Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  “Israeli allegorical fiction . . .” In his novel The Retrospective (2013), A. B. Yehoshua adapts Kafka’s fragmentary story “In Our Synagogue” (“In unsurer Synagoge,” written in 1922 and translated into Hebrew by Dan Miron in 2009), about a timorous animal who takes up residence in a synagogue. Left untitled by Kafka, the story was given its title by Brod when he published it in 1937. For a discussion of “the omnipresence of Kafka” in Aharon Appelfeld’s fiction, and the “heavy debt” Appelfeld’s Hebrew owed to Kafka’s German, see David Suchoff, “Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders,” The Germanic Review 75:2 (2000).

  “Agnon consistently refused to recognize Kafka’s paternity . . .” Viennaborn scholar of comparative literature Lilian Furst writes: “In spite of certain undeniable affinities between them, Kafka and Agnon are related only as black is to white.” Among contemporary Israeli novelists, David Grossman (b. 1954) acknowledges his debt to Kafka but denies that the Prague writer can be pinned to any single national tradition. “I think Kafka would be Kafka even if he were born in America, or England, or Australia,” Grossman says. For a comparison of Kafka and Agnon, see Hillel Barzel, Agnon and Kafka: A Comparative Study, Bar-Ilan University Press, 1972 [Hebrew]; and Gershon Shaked, “After the Fall: Nostalgia and the Treatment of Authority in Kafka and Agnon,” in The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature, Hebrew Union College Press, 2006. “Both Kafka and Agnon,” Shaked concludes, “were shaped by the trauma of World War I. Their works predict the greater cataclysm to follow, as well as the catastrophe awaiting Europe’s Jewry, while they reflect the despair felt by residents of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire, who could find no viable substitute for the emperor/father/ ‘former commandant.’ ” For Brod’s views on Agnon, see his article, “Zwei Jüdische Buchers,” Die neue Rundschau 29:2, 1918, where Brod writes of the way in which Agnon expressed “the atmosphere of his native land.”

  “A newfound fascination with German culture . . .” For more on the subject, see The Slopes of a Volcano, Amos Oz’s collection of three essays in Hebrew on the normalization of relations between Israel and Germany (Keter, 2006); Fania Oz-Salzberger, Israelis in Berlin, Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001; Dani Kranz, Israelis in Berlin. Wie viele sind es und was zieht sie nach Berlin? Bertelsmann, 2015; and sociologist Gad Yair’s 2015 study of Israeli migration to Germany, Love is Not Praktish: The Israeli Look at Germany, Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 2015 [Hebrew]. Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk (1930–2013) records his encounters in Germany between 1984 and 2000 in Ha-Berlinai Ha-Acharon [The Last Berliner], Yediot Acharonot, 2004; Der letzte Berliner, List, 2002.

  Kafka’s Last Wish, Brod’s First Betrayal

  “He wanted to burn everything that he had written . . .” Quoted in J. P. Hodin, “Memories of Franz Kafka,” Horizon, January 1948. Before ill health forced him to leave Berlin for the last time, Kafka left with Dora some twenty notebooks. These, together with some thirty-five of his letters to her, were seized from her apartment by the Gestapo in March 1933 and have never resurfaced. Later in the ’30s, Brod asked his friend the Czech-Jewish poet Camill Hoffmann, then press attaché at the Czech embassy in Berlin, to look for this material. The search was in vain, and Hoffmann himself, a close friend of President Masaryk, was arrested by the Gestapo. He perished in Auschwitz in October 1944.

  “Brod was neither the first nor the last to confront such a dilemma. . . .” For a discussion of these and other examples, see On the Burning of Books by Kenneth Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2017. For the Albee case, see Michael Paulson, “Edward Albee’s Final Wish: Destroy My Unfinished Work,” New York Times, July 4, 2017.

  “The two notes forbidding the publication of Kafka’s works . . .” For one of the earliest defenses of Brod along these lines, see Walter Benjamin “Kavaliersmoral,” Literarischen Welt, October 10, 1929. Brod printed Kafka’s two notes in the German magazine Weltbühne a month after Kafka’s death.

  Kafka’s Creator

  “In his lecture on ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Vladimir Nabokov writes . . .” Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

  “We read Kafka Brodly.” The phrase is borrowed from the English novelist and essayist Zadie Smith (“F. Kafka, Everyman,” New York Review of Books, July 17, 2008).

  “William Phillips, coeditor of Partisan Review . . .” In a retort to William Phillips, Austrian-Jewish writer Friedrich Torberg, who had been mentored by Brod, writes: “There seems to be in this country a general critical tendency to discard Brod’s insistence on Kafka’s Jewishness as a kind of sectarian queerness, and it seems particularly outspoken among Jewish critics—obviously as part and parcel of that glorious Jewish attitude which refuses to look at a problem, be it ever so Jewish, from a ‘merely’ Jewish standpoint” (“Kafka the Jew,” Commentary, August 1947).

  “In Israel, the small number of his books translated into Hebrew . . .” Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, Germany, is currently putting out Brod’s “Selected Works” (edited by Hans-Gerd Koch and Hans Dieter Zimmermann). For a review of the first two publications of the twelve-volume series, see Nikolaus Stenitzer, “über Ausgewählte Werke von Max Brod,” konkret, May 2013.

  “He persuaded the Munich publisher Kurt Wolff . . .” Kurt Wolff founded his publishing house in 1912. After fleeing to the United States in 1940, Wolff and his wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in 1942. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Kurt Wolff Archive, 1907–1938, which includes Wolff ’s correspondence with Kafka, Brod, Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel, among others. For an informed discussion of Jewish readings of Amerika, see Joseph Metz, “Zion in the West: Cultural Zionism, Diasporic Doubles, and the ‘Direction’ of Jewish Literary Identity in Kafka’s Der Verschollene,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 78:4 (2004).

  “To end The Trial with Joseph K.’s execution . . .” In the critical edition published by S. Fischer Verlag, Malcolm Pasley resequenced the chapters of The Trial. (See Kafka, Der Proceß. Roman in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Malcolm Pasley, S. Fischer, 1990.) Herman Uyttersprot blames much of the interpretive difficulties in The Trial and Amerika on Brod’s clumsy editing. See his book Eine neue Ordnung der Werke Kafkas?, de Vries-Brouwers, 1957. For a contrasting view, see Ronald Gray, “The Structure of Kafka’s Works: A Reply to Professor Uyttersprot,” German Life and Letters, 13 (1959).

  “He was urged by one of his editors . . .” Quoted in “Publisher’s Note,” The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, trans. Breon Mitchell, Schocken, 1998.

  “The last bastion of culture in Germany . . .” Schocken Verlag issued the first of six volumes of Kafka’s Collected Works in 1935. Other German reviews that greeted Schocken’s publication of the first volume that year appeared in Magdeburger Zeitung, May 17, 1935; and Schweinfurter Tagblatt, May 31, 1935.

  “Spitzer fled to Jerusalem . . .” Once settled into his home on Radak Street in Jerusalem’s upscale Rehavia neighborhood, Spitzer founded Tarshish Books, a publishing house renowned for its innovative typography and high production values. It would publish 119 titles between 1940 and 1979, including Yosl Bergner’s Illustrations to Franz Kafka (published in English in 1959 and in Hebrew in 1970); the poems of Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Abraham Sonne); Kelev Hutzot (A Stray Dog) by S. Y. Agnon (with illustrations by Avigdor Arikha); and Mein Blaues Klavier [My Blue Piano] by Else Lasker-Schüler. Spitzer also brought out Hebrew translations of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht (lithographs by Gershon Knispel), the poems of Rilke (illustrations by Avigdor Arikha), and Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. For more, see Moshe Spitzer: Books-Typography-Design (catalogue of an exhibition at the National Library of Israel), Jerusalem, 1981; Ada Wardi, ed., Spitzer Book, Mineged Publications, 2016; Israel Soifer, “The Pioneer Work of Maurice Spitzer,” Penrose Annual 63, 1970; and Hilit Yesh
urun’s interview with Spitzer, “Unfinished Conversations,” Hadarim, Winter 1982–83.

  “Heinrich Heine’s manuscripts and letters . . .” David Suchoff, author of Kafka’s Jewish Languages (2012), calls Heine “the greatest—we could say the most universally loved—German-Jewish writer before Kafka.” In late 1966, Gideon Schocken, a son of Salman Schocken, sold the family’s Heine collection to the Bibliotheque Nationale, the French National Library, for an undisclosed price. (The Schocken Library in Jerusalem had put some of them on display ten years earlier, in 1956.) President Charles de Gaulle lent his personal support during the negotiations. Israeli authorities registered no objection. Once in Paris, the manuscripts were studied by a team of French and German scholars led by Louis Hay. In 1960, the auction house Hauswedell sold Schocken’s Novalis collection to the Freie Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main. Later in the decade, these were edited as volumes 2 and 3 of Novalis’ Complete Works. (See “Ernst L. Hauswedell: Ein Arbeitsbericht,” in Ernst Hauswedell 1901–1938, ed. Gunnar A. Kaldewey, Maximilian-Gesellschaft, 1987.)

  The Last Train

  “I have known and admired Dr. Brod . . .” The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, University of California Press, 1975, pp. 237–38. See also Peter F. Neumeyer, “Thomas Mann, Max Brod, and the New York Public Library,” MLN (Modern Language Notes), April 1975.

  “The Schocken Library on Balfour Street . . .” For a detailed description of the Schocken Library in Jerusalem, see Adina Hoffman, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016.

  The Last Tightrope Dancer

  “Several novels of Dostoyevsky . . .” In Kafka’s copy of a German translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Felice Bauer wrote a dedication dated 1914: “Perhaps we will read it soon together.” For a detailed account, see Jürgen Born, Kafkas Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis, S. Fischer Verlag, 1990.

  “The Lutheran writer of Alemannic folktales Johann Peter Hebel . . .” Kafka’s interest in Hebel’s writings is perhaps particularly interesting in view of the attraction they would hold for an admiring Nazi readership. In 1933, the Nazi mayor of Freiburg, Franz Kerber, claimed that given “his deeply rooted love of the homeland . . . today Hebel too would support the National Socialist party.” For Martin Heidegger’s admiration for Hebel’s “rootedness” in Alemannic dialect and landscape, see Heidegger’s essays “Sprache und Heimat,” in Über Johann Peter Hebel, Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1964; and “Hebel, der Hausfreund,” G. Neske, 1957. The latter appeared in English as “Hebel—Friend of the House,” translated by Bruce V. Foltz and Michael Heim, in Contemporary German Philosophy, Volume III, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983.

  “Goethe was his Bible . . .” Compare with the sentiments of Gershom Scholem, who emigrated from Weimar Germany to British Mandate Palestine in 1923, a year before Kafka’s death: “Goethe has never spoken to me, which must mean something very important, perhaps that the Jewish genius in me demarcates itself somehow from the German world.” Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, translated and edited by Anthony David Skinner, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 212.

  “German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey . . .” See Wilhelm Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” (address delivered on the occasion of the founding of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Literatur, January 16, 1889, Deutsche Rundschau 58 (1889); and Adolf Landguth, “Zur Frage der ‘Archive für Literatur,”’ Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 6:10 (1889).

  “The Third Reich both commandeered German-language literature and called it into question . . .” The most trenchant treatment of the subject is Victor Klemperer’s LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947); translated into English by Martin Brady as The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook (2000). “If a piece of cutlery belonging to Orthodox Jews has become ritually unclean,” Klemperer writes, “they purify it by burying it in the earth. Many words in common usage during the Nazi period should be committed to a mass grave for a very long time, some forever.”

  “The loose-knit circle of German writers known as Gruppe 47 . . .” Many of the Gruppe 47 writers bore affinities, direct or indirect, with Kafka’s work, including Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), awarded the Kafka Prize in 1983, and Siegfried Lenz (1926–2014), whose short stories were unmistakably haunted by Kafka’s influence. See Klaus Briegleb, Missachtung und Tabu. Eine Streitschrift zur Frage: Wie antisemitisch war die Gruppe 47? Philo-Verlag, 2003. Briegleb disparaged the group’s “deep malaise” (“tiefe Befangenheit”) vis-à-vis Jews writing in German and its “anti-Jewish affect” (“antijüdische Affekte”). Maxim Biller, a German-Jewish provocateur, went so far as to call the group a “de-nazified Chamber of Literature” (“entnazifizierte Reichsschrifttumskammer”). (Brauchen wir eine neue Gruppe 47? Interviews mit Joachim Kaiser und Maxim Biller: 55 Fragebögen zur deutschen Literatur, eds. Joachim Leser and Georg Guntermann, Reinhard Nenzel Verlag, 1995.)

  “Hitler Youth, looking to Schiller as a standard-bearer of National Socialism . . .” For more on the Nazi appropriation of the poet, see Schiller als Kampfgenosse Hitlers (Schiller Fighting at Hitler’s Side), by the National Socialist politician Hans Fabricius (published in 1932, reprinted in 1934 and 1936); and Lesley Sharpe, “National Socialism and Schiller,” German Life and Letters 36 (1983). During the Second World War, the Schiller Museum in Marbach was directed by Georg Schmückle (1880–1948). A member of the Nazi Party since 1931, he also served as chairman of the right-wing anti-Semitic political society called the Militant League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur).

  “In his notorious essay ‘Judaism in Music’ . . .” Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

  “West Germans pressed Kafka into service . . .” In East Germany, by contrast, Kafka was written out of the curriculum and literary canon. Angelika Winnen, in a study of his reception in the GDR, writes that the literary establishment of the 1950s, committed to socialist realism since the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934, denounced Kafka’s works were as “decadent” and “useless.” Angelika Winnen, Kafka-Rezeption in der Literatur der DDR: Produktive Lektüren von Anna Seghers, Klaus Schlesinger, Gert Neumann und Wolfgang Hilbig, Königshausen & Neumann, 2006.

  “Those who were guilty of and complicit in the excessive crimes of the Hitler regime . . .” Günther Anders, “Einleitung,” in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, C. H. Beck, 1984. See also Günther Anders, Kafka, Pro und Contra: die Prozess-Unterlagen, C. H. Beck, 1963; and “Kafka: Ritual Without Religion,” Commentary, December 1949. “Ironically,” writes Kata Gellen of Duke University, “Anders transforms Kafka from a prophet into an agent of historical delusion, from someone who sees into someone who prevents others from seeing.” See “Kafka, Pro and Contra: Günther Anders’s Holocaust Book,” in Kafka and the Universal, eds. Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, de Gruyter, 2016.

  “Both are pariahs.” Quoted in Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Über Ruhestörer: Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Piper 1973, p. 55; and in Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743–1933, Metropolitan, 2002, p. 10.

  Laurel & Hardy

  “The flagship Habima theater . . .” Yfaat Weiss, professor at the Department of the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, points out that a considerable part of Habima’s administrative archive from the first decade and a half of its existence is written in German. Why is this so, she asks, “given that the theater was founded in Moscow in 1917, and from its inception performed solely in the Hebrew language? Because Weimar Berlin, capital of European theater during the initial third of the twentieth century, was the city in which Habima was enthusiastically welcomed when it repeatedly visited there between 1926 and 1931. It was there that Habima shaped its professional profile and evolved from being just o
ne of a number of eastern-European Jewish theater troupes that frequented the city to become a genuinely modernistic repertory theater.” (“German or in German? On the Preservation of Literary and Scholarly Collections in Israel,” Transit: Europäische Revue, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, March 2, 2015.)

  “I was invited by the universities in Zürich and Basel . . .” Gnazim archive, 97/24606.

  “He created a two-act libretto for the first Hebrew opera in history . . .” Seventy years later, in May 2015, the opera would be revived and staged by the National Library of Israel. Shin Shalom was introduced to Brod by Anna and Meinhold Nussbaum in 1939. Anna, the sister of the German-Jewish poet Jakob van Hoddis, had translated one of Shalom’s novels into German (Galiläisches Tagebuch). Brod’s other musical compositions include a piano quintet, Israeli dances, and Requiem Hebrascum (words by Shin Shalom). Brod claimed to have “discovered” the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, whose libretti Brod translated into German. See Charles Susskind, Janáček and Brod, Yale University Press, 1985. For Brod’s own views on his role in Hebrew theater, see “From the Notebook of a Dramaturg,” Bamah, December 1940, and “From the Diary of a Dramaturg,” Bamah 48, 1946 (both in Hebrew). For more on Brod’s Habima archive, see Ofer Aderet, “Where Are the Missing Index Cards?” Haaretz, September 22, 2008.