Two-dozen unknown drawings by Kafka . . .” Sometime around 1980, Esther Hoffe had told Unseld that she had fifty unpublished sketches and drawings by Kafka. French researcher Jacqueline Sudaka-Bénazéraf says she saw fifty drawings at Hoffe’s apartment in Tel Aviv, of which twenty-six had been published, and twenty-four had not. Two of Kafka’s sketches have been housed at the Albertina Museum in Vienna since 1952; it is unclear how they got there. For more on these drawings, see Frederike Fellner, Kafkas Zeichnungen, Fink Verlag, 2014.

  “Ottla, the youngest and most vivacious of the Kafka sisters . . .” Ottla Kafka, together with Max Brod’s wife, Elsa, was active in Prague’s Zionist Club of Jewish Women and Girls, founded in 1912. A plaque affixed to the bottom of Kafka’s tombstone in Prague carries an inscription in Czech: To the memory of the sisters of the renowned Prague Jewish writer Franz Kafka murdered during the Nazi occupation in 1942–1943. See H. Zylberberg, “Das tragische Ende der drei Schwestern Kafkas,” Wort und Tat, 1946–47, Heft 2. 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).

  “In June 2015, the Supreme Court upheld that decision . . .” Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien v. Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, file 9366/12.

  Last Son of the Diaspora

  “Kafka was one of ours. . . .” Weltsch, “Freiheit und Schuld in Franz Kafkas Roman Der Prozeß,” in Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption 1924–1938, ed. Jürgen Born, Fischer, 1983, pp. 122–128. See also Weltsch’s essay from three decades later, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish-German Symbiosis: The Case of Franz Kafka,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 1 (1956), pp. 255–76.

  “Kafka’s nameless heroes, Hannah Arendt wrote . . .” In his epilogue to Kafka’s novel The Castle, Brod reports on the enthusiasm with which Kafka told him the story of Flaubert’s visit to a simple, normal family with many children. “Ils sont dans le vrai (those folks are right),” Flaubert exclaimed. “It was the perception of this truth,” Hannah Arendt argued in 1944, “that made Kafka a Zionist. In Zionism he saw a means of abolishing the ‘abnormal’ position of the Jews, an instrument whereby they might become ‘a people like other peoples.’ ” (Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman, Grove Press, 1978, p. 89.)

  Kafka’s readers in the Arab world, however, insisted otherwise. During the brief Damascus Spring of 2000, the Syrian writer Nayrouz Malek, for instance, brought out a novel called Kafka’s Flowers. The protagonist, Jamal al-Halabi, is sent to Paris, where he immerses himself in Kafka’s works to the point that he begins to converse with a statue of the writer.

  The bronze statue smiled: “I am sorry, I have not introduced myself; my name is Franz Kafka.”

  I stopped, perplexed. I did not believe what the statue said. . . .

  True, that was Kafka, or someone who looks a lot like him and has assumed his personality. I protested: “But Kafka has been dead for sixty-five years; moreover, Kafka does not know Arabic.”

  The Kafka statue smiled back. “Forgive me, please, I ask you not to speak of death. As for the Arabic in which I addressed you, I learned it recently and I was forced to learn it because, in their feverish fight against Zionism, some Arab critics accused me of being a Zionist and a writer who serves Zionist ideology. I had to learn Arabic so that I could tell them that my position is the opposite of what they think. I don’t deny that I believe in Judaism that I am Jewish even though my relationship to religion and God was never compatible. As for the accusation of Zionism, it is utterly false.”

  In the end, Jamal returns home and checks into a mental asylum, where he goes by the name Kafka.

  For a review of Kafka’s reception in Arabic since 1939, see Atef Botros’s study Kafka—Ein jüdischer Schriftsteller aus arabischer Sicht, Reichert Verlag, 2009.

  “Representative Man . . .” Frederick R. Karl, Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin, 1991. “His was the voice of Europe well before Europe began to close in on its Kafkas,” Karl writes.

  “Although the word ‘Jew’ never appears . . .” Brod might have added that the word “God” is similarly absent from Kafka’s writing. In a dissertation called Kafka’s German-Jewish Reception as Mirror of Modernity (City University of New York, 2014), Abraham A. Rubin remarks: “Brod’s recovery of Kafka’s writing for a Jewish-national agenda illustrates the ways in which his political and ideological convictions shaped his literary analysis. The underlying irony of all this is that Brod’s vision of Jewish particularity is taken directly from an intellectual tradition whose influence he would most likely disavow, German Romanticism. His conception of Kafka’s Jewishness is deeply indebted to the Herderian idea that an author’s work expresses a Volksgeist unique to the nation to which he or she belongs. His interpretation imposes an ideological coherence on Kafka that never existed there in the first place. . . . The terms he uses to portray Kafka’s Judaism are meant to convey the idea that ‘Jewish’ and ‘German’ represent mutually exclusive cultural entities.”

  “has said more about the situation of Jewry as a whole today . . .” In May 1927, Franz Rosenzweig, then translating the Hebrew Bible into German with Martin Buber, remarked to his cousin Gertrud Oppenheim: “The people who wrote the Bible indeed thought like Kafka. I have never read a book that reminded me as powerfully of the Bible as his novel, The Castle.” In a 1953 essay on Kafka, one of the earliest in Hebrew, the Israeli poet Leah Goldberg (1911–1970), an immigrant from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), made a similar observation. “Kafka desired, desired greatly, a solution and liberation from his current feelings and awareness. The symbol of that liberation was a homeland. He repeats ‘homeland’ several times [in The Castle]. This spells out the Land of Israel.” Roberto Calasso, one of the preeminent authors in Italy, regards The Castle and The Trial as twin reflections on the election and condemnation of the Jews. “To be chosen, to be condemned: two possible outcomes of the same process,” Calasso writes. “Kafka’s relationship to Judaism . . . emerges most clearly on this point.”

  For a contrasting view, see Jakob Michalski’s 1935 review of The Castle: “The only thing incomprehensible to the author of this review is the excess of literary propaganda that dares to designate Kafka’s art as specifically ‘Jewish’ and continues to celebrate him as a Jewish prodigy! His writings are as un-Jewish as the novels of his friend and editor Max Brod . . . One may celebrate Kafka as an artist, yet his accomplishments have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism, and we reject the notion that a Jewish essence [ jüdischen Wesen] emanates from his work.” ( Jakob Michalski, “Das Schloß.” Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption 1924–1938, ed. Jürgen Born, Fischer, 1983, p. 398.)

  In writing The Castle in the first half of 1922, Kafka seems to have put his Hebrew to use. The protagonist’s profession, Landvermesser, for instance, might play on the similarity of two Hebrew words: maschoah (land surveyor) and mashiach (messiah). See Rashi’s commentary on Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 98b.

  “For Kafka knew better than anyone else . . .” Gershom Scholem, Judaica 3, p. 271 (Suhrkamp, 1973). See also Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship ( Jewish Publication Society, 1981), pp. 170ff. It is worth noting that Scholem’s disagreement with Walter Benjamin turns on just this point. In a letter from August 1, 1931, Scholem comments about a talk Benjamin gave called “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer”: “How, as a critic, you could manage to say anything about the world of this man without putting the doctrine, what Kafka called the law, into the center, is an enigma for me.” For more on Scholem’s appreciation of Kafka, see Stéphane Moses, “Zur Frage des Gesetzes. Gershom Scholems Kafka-Bild,” in Kafka und das Judentum, eds. K. E. Grözi
nger, S. Moses, and H. D. Zimmermann (Athenaeum, 1987); Harold Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture (CCNY, 1987); David Biale, “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah, Text and Commentary,” in Gershom Scholem: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1987); and Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Harvard University Press, 1991).

  “According to his colleague Alexander Altmann . . .” Alexander Altmann, “Gershom Scholem, 1897–1982,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 51 (1984). In 1916, Scholem had met Kafka’s fiancée Felice Bauer while both were involved with the Jüdisches Volksheim, the Jewish community center in Berlin.

  “In a 1929 essay, German-Jewish thinker Margarete Susman . . .” Margarete Susman, “Das Hiob-Problem bei Franz Kafka,” Der Morgen, vol. 5 (1929); trans. Theodore Frankel, “Franz Kafka,” Jewish Frontier, vol. 23 (1956). Max Brod also alluded to the ways Kafka addressed “the old Job-question.” See Brod, “Franz Kafkas Grunderlebnis,” Die Weltbühne, May 15, 1931. After reading The Trial in 1926, Gershom Scholem wrote: “Essentially, this work is without parallel, apart from the Book of Job. The situation of the hidden trial, within the framework of whose rules human life occurs, is developed in these two works to the very highest level. One may conjecture that never did any Jew attain such a fashioning of his world from such an inner and profound center of Judaism.” And in a 1931 letter, Scholem advised Walter Benjamin “to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment.” For more on Susman’s association of Job with Kafka, see Mark Larrimore, The Book of Job: A Biography, Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 236–39.

  “Had Kafka lived a century or two earlier . . .” Robert Alter, “Kafka as Kabbalist,” Salmagundi, Spring 1993. In his book Canon and Creativity (2000), Alter refers to Kafka’s “midrashic adroitness” in his handling of the Tower of Babel story told in Genesis and underscores Kafka’s “assumption that the Bible can provide him a resonant structure of motifs, themes, and symbols to probe the meaning of the contemporary world.” (Kafka’s reflections on that text can be found in Parables and Paradoxes, Schocken, 1961.) In an earlier book, After the Tradition (1969), Alter writes: “No Jew who has contributed so significantly to European literature appears so intensely, perhaps disturbingly, Jewish in the quality of his imagination as Kafka.” British literary critic John Gross, in his review of the book, remarks that “Alter is rewarding, too, on the subject of critics who talk gaily about the ‘talmudic’ qualities of Kafka’s prose without giving any sign that they know the difference between an aleph and a bet” (Commentary, April 1969). Like Alter, the literary critic George Steiner similarly sees Kafka as heir to Jewish styles of reading and interpretation. “The principal code” of his parables, Steiner writes, “is, self-evidently, that of the biblical and Talmudic legacy.”

  “I prefer another approach over psychoanalysis . . .” For more on Kafka’s views on psychoanalysis, see “Kafka’s Ambivalence towards Psychoanalysis,” by Leena Eilittä, Psychoanalysis and History 3:2, 2001; and “Kafka, Freud, and ‘Ein Landarzt,’ ” by Eric Marson and Keith Leopold, The German Quarterly, 37:2, March 1964.

  “An overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation . . .” Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June 1921 (quoted in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 185). In a 1913 essay, “Der jüdische Dichter deutscher Zunge” [The Jewish Poet of the German Tongue], Brod argued that the Jewish poet merely safeguarded the German language as “foreign property” [da es nicht das Erbe seiner Ahnen ist, das er verwaltet, sondern fremder Besitz]. “Der jüdische Dichter deutscher Zunge,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913, pp. 261–63.

  “Speech on the Yiddish Language.” The critical edition more accurately titles Kafka’s talk “Einleitungsvortrag über Jargon” (Introductory Lecture on Jargon). For a more detailed discussion of Kafka’s encounter with Yiddish theater, see Evelyn Torton Beck’s groundbreaking study, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. “Kafka’s abiding concern with the themes of justice, authority, and law, and his exploration of the relationship between the individual and the absolute and between the individual and the community may be seen as abstract formulations of the specifically Jewish problems raised by the Yiddish plays,” Beck concludes. “By reinforcing his personal concerns, the plays of the Yiddish theater exercised a lasting influence on Kafka’s style and helped to give shape to the problems that tormented Kafka the man.”

  The Last Ingathering

  “In Berlin, hundreds of thousands more volumes were kept in the Reich Security Main Office . . .” See Dov Schidorsky, “The Library of the Reich Security Main Office and Its Looted Jewish Book Collections,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 1 (2007). In 1942, Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, was dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. They ordered Herman Kruk, head of the Vilna ghetto library, to collect Jewish books in preparation for a “selection.” Some 70 percent, Kruk reported, were to go “into the trash as scrap paper.” “The Jewish workers employed on the project are literally weeping,” he said. Between March 1942 and September 1943, Kruk organized a “paper brigade” which at great risk succeeded in rescuing thousands of Jewish books and manuscripts (including two hundred Torah scrolls, documents by H. N. Bialik, and a volume of Theodor Herzl’s diaries). See Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939–1944, trans. Barbara Harshav, Yale University Press, 2002; and David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, University Press of New England, 2017.

  “The Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.” See Cecil Roth, “The Restoration of Jewish Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7:3 (1944); Salo W. Baron, “The Spiritual Reconstruction of European Jewry,” Commentary 1:1 (1945); Noam Zadoff, “Reise in die Vergangenheit, Entwurf einer neuen Zukunft: Gershom Scholems Reise nach Deutschland im Jahre 1946,” Münchner Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2 (2007); and Elisabeth Gallas, “Locating the Jewish Future: The Restoration of Looted Cultural Property in Early Postwar Europe,” Nahariam 9 (2015). For a report of his rescue mission, see Scholem, “On the Question of Looted Jewish Libraries,” Haaretz, October 5, 1947, pp. 5–6 [Hebrew].

  “Comparatively few Israeli literary critics have written about Kafka . . .” Gabriel Moked (born Munwes), a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who emigrated from Poland to Tel Aviv in 1946, published a book-length Hebrew commentary on “The Metamorphosis” in 1956. “Kafka’s status as a Jewish author,” Moked remarked, “is of major significance, since he expresses a certain continuity of Jewish spiritual affinities and thoughts, and not merely as an individual Jewish genius.” The literary critic Mordechai Shalev (1926–2014) addressed the Jewish elements in Kafka’s writing in a series of three essays in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (October 15, 1997; April 10, 1998; and May 29, 1998). Yoram Bar David wrote a book about Kafka in 1998 (see also his article “Kafka’s Paradise: His Hasidic Thought,” in Kafka’s Contexuality, ed. Alan Udoff, Gordian, 1986, pp. 235–86); as did Nathan Ofek (1942–2006) in 2002. See also Kafka: New Perspectives, a collection of essays in Hebrew edited by Ziva Shamir, Yochai Ataria, and Chaim Nagid (Safra, 2013). To be sure, this is by no means an exhaustive list, and some Israeli critics have addressed Kafka’s work without stressing the author’s Jewishness. See, for example, The Way of Wavering: Forms of Uncertainty in Kafka [Derech Ha-Hissus] by
Shimon Sandbank (Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 1974), and Kafka’s Wound by Galili Shahar (Carmel, 2008).

  “A short-lived local German-language weekly called Orient. . . .” See Ori- ent. Haifa 1942–1943: Bibliographie einer Zeitschrift, ed. Volker Riedel, Aufbau Verlag, 1973. Arnold Zweig wrote one novel in Palestine: Das Beil von Wandsbek (The Axe of Wandsbek). It was published in Hebrew translation in 1943 as Ha-Kardom shel Wandsbek (trans. Avigdor Hameiri, Merhavia Publishing). Other postwar authors who lived in Israel but wrote in German included Werner Kraft, Ilana Shmueli, Manfred Winkler, and Schalom Ben-Horin.

  “My mother tongue, as stated, was German . . .” Appelfeld, “First Years, Mother Tongue, and Other Pains,” Maariv, April 18, 1997 [Hebrew].

  “There is no question that Jews tried to enter into a dialogue with Germans . . .” See Gershom Scholem, “Wider den Mythos vom deutschjüdischen Gespräch,” in Auf gespaltenem Pfad: für Margarete Susman, ed. Manfred Schlösser (1964), pp. 229–33; and “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (1976). See also “The ‘German-Jewish Dialogue’ and its Literary Refractions: The Case of Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem,” Abraham Rubin, Modern Judaism, February 2015, pp. 1–17.

  “In his book Old Worlds, New Mirrors . . .” See Vivian Liska’s review of Moshe Idel’s book: “On Getting It Right,” Jewish Quarterly Review, Spring 2012, pp. 297–301. See also Idel’s discussion of Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” in Kabbala: New Perspectives (Yale University Press, 1988), p. 271.

  “Kafka was on the side of the mice or the moles . . .” Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, Stanford University Press, 2010.

  “Kafka’s premonitions . . .” In his book The Conflagration of Community, J. Hillis Miller, professor at the University of California, Irvine, writes that “what Kafka foresaw was a wholesale destruction of the Jewish people.” Miller further contends that Kafka’s writing not only foretold the future but shaped it; Kafka, fearing his writings “might be prophetic or might have the force to bring about on a large scale the individual sufferings and catastrophes they dramatize,” instructed Brod to destroy them to prevent them “from having their magic performative effect.” Dissenters from this view include Robert Alter, who calls the making of Kafka into a prophet of the Holocaust “the ultimate vulgarity.” For counterarguments and explanations for why “striking parallels do not a prophet make,” see Lawrence Langer’s 1986 essay, “Kafka as Holocaust Prophet: A Dissenting View,” in Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, Oxford University Press, 1995.