Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond [Reprint 2014 ed.] 3484651504, 9783484651500

Table of contents :
»any reality, however small.« Prague Zionisms between the Nations
»The Entrance to the More Important.« Kafka’s Personal Zionism
»Der letzte Zipfel.« Kafka’s State of Mind and the Making of the Jewish State
Anti-Ödipus im Land der Ur-Väter: Franz Kafka und Anton Kuh
Nachbarn, Feinde und andere Gemeinschaften
Jewish Education: Borderline and Counterdiscourses in Kafka
Kafka’s Gnostic Existentialism and Modem Jewish Revival
Metamorphosis as Messianic Myth. Dream and Reality in the Writings of Franz Kafka
Kafka, the »Ostjuden«, and the Inscription of Identity
Uncovering the Father: Kafka, Judaism, and Homoeroticism
»Ende oder Anfang?« Kafka und der Judenstaat
Kafka and Agnon: Their Relationship to Judaism and Zionism
A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka’s Hebrew Notebooks
The Image of Kafka in Brod’s Zauberreich der Liebe and its Zionist Implications
The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka
The Look Back: Lot’s Wife, Kafka, Blanchot
Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Conditio Judaica

50

Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch in Verbindung mit Alfred Bodenheimer, Mark H. Gelber und Jakob Hessing

Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond Edited by Mark H. Gelber

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2 0 0 4

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. ISBN 3-484-65150-4

ISSN 0941-5866

© Max Niemeyer Verlag G m b H , Tübingen 2004 http://www. niemeyer. de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: Laupp & Göbel G m b H , Nehren Einband: Nadele Verlags- und Industriebuchbinderei, Nehren

Contents

Introduction. Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks

1

Scott Spector »any reality, however small.« Prague Zionisms between the Nations

7

Niels Bokhove »The Entrance to the More Important.« Kafka's Personal Zionism

23

Hans-Richard Eyl »Der letzte Zipfel.« Kafka's State of Mind and the Making of the Jewish State

59

Andreas B. Kilcher Anti-Ödipus im Land der Ur-Väter. Franz Kafka und Anton Kuh

69

Vivian Liska Nachbarn, Feinde und andere Gemeinschaften

89

Iris Bruce Jewish Education: Borderline and Counterdiscourses in Kafka

107

Gabriel Moked Kafka's Gnostic Existentialism and Modern Jewish Revival

147

Eveline Goodman-Thau Metamorphosis as Messianic Myth. Dream and Reality in the Writings of Franz Kafka

157

Delphine Bechtel Kafka, the »Ostjuden«, and the Inscription of Identity

189

David A. Brenner Uncovering the Father: Kafka, Judaism, and Homoeroticism

207

VI

Contents

Benno Wagner »Ende oder Anfang?« Kafka und der Judenstaat

219

Gershon Shaked Kafka and Agnon: Their Relationship to Judaism and Zionism

239

Alfred Bodenheimer A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka's Hebrew Notebooks

259

Mark H. Gelber The Image of Kafka in Brod's Zauberreich der Liebe and its Zionist Implications

271

Ritchie Robertson The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka

283

Shimon Sandbank The Look Back: Lot's Wife, Kafka, Blanchot

297

Mark M. Anderson Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions

307

List of Contributors

321

Index

323

Introduction Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks

The essays collected in this volume are revised versions of lectures presented at an international conference, entitled: »>Ich bin Ende oder Anfange Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond.« The conference, held in Jerusalem and in Beer Sheva, was the fruitful result of a cooperative effort, bringing together the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center of Hebrew University, the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, the Goethe Institute, Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva. I would like to thank the partner institutions and the individuals who joined in this effort to make the meeting possible, especially Gabi Motzkin and Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Rosenzweig Center and their staff; Shlomo Meir of the Leo Baeck Institute; Christine Günther of the Goethe Institute and her assistant Heike; and Suzi Ganot, administrative assistant of the Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University. The idea to organize this international meeting focusing on Kafka and Zionism was originally generated by Niels Bokhove of the Dutch Kafka Society in collaboration with Hans-Richard Eyl of Jerusalem. In the first stage of planning, Gerhard Kurz of the University of Gießen and Jakob Hessing of the Hebrew University became supportive and consulting partners in this endeavor. Although I personally joined the organizational team after a general idea of the conference began to form, it was still early enough to allow me to participate in shaping the intellectual parameters of the meeting according to my sense of the priorities of topics, the desireability of including certain participants, and the need to contextualize the substance and direction of discussions which might take place. I am indebted to Hans-Richard Eyl for his continuing enthusiasm about this project and his individual contribution to the organization of the conference. At the outset, a few words should be said about the background, conception, and structure of this gathering, and the essays which are included in this collection, because international Kafka conferences do not take place everyday, or every year, or even every decade in Israel, despite the relative importance and stature of Kafka in Israeli academic discourse and intellectual life in general. The last major international symposium held in Israel which was devoted to Kafka and his writing took place at the time of the centennial of his birth in 1983. It was initiated and funded by the Austrian embassy. At that time, the prime mover behind the academic activity focusing on Kafka was Barbara Taufar, the dynamic Austrian press and cultural attachée, who subsequently became quite well known or even legendary in Israel. Actually, this particular

2

Introduction

Kafka activity in Israel was divided into two parts: first, an evening symposium in Jerusalem at the Van Leer Institute, followed by, second, a full day meeting at Ben-Gurion University. The Kafka-»Wanderausstellung« of the Austrian documentation center for literature was shown at the Z. Aranne Central Library in Beer Sheva during the time of the symposium. I had the honor of chairing the ceremonial opening and evening symposium in Jerusalem. The Austrian ambassador and other distinguished guests were present: Eduard Goldstücker, a grand old figure in Kafka reception history with a special personal connection to Israel, came from Sussex to give the inaugural lecture. He was followed by Walter Sokel, one of the doyens of American Kafka scholarship, and Werner Welzig, an Austrian Germanist, who was then rector at the University of Vienna. Two or three hundred people, at least, attended the evening event at the Van Leer Institute. As I recall, there were not enough seats in the large lecture hall, and people were sitting in the aisles and standing in the back and against the walls. The full day of lectures in Beer Sheva was entitled »Franz Kafka: His World and Ours.« I remember that this symposium was very well attended also. Preciously little, if anything at all, was said at that time in Jerusalem or in Beer Sheva about Kafka and Judaism or Kafka and Zionism. Following Max Brod's well-known identification of two oppositional tendencies within Kafka - the one which tended toward loneliness, his »Einsamkeitssehnsucht«, and the one which sought community, »der Wille zur Gemeinschaft« - it is fair to say that the lectures given in 1983 and the following discussions focused on the former tendency, from the perspective of his biography and writings. In retrospect, I think that those sessions were in many ways indicative of the general state of German-Jewish scholarship and research at the time. Basically, the Jewish aspects were mostly repressed. The conference entitled »Ich bin Ende oder Anfang: Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond«, in contrast to what transpired in Israel in 1983, was designed to focus on Kafka's tendency toward Gemeinschaft. Of course, as with most matters concerning Kafka, the topic is much more complex than Brod conceived of it. Despite the important work of Hartmut Binder, Giuliano Baioni, Ritchie Robertson, Iris Bruce, Mark Anderson, Sander Gilman, and others who have exposed and explored many of Kafka's Zionist sympathies, antipathies, and interests, Kafka's complicated Zionist connection, or better manifold connections, are largely unappreciated in scholarship and mostly unknown, outside small pockets of specialized readerships. I learned this first-hand a few years ago, when I lectured on German-Jewish literary relations at the University of Graz in Austria, a place where Kafka is well-known and read, certainly. But, my Austrian students were rather shocked to hear that Kafka was Jewish and that his writings could be read cogently from Jewish and Zionist points of view, or in conjunction with Jewish and Zionist materials and contextualizations. The purpose of this meeting and this volume of essays, then, has been to narrow the focus of the discussion to Zionism, while at the same time encouraging an expanded sense of the term itself, as well as promoting a broad con-

Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks

3

ception of Kafka's intellectual and literary encounter with Zionist ideas or with ideas related to Zionism. When the topic of the conference became known abroad during its initial planning stages, a prominent American colleague in the profession, who has published a good deal on Kafka, sent me a message asking if it would indeed be possible to devote an entire conference to this narrow topic! He appeared to be quite doubtful about it. Subsequently, I began to prepare a list for myself of some of the more obvious aspects, which might figure in the proposed conference. The list included the following: -

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

Kafka's discussion with Felice Bauer during their first meeting in August 1912 about visiting Palestine together, which supplied Kafka with sufficient reason or an excuse to write her a month later, ushering in a very productive period in his career as a writer, which included several hundred pages of letters written to Felice over the next several months; also Zionism as a sub-text of their relationship as it continued to develop, and the failure of Kafka to establish a permanent or lasting relationship with either Zionism or Felice; his relationship to Brod's developing Zionist commitment and his closeness to members of the Bar Kochba group in Prague, especially to Hugo Bergmann and Felix Weltsch, including his great interest in Bergmann's career in Palestine; his encounter with Yiddish, Yitzhak Loewy, and the Yiddish Theater and his ideas about Yiddish as an expression of Jewish nationalism, taking into account Jewish nationalist options for Kafka in the diaspora; his abiding interest in the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr and his literary relationship to it, as well as his reception of Zionist writings; his visiting of the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913; his responses to Buber's writings, as well as Kafka's own literary contributions to and interest in Martin Buber's Der Jude and the Buber-Kafka correspondence; his keen interest in Jewish education and his enthusiastic support for the establishment of a Jewish school in Prague and later his great interest in Sigfried Lehmann's Jüdisches Volksheim in Berlin; his horticultural activities and their possible relationship to Zionist theory and practical agricultural enterprise, as preparation or as substitute for pioneering in the land of Israel; his decision to learn Hebrew, his Hebrew teachers and lessons, his reading of Brenner, and the Hebrew notebooks in the Nachlaß; his various plans to immigrate to Palestine, to work either as a manual laborer or as a waiter in the restaurant which would serve up Dora's cooking, and the late preparations and discussions with Hugo Bergmann about travelling with Bergmann's wife and coming to live in theyishuv; his complicated reception of Zionist writings in his own literary work and consideration of the conflicted view that Zionism presented Jewry with a healthy alternative to the sickly Jewish existence in the diaspora, which the Western Jew and Kafka himself embodied;

4

Introduction

- his response to Hans Bliiher's anti-Semitic Secessio Judaica (1922) taking into account its claim that the Zionists will prevail among Jewry, despite a major pogrom which would devastate this (for Blüher) degenerate people; - his interest in Bank Hapoalim and its bank shares; - the late testimony of friends, like Brod and Bergmann, who addressed themselves to Kafka and Zionism in their writing or the legacy of Kafka among those working in Israel, like Werner Kraft; - the reception of Kafka in Hebrew literature and the Hebrew translations (by Shenhar, Kornfeld, Shenberg, Keshet, Miron, and Sandbank), the role of Schocken, and the studies by Israeli scholars, like Hillel Barzel, Gabriel Moked, Gershon Shaked, and Shimon Sandbank, to name the most important; - Kafka in Israeli art and cinema. All of these topics seemed to me from the outset to be within the purview of this meeting, but actually merely as possible points of departure. If, as Sander Gilman has claimed, Kafka drew on discourses that are heavily coded as Jewish, but that self-consciously erase or distance themselves from this labelling, 1 the same may be said for Zionism and its various discourses and their potential meanings in terms of his literary production. Examining and explaining the mechanisms and sense of this distancing or alienation from Zionist discourses in Kafka's writings would also be an important aspect of the deliberations within the framework of our sessions. In all likelihood a complex cultural system which figures in the discussion between Kafka and Zionism might be elucidated. I would like to emphasize from the beginning that this conference was not conceived as an opportunity to appropriate Kafka for Zionism, in the sense of Max Brod, 2 but rather to amplify the scholarly discussion by admitting the complexity of the topic itself, to emphasize its potential importance in overall assessments of Kafka and his career, and to attempt to understand a dimension of Zionism as a portal, which Kafka, Brod, and others saw as an entrance way to something larger and more significant that lies beyond it.3 When we consider the essays collected in this volume, it is possible to determine the extent to which this initial conception was realized. Regarding the publication of the lectures, I would like to thank sincerely the Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at BenGurion University and the Research and Publication Committee of the Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion for authorizing grants to help subsidize the costs of preparing and printing the manuscript. Also, the Moshe and Margarita Pazi Fund for the Study of Bohemian Jewry made 1

2 3

Sander L. Gilman: Kafka goes to camp. In: Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996. Ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes. New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1997, 4 2 7 ^ 3 3 , here 428. See Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1966, passim. See Mark H. Gelber: Max Brod's Zionist Writings. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 33 (1988), 437-448.

Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks

5

money available for this publication project. Prof. Hans Otto Horch (Aachen) and Till Schicketanz have been indispensable with their advice and practical help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Beer Sheva/Omer

Mark H. Gelber

Scott Spector

»any reality, however small.« Prague Zionisms between the Nations

What did Zionism mean for Kafka? To answer this question, we need to reconstruct several different kinds of contexts that informed Kafka's understanding of Zionism and his apparently changing relationship to it. The nationality conflict in Bohemia at the turn of the century provides a broad backdrop for the following study. But, more specifically the idiosyncratic variant of Zionism at the time called »cultural« Zionism, sometimes even »spiritual« Zionism was the dominant variety in Kafka's circle of friends. These matters did of course inflect Kafka's confrontation with Zionism in important ways. However, I am uncomfortable with the idea that they can or should be discussed as historical contexts in the sense of neutral or stable backgrounds in which historical figures can be situated. It seems to me that these »contexts« themselves - Zionism on the one hand, and nationality in Prague on the other - sometimes took on a figurative character in this period, taking a course quite different from or even opposed to what would be assumed to be their »proper« referents, and this fact has contributed to, if not produced, the murkiness of the question of Kafka's relation to Zionism. 1 Part of the problem certainly proceeds from the often noted tension between the virtual absence of direct allusions to Jewishness in K a f k a ' s fiction, published or unpublished in his lifetime, and the comparative preoccupation with such issues in the Kafka ephemera - letters to lovers, friends, and family, and especially the diaries. The radical separation of documents relating to K a f k a ' s life on the one side and fragments of his literary project on the other, is one way that critics have managed to keep the elusiveness of reference and multivalence of figures they have often recognized in the literary work from infecting their discussions of what appears to be a rather straightforward ideological progression in K a f k a ' s life from antipathy toward, to sympathy with, Zionism. But what sort of figure was »Zionism«? Are we sure we know what it meant, or that it meant one particular thing at all? What was Zionism »in reality« for Prague German-speaking Jews, and what was the »reality« of Zionism?

1

Cf. Thomas McLaughlin: Figurative Language. In: Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. by Frank Lentricchhia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago, London: University of Chicago 1990, 80-90.

8

Scott Spector

The same may be asked about the other context I wish to discuss, that is Prague itself, the city of national conflict. And here I would argue that, in this time and place, for historical reasons somewhat too detailed to explicate here, subjects seemed to be particularly self-conscious of the way in which »Prague« was not simply a setting, or neutral background in which artists and their work were seen to be situated. To give an example of this I will begin with a quotation from the Prague German-speaking Jewish writer who might be the last one to turn to for the question of Prague Zionism - the Christian-spiritualist revolutionary Franz Werfel. It may not be casual that most of this generation of Prague German writers - and it is important to notice that the number of these was far out of proportion to their population - found that they could not stay in Prague. In 1922 a Prague newspaper sought to survey some of its most talented emigres to discover why they had left the city. Franz Werfel responded that the Czechs had a vital capital city in Prague which meant for them »life«, »health«, »culture«. In contrast, Werfel writes: For the non-Czech, it seems to me, this city has no reality. For him she is a daydream that offers no experience, a crippling ghetto without even the poor life relations of a ghetto, a dull world from which no activity or only sham activity can originate. 2

This »irreality« of Prague may seem to invoke an aspect of Prague still familiar to contemporary readers: the mythical mysticism of the city, the secrets of the Golem, the ghostly presence of Baroque statues looking down from cornices and along the Charles bridge, a mystery embedded in Prague that is expounded at length in Angelo Maria Ripellino's Praga magica} But Prague as the city of ghosts was more the reflection of a socio-cultural condition than a metaphysical one: while such a reading of the city did exist at the turn of the century, it was a German reading, that is, the projection of the formerly hegemonic cultural minority; Czech intellectuals did not share and they even objected to this »decadent« image, proceeding so transparently from a declining class of German bourgeois. 4 One such critic was F. X. Salda, who went so far as to assert - in terms that would not have been unfamiliar to the Germans he criticized - that there was no and could be no Prague German literature, in spite of the existence of Prague German writers: the blossom of true literature cannot exist without the tree (of a nation), the tree cannot live without roots in the soil (of a homeland). 5 By the century's turn, the nineteenth-century Ger2

3 4

5

Franz Werfel: Warum haben Sie Prag verlassen? In: Prager Tagblatt, June 4, 1922, reprinted in: Kurt Krolop: Hinweis aus einer verschollene Rundfrage, »Warum haben Sie Prag verlassen?« In: Germanistica Pragensis 4 (1966), 47-62. Angelo Maria Ripellino: Praga magica. Turin: Einaudi 1973. See the very clear articulation of this position by literary critic Arne Novák in Venkov, vol. 12, no. 86. F. X. Salda, in a review of Max Brod's The Redemption of Tycho Brahe (1916), cited by Joseph Peter Stern, The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology (Oxford: Blackwell 1992), 71.

Prague Zionisms Between the Nations

9

man-liberal image of a Prague culturally integral to German Central Europe had been obscured by the reality of Prague, the rising Czech metropolis, as well as revived memories of its not-so-purely Germanic past (the name Praha itself derived from the Slavonic word for »threshold«). If we take these writers, Czech and German, Christian and Jewish, at their words, we may begin to think of this Prague condition in terms of a selfconsciousness of the brokenness of what was supposed to be some kind of organic relation - let us call it a mutually dependent relation of artistic subjectivity, national territory, and cultural production. If the Jewish Germanophone writers of this generation were particularly susceptible to an awareness of a crisis of this relation, perhaps, one might certainly argue, this goes some way toward explaining why so many of them turned to their Jewish identities in one form or another in the first decade of the new century. Zionism, as the term is commonly understood, would seem to be a makeshift solution to this dilemma, offering a way out of the Prague constellation of national identity, language, and territory. Put another way, Zionism, if it is taken »literally«, is the ideology of reterritorialization par excellence. I do not wish to take Zionism »literally« in this way; not think of Prague, Prague nationality or even »territoriality«, and Prague Zionism as historical settings - but to allow each of these the complexity and elusiveness we would allow them as literary figures. Zionist discourse in this setting is illuminated by a close reading that is attentive to its unique and idiosyncratic logic. The Prague Zionist with whom I wish to begin, and to focus on centrally, is Hugo Bergmann (1883-1975), Kafka's classmate through their childhood, and the first of Kafka's friends to embrace Zionism. In 1902, when they were both still teenagers, Kafka had to ask his classmate why he had become a Zionist, to which Bergmann replied: Why have I become a Zionist? [...] I should almost stop wondering, and yet again and again I have to wonder why you, who [...] were my classmate for so long, do not understand my Zionism. If I saw a madman before me and he had an idée fixe, I would not laugh at him, because his idea is a piece [»Stück«] of life for him. You think Zionism is also an »idée fixe« of mine. You surely do not know that it is perhaps also a piece of my life [»ein Stück meines Lebens«], yet it is so. It is perhaps more for me. It is pieced together and patched together from the shreds of my self. 6

Bergmann's response begins with the repeated »wondering« about why the opening question should be a question for him at all, for his Zionism was inex6

Hugo Bergmann to Franz Kafka, 1902. Reprinted in part in Schmuel Hugo Bergmann: Tagebücher & Briefe. Hg. von Miriam Sambursky. Mit einer Einleitung von Nathan Rotenstreich. Königstein/Ts.: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum 1985, vol. 1, 9. My comments on Hugo Bergmann and Martin Buber are drawn from my much more detailed discussion in »Another Zionism. Hugo Bergmann's Circumscription of Spiritual Territory«, in: Journal of Contemporary History 34 (1999), no. 1, 85-106.

10

Scott Spector

tricably connected to the circle of classmates and their common territorial condition. But what interests me more here is the peculiar structure of »my Zionism« in the quotation. An »idée fixe« is in one gesture transformed to something very material in Bergmann's letter, with the awkward and persistent appearance of the term »piece« (»Stück«). Adherence to an external ideology here has an immanent source - it is a »piece« of Bergmann's »life«, with all the ring of authenticity and essentiality that the term Leben had in the early twentieth century. But this »piece« of life is itself »pieced« together from »shreds of self«. This reflexive relation, conflating and then again subdividing subject-predicate definitions, scrambles the terms necessary to construct a simple relation between self and community. And, of course, that relation is at the heart of the step that Bergmann has taken. The letter continues: I have searched and searched [...] I did not have the strength to stand alone, like you. [...] Don't think that it was sympathy that made me a Zionist. My Zion is a good piece of selfishness. I sense that I would like to fly, I would like to create and cannot; I no longer have the strength. And yet I also sense that I might have the strength under other circumstances, that the innate ability doesn't abandon me at all. I only lack the strength. [...] Perhaps we will in fact overcome this weakness once more, and stand sturdily again on our own ground instead of waving unrooted like a reed; perhaps, perhaps I will even find my strength again ... Sometimes I feel that I might be able to fly, but then my strength is broken and my wings are lame. I would like to stand for once on our own ground and not be rootless. Maybe then my strength will return to me, too.

The lamed and powerless modern self, then, seeks a reconstitution of strength through rooting itself in a community. The individual alone is defeated by what Bergmann elsewhere in this letter calls »raw reality«. However, there is a slippage in the text from the declaration of »my« loss of strength to »our« weakness - the strength does not return with inclusion in the community, for the community itself is impotent outside of its rootedness to a territory. The element of strength (»Kraft«) seems at first to be manifestly in step with the Zionism of this period, with its stress on reversing the qualifiers associated with diaspora Jewishness (we will return to this aspect of Zionist rhetoric). In spite of this similarity, Bergmann does not faithfully reproduce a discourse where a positive »strength«, physicality, and power are juxtaposed to a negated intellect, or an ephemeral spiritualism. For what Bergmann seeks in this circle of community which fast becomes a territory is the power to dream; it is the strength to stand ground, but only in order to escape from »raw reality«. This paradox, Bergmann's need to be »rooted« in order to »fly«, already suggests the extraordinary ambivalence of his relationship to the notion of territory. Another interesting tension with the pedestrian notions of the face-off between Zionism and assimilationism is in the phrase: »I did not have the strength to stand alone, like you.« Bergmann ascribed here a strength to non-communally identified diaspora Jews who were more commonly figured as weak in Zionist discourse. Indeed, Kafka, for his part, might wonder how his own lack of faith in a communal circle could be read as an expression of strength. In a

Prague Zionisms Between the Nations

11

more resigned despair over powerlessness, Kafka stands in an open-ended and unstable territory for one, sooner characterized as an angle (»Winkel«) than as a circle, and writes: What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner [»Winkel«], content that I can breathe. 7

The ellision of Bergmann's images of rootedness (to territory) and flight (of spirit) are not merely the mixed metaphors of a confused teen. This creative play with territorial metaphor foreshadows Bergmann's most serious philosophical and political work from his university years until his departure from Prague after World War I. Implicit in these images is the binary opposition of reality/ideality - an opposition sustained by a set of powerful assumptions which Bergmann's Zionism attacked head-on. When Bergmann enrolled at the university and joined the Zionist student association Bar Kochba in 1901, the organization was ripe for revitalization. In its short history, the only Jewish-national student association had not been able to maintain a stable membership nor a consistent program.8 Even in Bergmann's tenure, only a very small minority of Jewish students chose to join Bar Kochba rather than the German-liberal Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag.9 Yet, Bar Kochba can be said to have represented the focus of Bohemian Zionism in the pre-war period,10 and the birthplace of the peculiar stamp of Zionism which was particular to Prague." 7

8

9

10 11

Franz Kafka: Tagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller und Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, 622. Founded in 1893 with the name »Maccabäa«, the organization went through several changes of name and charter before adopting the name Bar Kochba and an openly Zionist line in 1899. For more detail on the origins and development of the association, see Stuart Borman: The Prague Student Zionist Movement, 1896-1914. (Diss.) University of Chicago 1972. The date of the founding of Maccabäa corresponds to the year that German völkisch-minded students broke off from the Halle to form the anti-liberal and antiSemitic competitor Germania. It is interesting to note that at the turn of the century, both Germania and Bar Kochba memberships consisted by and large of students from outside of Prague. This supports the thesis that the Prague »island« was out of step with ideology in the Bohemian and Moravian periphery. The Jewish-national association was founded by Russians studying in Prague, and the students responsible for the adoption of a Zionist line were Czech-speaking Prague »transplants«. See Hillel J. Kieval: The Making of Czech Jewry. National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. New York et al.: Oxford University Press 1988 (Studies in Jewish History), 93-98. Ibid., 99. Felix Weltsch speaks significantly of their »distinctive - though perhaps not leading - role in the Zionist movement« (Realism and Romanticism. Observations on the Jewish Intelligentsia of Bohemia and Moravia. In: The Jews of Czechoslovakia 2 [1971], 440-454, here 440). George Mosse calls the Prague Bar Kochba »a germinal group in the intellectual history of modern Judaism«, implicitly recognizing that

12

Scott Spector B y all accounts, the original direction Bar Kochba took in the first years o f

the twentieth century can be directly attributed to the activity o f H u g o Bergmann. What w a s that direction, and h o w did it engage young Jewish people at the time? A former Bar Kochba member recounts: At that time, a community was created that took pains to spread the idea of a Judaism of life and of the future [...]. The realization [»Verwirklichung«] of Jewish life did not simply serve an externally-directed program [...] it stressed the necessity that a member take up Jewish culture in himself [...]. 12 This passage reads like a catechism, with the terms learned by rote remembered years later by the devoted pupil. The contents o f this catechism, the discourse constituted by the elements o f »life«, »future«, »realization«, »external/internal«, and so on, are at the heart o f the project the Prague student adherents preferred to call »cultural Zionism«. 1 3 The concrete program o f Bar Kochba w a s decidedly intellectual; it stressed the study o f Hebrew, Jewish history, and even Yiddish, while the public social activities typical o f most student associations were replaced by public addresses and discussions on Jewish topics. Yet it is important to keep in mind, as the citation above stresses, that the significance o f this program w a s not conceived as an externally-directed, didactic one. The activities were designed as a route out o f a foreign cultural circle into the circle o f Judaism. 1 4 This

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14

their somewhat idiosyncratic position was in another way paradigmatic. See George L. Mosse: The Influence of the Volkish Idea. In: id., Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a »Third Force« in Pre-Nazi Germany. New York: Fertig 1970, 77-115, here 82. Zirkular (Newsletter of the Iggud Vatikei Bar Kochba [Association of Former Members of Bar Kochba], Tel Aviv]. April 1967, 4. The term is most often associated with Martin Buber. Giuliano Baioni puts this »cultural Zionism« at the center of his description of Kafka's context. See Giuliano Baioni: Kafka. Letteratura ed ebraismo. Turin: Einaudi 1984 (Einaudi paperbacks; 155), 3-36. The now less common term »spiritual Zionism« was at the time used interchangeably with »cultural Zionism«. Several important references have been made to the Bar Kochba association as exemplary of a certain spiritualist tendency among central European Zionist youth at the turn of the century, focusing especially on the influence of Martin Buber. Most important is Mosse, The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry (note 11). Cf. id., German Jews Beyond Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985 (The Modern Jewish Experience), 37—41. In this later volume Mosse mentions in passing the unique Zionism of the Prague Jews Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, and others as »a part of Zionist history which demands to be written« (77). See also Paul Mendes-Flohr: Divided Passions. Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991 (The Culture of Jewish Modernity), 83-85. Iwri [= Hugo Bergmann]: Das Babel der Kleinvölker. Prager Brief. In: Jüdische Zeitung, 13 December 1907: »[T]he efforts of the Zionists to achieve here what is already reality in the East-the creation of Jewish cultural circles [Kulturkreise]- are still in their beginnings [...].«

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transformation was presented as the solemn, personal task of each member of Bar Kochba, and its ultimate goal was the general cultural regeneration of Judaism. Another Bar Kochba alumnus claims that the students' Jewishness may have previously been represented as an object of »love« or »passion«, but it now took on the urgency of more active »tasks«: the realization of Judaism, the trial of Judaism in reality (»in der Wirklichkeit«), and the reification of Judaism. (»Der Drang, das Judentum im Leben zu verwirklichen, ist die Grundkraft der Bar-Kochba in allen Zeiten gewesen.« 15 ) Thus Bergmann described the role of Hebrew as specifically non-instrumental, that is, neither as a key to understanding the Bible nor to an aestheticist appreciation of its beauty. The »serious Jew« recognizes that taking Hebrew into him or herself is an »irrefutable necessity«, offering a »new, swelling life«. 16 Bergmann's Zionism is not the secular, territorial ideology that one may think of as its »proper« referent in this period, nor the religious Zionism of Hebron settlers - it aimed at a recovery of a continuity in Judaism, represented in two and one-half millennia of religious writing. Bergmann studied the liturgical canon as the key to Judaism's essential spiritual mission in universal history: a messianic, revolutionary mission. 17 None of this could be changed by Herzl and Nordau's »politicization« of Zionism, which attempted to privatize spiritual questions, as in liberalism or socialism. 18 This spiritual Zionism, influenced by the modern Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha'am and especially by Martin Buber, who had spoken in Prague in 1903, opposed itself to any tendency that did not seem to spring directly from »within« the mystical circle of the Judaism it sought to create. The conflict of Czechs and Germans, represented by street fights between their student fraternities (including Bar Kochba's rival fraternity Barissia), were clearly identified as profane, external and therefore abstract concerns. While remaining within the framework of the Austrian and world Zionist organizations, Bar Kochba took the side of those minority voices opposing the mainstream »dogmatic« or »political« Zionism of Herzl and Nordau. Spiritual, cultural, or »practical« Zionists were not as concerned with the Jewish State as with the State of Judaism. They focused on precisely those areas of Jewish life that Herzl deliberately ignored; likewise, they showed disinterest in or disdain for all of those 15

16

17

18

Zirkular, January 1967, 3: »Die unmittelbare Bedeutung des Zionismus bestand darin, daß er zum erstenmal die jüdische Jugend für die jüdische Sache begeisterte, die bis dahin ein Gegenstand der Liebe und des Leidens, nicht des strebende Tuns gewesen war. Jetzt zum erstenmal wurde von der Jugend verlangt, was ihr Lebenselement ausmacht: Bewährung des Judentums in der Wirklichkeit, Verwirklichung des Judentums. Der Drang, das Judentum im Leben zu verwirklichen, ist die Grundkraft der Bar-Kochba in allen Zeiten gewesen.« Über die Bedeutung des Hebräischen für die jüdischen Studenten. In: Unsere Hoffnung, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1904), 85. Hugo Bergmann: Religiöser Zionismus. In: Europäische Revue 1 (1925/26), no. 12, 370-373. Ibid.

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»external« and abstract political efforts that they thought irrelevant to a spiritualist Jewish renewal. By identifying the necessarily religious, messianic, and revolutionary character of Zionism, Bergmann and his cohort called into question the authenticity of a Zionism based on diplomacy and party politics. His political engagement undermined the secular realm of Jewish »politics«; it challenged Zionist youth to join in a spiritual transformation of self - the only real transformation possible - that would change the »political« world. The »cultural question« within Zionism is strongly associated with the Russian Jew, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am), and may have been thought of as foreign to most German Zionists; its mediation to Prague and its gestation there to the unique product it became must be attributed in large measure to the influence of Martin Buber. Buber spoke to the Prague student Zionists on several occasions and felt a special affinity with them. Bergmann had long been influenced by him, and had invited him as guest speaker at Bar Kochba's first Festabend in 1903. But the real engagement between Bar Kochba and Buber began with a series of three lectures sponsored by Bar Kochba between 1909 and 1911. Max Brod attended the lectures as »guest and opponent,« and he came out a Zionist. 19 Interestingly enough, the experience also left its mark on Buber himself. He found in the young Prague intellectuals a certain attachment, a family resemblance of sorts, 20 and he was to maintain contact with some of them for the rest of his life. 21 Let us recall Buber's framing question in his first lecture, »Judaism and the Jews«. He asked: Why do we call ourselves Jews? 22 It is important to him that the question be defined not as an abstraction, but as something very »real«: I want to speak to you not about an abstraction, but of your actual life, of our actual life. And not of its external machinery, but of this life's inner justification and essence [»Recht und Wesen«]. [...] I am not asking about the formation of external life, but of its internal reality. Judaism has as much meaning for the Jews as it has inner reality. 23

19 20

21

22

23

See Max Brod: Streitbares Leben. Autobiographie. München: Kindler 1960, 67. Hillel Kieval argues convincingly that an »elective affinity« may have had its roots in Buber's childhood in the multinational and polyglot Austrian Galician Lwów (Lemberg): »Buber offered in his own person the mirror image of the Prague Zionist. From a corner of the Habsburg monarchy that was nationally ambivalent, yet Jewishly traditional, he had emerged to reaffirm, redefine, and recreate his Jewish national personality.« See Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry (note 9), 129. See Martin Buber: Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten. Hg. und eingeleitet von Grete Schäder 3 vols, Heidelberg: Schneider 1972-1975. The complete Buber correspondence is found in the Martin Buber Archives, Manuscript Department of the Jewish National and University Library, MS Var 350. Buber was originally invited to be guest speaker at a Bar Kochba Festabend, open to the public, in January 1909. The stunning reception of the first lecture led to subsequent invitations for Buber's return, which took place in April and December 1910. Martin Buber: Drei Reden über das Judentum. Frankfurt a. M.: Rütten & Loening 1916, 15

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Here, again, external circumstances are not what define, nor should they define, Jewish experience; not the ways of living (as Jews in the diaspora or in the Yishuv) but the »inner lives« of Jews. The inner/outer dichotomy takes on ethical import in Buber's essays; those terms relegated to the »inside« - »Leben«, »essence«, »reality« - have powerful organic connotations, as against an external machinery capable only of abstraction. The »Jewish question« for Buber is in fact a struggle of the individual consciousness, a struggle for reality. Bar Kochba's program of lectures and discussions, Hebrew lessons, and readings in Jewish history and literature was seen as intimately connected to a revolutionary project to renew modern Judaism. The modernity under attack mechanical and lifeless - was clearly not unique to the Jewish community; in the rhetoric of the above passage it is impossible to ignore the tones of a particular German-language cultural critique running through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence this attack on the modern Jewish condition, the modern condition par excellence, was figured as a spiritual struggle. Bergmann moved to London after the war, working for the Department of Culture of the Zionist Organization, before he came to live Jerusalem in 1920. It is not just that this special variant of Zionism was native to Prague; it could apparently not survive outside of the city. At least the archive in Jerusalem at Givat Ram seems to testify that it could not be exported to Eretz Yisroel, the land of Israel. Within a decade of his residence here, he reflected on what he called the »error« he and his cohort had committed as students, thinking that Jewish life could be found in the so-called Jewish Renaissance instead of in the real life of Zion. 24 In a letter to Robert Weltsch in 1923, Bergmann openly doubted the value of all of the activities of Bar Kochba and called the central European Zionism of Buber »senseless«. 25 Finally, in an apologetic preface to a late reprint of his famous essay on »Kiddush Hashem«, Bergmann explained: »I was young then, [and] did not know real [»das wirkliche«] life yet...« Bergmann was an active force in Zionist life here in Jerusalem for the rest of his long life, founding the Hebrew University library and joining the faculty of philosophy. He was involved in the B'rith Shalom movement, which advocated a bi-national Palestinian state, rather than a Jewish one. It is quite interesting, at least considering the fact that he came to Palestine from a multinational state, region, and city, that is from a reality that had proved untenable. Kafka's close friend Felix Weltsch was also to come to Palestine and to be active at the Hebrew University. Weltsch, like Bergmann, had a philosophical background, and in fact he came to know Bergmann at the philosophical salon of Bergmann's future mother-in-law Bertha Fanta. It was through Bergmann that 24

25

From an article of unknown origin, dated May 1928, clipping in file 10a, Shmuel Hugo Bergman Archives (Arc. 4. 1502). See the manuscript »Robert Weltsch and Hugo Bergman. Eine Freundschaft aus der Zeit des jungen Zionismus« by Escha Bergmann, file 136b, Are. 4. 1502. The Bergmann-Robert Weltsch correspondence is found in the same archive, file 1334, folders 1-11.

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Weltsch was introduced to Zionism. Essays from Weltsch's school years (1900 and 1901), which may be found in the archives at Givat Ram, show the mark of a German-liberal son of Prague with a fervent German self-identification; by 1907 Weltsch was a Zionist, and he looked back to his essay on the mission of creativity »for our German nation, whose sons we feel ourselves to be through thick and thin until the end of our very lives«.26 He scratched in the margin, »I take it all back!«21 Weltsch's contribution to Zionism does not really come into its own until the 1920s and 1930s, when the context of the multinational Habsburg Empire had given way to a Central Europe of nation-states with large minority populations, and where the ideologies of the pre-war period were giving way to uncompromising extremisms. In this new context, the illiberal rhetoric (let us call it »radical humanism«) of Buber and the early Bergmann gives way to what Weltsch would call a »new Liberalism«, one that would not make the mistakes of narrow class and national chauvinism of the previous generation. It is in this period that Central or »middle« Europe is identified as the possible cite of mediating and moderate discourse; Weltsch's writings on ethics and politics play with this notion of a middle ground that might be made as seductive as the extreme positions of left (the Soviets) and right (the radical nationalists and, finally, the Nazis). 28 With Max Brod, Weltsch felt that nationalism could still be rescued from the wreckage that right-wing nationalists all around were making of it; in this spirit they coined the term »Nationalhumanismus«, to focus on the creative rather than destructive elements of nationalism. 29 As for the liberals before him, culture was the central figure of this conception of nationhood. The nation, Weltsch postulated, can never be placed above humanity; but »human culture« is not accessible, the higher level of humanity is only made available through the medium of the nation. Weltsch's »Zionism« was to be this sort of national humanism. Max Brod went through a similar evolution; introduced to Zionism largely through Hugo Bergmann and the lectures of Martin Buber. 30 Brod was a Zion26

27 28

29

30

Felix Weltsch: The German Folk Song, Felix Weltsch Archives: »Ich revociere alles 1907«. Roger Chickering reminded me that the use of the Latin-root »revocieren« is not only awkward, but resists well established German-national linguistic-political norms. See Roger Chickering: Language and the Social Foundations of Radical Nationalism in the Wilhelmine Era. In: 1870/71-1989/90. German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse. Ed. by Walter Pape. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 1993 (European Cultures; 1), 61-78. Weltsch, The German Folk Song (last note). Culminating in Felix Weltsch: Das Wagnis der Mitte. Ein Beitrag zur Ethik und Politik derZeit. Mährisch-Ostrau: Julius Kittls Nachfolger 1937. See Felix Weltsch: Thesen des Nationalhumanismus. In: Max Brod / Felix Weltsch: Zionismus als Weltanschauung. Mährisch-Ostrau: R. Färber 1925, esp. 53-56. See Hans Lichtwitz: Dem Zionisten. In: Dichter, Denker, Helfer. Max Brod zum 50. Geburtstag. Hg. von Felix Weltsch. Mährisch-Ostrau: Julius Kittls Nachfolger, Keller & Co. 1934), 44-^9.

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ist with a political agenda, to be sure. He joined the Zionist District Committee during World War I, and was instrumental in the formation of the Jewish National Council in the First Czechoslovak Republic. He served as one of two foremost spokespeople for Czechoslovak Jews in Masaryk's republic. But the interesting turns his Zionist thought took can be summarized in two separate categories. The first of these is that mentioned above: the notion that this nationalism will not only be a kinder, gentler (sic) nationalism, but will actually be a necessary step to something that might be seen as contrary to nationalism - a universal humanism. Before he and Weltsch spoke of »national humanism,« he even used the term »Übernationalismus« - supernationalism - to indicate that just as the Jews were a nation unlike any nation, their nationalism would do something unheard of among European nationalisms: it would heal the wound of nationalism itself. The other principle idea that might be relevant to the general discussion is what he comes to call »Distanzliebe« for the delicate relation between Jewish national identity and »foreign« German language. 31 Something like this idea was present already in a 1913 essay written for the Bar Kochba's seminal anthology Vom Judentum. The article, entitled »The Jewish Poet of German Tongue«, accepts certain premises of völkisch anti-Semitism regarding the Jew's essential distance from German language to posit what becomes a privileged relationship to it-one, however, that can only be achieved after getting in touch with one's »own« Volk through Zionism. 32 These ideas could be related in interesting ways to Kafka's famous and cryptic comments on Mauschel (the letter to Brod in which Kafka speaks of Kraus's language as this Jewish speech, the usurpation of foreign property). 33 The issue of »reality« within Zionism that I have been pointing out through some of my descriptions of these Zionisms around Kafka is central. »Zionism« for Bergmann and the Bar Kochba Association was the name of the ethereal battle for an alternate »reality,« even as their program focused on the practical tasks encompassed by Gegenwartsarbeit. Brod, too, became very engaged with Gegenwartsarbeit, for example, working to establish a school to absorb and educate Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe during the war. Before the war, Kafka retained a skeptical interest in the Bar Kochba activities, and subscribed to the Prague Zionist weekly, Selbstwehr. Yet, his most profound investment 31 32

33

See Max Brod: Rassentheorie und Judentum. Prag: J.A.V. Barissia 1934, 19-20. »Der jüdischer Dichter deutscher Zunge. In: ed. Vom Judentum. Ein Sammelbuch. Hg. vom Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag. Leipzig: Wolff 1913, 261— 263. An interesting parallel is found in Brod's later work Rassentheorie und Judentum (last note), where he attempts to appropriate certain of the premises of race theorist Hans F. K. Günther for Zionism. This deeply flawed project does, however, at least attempt to escape from racism in some form by accepting a notion of »difference« while condemning what we would now call racist essentialism as a »new materialism« (that biology determines that characteristics of a people »automatisch und mit naturgesetzlichen Bestimmtheit gegeben sind«.) See 43-44. Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. Hg. von Max Brod. New York: Schocken 1959, 336.

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in the Zionist project of Gegenwartsarbeit took form first during the war, and was not focused on the program of the Prague Bar Kochba Association at all, but on the Berlin Jewish woman named Felice. *

*

*

In view of the array of oblique and apparently contradictory references to »Zionism« in Kafka's notebooks and letters, the question of Kafka's relationship to Zionism has been recognized as a difficult one. Early assertions by Brod, Bergmann, and Felix Weltsch that Kafka eventually came to be a fully committed Zionist have been revised to allow for a more complicated picture. Yet, the general image of a gradual but steady conversion to Zionist ideology is by and large reinforced by these revisions.34 There is much to speak for this assumption: Kafka's alienation from Brod over the latter's insistent Zionism around 1913 gives way to more positive references to Zionism in Kafka's notebooks of 1916; a list of self-identifications in Kafka's diary includes, in sequence, »anti-Zionism, Zionism ...«; there appears to be a chronological transition in the Kafka diaries from the intense interest in Yiddish and Yiddish theater in the early teens of the century to the Hebrew exercises that dominate the last extant notebook of Kafka's life; and, finally, there is Kafka's stated plan to move to Palestine with Dora Dymant and to work there as a bookbinder or a waiter. Yet, it cannot be overlooked that each of these pieces of potential evidence is a narrative construction, and never remotely a political engagement - even, as it turns out, the plan to move to Palestine, materializing only very far into Kafka's illness, when it was certain that such a journey could be imagined but never executed. To describe these narrative constructions as an ideological 34

See Max Brod: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre. In: id., Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1966), 223-299, here esp. 270; id., Franz Kafka und der Zionismus. In: Emuna 10 (1975), no. 1/2, 33-36; id., Humanistischer Zionismus im Werk Kafkas. In: Auf gespaltenem Pfad. Für Margarete Susman. Hg. von Manfred Schlosser. Darmstadt: Erato-Presse 1964), 278-81; Felix Weltsch: Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas. Berlin: Herbig 1957, 38; cf. Schmuel Hugo Bergmann: Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. In: Universitas 27 (1972), 739-750. Klara Pomeranz Carmely reinforces the image of a Zionist Kafka in: Das Identitätsproblem jüdischer Autoren im deutschen Sprachraum. Von der Jahrhundertwende bis zu Hitler. Königstein/Ts.: Scriptor 1981 (Monographien Literaturwissenschaft; 50), 162-166. Nonetheless, the strong impression of a trajectory, if a troubled one, to a Zionist identification is the clear conclusion of more detailed revised accounts; see Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bände. Hg. von Hartmut Binder. Stuttgart: Kröner 1979, vol. 1, 370-376, 435^137, 491-510; id., Franz Kafka and the Zionist Weekly Selbstwehr. In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1967), 135-148; Ritchie Robertson: Antizionismus, Zionismus. Kafka's Responses to Jewish Nationalism. In: Paths and Labyrinths. Nine Papers Read at the Franz Kafka Symposium, Held at the Institute of Germanic Studies on 20 and 21 October 1983. Ed. by J. P. Stern. London: Institute of Germanic Studies 1985 (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies; 35), 25^12, and id., Kafka. Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985.

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»sympathy« would require a much more careful exploration of »Zionism« as a figure in Kafka's texts than we have tended to see in Kafka scholarship. A similar (and, as I will argue, closely related) problem arises when we try to determine Kafka's position toward bachelordom and marriage. Presented with often obscure and persistently contradictory statements in the Kafka ephemera, one is easily led to the pathetic image of a lonesome Kafka wishing desperately for marriage. Critics are tempted to take at face value the assessment of »marriage, and children« as »the only thing that matters«, without looking at the terms »bachelor« and »marriage« as the same sort of complex literary figures they examine in his fiction. The figures of »Zionism« and »marriage« run through much of Kafka's letters and diaries, as well as through the literary work itself, however elusively. But these figures come together in a revealing way in the course of his correspondence with Felice Bauer between 1912 and 1916. Of these two figures, »marriage« has received substantial attention in the critical literature, because scholars have been able to connect it to what Kafka himself identified as a breakthrough in his writing: the deferral of »happiness«, or of physical union with the beloved Felice, is linked within the correspondence itself to the pain and solitude of writing. But the nature of that link is not as simple as it seems; Kafka's figuration of Zionism and his relationship to it is no less complex. The association of Felice and Zionism is established at the very beginning of Kafka's correspondence with her. In his description of their first encounter at a dinner party, Kafka mentions that in the course of conversation »it transpired that you are a Zionist, and this suited me very well«. 35 Kafka then offered Felice a copy of the Viennese Zionist journal Palästina, which he happened to have brought along, and the two discussed taking a trip together to Palestine. It was this casual conversation that Kafka recalled to Felice in order to inaugurate the correspondence, thus linking their relationship to each other and to Palestine in a way that would never entirely vanish from his letters to her. Following this inaugural move in their relationship, Kafka made several attempts to put Felice in contact with Yitzhak Löwy's troupe of Yiddish actors when they performed in Berlin. But the most direct identification of Felice with Zionism emerges in the correspondence in 1916, as Eastern European Jewish refugees arrived in Berlin in large numbers. From this point onward, Kafka developed an intense investment in Felice's involvement in the Zionist Gegenwartsarbeit project of a Berlin Jewish Home (Jüdisches Volksheim). Felice did volunteer at the Jewish Home upon Kafka's repeated insistence, and his letters to her thereafter attest to his continued obsession with her involvement, as he just as insistently policed her reports to him of her activities there. So while the letters may be taken to provide evidence of Kafka's Zionist 35

Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, October 27, 1912. In: id., Letters to Felice. Ed. by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Trans, by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken 1973, 15.

20

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Spector

»sympathies«, they only do so through Felice: Kafka repeatedly asserts that he himself would be incapable of such an engagement. A third figure that is associated with Felice - and hence with Zionism - is that of »health«, and here again it is contrasted to the writer's own ill health. In Kafka's earliest correspondence, with his schoolmate and friend Oskar Pollak, women and the intercourse with women were identified with »going out«, with escaping from the self-polluted and »ill« atmosphere evoked in the KafkaPollak correspondence and associated with isolation, with writing, and with the correspondence with Pollak itself. In the decade between Kafka's letters to Pollak and the initiation of his correspondence with Felice, his perception of his own weakness and ill health had become much more developed - in spite of the fact that he was not to be diagnosed with tuberculosis until the very end of his correspondence with Felice, in 1917. Early in the exchange of letters, though, Kafka articulates the dichotomy that has long been discussed in relation to the correspondence - it could even be thought of as the binary structuring all discussion of the correspondence: namely the antinomy between health and happiness, marriage and children, on the one side, and solitude and illness, Prague and writing, on the other (thus writing entails sacrifice, it is a form of asceticism, and so on). Thus on November 11, 1912, he explains that he does not heroically leap onto a train to join his beloved because: »My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood.« 36 One does not need to rehearse very long that which is well known: that Kafka's letters describe what he calls an »inner battle« for Felice, which he describes as a conflict between happiness with her, a happiness associated with »reality,« with groundedness and health, and on the other side his illness, his solitude, and his writing. But what must be remembered, and often is not, is that this is not a simple matter of a battle between opposing terms. What Kafka specialists call the »breakthrough« - the single night in September 1912 in which Kafka composed the story »The Judgment« from beginning to end, and after which followed in rapid succession much of the major Kafka fiction - is justifiably associated with the relationship to Felice (hence Kafka's dedication of the story to her). While both writing and illness were self-identifications for Kafka before meeting Felice, neither of these took really concrete form, or came into their own, until his epistolary relationship with her. The »reality« represented by Felice is thus inseparable from the »becoming-real« of this writing, and this illness, even as these are figured to be in opposition to the life and health she embodies. The »inner battle« Kafka thematizes in the letters is thus not simply a struggle between two life choices, but rather describes an intensely painful dialectical process through which the writer Kafka is to emerge. What if - in keeping with the association of Felice and Zion established in the correspondence - we were to think of Kafka's relationship to Zionism in the same way? 36

Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, November 11, 1912, in: ibid., 37.

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To do so, we would have to take as a starting point the construction of Zionism in Kafka's text as a figure of unqualified strength, youth, vigor, territory; one that is diametrically opposed to the weakness pertaining to the assimilated Westjude?1 In a particularly difficult passage of Kafka's diary, in 1922, there is an elliptical reference to the relation of this latter condition and the production of literature. There Kafka's writes obliquely of a »hunt« that he says can also be called »the storming of the last earthly border« (»Ansturm gegen die letzte irdische Grenze«), In a reworking of this passage, Kafka writes: This entire literature is a storming of the borders and it would have - if only Zionism had not gotten in the way - easily been able to develop into a new secret teaching, a Cabbala. 38

Here the territorial ideology of Zionism blocks the creation of a new spiritual language, represented by the metaphor of Jewish mysticism. So we see again what appears to be a clear opposition (of Zionism against writing, territoriality against deterritorialization). This binary seems to be reinforced in Kafka's letters to Felice: even as he urges her to volunteer at the Jewish Home, it is she who becomes identified with the figure of »Zionism« in his letters, while he stands on the other side. The Zionist bank of this apparent chasm is the one charged with »reality«: Only the reality of the Home can teach you anything of importance - any reality, however small [»die kleine und kleinste Wirklichkeit«]. [...] As far as I am concerned, please consider that this work removes you to some extent from me, since - in any case at present, and I am not thinking of my state of health in this connection - I wouldn't be capable of doing this kind of work; I would lack the necessary dedication. 39

It may seem a cruel joke for a lover to have lured Felice into the Jewish Home to please him, only to declare that the engagement will contribute to the gulf between them. Yet, as this letter of September 12, 1916 demonstrates most clearly of all, the distance from Kafka created by this grounding in »reality« (however small) is a necessary step in the overcoming of that distance. He continues: 37

38

39

The notion of Zionism and the Zionist figure of the »muscle Jew« (after Nordau) as an inverse image of the anti-Semitic stereotype was already in currency in this period. Recent literature rethinking this aspect of Jewish identity in interesting ways includes Paul Breines: Tough Jews. Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry. New York: Basic Books 1990; George L. Mosse: The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 (Studies in the History of Sexuality); and most specifically (and provocatively) of all, Daniel Boyarín: Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press 1997 (Contraversions; 8). Kafka, Tagebücher (note 7), 878, January 16, 1922: »Diese ganze Litteratur ist Ansturm gegen die Grenze und sie hätte sich, wenn nicht der Zionismus dazwischen gekommen wäre, leicht zu einer neuen Geheimlehre, einer Kabbala entwickeln können.« Kafka, Letters to Felice (note 36), 500.

22

Scott Spector On the whole I can think of no closer spiritual bond between us than that created by this work. I shall live on every small thing you do, on every difficulty you shoulder... I shall live on every one of these things, as on your last letter. As far as I can see, it is positively the only path, or threshold to it, that can lead to spiritual liberation. [»Es ist, soviel ich sehe, der absolut einzige Weg oder die Schwelle des Weges, der zu einer geistigen Befreiung fuhren kann.«] 40

Felice (or »Zionism«) does not represent a territorialized existence in stark opposition to Kafka's ephemeral one, as much as she/it offers the promise of a bridge to »spiritual liberation«. The East European pupils, of course, are not the beneficiaries of this liberation, but rather effect it in their bourgeois Western Jewish teachers (or »helpers«, as Kafka consistently refers to them). The Gegenwartsarbeit or charitable work of the Berlin Home is precisely this work of opening up the possibility of some kind of spiritual transformation. This function of »Zionism« was alluded to in a postcard to Felice from Kafka the previous month, on August 2, where he stated that Felice need not worry about her commitment to Zionism itself before getting involved in the Home: Through the Jewish Home other forces, much nearer to my heart, are set in motion and take effect. Zionism, accessible to most Jews of today, at least in its outer fringes, is but an entrance to something far more important. 41

Zionism is not the impossible dream, but rather something fully accessibleonly it is itself not the ultimate object, but the »entrance« to something far less accessible but more important. As he would write in the September 12 letter, it is itself not the path to liberation as much as the »threshold« to it. Both these images evoke the famous threshold or entrance to the Law in one of the most well-known Kafka writings, the fragment from The Trial known as »Before the Law«. The Law itself is never glimpsed in the parable, which itself, belonging to »the introductory writings to the Law«, stands before - or at the threshold of - a fully inaccessible text. Kafka identified the Zionist kernel of the Jewish home in its »youthful vigorous method, youthful vigor generally«, in the same breath as he confessed that he might not be a Zionist, upon »examination«. And yet it is necessary to embrace Zionism, or to wish to embrace it, to wish powerfully for redemption through it: to come straight through Zionist ideology to come out in a place far away from territory. Surely this complex set of relations is best described as dialectical. Kafka's Zionism and Kafka's Felice are, in the last analysis, neither objects of identification/desire nor are they figured in diametrical opposition to a »writerly« Kafka. They are figures to which Kafka was powerfully and painfully drawn, but which he would never fully grasp; they would come to represent necessary passages to something beyond themselves. 40 41

Ibid., emphasis added. Ibid., 482 (»Es kommen durch das Volksheim andere Kräfte in Gang und Wirkung, an denen mir vielmehr gelegen ist. Der Zionismus, wenigstens in einem äußern Zipfel, den meisten lebenden Juden erreichbar, ist nur der Eingang zu dem Wichtigern.«)

Niels Bokhove

»The Entrance to the More Important.« Kafka's Personal Zionism

Introduction In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer of August 1916 Kafka wrote these puzzling words: »Der Zionismus, wenigstens in einem äußern Zipfel, den meisten lebenden Juden erreichbar, ist nur der Eingang zu dem Wichtigern.«] What did Kafka mean by this? Zionism as the entrance to something more important? I would like to attempt to solve this puzzle. On my way to an answer I will try to give an adequate and more differentiated alternative to the allegations that Kafka was either a Zionist or not a Zionist or maybe something in between. His friend Max Brod asserted that Kafka eventually became a Zionist, though not in a practical or political, but rather in a private sense. One of his schoolmates called him an »enthusiastic Zionist« without any hesitation.2 To achieve my goal, I will follow three lines: first, Kafka's relation to Zionism in itself; second, his attitudes to Hassidic East-European Jewry; and third, his interest in horticulture. Kafka's curious words quoted above refer to a feuilleton in the Jüdische Rundschau, which for him showed a »merkwürdige zionistische Stimmung«.3 At the same time, he urged Felice to work as a volunteer in the Jüdisches Volksheim (Jewish People's Home) in Berlin. Referring to this kind of interest and activity, many Kafka scholars, starting with his close friend Max Brod, have 1

2

3

Franz Kafka: Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Mit einer Einleitung und hg. von Erich Heller. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1967, 675 (my emphasis). - In her well documented article, »Franz Kafka - The Jewish Context«, in: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 23 (1978), 227-238, here 230, Helen Milfull also quotes this passage, but hardly considers its meaning. Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag 1966 (Fischer-Bücherei; 735), 271; Zdenko Vanëk: Erinnerungen eines Mitschülers. In: »Als Kafka mir entgegenkam ...« Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch. Berlin: Wagenbach 1995, 37. Brod, wishing to present Kafka as an unambiguous Zionist, later quoted this passage. See Max Brod: Der Prager Kreis. Mit einem Nachwort von Peter Demetz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1979 (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch; 547), 130. Bergmann only mentioned it in passing. See Schmuel Hugo Bergmann: Tagebücher und Briefe. Hg. von Miriam Sambursky. Mit einer Einleitung von Nathan Rotenstreich. Eine Veröffentlichung des Leo Baeck Instituts. Königstein/Ts: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum 1985, vol. 2, 490. Kafka, Briefe an Feiice (note 1), 675.

24

Niels Bokhove

asserted that Kafka had been a full-fledged Zionist. Another close friend, Felix Weltsch, called him »ein glühender Zionist«.4 Brod was convinced that Kafka's Zionism becomes obvious if one reads his diary notes on the Yiddish theater group or literary fragments like »Das Synagogentier«. It is very spurious reasoning, which Brod also applied in his well-known study: Franz Kaflcas Glauben und Lehre of 1948. Curiously, the term Zionism does not appear anywhere in his subsequent study of Kafka of 1959, Verzweiflung und Erlösung im Werk Franz Kafkas. Weltsch even talked about Kafka's »human-universal humanistically oriented Zionism«. 5 Brod and Weltsch6 obviously made the mistake of linking Zionism to the process of Kafka's becoming aware of his Jewish roots and to his becoming Jewish as well. These, however, do not automatically imply a Zionist inclination. Take for example the very committed Jews - Jewishly conscious Jews - who at this time opposed Zionism. It is erroneous to treat Judaism as identical with Zionism.7

The Beginnings Only a few years after the publication of Theodor Herzl's fundamental work, Der Judenstaat of 1896, the first Zionist meeting in Prague took place in the »Produktenbörse« on April 24, 1899. Two guests from Vienna spoke on Zionism as the last phase of the Diaspora and talked about their travel impressions of Palestine. After some interruptions by Czech nationalists, who demanded that the talks be given in Czech, the first speaker finished his presentation, in which he described the miserable situation of the Galician Jews and the need for them and all other Jews to seek refuge in Palestine. His successor behind the pulpit did not get his chance, as the same nationalists protested again, after which the police broke up the meeting. 8 Of course, this meeting and Herzl's program were not the beginning of Zionism. This path had been prepared since the beginning of the 19th century. There existed two streams in Jewish-national culture. The first was represented by Moses Hess. It combined Jewish Enlightenment with Hassidism and was socialist in outlook. His major work in this regard, Rom und Jerusalem ( 1862), is found on a booklist of Kafka from June 1923, in an edition introduced by Bergmann. The other stream was represented by Ahad Ha-am. His goal was to

4

5

6

7 8

Felix Weltsch: Franz Kafka gestorben. In: Als Kafka mir entgegenkam ... (note 2), 9-11, here 9 Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 270-278; Cf. Brod, Der Prager Kreis (note 2), 108f., 117. Felix Weltsch: Entretiens avec Dora Dymant. Manuscript, 1949/50, Felix Weltsch Archive, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem), [2], See Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 270f. Eine aufgelöste Zionistenversammlung. In: Bohemia, April 25, 1899.

Kafka 's Personal Zionism

25

unify and rejuvenate the Jewish people. Birnbaum and Buber were decisively influenced by this spiritual and cultural orientation. 9 Partly as a reaction to German nationalism, Kafka's schoolmate and friend Hugo Bergmann became a Zionist early on. In 1899 he joined the Bar Kochba Zionist association. At this time, Kafka was becoming an atheist and a socialist. This divergence was one of the causes for the break in their relationship. Later, when they met each other again at the university, Kafka seemed to be critically interested in Bergmann's choice for Zionism, calling it an »idee fixe«. Kafka asked him with some derision about his motives, and Bergmann answered him in a letter of 1902. Although he first pointed to Kafka's tendency to solitude, Bergmann confessed: Es war mein Erbteil, daß ich mich nach anderen sehnte [...]. Glaube ja nicht, es wäre Mitleid, das mich zum Zionisten gemacht hat. Mein Zion ist ein gutes Stück Egoismus. [...] Und so ist mir der Zionismus der Ausdruck für meine Sehnsucht nach Liebe. 10

Despite Bergmann's example, Kafka appeared to keep his distance from Zionism. (And, inspite of Kafka's distant attitude, his position appeared not to be so clear to one of his other schoolmates, as noted already above.) More than fifteen years later Kafka explicitly recognized Bergmann's importance for Zionism. 11 In the next ten years or so Kafka's relation to his Jewish origins, let alone to Zionism, was rather superficial. In general, Zionism was not very alive in Prague, where the joke circulated: »If the ceiling were to fall down in a certain café, the entire Zionist movement in Prague would be destroyed.« In his »Brief an den Vater« of 1919, he criticized his father for being an assimilated Jew, practising his beliefs as a >Viertagenjudeideas< at the same time, as demonstrated in the lives o f many Talmudists, authors, or philosophers, e. g. like Spinoza grinding lenses. Sholem A l e i c h e m called these Jews »Luftmenschen«. Probably Kafka w a s thinking o f this word when he coined the term »Lufthunde« in »Forschungen eines Hundes«. 6 7

Zionism and Jewishness Almost directly after his work in the Pomological Institute, in the first week o f September 1913, Kafka travelled to Vienna to attend a congress, relevant for his professional work. At the same time the 11 th World Zionist Congress was taking place there. Kafka bought tickets and attended the session on September 8 th . A l s o attending this Congress w a s Kafka's future publisher Salman Schocken. David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann were o f course also in attendance. 6 8 In his travel diary he wrote regarding the Congress as follows: Der Typus kleiner runder Köpfe, fester Wangen. Der Arbeiterdelegierte aus Palästina, ewiges Geschrei. Tochter Herzls. Der frühere Gymnasialdirektor von Jaffa. Aufrecht auf einer Treppenstufe, verwischter Bart, bewegter Rock. Ergebnislose deutsche Reden, viel hebräisch, Hauptarbeit in den kleinen Sitzungen. Lise W. [Weltsch] läßt sich vom Ganzen nur mitschleppen, ohne dabei zu sein, wirft Papierkügelchen in den Saal, trostlos. 69 One cannot call this a very positive or enthusiastic description. In a letter from the same time he w a s still more explicit: Im Zionistischen Kongreß bin ich wie bei einer gänzlich fremden Veranstaltung dagesessen, allerdings war ich durch manches beengt und zerstreut gewesen [...] und wenn ich auch nicht gerade Papierkugeln auf die Delegierten hinuntergeworfen habe, wie ein Fräulein auf der gegenüberliegenden Galerie, trostlos genug war ich. 70 67

68

69 70

Theun de Vries: Spinoza. Beeldenstormer en Wereldbouwer. Amsterdam [s. a.], 78. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 446ff.; source for S. Aleichem: Mischket Liebermann: Aus dem Ghetto in die Welt. Autobiographie. Berlin: Verlag der Nation 1977, together with Isaac Deutscher: Marc Chagall und die jüdische Vorstellungswelt. In: id., Der nichtjüdische Jude. Essays. Mit einem Beitrag von Tamara Deutscher und einer Einführung von Detlev Claussen. Berlin: Rotbuch 1988, quoted in: Die jüdische Welt von gestern 1860-1938. Text- und Bild-Zeugnisse aus Mitteleuropa. Hg. von Rachel Salamander. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1998 (dtv; 30700), 95. Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des XI. Zionisten-Kongresses in Wien vom 2. bis 9. Sept. 1913. Hg. vom Zionistischen Aktionskomitee. Berlin, Leipzig 1914, 5f. - The editors of Franz Kafka. Eine Chronik (Berlin: Wagenbach 1999, 107), conjecture that Kafka heard the lecture »Jüdische Kulturarbeit in Palästina«, but it seems most likely, given the congress protocol, that Kafka was at the general meeting. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 1063f.; id., Briefe an Felice (note 1), 465. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 18.

36

Niels Bokhove

Kafka obviously was very disappointed by what he witnessed in Vienna. The Neue Freie Presse called the meeting »sehr lebhaft«, 71 a euphemism for the riot-like atmosphere not only described by Kafka, but also apparent from the congress report. The day was divided into three parts, of which the first two were devoted to the Palestine debate, while the evening session focused on »Kulturarbeit«. Kafka's words indicate that he attended the afternoon and also the evening sessions. 72 It is curious that Kafka did not mention one of the keynote speakers of that day, the agronomist Arthur Ruppin. Probably at this occasion he bought Adolf Böhm's Zionistische Palästinaarbeit, a brochure prepared by the Zionist Central Office in Vienna with a picture of the Kinnereth, the Sea of Galilee, on the title page. 73 The seemingly permanent divisive atmosphere between various strands within Zionism, which surfaced at the Zionist Congresses, was criticized by Brod in an article published in Selbstwehr five years later. In his »Krähwinkelei im Zionismus« he lambasted the general habit in Zionist circles of belittling, mocking, and scorning the work of others, instead of forging ahead with one's own job. Kafka read this article and called it »herrlich«. 74 Of course, he remembered his own experiences at the Viennese Zionist Congress: »Ich habe während des Lesens vor Freude Grimassen gemacht. Er ist unerschütterlich, wahr, durchsichtig, erkenntnisreich, zart und außerdem noch blendend.« 75 Behind Kafka's scepticism is of course the alienation between himself and Max Brod, relating as well to Kafka's lack of social faculties. Kafka confessed his »unsocial« nature to Grete Bloch in June 1914 and he linked it to his nonZionist and non-religious Jewishness - for »etwas zähes Judentum« was still in 71

72

73

74

75

Der Zionistenkongreß - Die Palästinafrage. In: Neue Freie Presse, no. 17617, Sept. 9, 1913, 9. The passage on the »Typus« refers to Nahum Sokolow's distinction of three types of delegates (Stenographisches Protokoll [note 73], 241). The workers' delegate must have been S. Tolkowsky from Rechoboth (245). He was frequently interrupted by long shouts, as he disclosed some controversial incidents in Palestine. One example is the neglect of the Herzl House, which may explain Kafka's mentioning of Herzl's daughter (254-259). The »Gymnasialdirektor« from Jaffa was probably a reference to Dr. B. Mossinsohn (313f.). The reference points to the evening discussion on the foundation of a Hebrew University and Library in Jerusalem (29 Iff.). The reference to »Hebräisch« is of course to the contributions in that language, especially the short discussion about the choice of German as the Congress language (292f.; cf. 239, 259f„ 264, 273f., 287-292; cf. 274: »jüdisch«, i. e. Yiddish). Ruppin: 246-254. It is not clear to which passage the pellet throwing refers. Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 9), 109. Not earlier than 1920 did he have in his possession Böhm's well known, two-volume work Die zionistische Bewegung. Eine kurze Darstellung ihrer Entwicklung (Berlin: Welt-Verlag 1920/21), see ibid. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 257, 496; Max Brod: Krähwinkelei im Zionismus. Eine Betrachtung über das innere Leben der Bewegung. In: Selbstwehr 12 (1918), no. 38 (Oct. 11), 2. Cited in: Kafka-Handbuch (note 14), vol. 1, 507f.

Kafka 's Personal

Zionism

37

him, »nur hilft es meistens auf der Gegenseite«.76 Which oppostion or which opponent did he mean here? In any case, his ever present ambivalence is expressed. He noted: »[...] ich bewundere den Zionismus und ekle mich vor ihm.«77 Despite this ambivalence, Jewish themes continued to play a role in his life in the coming war years, notably in Kafka's relationship to Felice Bauer. In May 1916 the >Jüdisches Volksheim< in Berlin, founded by Siegfried Lehmann with Landauer's, Buber's, and Gershom Scholem's help, was opened by Gustav Landauer with a lecture on Judaism and Socialism. The home was meant for children of East European refugee proletarian families and later became a kind of training school for people who played an important role in social and educational work in Eastern Europe and Palestine.78 Only two months after Landauer's lecture, Kafka asked Brod to send a prospectus to Felice, meant as a suggestion to take a job there. He was very concerned about the institution's future, and he was very anxious and impatient to hear about Felice's impressions of this home. Kafka wrote her, in a somewhat mutilated way: »Es kommt mir (und muß auch Dir nicht) auf den Zionismus hiebei ankommen, sondern nur auf die Sache selbst und was sich aus ihr etwa ergibt.«79 At last, when Felice contacted Siegfried Lehmann around mid-August, it pleased him very much.80 Kafka showed a strong interest in a lecture on Jewish-religious education in September 1916, in which Lehmann treated »die Kernfrage« - what question exactly remains unclear - , which according to Kafka »nie ruhen wird, immer wieder den Boden des Zionismus in Unruhe bringen muß«.81 He discussed this matter rather extensively in his letters. Franz warned her not to fear the home's Zionism: »Jedenfalls mußt Du Dich vor dem Jüdischen Volksheim wegen des Zionismus, den Du nicht genügend kennst, nicht fürchten.«82 And he added: »Es kommen durch das Volksheim andere Kräfte in Gang und Wirkung, an denen mir vielmehr gelegen ist.«83 This sentence is followed by the puzzling words I cited at the start. In another letter he went into the matter more extensively:

76 77 78

79 80 81

82 83

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 727. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 598. See Gershom Scholem: Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Jugenderinnerungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1977 (Bibliothek Suhrkamp; 555); see the chapter »Student in Berlin«; and Robert Weltsch: Introduction. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 15 (1970), VIII-XVIII, here XIII; Eike Geisel: Im Scheunenviertel. Bilder, Texte und Dokumente. Berlin: Severin und Siedler 1981, 19f„ 46-^9. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 673. Ibid., 687. Ibid., 694. As to Lehmann's lecture, Kafka meant his »Das Problem der jüdischreligiösen Erziehung und Franz Werfel«, the only lecture given by him in 1916 for the personnel and their guests (Das Jüdische Volksheim Berlin. Erster Bericht, May/Dec. 1916. Berlin 1917, 15; cf. »Über jüdische Erziehung«, 17f.) Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 675. Ibid.

38

Niels Bokhove Mit dem Zionismus hängt es (dies gilt aber nur für mich, muß natürlich gar nicht für Dich gelten) nur in der Weise zusammen, daß die Arbeit im Heim von ihm eine junge kräftige Methode, überhaupt junge Kraft erhält, daß nationales Streben anfeuert, wo anderes vielleicht versagen würde, und daß die Berufung auf die alten ungeheuern Zeiten erhoben wird, allerdings mit den Einschränkungen, ohne die der Zionismus nicht leben könnte. Wie Du mit dem Zionismus zurechtkommst, das ist Deine Sache [...]. [...] solltest Du aber Zionistin einmal Dich fühlen [...] und dann erkennen, daß ich kein Zionist bin [...] dann furchte ich mich nicht und auch Du mußt Dich nicht furchten, Zionismus ist nicht etwas, was Menschen trennt, die es gut meinen. 84

He appreciated the objectives and activities of the Volksheim, but he continued to regard Zionism only as a motor, a stimulus, not as the really important thing. There is too much »Hochmut« in it, he remarked in another letter.85 In this way he challenged Zionism, while categorizing it as a secondary phenomenon. 86 Kafka returned to his reading about Judaism, partly as a consequence of the impact of the Volksheim on him. He read Samuel Lublinski's book on the genesis of Judaism, an issue of the Jüdische Rundschau, mentioned already in this paper, and which contained an article by Brod about the East European war refugees in Prague, and as might be expected, the Volksheim's first report, typed by Felice herself. 87 But, at the same time, his interest in East European Hassidic Jewry was aroused again. He was fascinated by his visit in September 1915 to the Galician »Wunderrabbi« of Grodeck, who had fled from the arena of war to the Prague quarter of Zizkov. Kafka was also very excited by the Beizer Rabbi's visit to Marienbad in July 1916. He reported about it extensively in a slightly ironical, but also admiring way in his diaries and correspondence. In both cases he was accompanied by Georg (Jirí) Langer (1894-1943), originally an assimilated Prague Jew, who had taken on the lifestyle and dress of the orthodox Hassidim. Langer informed Kafka about Hassidic life and told him stories from this culture. In general Kafka had a strong interest for its literature in those years and also later.88

84 85 86

87

88

Ibid., 697f. Ibid., 725. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 149; Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 667, 668, 67If., 676, 683 (cf. 686-689), 694f„ 696ff. (cf. 702, 708, 712), 725 (cf. 700). Samuel Lublinski: Die Entstehung des Judentums. Eine Skizze. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1903. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 674; Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 9), 169; Das Jüdische Volksheim Berlin (last note); Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 701, 708, 724ff. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 751f., cf. Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 137; Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 150-155; Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 666; id., Tagebücher (note 13), 766ff., 776f.; Binder, Kafka-Handbuch (note 14), vol. 1,471 f.

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39

Zürau and after Shortly after he was diagnosed as a tubercular in 1917, Kafka decided to stay for some time with his sister Ottla in Zürau, a little village 70 kilometres west of Prague. A year before, he had written to Felice that in the course of time he had become »aus einem Stadtmenschen ein Landmensch«. 8 9 So it is not surprising that during the period of September 1917 - March 1918 he had, as he wrote to Milena, »vielleicht die beste Zeit« of his life. 90 It was perhaps the happiest time for him, and also the most contemplative. During those eight months he thought about his place in the world as an individual and as a citizen in society and in history. Early in 1917 Ottla had successfully applied for admission to a women's agricultural school in Otterbach-Schärding, but she decided in April to go to Zürau and to take care for the fields in the possession of one of her brothers-inlaw. The property consisted of about 20 rather neglected hectares, consisting of 25 fields, some hop-gardens, and a kitchen-garden. She had dreamt of working in agriculture for a number of years. This desire may have been related to her Zionism, which, according to her brother, went back at least to the early part of 1914. Ottla bought a horse - Kafka advised her to buy a captured Russian one, useless for the war - a pig, goats, and geese. But, several tools failed and there were other problems as well, so Ottla had a rather tough time. 91 Kafka came upon this situation, when he arrived in Zürau in mid-September. In no time he managed to adapt himself to rural life with its own rhythm by completely changing his habits. To Brod he wrote that he lived with Ottla »in kleiner guter Ehe«, which we may designate a »kvutza« or »kibbutz«. 92 Three weeks later he made an essential observation in his diary: Allgemeiner Eindruck der Bauern: Edelmänner, die sich in die Landwirtschaft gerettet haben, wo sie ihre Arbeit so weise und demütig eingerichtet haben, daß sie sich lückenlos ins Ganze fügt und sie vor jeder Schwankung und Seekrankheit bewahrt werden bis zu ihrem seligen Sterben. Wirkliche Erdenbürger. 93

This description contains a number of terms and concepts characteristic for Kafka's work: »Demut« and »Erdenbürger« appear in his aphorisms from his time in Zürau. »Schwankung« and »Seekrankheit« already figured in his early work. But, it is necessary to focus attention on the meanings of these concepts, what they represent, and their context. These concepts - the first two positive, the last 89 90

91

92

93

Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 732. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Milena. Hg. von Jürgen Born. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1983, 36; cf. 98; id., Briefe (note 42), 381f. Hartmut Binder: Kafka und seine Schwester Ottla. In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968), 403^156, here 441. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 163 (These words are sometimes misunderstood as an allusion to incest!) Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 840.

40

Niels Bokhove

two negative - lead to a formula for understanding Kafka's puzzling words in the title of my paper: Zionism as »The Entrance to the More Important«. In his early novella, »Beschreibung eines Kampfes«, Kafka used two metaphors to denote his existential situation: »Seekrankheit auf festem Lande« and »Stange in baumelnder Bewegung«. 94 Both refer to an uncertainty concerning his position in the world. In 1904 he heard a woman next door answering a question posed by his mother in a very self-confident tone; he was amazed by »die Festigkeit mit der die Menschen das Leben zu tragen wissen«, 95 and he incorporated the episode into his novella. The swinging rod, essentially meaning the same - and reminding one of Pascal's representation of man as a thinking reed - , was a favorite image of his, which he repeated in his diary in late 1914: »eine nutzlose, mit Schnee und Reif überdeckte, schief in den Erdboden leicht eingebohrte Stange auf einem bis in die Tiefe aufgewühlten Feld am Rande einer großen Ebene in einer dunklen Winternacht«. 96 Shortly after this time, he elaborated this existential experience in the socalled »Du« fragments, which can probably be read as the continuation, at least thematically, of »Beschreibung eines Kampfes«. 97 A set of related fragments from 191098 is especially relevant here. It contains a rather metaphysical view of the bachelor's existence, of the conditio humana in general. The bachelor has no center of gravity, no profession, no love, and no family; in short, he cannot hold his own in society. The bachelor, the unsuccessful citizen, »hat nichts vor sich und deshalb auch hinter sich nichts«. 99 He stands »außerhalb unseres Volkes, außerhalb unserer Menschheit, [...] ihm gehört nur der Augenblick [...], er hat nur soviel Boden als seine zwei Füße brauchen«. 100 Kafka used the maritime metaphor again in order to compare the successful (mature) citizen with someone traveling by sea, »mit Schaum vor sich und mit Kielwasser hinter sich[,] also mit vieler Wirkung ringsherum«.101 Successful individuals in society, having found a stable place and a useful role in society, are held by [...] unsere Vergangenheit und Zukunft. [...] Was die Zukunft an Umfang voraus hat, ersetzt die Vergangenheit an Gewicht und an ihrem Ende sind ja die beiden nicht mehr zu unterscheiden^] früheste Jugend wird später hell wie die Zukunft ist und 94

95 96 97

98

99 100 101

Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften I (note 9), 89 and 157f.; 62 and 129; cf. id., Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 376. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 12. Brod / Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 705; See Niels Bokhove: »In rook vervlogen.« Kafka's verloren werk, Part 14. In: KafkaKatern 7 (1999), no. 1, 16-19. In his edition of Kafka's diaries, Brod has combined the entries in a certain order (Kafka, Tagebücher [note 13], 112, 116-118, 113-115, 115f., 118f., 124f„ 124, 122, 122f., 125f.) in order to produce a more or less logical text. See Franz Kafka: Tagebücher 1910-1923. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1948, 17-24. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 114. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 114.

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das Ende der Zukunft ist mit allen unseren Seufzern eigentlich schon erfahren und Vergangenheit. So schließt sich der Kreis, an dessen Rand wir entlang gehn. 1 0 2 In his description o f the bachelor's status, Kafka unmistakenly pictured his o w n place in history and society as experienced by him. It is almost exactly the same description w e encounter in his early story »Der Fahrgast« (ca. 1907), where the narrator, sitting in a tram as a metaphor for life as a journey in time, is »vollständig unsicher« 1 0 3 about his position in the world, at home, and in his family. It is perhaps even closer to the famous passage on Christianity and Zionism, written eight years later during his stay in Zürau: Ich bin nicht von der allerdings schon schwer sinkenden Hand des Christentums ins Leben gefuhrt worden wie Kierkegaard und habe nicht den letzten Zipfel des davonfliegenden jüdischen Gebetmantels noch gefangen wie die Zionisten. Ich bin Ende oder Anfang. 1 0 4 A closely related passage is the puzzling one I am trying to clarify here: »Der Zionismus, wenigstens in einem äußern Zipfel, den meisten lebenden Juden erreichbar, ist nur der Eingang zu dem Wichtigern.« 1 0 5 Only t w o years later Kafka applied this image o f isolation to the Jews themselves in a letter to Milena Jesenská: Die unsichere Stellung der Juden, unsicher in sich, unsicher unter den Menschen, würde es über alles begreiflich machen, daß sie nur das zu besitzen glauben dürfen, was sie in der Hand oder zwischen den Zähnen halten, daß ferner nur handgreiflicher Besitz ihnen Recht auf das Leben gibt und daß sie, was sie einmal verloren haben, niemals wieder erwerben werden, sondern daß es glückselig für immer von ihnen fortschwimmt. 1 0 6 He used this metaphor, although a bit more concealed, in a letter to Felice concerning the Volksheim in Berlin, writing that »man doch fur dieses Leben schon einmal in seine Haut eingenäht und zumindest mit eigenen Händen und unmittelbar an diesen Nähten nichts ändern kann«. 1 0 7 Here w e see the same images o f utmost isolation as in the »Du« fragments, the existential uncertainty o f the Jew102 103

104 105 106

107

Ibid., 118f. Franz Kafka: Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch et al. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1994, 27. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 98. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 675. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (note 90), 24-27, cf. 59: »Judenfrage«. - It is remarkable that some terms in this passage already occur ten years earlier in the »Du«-fragments. For example: »Besitz« and »Zähne« (Kafka, Tagebücher [note 13], 113f.). It seems, in one sense, that the bachelor (Kafka) of 1910 became Jewish in the course of that decade. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 697. Franz Werfel's article »Die christliche Sendung«, published in Die neue Rundschau in 1916, marked formally his turn to Christianity. It also was the start of a famous controversy with Max Brod and others. See his Streitbares Leben (note 13), 49-52; Peter Stephan Jungk: Franz Werfel. A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood. New York: Fromm 1991, 47-51.

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ish individual, who only possesses the moment or what he has under his feet and in his hands at that moment. He has neither a past nor a future, neither ancestors nor descendants, standing outside of history. The Western Jew - and Kafka, in his own words, as the most Western of them all - has to conquer the past, the present, and the future. At least, this is what he writes to Milena. Kafka strongly felt that he did not belong to any religious tradition. He could not turn to Christian faith - as Kierkegaard had, and whose work he studied in Zürau, or as Franz Werfel did. Nor was be able to embrace Jewish faith. As end (»Ende«) or beginning (»Anfang«) he did not belong to either of them. He saw himself standing outside tradition and outside history, and outside society as well. Two years later he formulated it in another, but essentially identical way: Dieses Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft habe ich nur äußerst selten überschritten, ich habe mich darin sogar mehr angesiedelt als in der Einsamkeit selbst.108 This border region - perhaps the one Karl Roßmann is traveling to at the close of Der Verschollene or the Bucket rider's destiny - is not far away from loneliness or community, even right in the middle of society. Kafka was undoubtedly using the term »Gemeinschaft« in opposition to »Gesellschaft« in the sense of the contemporary sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, that is, simply, »Gemeinschaft« as respresenting a well-knit, organic rural community opposed to »Gesellschaft«, the individualistic, mechanistic industrial society. This represents the negative side of Kafka's diagnosis of his own situation as a member of society. But, there is also a positive side, in a sense, a remedy to this situation. In short, the solution is that he would like to lead a natural life like the Zürau farmers, the »Erdenbürger«, in total harmony with nature, with the earth. This life would preclude questions like »Was soll ich tun? oder Wozu soll ich es tun?« They would have no place there. The results of his thinking about this remedy may be found in the Zürau aphorisms. He despairs that »der Boden auf dem Du stehst, nicht größer sein kann, als die zwei Füße ihn bedecken«. 109 He would like to turn his despair into happiness. This wording is almost identical to the wording in the »Du« fragments! He yearns to change his feelings of »Seekrankheit auf festem Lande« and of »Hier ankere ich nicht«, into the positive experience of what he refers to as »die wogende, tragende Flut um sich«. 110 The basic attitude of the Zürau farmers, the »Erdenbürger«, is »Demut« (humility). Kafka regarded »Demut« as a very potent social instrument: Die Demut gibt jedem, auch dem einsam Verzweifelnden, das stärkste Verhältnis zum Mitmenschen und zwar sofort, allerdings nur bei völliger und dauernder Demuth. Sie kann das deshalb, weil sie die wahre Gebetsprache ist, gleichzeitig Anbetung und festeste Verbindung. Das Verhältnis zum Mitmenschen ist das Verhältnis

108 109 110

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 871. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 46, 118 (no. 24). Ibid., 68, 129 (no. 76).

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des Gebetes, das Verhältnis zu sich das Verhältnis des Strebens. Aus dem Gebet wird die Kraft für das Streben geholt. 111 K a f k a p e r c e i v e d that humility h a d a religious connotation: f o r h i m it w a s a f o r m o f praying. In this context it m a y b e w o r t h r e m e m b e r i n g that K a f k a felt that his writing w a s his very p e r s o n a l gift to his f e l l o w h u m a n , his existential legitimation: » S c h r e i b e n als F o r m des G e b e t e s . « 1 1 2 In K a f k a ' s v i e w p r a y e r m a k e s humility possible. M o r e o v e r , p r a y e r p r e s u p p o s e s faith: » G l a u b e n heißt: das U n z e r s t ö r b a r e in sich b e f r e i e n o d e r richtiger: sich b e f r e i e n o d e r richtiger: u n z e r s t ö r b a r sein o d e r richtiger: sein.« 1 1 3 T h i s is o n e o f his f r e q u e n t l y q u o t e d a p h o r i s m s . It m e a n s that h u m a n life c o m e s d o w n to »das U n z e r s t ö r b a r e « . It is the heart, the »rock b o t t o m « of K a f k a ' s thought, b e it religious or not: Der Mensch kann nicht leben ohne ein dauerndes Vertrauen zu etwas Unzerstörbarem, wobei sowohl das Unzerstörbare als auch das Vertrauen ihm dauernd unbekannt bleiben können. Eine der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten dieses Verborgen-Bleibens ist der Glaube an einen persönlichen Gott. 1 1 4 T h e question o f K a f k a ' s religiosity is not t h e issue here. T h e question o f his Z i o n i s m is difficult e n o u g h to a n s w e r . A t the s a m e time, » d a s U n z e r s t ö r b a r e « is in his v i e w the f o u n d a t i o n f o r social relations, b e c a u s e , as h e writes: Das Unzerstörbare ist eines, jeder einzelne Mensch ist es und gleichzeitig ist es allen gemeinsam. Daher die beispiellos untrennbare Verbindung der Menschen. 1 1 5 T h e ideas of » d a s U n z e r s t ö r b a r e « and o f a t r a n s c e n d e n t c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n all h u m a n beings are classic t h e m e s in p h i l o s o p h y . F o r e x a m p l e , they m a y b e f o u n d in S c h o p e n h a u e r , w h o s e w o r k w a s k n o w n to K a f k a . In fact, K a f k a linked humility to a concept of »das Unzerstörbare« as well. 1 1 6 O f c o u r s e it is a 111 112 113 114 115

116

Ibid., 96 and 138f. (no. 106); cf. ibid., 112. Ibid., 354. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 58, 124. Ibid., 66. Cf. ibid., 65: »Theoretisch gibt es eine vollkommene Glücksmöglichkeit: An das Unzerstörbare in sich glauben und nicht zu ihm streben.« (I agree with Brod, who called aphorism no. 50 the central sentence of Kafka's »lore« [Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 235, 313].) Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II.2, esp. chap. 41: »Ueber den Tod und sein Verhältnis zur Unzerstörbarkeit unseres Wesens an sich«; Julius Frauenstädt: Schopenhauer-Lexicon. Ein philosophisches Wörterbuch nach Arthur Schopenhauer's sämmtlichen Schriften und handschriftlichem Nachlaß. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1871, vol. I, 113. Kafka knew Schopenhauer's work rather well. Brod was a Schopenhauerian in his youth and possessed Rudolf Steiner's edition of Schopenhauer's complete works, containing Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Parerga und Paralipomena (Born, Kafkas Bibliothek [note 9], 128-130). In 1916 Kafka together with Ottla read Schopenhauer's essay »Zur Rechtslehre und Politik« (Parerga und Paralipomena, chap. IX) on »das Maß der Arbeit« (Binder, Kafka und seine Schwester Ottla [note 96], 432). Here we find again the labor theme. On Kafka

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very traditional concept, although perhaps in another or new form. It recalls concepts of the »soul«, or »radius« (Spinoza), and the like. But more interesting in this context is that »das Unzerstörbare« is exactly the quality Kafka attributed to the woman next door, talking to his mother with so much »Festigkeit«. It is the quality ascribed to the Zürau farmers, the »Edelmänner«, the »Erdenbürger«, the people with enough »Boden« beneath their feet, that is those who have a presence and are connected to a past and a future. In this way, they are inhabitants of two worlds, both the terrestrial and the celestial. Kafka described this in aphorism no. 66: Er ist ein freier und gesicherter Bürger der Erde, denn er ist an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben und doch nur so lang, daß nichts ihn über die Grenzen der Erde reißen kann. Gleichzeitig aber ist er auch ein freier und gesicherter Bürger des Himmels, denn er ist auch an eine ähnlich berechnete Himmelskette gelegt. Will er nun auf die Erde, drosselt ihn das Halsband des Himmels, will er in den Himmel jenes der Erde. Und trotzdem hat er alle Möglichkeiten und fühlt es [...]. 117

Not only does the concept of »das Unzerstörbare« exist in a tradition, but so does that of »Demut«. Not only does humility have a religious connotation in Christianity, but it also does in Hassidism, where it is called »shiflut«. Here, it does not mean self-belittlement but rather »Selbstvergessenheit«, as Kafka called it himself, e. g. already in the early »Du« fragments. 118 Only if humans stop thinking of themselves can they be a real part of his context, both social and cosmic. 119 To conclude my selective exegesis, based upon these essential aphorisms and commentary which help clarify Kafka's concepts of »Demut« and »Erdenbürger« as utilized in his Zürau period, I wish to adumbrate one last philosophical issue, which is related to the last aphorism quoted above: the problem of free will, which was precisely the main philosophical interest of Kafka's friend Felix Weltsch, with whom he maintained a rather frequent and also abstract correspondence during his stay in Zürau. 120 According to the general view of Kafka, Weltsch, and Brod, real free will was free will in restraint and

117 118 119

120

and Schopenhauer, see: T. J. Reed: Kafka und Schopenhauer. Philosophisches Denken und dichterisches Bild. In: Euphorion 59 (1965), 160-172. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 63, 127f. Ibid., 64. L. J.: Basic Ideas in Hasidism, in: Hasidism. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Keter 1971, vol. 7, 1404. Kafka sometimes called it »Selbstabschüttelung« oder »Selbstaufzehrung«. See Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 77. See Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 160-241 passim, esp. 187. - Weltsch's part of the correspondence, now in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (Die KafkaSammlung Hélène Zylberberg. Redaktion: Petra Plättner. Berlin: Kulturstiftung der Länder 1996 [Patrimonia; 103], 14f., 17), has been presented in excerpts by Margarita Pazi (Felix Weltsch - Die schöpferische Mitte. In: Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 13 [1974], 51-75).

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this restraint is identical to humility.121 Perhaps here is the key to the strange words about Zionism as the entrance to the more important as expressed in Kafka's letter to Felice. The »Erdenbürger«, who are firmly rooted in the earth and at the same time are connected to a spiritual realm, are in possession of the key to that entrance. Both realms constitute the ideal context for the socially successful citizen. In this way Zionism may be the instrument or the road to »the good life« in a philosophical sense. This interpretation is reminiscent of the possible meaning of »Vor dem Gesetz«, written a few years earlier. Kafka was striving for an understanding of the law of human relations. Theoretically, there should have been a place in society reserved especially for him - as for every normally functioning human being; but, he did not succeed in understanding or internalizing the rules required for occupying that place, which would permit him to be firmly rooted in society and history. This is owing to »das Unzerstörbare«, which is the fundamental, underlying factor of the existence of individuals and their relationship to fellow-individuals. Kafka's ultimate objective is beautifully put into words in another letter from Zürau to Felice Bauer. Kafka obviously liked this particular formulation very much, for he cited it literally both in a letter to Brod and in his own diary: Wenn ich mich auf mein Endziel hin prüfe, so ergibt sich, daß ich nicht eigentlich danach strebe ein guter Mensch zu werden und einem höchsten Gericht zu entsprechen, sondern, sehr gegensätzlich, die ganze Menschen- und Tiergemeinschaft zu überblicken, ihre grundlegenden Vorlieben, Wünsche, sittlichen Ideale zu erkennen, sie auf einfache Vorschriften zurückzuführen und mich in ihrer Richtung möglichst bald dahin zu entwickeln, daß ich durchaus allen wohlgefällig würde [...]. 122

Kafka's stay in Zürau pleased him so much - the kitchen-garden would gradually become his territory - that not two months after his arrival, Ottla could write to her fiancé: Falls möglich, kann er bis zum Ende des Krieges in Zürau bleiben und dann sich ein kleines Häuschen kaufen, irgendwo auf dem Dorf und dazu eine kleine Landwirtschaft. Vielleicht nur einen Garten und ein Feld für Kartoffeln, damit er eine Beschäftigung hat. Das ist tatsächlich alles, was er sich wünscht. 1 2 3 121

122

123

Brod, Streitbares Leben (note 13), 47f.; id., Der Prager Kreis (note 2), 154-159. Until 1918 Brod thought that Jewry was identical with free will (Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft [note 13], 243, 245f.). Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 755 (my emphasis); Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 178; Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 839. It reminds one of the three parts of the social world, distinguished by Kafka in his Brief an den Vater. one part ruled by »Gesetzen, die nur für mich erfunden waren und denen ich überdies, ich wußte nicht warum, niemals völlig entsprechen konnte«; one part ruled by his father; and one part, »wo die übrigen Leute glücklich und frei von Befehlen und Gehorchen lebten« (Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II [note 9], 156). At the same time he wrote »Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie«, treating in literary form exactly the same subject as formulated in the letter to Felice. Binder, Kafka und seine Schwester Ottla (note 96), 443, 445; Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 318.

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Think of the possibility: Kafka's exit as a writer and his entrance as a potato farmer! It is hardly conceivable!

»Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft« But there is more to this story. A few days before leaving Zürau for Prague in April 1918, Kafka seems to have summarized his rather abstract contemplations in a very concrete scheme of a community, constituting a stylistic break in his notebooks: »Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft«, divided into two sections, »Duties« and »Rights«. 124 It is a curious text, reminding one of the kibbutz (see the »Datteln« in Kafka's scheme) or close to communism or giving a »communistic« impression. Kafka had mentioned the Russian Revolution in the preceding year in a letter to Brod of November 1917. Now Kafka emphasized several elements: the primacy of labor, minimal property possession, and mutual trust. Essentially, the text is a plea for humility, emphasized by obedience to the community leaders, combined with personal responsibility and attention to the poor and weak. It seems to stand completely apart from the Zürau contemplations, but a closer look proves the contrary. It is in fact their logical continuation and synthesis. As a whole, this scheme seems to constitute a design for a community suitable for at least Kafka to live in. His contemplative activity in Zürau and the aphorisms resulting from it were devoted to his place and function, to the legitimation of his terrestrial existence among his fellow human beings. A few days earlier he noted: Niemand schafft hier mehr als seine geistige Lebensmöglichkeit; daß es den Anschein hat, als arbeite er für seine Ernährung, Kleidung u. s. w. ist nebensächlich, es wird ihm eben mit jedem sichtbaren Bissen auch ein unsichtbarer, mit jedem sichtbaren Kleid auch ein unsichtbares Kleid u. s. f. gereicht. [...] Allerdings muß jeder Mensch sein Leben rechtfertigen können. 125

This scheme is the necessary context for this legitimation. The section entitled »Rights« of Kafka's draft contains a notable formulation, although it is somewhat isolated: »Das Arbeitsleben als eine Angelegenheit des Gewissens und eine Angelegenheit des Glaubens an den Mitmenschen.« 1 2 6 It may be viewed as Kafka's credo and as the draft's foundation. Labor figures both as a duty, that is, as a matter of conscience, and as a means to establish bonds with fellow human beings. »Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft« appears to be a plan for a community, which would realize Kafka's ideas and principles formulated in the preceding 124 125 126

Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 105f. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 106.

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aphorisms. But in regard to Kafka's emphasis on labor, one may suppose that there is a source outside these aphorisms, namely the thought of Aharon D. Gordon (1856-1922). He was a disciple of Tolstoy, as was Kafka, and a Zionist thinker, who would die two years later in Degania. In March/April 1920 Kafka was introduced to him by the typographer and publisher Moshe Spitzer, during a conference of the Zeire Zion and Hapo 'el Haza 'ir (The Young Worker Party), sometimes incorrectly called Gordon's party (its weekly was called Die Arbeit), in the Prague Lucerna. Hugo Bergmann, scheduled to emigrate to Palestine the next month and one of Gordon's admirers and his later editor, was also present. Robert Weltsch prepared the way for Gordon's speech by writing in the Selbstwehr. Nicht durch politische Mittel und nicht durch Geld vermögen wir das Land zu erobern, sondern durch Schweiß und Blut, durch unserer Hände Arbeit}21

For the most part, Gordon articulated a romantic kind of intuitionistic philosophy, many elements of which are very much akin to aspects characteristic of Kafka's aphorisms. Relevant in this context is Gordon's emphasis on nature and the earth as the proper environment for humans. His credo was: »Our road leads to nature through the medium of physical labor.« He elaborated his so called »religion of labor« in an article which appeared in the first issue of Buber's Der Jude in April 1916. Kafka originally had a copy of it in his library. According to Gordon, the Jewish people at present are completely alienated from the earth and from working the soil: Uns fehlt das Wesentliche: die Arbeit, - nicht die aus Zwang, sondern die, mit der sich der Mensch organisch und natürlich verbunden fühlt und durch die das Volk seinem Boden und seiner in Boden und Arbeit wurzelnden Kultur verwachsen ist. 128

Labor could be »die Brücke des Lebens, die lebendige Brücke zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit« and, at the same time, »ein Ideal der Zukunft«. 129 This component had been missing for Kafka, and it was tantamount to his reinstatement into history. To Gordon it was clear that »der Schriftsteller, der Dichter darüber nachsinnen sollte, wieviel ihm die Arbeit zu geben imstande wäre«. 130 Did Kafka feel addressed himself? For Gordon, physical labor and 127

128

129 130

Gordon's speech on March 25 was published in Selbstwehr 14 (1920), no. 14 (April 2), 5 (cf. 7f. and id. 14 [1920], no. 17 [April 23], 4). For Gordon's romanticism, e. g. the organic unity of man and cosmos, an ambivalent attitude toward human ratio, the individual as the source of religion, etc. see S. H. Bergmann: Gordon, Aharon David. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica (note 124), vol. 7, 792; Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 9), 169 (cf. Werner Hoffmann: »Ansturm gegen die letzte irdische Grenze«. Aphorismen und Spätwerk Kafkas. Bern, München: Francke 1984, 266. A. D. Gordon: Arbeit. In: Der Jude 1 (1916/17), no. 1 (April), 37^43, here 38, 40f„ 41,42. Ibid. Ibid.

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working the land were the alpha and omega of the efforts to settle Palestine and rejuvenate the Jewish people. 131 Kafka's thinking about his problematical place in history and society did not miss its effect. In Zürau the three loose strands presented in my paper Zionism, Hassidism, and horticulture - combined into one thread. Perhaps Kafka's Odradek plays a hidden role here! Almost immediately after his return to Prague, Kafka sent Ottla advice regarding manure and vegetables. In the meantime, he had seen some »Schreber« gardens at the edge of Prague, and he was no longer so proud of their Zürau garden. He made an effort to send Ottla information on horticultural schools, and he resumed his voluntary work at the Pomological Institute near Troja. 132 In September he stayed a few weeks in a sanatorium in North-Bohemian Turnau (now Turnov), working by day in the local commercial market-garden of Karel Maschek. This garden, founded in 1873 by his father Vojtëch and Karel Korselt, was the largest in Bohemia and famous throughout Europe and also in Persia, America, and Australia. Maschek Jr. was a very astute businessman, bought some new grounds, built a big family house and also many operational buildings, and founded a »tree nursery«. Interesting in relation to Kafka's illness is the fact that Maschek was also a medical doctor and he ran his own private hospital. Kafka wrote to Minze Eisner two years later, Maschek's firm was already »ein wenig im Niedergang und weit entfernt von deutscher Präcisionswirtschaft«. 133 These activities show Kafka's intense involvement in horticulture since his Zürau experiences. And, it continued in the following years. From November 1918 until March of the next year, Ottla attended a course at the Landwirtschaftliche Winterschule in Friedland, also in North Bohemia. She had to present a paper and was advised by her brother to use a rather renowned study on land reform: Adolf Damaschke's Die Bodenreform, first published in 1902 and followed by many reprints. Probably Kafka's interest in this book was aroused

131

132

133

Robert Weltsch: Hapoel hazair und die jüdische Wiedergeburt. In: Selbstwehr 14 (1920), no. 12 (March 19), 1. Regarding Kafka and Tolstoy, Tolstoy's Der Fremde und der Bauer (1918) was in Kafka's library (Born, Kafkas Bibliothek [note 9], 50; in Zürau he read Der Morgen des Gutsbesitzers (1901), cf. Binder, KafkaHandbuch [note 14], vol. 1, 517-519). Cf. Erich Gottgetreu: They knew Kafka. In: Jerusalem Post, June 14, 1974. Binder was the first to point to the connection with Gordon (id., Kafka-Handbuch [note 14], vol. 1, 506f.); Bergmann, Tagebücher und Briefe (note 2), vol. I, 143f., cf. 252 and vol. II, 24-28. Kafka, Briefe an Ottla (note 62), 53f., 55ff.; Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 148; cf. Ernst Weiß on Franz Kafka to his partner Rahel Sanzara, June 1918, cited in: J. Schneider: »Der böse Pharisäer«. Ernst Weiß' verhouding tot Franz Kafka. In: Kafka-Katern 7 (1999), no. 2/3, 55-57, here 57. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 301 (dating after id., Briefe an Ottla [note 62], 198). - In 1988 two thirds of the garden had to yield to a new motor-way. At present some unique trees are left, preserved by the state. I thank Mrs. Jana Jirásková of the Information Centre of Turnov and Mrs. Baukje Boonstra of the Dutch Foundation Twinning Cities Reeuwijk-Turnov for information on the Maschek firm.

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by Brod's review of it in 1915 in Selbstwehr, and the chapter on land reform in Israel appeared in 1916 in the same journal. Also, Brod lectured on it to the Galician refugees in Prague in 1916. Damaschke, founder of the >Bund Deutscher Bodenreformen in 1898, saw the solution of the social question of poverty not in mammonism or communism, but in a radical land reform as a necessary condition, including the abolishment of large landlordism. Its core would be the collectivization of the ground-rent. 134 Its meaning for Zionism became clear at the Zionist Congress in 1903, when Damaschke's ideology was declared the basis of the policy of the future Jewish state. Directly from it originated the guidelines of the Jewish National Fund, which Kafka endorsed in 1920.135 There is a horticultural connection to Minze Eisner, as well. Kafka met this Jewish girl in Schelesen in late 1919, and he maintained a lively correspondence with her. At the time, she was looking for an agricultural education and he gave her advice. Schools in Holzminden in Braunschweig, Großpriesen, Opladen (a Jewish one) near Cologne, and even schools in the Netherlands were suggested. He mentioned an advertisement of the »Immenhof (Henny Rosenthal), Deutsches Reich, Dessow, Mark«, 136 which he remembered having seen in a Jewish journal two years before. Kafka's knowledge in this field was quite extensive. Early 1920 he wrote her: Vor mir liegt ein Bericht über die »Ahlemer Gartenbauschule« mit Bildern. Nun dort ist es prachtvoll und zu meinem nächsten Geburtstag wünsche ich mir nichts Besseres als 19jährig zu werden und nach Ahlem - das ist nämlich Ihre Simonsche Schule - zu kommen. Die Gartenbauschule für Mädchen ist übrigens erst seit Kriegsende eingerichtet, bis dahin gab es nur eine Knabengartenbau- und eine Mädchenhaushaltungsschule. Auch das verstärkt vielleicht die Hoffnung, daß Sie angenommen werden. Möge es bald sein! 137

The »Israelitische (later called »Jüdische«) Gartenbauschule« in Ahlem near Hannover was founded in 1883 by the banker Alexander Moritz Simon (1837-1905) and became functional ten years later. Originally only for boys, a girls' section was opened in 1914. Its main objective, simply, was to instruct and promote »Hand- und Fabrikarbeit, Handwerk, Landwirtschaft, Gartenund Obstbau unter den Israeliten in größerem Umfange«. 1 3 8 Its three-year 134

135

136 137 138

See Α. Damaschke: Die Bodenreform. Grundsätzliches und Geschichtliches zur Erkenntnis und Überwindung der sozialen Not. Jena: Fischer 1912, 61 f. Brod, [Review of Α. Damaschke, Die Bodenreform (10th ed.)]. In: Selbstwehr 9 (1915) no. 43; Α. Damaschke: Die Bodenreform in Israel, I—II. In: Selbstwehr 10 (1916), no. 1 (Jan. 7), 4-7, and no. 2 (Jan. 14), 1-2. It is a remarkable and ironical fact, that Damaschke became a candidate for Germany's presidency in November 1919, as announced in e . g . Schnitzer's Reformblatt für Gesundheitspflege 23 (1919), No. 270 (Dec.), 3158f. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 257f., 260, 265. Ibid., 263f. E. G. Lowenthal: The Ahlem Experiment. A Brief Survey of the »Jüdische Gartenbauschule«. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 24 (1969), 165-181, 168,

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curriculum included agriculture and horticulture in addition to regular subjects (also religion), but at least in its initial phase, no special subject was offered related to the specific soil or conditions in Palestine, with the exception that special attention was devoted to its geography. This appears a bit odd, since the school enjoyed financial support from the Jewish Colonisation Association. Many pupils at the school came from Eastern Europe. Of the more then 400 pupils, who had left the school by 1932, fewer than 10 % had emigrated to Palestine. At first, Minze was not admitted, but at last she succeeded and entered the school in the autumn of 1920. Kafka wrote her in an optimistic mood: » [ V i e l leicht werden Sie selbst noch einmal einen Balken von Ahlem nach Palästina tragen.« 139 He wanted to know everything about her experience: Sind lauter Jüdinnen in der Anstalt? Und die Lehrer Juden? Von den Jungens schreiben Sie gar nicht. Wie weit ist Hannover? Man kann frei hinfahren? (Dieses Judentum übrigens, das so hochmütig auf die Deutschen hinunterschaut, ist mehr als ich wollte. Auch ist Deutschland mehr als Hannover.) - Gern würde ich übrigens einmal ein Weilchen, wenn große Gesellschaft ist (wie alt sind die Mädchen?), in Ihrem Zimmer sitzen [...], womöglich auf dem Ofen, weil mir leicht kalt wird, und zuhören und mitsprechen und mitlachen (so gut ich es kann). 140

Kafka not only demonstrated his involvement by supplying Minze with information about horticultural institutes, Jewish or not, but he also expressed a desire to be a pupil himself. However, things worked out differently for Minze: she left Ahlem already a few months later, being unsatisfied with the course. What the exact nature of the problem was is not clear. But, this episode did not affect Kafka's own interest in gardening, which became strong again in the spring of 1921. His favorite uncle encouraged him in this direction. In a letter to Minze he used Biblical terminology concerning gardening, by writing that he preferred »irgendwo in einem Garten arbeiten«, »im Schweiß des Angesichtes«. 141 In 1921/22 he seemed for a moment to reconsider his plans. Now, he saw his gardening activities - and also his plan to become a joiner or a bookbinder as useless, i. e. from the pivot of one's life to the ideal circumference of success. Still, referring to his joinery and gardening activities, Kafka told Janouch around 1921, completely in Gordon's spirit: Es gibt nichts Schöneres als so ein reines, greifbares, allgemein nützliches Handwerk. [...] Intellektuelle Arbeit reißt den Menschen aus der menschlichen Gemeinschaft. Das Handwerk dagegen führt ihn zu den Menschen. 142

139 140 141 142

171, 180, 173, 174. Die Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt zu Ahlem in Bild und Wort. [Hannover], s. a. [1901/02?], 12; Fünfter Bericht über die Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt zu Ahlem bei Hannover. Für das Jahr 1900. Hannover 1901, lOf. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 281. Ibid., 282f. Ibid., 312. Gustav Janouch: Gespräche mit Kafka. Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen. Erw. Ausg., Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1968, 34f. Janouch's notes are not reliable, as one

Kafka 's Personal Zionism

51

Das Schloß It is fair to say that two texts read by Kafka prefigure in a certain sense the situation in Zürau. Around 1920 a pamphlet was published, in which the story »Die Legende von Theodor Herzl«, written by the Berlin Zionist physician Hans Bloch, appeared. His sister, Grete Bloch, had sent Kafka the manuscript earlier, asking for his opinion. In his answer he wrote: »Das Wenige, was die jüdischen Dorfbewohner ζ. Β. betrifft, macht den Eindruck des Wahren, ist aber allgemeine zionistische Sehnsucht.« 143 Kafka was obviously drawing a distinction between veracity and Zionist propaganda. The pamphlet is still in Kafka's library. 144 The second text is a collection of Shlomo Zemach's stories from the new Palestine in Jüdische Bauern from 1919. It may have influenced Kafka's novel Das Schloß.145 In fact, his last novel can be interpreted as the literary expression of his striving to belong to and become integrated in a rural community. Zürau functions as a model for both the village and the castle, as these are essentially identical. 146 Surveyor K., having no past and no future in the novel, keeps on trying to learn to conform to the villagers' social code in order to leave the »Grenzland« between loneliness and community. The core theme of Das Schloß is the wish to cross a border. Perhaps this is why K. presents himself as a surveyor; he is constantly measuring this borderland and at the same time trying to leave or cross it. 147 K. is explicitly told he is neither from the village nor from the castle; rather, he is a stranger, »der überzählig und überall im Weg ist«. 148 As Brod has written, the novel was supposed to end with the conditional admission of the dying K. to the village-community »mit Rücksicht

knows, but this statement corresponds very well with other statements from Kafka's texts themselves. 143 Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 480, 594, 595. Bloch's story may be found in: Der zionistische Student. Flugschrift des Κ. Ζ. V. Hg. von Gustav Krojanker. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag [ca. 1920], 51-62. 144 Cf. Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 9), 132 and 196, and Iris Bruce: »Zionistische Sehnsucht«. Franz Kafka und Hans Blochs »Legende von Theodor Herzl«. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 2/3, 1992. 145 Shlomo Zemach: Jüdische Bauern. Geschichten aus dem neuen Palästina. Wien, Leipzig: Löwit 1919. This work may be found in Kafka's library (Born, Kafkas Bibliothek [note 9], 56). 146 c f p r a n z Kafka: Das Schloß. Roman - in der Fassung der Handschrift. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1982, 17 and 20: »Zwischen den Bauern und dem Schloß ist kein großer Unterschied.« 147 Cf. Aphorisms 5, 17, 94 (Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II [note 9], 114, 117, 134). See also the ell as measuring-staff in 39a (ibid., 122); cf. Kafka, Das Schloß (last note), 50: »Und konnte denn der Weg unendlich sein?« What is meant here is the path to the castle. 148 Ibid., 80.

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auf gewisse Nebenumstände [...] hier zu leben und zu arbeiten«. 149 In some ways, then, Das Schloß is the continuation of »Vor dem Gesetz«.

Zionist Meetings At the same time, that is, around 1920 Kafka met Aharon David, as well as others, who were planning to emigrate to Palestine. Kafka mentioned a Palestinian Jew in July 1920, who meant very much to him: »er hat mich die halbe Nacht gekostet in der Erinnerung«. 150 In late 1921 he wrote to his friend Robert Klopstock about a Prague acquaintance, who after some years of studying law switched to a locksmith course and planned to go to Palestine a few months later: »Erde braucht Palästina, aber Juristen nicht«, 151 was his comment, employing the term »Erde« as a symbol for manual labor in general and implying that there was no place for himself as a jurist in Palestine. In a letter to Ottla he described Klopstock and others as »Juden, aber nicht Zionisten«. 152 For Kafka, there clearly was no self-evident congruence of Jew and Zionist. He even experienced Zionism as an obstacle to his literary activity. Perhaps he had the surveyor metaphor in mind, when he wrote: Diese ganze Literatur ist Ansturm gegen die Grenze und sie hätte sich, wenn nicht der Zionismus dazwischen gekommen wäre, leicht zu einer neuen Geheimlehre, einer Kabbala entwickeln können. 1 5 3

Perhaps this new Kabbala would have restored his place in cultural tradition and in history. Perhaps Kafka meant here the Hassidic tradition. The central importance of East European Hassidism for Kafka manifests itself strikingly in a letter to Milena of September 1920. Once, when passing the Jewish Town Hall in Prague, he looked inside and saw a crowd of more than one hundred Russian-Jewish emigrants, waiting for American visas. He thought to himself : [...] wenn man mir freigestellt hätte, ich könnte sein was ich will, dann hätte ich ein kleiner ostjüdischer Junge sein wollen, im Winkel des Saales, ohne eine Spur von Sorgen, der Vater diskutiert in der Mitte mit den Männern, die Mutter dick eingepackt wühlt in den Reise-fetzen, die Schwester schwätzt mit den Mädchen und kratzt sich in ihrem schönen Haar - [...]. 154

149

150 151 152 153 154

Max Brod: Nachwort zu Franz Kafkas Roman »Das Schloß«. In: Franz Kafka. Kritik und Rezeption 1924-1938. Hg. von Jürgen Born. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1983, 143150, here 143. For other (embryonic) Zionist interpretations of Das Schloß, see J. P. Hodin: Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. In: Der Monat 2 (1949), no. 8/9, 94. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (note 98), 162. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 365 Kafka, Briefe an Ottla (note 62), 108. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 878. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (note 98), 258.

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In fact, this passage echoes a letter of his to Felice Bauer, which he had written six years earlier. There he stated that if he had the choice between the Jüdisches Volksheim and another home, where the assistants would be simple East European Jews: »ich würde mit riesigem Aufatmen, ohne mit den Augen zu zwinkern, dem letzteren Heim den unbedingten Vorzug geben«. 155 Yet Kafka read eagerly an essay in Selbstwehr on the ideas of the then famous Palestinian sociologist and statistician, Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), whom he might have seen at the 1913 Zionist Congress. Ruppin, sometimes called the »father of Zionist settlement«, headed the Zionist Executive's Palestine Office since 1908 and was thus responsible for all settlement activities. He defined the aim of Zionism as »the formation of a coherent Jewish population in Palestine with agriculture as its economic basis and Hebrew as the national language«. 156 Ruppin was convinced that the colonization of Palestine would take a long time and that it was necessary to train and prepare Jewish farmers in Europe. The secret of the success of his ideas was his deep awareness that the really important factor in any settlement activity must be the individual settler with his unique qualities, rather than the organization behind him. During the 12th Zionist Congress in 1921 in Karlsbad, Ruppin gave an impressive lecture, which included his proposals for intensive cultivation of the land in Palestine. This speech was reported in the daily Congress journal, as a supplement to Selbstwehr. Brod, one of the delegates to the Congress, regarded Ruppin's talk as one of the Congress's highlights, giving a new impetus to the settlement of Palestine. 157 In contrast with the 11th Congress eight years before, Kafka now evidenced a strong interest in this one. He seems to have read the report of Ruppin's lecture - related as it was to Damaschke's work - with pleasure. But, at the same time he probably realized that he was not suited physically for that kind of work. He regularly experienced his body as an obstacle to his goals, even as the main obstacle to his literary ambitions. Ruppin favored introducing into the Zionist movement the idea of selecting who would be eligible to become a Palestinian worker; until this time, every Jew had been welcome: »mochte er alt, krank, arbeitsunfähig oder nach seinem Charakter antisozial sein, die öffentliche Meinung in Palästina fragte nicht danach«. 158 155 156

157

158

Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 697. Alex Bein: Arthur Ruppin: The Man and his Work. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 27 (1972), 117-141, here 126. Max Brod: Der zwölfte Zionistenkongreß. In: Das Tage-Buch 2 (1921), no. 40 (Oct. 10), 1205. Because of the incompleteness of the Selbstwehr volumes in Prague's libraries, I could not unfortunately consult this Congress journal. As a librarian of the Jewish Historical Museum in Prague told me in the summer of 1999, all available complete volumes in Prague will be brought together in the Klementinum to form one complete set. This will be of great advantage for the future study of Prague Zionism. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 350, 363; Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 364f.; cf. Binder, Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift »Selbstwehr« (note 42), 286; Kafka,

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Kafka was still very much interested in Zionism around 1921-22, but he did not consider it to be practical for him. It was no longer a personal option. It is important to remember that in his eyes Palestine was not the only and obligatory place to be for a Jew. In 1921 he summed up his three main wishes to Brod as follows: health, a foreign southern country (»es muß nicht Palästina sein«) and »ein kleines Handwerk«. 159 He even expressed some antagonistic feelings about Zionism, despite the violent outburst of anti-Semitism in November 1920 in Prague: Die ganzen Nachmittage bin ich jetzt auf den Gassen und bade in Judenhaß. [...] Ist es nicht das Selbstverständliche, daß man von dort weggeht, wo man so gehaßt wird (Zionismus oder Volksgefiihl ist dafür gar nicht nötig)?160

Thus, he simply denied the traditional role of anti-Semitism as an argument for Zionism. Similarly, in his short story »Der Aufbruch«, written in this period (1921/22), the narrator's goal is defined as »Weg von hier«. 161 The more ambitiously conceived text, »Forschungen eines Hundes«, which dates from the same years, is sometimes considered to be a critique of Zionism. 162 Regarding Kafka's relationships to Judaism, Zionism, and Hassidism, we must conclude that his attitude towards his Jewish roots shows an aversion to assimilated Western Jewry, while his attitude towards Zionism alternated between irony and scepticism to antagonism; his attitude towards East European Hassidism remained consistently positive and firm, ever since the time of his introduction to the Yiddish theater ensemble. How did this threefold position play out in Kafka's last years?

Last Years: Palestine or Galicia? In the summer of 1922 Kafka stayed for a few months with an uncle in Planá, a village in South Bohemia. From there he had »einen stärkeren Ausblick nach Palästina als Prag«, for reasons of health as he wrote to Robert Klopstock. 163

159 160

161 162

163

Tagebücher (note 13), 263f. Cf. Arthur Ruppin: Die Auslese des Menschenmaterials für Palästina. In: Der Jude 3 (1918/19), no. 8/9 (Nov./Dec.), 373-83, here 374. Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 13), 334. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (note 98), 288 (my emphasis; cf. Kafka, Briefe [note 42], 274f.) Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 9), 374f. Iris Bruce: »Aggadah Raises Its Paw Against Halakha«. Kafka's Zionist Critique in Forschungen eines Hundes In: Journal of the Kafka Society of America 16 (1992), no. 1, 4-18, based on: Hugo Bergmann: Franz Kafka und die Hunde. In: Mitteilungsblatt der Irgun Olej Merkas Europa 40 (1972), no. 34/35 (Sept. 3), 4. The word >Lufthunde< in this story is probably coined after »Luftmenschen«, Sholem Aleichem's name for Jews without profession or money, but producing ideas. See Liebermann, Aus dem Ghetto in die Welt (note 72). Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 417.

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Back in Prague he took Hebrew lessons with Puah Ben-Tovim, and he spoke with her about the Palestinian pioneers and his wish to find work in agriculture. In the spring of 1923 Hugo Bergmann, who had been living and working for three years in Palestine, visited Prague for a few months. He had been invited by the Keren Hayesod to give some lectures on his experiences in Palestine. Kafka attended one of the talks, and afterwards he said to Bergmann some words, which are often quoted: »Diesen Vortrag hast Du nur fur mich gehalten.« 164 At the same time, Kafka promised him to promote the sale of shares of »The Workers' Bank« (Bank HaPoalim) in Jaffa. 1 6 5 In July 1923 Kafka went for a time to Miiritz on the Baltic Sea with his sister Elli and her children. Looking through his boarding-house window at the vacation-camp of the Berlin Jewish People's Home and reminded of Felice, he wrote to Bergmann that his trip to Müritz was a test of his »Transportabilität« to Palestine. 166 Bergmann's wife, who was in Prague at the time, had made Kafka the offer to travel with her to Palestine. Still, he declined: »[...] es wäre keine Palästinafahrt geworden, sondern im geistigen Sinne etwas wie eine Amerikafahrt eines Kassierers, der viel Geld veruntreut hat.« 167 In other words, he would feel as if he were betraying his home (just the opposite of Karl Roßmann's fate). But, as he added, »die Hoffnung bleibt fur später«. 168 His Zionism was obviously not strong enough to enable him to take real action. In Müritz he fell deeply in love with one of the assistants who worked at the vacation-camp: Dora Diamant, a 19-year old girl from a very conservative Hassidic family in Galicia. In September he decided to go to Berlin, where he started to live with her and where his wish to go to Palestine receded in importance. At first he wrote to Ottla: »Ich sah, daß, wenn ich irgendwie weiterleben wollte, ich etwas ganz Radikales tun müßte und wollte nach Palästina fahren.« 1 6 9 At this stage, he still regarded Berlin as a »Zwischenstation« on the way to Palestine. 170 In Berlin, he took up his horticultural activity again, frequently visiting the Botanical Garden. He investigated the possibility of taking a course at the »Gärtner-Lehranstalt« in Berlin-Dahlem, but the experiences of one of Dora's Palestinian acquaintances led him to abandon this plan. On Dora's initiative they both attended a course at the »Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums«, not given - as is usually assumed - by Julius Guttmann and Harry Torczyner, but, as he wrote to a friend, by only one teacher, who must have been Julius Grün thai. He was the father of the Israeli composer Josef Tal, who still remembers a visit of Franz and Dora to his home in Berlin. 164

165 166 167 168 169 170

P. Menczel-Ben-Tovim: Ich war Kafkas Hebräischlehrerin. In: Als Kafka mir entgegenkam ... (note 2), 165-167, 167 Hugo Bergmann: Schulzeit und Studium. In: ibid., 13-24, here 22. Kafka, Briefe (note 42), 433f. Ibid., 437f. Ibid., 438. Kafka, Briefe an Ottla (note 62), 145f. Ibid., 146.

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Franz and Dora discussed openly with Grünthal and with others they met in Berlin their plans to emigrate to Palestine in due time. They even thought of settling in Tel Aviv; they would open a restaurant: Kafka would be the waiter (which evokes Chaplinesque visions!) and Dora the cook. 171 But they shared - and this is less well-known - another secret desire: their possible return to Dora's native region, to »uns«, around Galician Bendin (near Lódz in Poland), in order to join a »Gemeinschaft« and lead a simple, rural life. According to Dora, Kafka wished to be »ein gewöhnlicher, kleiner Durchschnittsmensch [...], ohne besondere Wünsche und Bedürfnisse«, that is, a person with »Demut«. 172 Dora herself described the social atmosphere in her native region, from which she once escaped because of its extremely conservative attititudes and its religious orthodoxy: Im Osten wußte man um den Menschen; vielleicht konnte man sich dort nicht so frei in der Gesellschaft bewegen und wußte sich nicht so leicht auszudrücken, aber man wußte um die Einheit von Mensch und Schöpfung. 1 7 3

According to her, for Kafka all things, even daily events, were linked together by cosmic causes (a notion that fits his belief in »das Unzerstörbare« and its functions). For Dora, it is this »Verlangen nach Ganzheit des Lebens« which one finds in Eastern Europe as well. 174 Weltsch remembered Dora telling him in 1949-50, that the two sources of Central European Zionism - renewal of a pure life of manual labor in the middle of the »Gemeinschaft« and the return to the original roots of Jewishness were of equal importance to Kafka. Weltsch thought that Dora (and, through her, Kafka) meant Palestine, but I am convinced that Weltsch erred in this judgement. Dora's and Franz's real goal was most probably Galicia, which was also the home of the Yiddish theater group, which had precipitated Kafka's confrontation with his own Jewish origins and another kind of Jewish existence very different from the Western version.

171

172 173 174

Dora Diamant: Mein Leben mit Franz Kafka. In: Als Kafka mir entgegenkam ... (note 2), 174-185, here 180; Weltsch, Entretiens avec Dora Dymant (note 6), 3; cf. Niels Bokhove: »Friedensort in den wilden Gegenden des Innern«. Kafka en de Berlijnse »Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums«. In: Kafka-Katem 7 (1999), no. 2 and 3, 4 3 ^ 9 . Diamant, Mein Leben mit Franz Kafka (last note), 180 Ibid., 175. N. Baudy: Entretiens avec Dora Dymant, Compagne de Kafka. In: Evidences (1950), no. 8, 21-25, here 24; Dora Diamant, in J. P. Hodin's words in his »Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka«, in: Der Monat 2 (1949), no. 8/9, 94; Diamant, Mein Leben mit Franz Kafka (note 184), 175, 179. On Dora Diamant, in: Κ. Diamant: A Sketch of Dora's Life. New biographical information on Dora Diamant - Notes from the book Dora's Story: The Mystery of Kafka's Last Mistress. In: KafkaKatern 7 (1999), no. 2/3, 38^13; see also: K. Diamant: Kafka's Last Love. The Mystery of Dora Diamant. New York: Basic Books 2003.

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In a way Franz and Dora were misleading their friends. Here, it will be useful to recall the formulation in a letter to Felice from six years previous to his last months with Dora in Berlin, where he expressed his idea of his ultimate goal, his »Endziel«. He would try to lead a social life, following social rules »wohlgefällig« (pleasing) to his fellow-citizens, [...] so wohlgefällig, daß ich, ohne die allgemeine Liebe zu verlieren, [...] die mir innewohnenden Gemeinheiten offen, vor aller Augen, ausführen dürfte. Zusammengefaßt kommt es mir also nur auf das Menschengericht an und dieses will ich überdies betrügen, allerdings ohne Betrug. 175

»Deceiving, but without deceit« - this is what Kafka did in his social life in the years after but also before Zürau and notably in Berlin (and what Rotpeter does in »Ein Bericht für eine Akademie«), Specifically, he was externally the exemplary Jew, conforming to the official definition of Zionism - the general striving to establish a juridically assured state for the Jewish people in Palestine, a southern movement. But, internally he longed to go eastwards. It is related to mimesis and manifested in Kafka's »Nachahmungstrieb« and in the frequent use of »Täuschung« in Der Prozeß,176 In his relation to Dora - they lived together without being married, which appears rather progressive to our modern eyes - Kafka in fact became the little East European Jewish boy he wanted to be, feeling safe between his parents and among his own people. From Dora's recollections and Kafka's correspondence at that time, one gets the impression she cared for him like a mother. Next came the idea of marriage, and Kafka proposed to Dora. In the spring of 1924, she - and not Franz - wrote a letter to her father, Herschel Diamant, in which she asked for permission to marry him, explaining that Franz was not a believer, but nevertheless a repentent Jew, who hoped to be adopted into the family. Her father, who belonged to the ultra-orthodox Gur Hassidic sect, sent Dora's brother David to the group's spiritual leader, the »Gerer Rebbe«, who simply, without any comment, said »no«. As in the case of the »Mann vom Lande« in »Vor dem Gesetz«, where entry to the law is denied, Kafka's other »entry to the more important«, that is, a normal marriage, was denied him. 1 7 7 In conclusion, I submit that Kafka's Zionism, which was socialistically oriented, was strictly personal. He regarded it as a possible means to realize a life 175 176

177

Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 1), 755f. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 13), 329f., 212 (»Nachahmung Löwys«), 227. See G. Neumann: »Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie«. Erwägungen zum »Mimesis«-Charakter Kafkascher Texte. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 49 (1975), 166-183; cf. Hans Dieter Zimmermann: »klam a mam? Zu Kafkas Roman »Das Schloß«. In: Kafka und das Judentum, hg. von Karl Erich Grözinger und Stéphane Mosès. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum 1987, 224-237 (Czech: »klam« = »deceit«). Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 2), 181 f., corrected by an e-mail from Zwi Diamant (Holon, IL), Dora's nephew, to me, January 14, 1996; cf. Diamant, A Sketch of Dora's Life (note 187), 38f.

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suitable for himself, not as an end in itself. A s an individual not capable of normal social intercourse, he thought that this path might allow him to restore his ties to history and society. 1 7 8 Basically, K a f k a was egoistic and unpolitical (in this he followed the young Bergmann). And, in this sense, he was also superficial, w h i c h w a s an aspect of his mimetic external social behaviour. In m y opinion, K a f k a ' s true interests w e r e horticultural and, above all, focused on East-European Jewish life and Hassidism. In fact, until the e n d of his life, he n e v e r betrayed M o r i z S c h n i t z e r ' s early advice about taking u p gardening. Also, the impact of the Yiddish theater group, going back to 1911, proved to be lasting. For social reasons only, K a f k a »feigned« being a Zionist, but in reality, deep inside himself, he w a s not. H e longed to turn his back on the W e s t e r n urban world and live a m o n g Hassidic Jews with a w i f e (and children?) in simplicity and in nature, f a r m i n g his land, perhaps growing potatoes. That is w h e r e he located his »Eingang zu d e m Wichtigern«. But, in the end the old m a n with the scythe prevented him f r o m fulfilling his dream.

178

Cf. Felix Weltsch's similar conclusion in: Felix Weltsch: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish-German Symbiosis: The Case of Franz Kafka. In: Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 1 (1956), 255-276, 274f.

Hans-Richard Eyl

»Der letzte Zipfel.« Kafka's State of Mind and the Making of the Jewish State

The question whether or not Franz Kafka can be called a Zionist seems somewhat bizarre, taking into consideration all that is known about his personality and work. Those who knew him, as well as his biographers and critics, have attempted to answer this question since the Kafka-reception cascade began about sixty years ago. These efforts have concentrated mostly on the circumstances of Kafka's life, on the one hand his attachments to his Zionist friends, like Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, Oskar Baum, and Hugo Bergmann, and, on the other, his response to the virulently malignant anti-Semitism of »Kafkas böses Böhmen«. Some observers thought they could derive the carat of Kafka's own Zionist convictions from the extent to which he showed himself to be receptive to the Zionist influence that was transmitted to him by his friends, and from the nature of his responses to the historical and actual anti-Semitism of his environment. In addition to these external circumstances, the problem regarding Kafka's inner sense of his Jewish identity naturally played a predominant role. Given the emphasis on external circumstances, however, what has received insufficient attention is the process by which one acquires or develops a Zionist conviction, as is the case with any conviction. The process must be supported by making an unambiguous choice and implementing a clear-cut decision. These apply to an even greater extent when the particular issue dictates accepting the consequences of such a conviction and deciding to move in actuality from Europe to former Palestine. For, no matter how the external circumstances may force one to make that choice - and more forceful circumstances than those existing in Europe before and during the Second World War are hardly imaginable - a decision to leave the country where one had been born and raised, for a domicile guaranteed by international law, as it was envisioned by Zionism, will always depend on one's inner willingness to make this move. How solid the caliber of that inner willingness has to be can be poignantly illustrated by the many - probably, far too many - for whom Zionism, despite it already figuring as their long-standing ideology, among whom were prominent leaders of the movement, who, in the middle of the imminent horror of those years were unable or did not wish to depart for Zion, even when the possibility still existed. The question of whether Kafka can be called a Zionist is related to the question of whether or not Kafka was up to making such a choice and implementing the decision that would result. I submit that Kafka was just as incapable of making a choice with regard to Zionism, as he was with regard to many other reali-

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ties of life, for example, marriage, profession, or living independently. It may be possible to agree however that there was one grandiose and overwhelming exception to this incapability, and that is what we might call his »condition humaine«: Kafka's overriding and all-consuming passion for writing. This choice of his - to write - was unconditional. A writer, he confessed to Max Brod, »should, if he wants to escape insanity, really never leave his desk. He must sink his teeth into it.« 1 Even as a twenty-year-old he was completely aware of what kind of discipline this required and what obstacles would have to be overcome to achieve the mastery for which he strove. He wrote to his childhood friend Oskar Pollak, »God does not want me to write. I, on the other hand, I must.« 2 But even this writing, or rather, it is precisely this writing, the result of Kafka's only unconditional choice, of his willingness to decide without the restraint of ambiguity, which is now overridingly characterized by a failure to make choices or implement decisions. The protagonists in his three novels Karl Roßmann, Josef Κ., and K. - allow the threatening nature and the unsympathetic indifference of those in power and of official institutions to pursue them. Kafka is like the protagonists and the narrators in the stories and shorter texts, who tolerate what is expected of them with a stifling stoicism. In Kafka's prose a ubiquitous passivity predominates. It appears unlikely that a writer who transformed the vulgar reality of an imperfect world by centering on the theme of alienation and passivity, and who derived his inspiration from all the imperfection and hopelessness around him, would be able to thrive in the climate of Zionism. In fact, early Zionism, as a movement, was distinguished by active struggle and by a vision of hope. To Max Brod's question whether or not hope exists, Kafka replied, »Yes, lots of hope, but not for us.« 3 Had Kafka continued to live, Philip Roth's speculative supposition is that »perhaps he would have escaped with his good friend Max Brod, who found refuge in Palestine [...]«, a supposition that Roth himself, however, immediately rejects. »But Kafka escaping? It seems unlikely for one so fascinated by entrapment and careers that culminate in anguished death.« 4 And, indeed, there is no question of escape in Kafka's life or work, although there is a question of shame at enduring the disgrace that befalls us by remaining where we are. »Whole afternoons I am out on the street and I bathe myself in the hatred of Jews«, he wrote Milena in November of 1920, »[...] >filthy race< [Kafka uses the Czech expression] I've already heard the Jews called once. Doesn't it go without saying that people would leave the place where they are hated so much (Zionism or national identity isn't even necessary for that)? The heroism that is entailed in staying in spite of this is that of cockroaches that won't allow them1 2 3

4

Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. Frankfort a. M.: Fischer 1958, 386. Ibid., 21. Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka. Frankfort a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag 1966 (Fischer-Bücherei; 735), 71. Philip Roth: »I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting« or, Looking at Kafka. In: Reading Myself and Others. London: Jonathan Cape 1975, 247-270, here 248.

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selves to be exterminated in the bathroom, either.«5 The appearance of the mounted police that scatters the jeering crowd, elicits from him the following comment: »[...] the awful disgrace, always having to rely on protection again.« 6 But, usually, what Kafka describes here with some benevolence as »protection«, arrives too late or is entirely absent. This is the case for Josef K. as well, who is finished off »like a dog«, and »it is as if the shame would survive him.« 7 It is understandable that in the literature about Kafka, in the light of his own contradictory testimonials, his ambivalence regarding Zionism is underlined as well. For example, Ritchie Robertson feels that there are both proofs of Kafka's anti-Zionism as well as his pro-Zionism. 8 Ernst Pawel similarly states, »That he was a Zionist doesn't make sense. That he was not a Zionist also doesn't make sense.« Pawel appears to be conflicted when he adds that Kafka, »after all, never allows himself to be encapsulated in a simple category«, and that »all attempts to have him identify with a star dogma must not only fail, but are even totally absurd«. 9 Robert Alter also leaves both possibilities open. He writes: »Kafka also manifested a growing interest in Zionism, which like all the important interests in his life was oscillating and ambivalent.« 10 Although Walter Jens and Iris Bruce lean toward a negative conclusion regarding Kafka's Zionism, they still allow for reservations. According to Bruce, [...] it should be noted that Kafka [...] kept a critical distance to Zionism because many Zionist discourses contained various degrees of dogmatism, fanaticism, and nationalism which he could not wholly embrace.11

And, according to Jens, »In contrast to his friend Brod, Kafka was never [...] a Zionist in the strict sense [,..].« 12 However, Hans Dieter Zimmermann definitely cuts the knot when he declares: 5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12

Franz Kafka: Briefe an Milena. Hg. von Jürgen Born und Michael Müller. Erweiterte und neu geordnete Ausgabe. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1983, 288. Ibid. Franz Kafka: Der Proceß. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990,312. Ritchie Robertson: »Antizionismus, Zionismus«: Kafka's Responses to Jewish Nationalism. In: Paths and Labyrinths. Nine Papers Read at the Franz Kafka Symposium, Held at the Institute of Germanic Studies on 20 and 21 October 1983. Ed. by J. P. Stern and J. J. White. London: Institute of Germanic Studies 1985 (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies; 35), 25-42, here 25. Emst Pawel: Der Prager Zionismus zu Kafkas Zeit. In: Kafka und Prag. Colloquium im Goethe-Institut Prag, 24.-27. November 1992. Hg. von Kurt Krolop und Hans Dieter Zimmerman. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 1994, 31^13, here 41. Robert Alter: Necessary Angels. Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991, 39. Iris Bruce: The Burrow of Art. Kafka's Private Counter-Discourse. In: Journal of the Kafka Society of America (June/December 1997), no. 1/2, 14—26, here 17, my emphasis. Walter Jens: Statt einer Literaturgeschichte. 7., erw. Aufl., Pfullingen: Neske 1978, 305, my emphasis.

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A Zionist, Kafka was not [...] not by any means was he a Zionist [...] Kafka is [...] in his exceptional way a Jewish writer who cannot be expected to belong to a particular group; he is an >unbridled< individualist, as he himself once wrote. 13

Kafka's thinking resists monolithic philosophies of life. Ritchie Robertson wrote that »Kafka's thinking is dualist«,14 and it is fair to say that this view is widely accepted. Kafka's motto was: »As always, I can only live in a contradiction.«15 At the end of his long-standing and difficult relationship with Felice Bauer, he wrote her: »That there are two people fighting each other inside of me, this you know.« 16 But even these contradictions, as an aspect of his inner struggle and »Widerspruch«, are boundless. He expressed them in a mise-en-abyme: they do not resolve themselves in an unequivocal conclusion, which would preclude further susceptibility to other contradictions. They cover a very wide, in fact an endless spectrum of life experiences and intellectual experiences. In this context, Gerhard Neumann makes reference to a »sliding paradox«, in which the opposing terms keep referring to other contradictions.17 These references and »interreferences« are to be found in many of Kafka's texts. For example, in one of his aphorisms from 1920, Kafka develops the image of two spiritual opponents who keep him from choosing his own road. The first one forces him ahead, thus in the direction for which one has a natural predilection from birth. The second, however, bars his way forward. So cornered, he combats both opponents, which indicates that he himself still has not decided to go one way or the other, forward or backward. Up to this point the contradiction is described by Kafka in a conclusive and obvious manner. It can be understood prima facie. But then this situation admits a paradox, after all. As he continues the short text, the first opponent is really supporting him in his struggle with the second, because the first one wants to force him forward against the wishes of the second opponent, just as the second opponent is also really supporting him in his struggle with the first one, because the latter wants to prevent this. But even this paradox does not hold up. Rather, it slips and slides away, as it were, from the conceptualization as presented thus far, because, as Kafka concludes, this situation is the only way it can be theoretically.

13

14

15

16

17

Hans Dieter Zimmermann: Franz Kafka und das Judentum. In: Juden und Judentum in der Literatur. Hg. von Herbert A. Strauss und Christhard Hoffmann. München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag 1985 (dtv; 10513), 237-253, here 239. Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985, X. Franz Kafka: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1992, 320. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Feiice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1967, 755. Gerhard Neumann: Umkehrung und Ablenkung. Franz Kafkas »Gleitendes Paradox«. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 42 (1968), 702-744.

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After all, there are not just the two opponents, but he is there as well, and, as the text asks, can one really know one's own intentions? 18 The crux of this text revolves around the indecisiveness of the combatant, in face of the two opponents, to move in a particular direction. Kafka himself once compared this situation to marching in place without moving from the spot. This indecisiveness derives from the awareness that each decision you make is susceptible to its opposite. Kafka's indecisiveness entails procrastination and patience. It is a passivity in the sense of Emmanuel Lévinas, for whom the capacity to endure such passivity and have patience is fundamental. 1 9 It requires an active awareness, however, to keep allowing that which militates against the making of a decision to stay active, in order to allow for thinking out the decision to its end, as it were. Kafka wrote: »All human faults are impatience, a premature breaking off of what is methodical, and an apparent curtailment of an apparent issue.« 20 The thought arises that the continual reversal of and deviation from standpoints, so typical of Kafka, could hardly be reconciled with Zionist principles and still less with Zionist politics. Thus, there is something about Kafka's inner make-up which appears to be incompatible with Zionism. In his reflections dated February 25, 1918, Kafka pointed out that his failure in all areas of life - family life, friendship, marriage, profession, and literature - was due to the lack of ground, of air, of a commandment. 21 It is typical of his unrestrained self-criticism that he even included literature in his list, the area in which he - according to the common opinion of the literary world - unassailably occupies an illustrious position. On one hand, one can demonstrate that what Kafka recognized here as a shortcoming, among other things his lack of ground and commandment, is precisely what makes the ominous and moving character of his literary creations so universally fascinating. On the other hand, however, the categories he enumerated - ground, air, and commandment - were precisely those defining for the world of ideas the practical implementation of the Zionist dream. Kafka admitted that with respect to the demands of life, he did not bring along anything at all (anything that might be helpful) except general human weakness. It is this weakness, so he emphasized, »by which I have powerfully absorbed in myself what is negative in my times, which is, after all, very close to me, and which I never have the right to challenge, but only, in a certain sense, to represent«. 22 To preclude any doubt about his identification with the negativity of his times, he stated that he did not even obtain a share of the little of what is positive that 18

19

20 21 22

Franz Kafka: Tagebücher. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, 851 f. Nico van der Sijde: Het literaire experiment: Jacques Derrida over literatuur. Amsterdam: Meppel 1998, 28. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II (note 15), 113. Ibid., 97f. Ibid., 98.

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his times had to offer. He did concede that he could benefit from the opposite of something negative, from which something positive might still arise. This rather outright acceptance of the negative tendencies of his times was linked by Christoph Stölzl to »an exceptionally strong pulling force that particular Jewish personalities exhibited and that people are in the habit of calling >Jewish selfhatredstehendes Marschierern«, a marching in place.34 Given this fundamental disposition, it is very difficult to imagine Kafka as somebody who would frequent Zionist meetings, or who would go to Zionist conferences with interest, or who would participate wholeheartedly in the debates of his Zionist friends. At the end of February 1913 he wrote Felice that on arriving home he ran into an acquaintance, »a Zionist student, intelligent, industrious, active, engaging«,35 who threw him into a state of confusion precisely because of his peace of mind. This student invited Kafka to come along to a particularly important Zionist gathering that evening. »How many such invitations hasn't he wasted on me!« he wrote Felice.36 »My indifference regarding his person and any Zionism was boundless and unspeakable at that moment.«37 He 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 3), 198f. Ibid. Ibid. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 18), 887. Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 16), 318. Ibid. Ibid.

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offered to accompany the student to the gathering, and did this »up to the door of the café«, but he »did not allow [himself] to be escorted inside«. 38 It is important to remember that Kafka was averse to attending meetings of any kind; thus, his reluctance to attend Zionist gatherings is just one aspect of a general tendency of his. The cause is to be found primarily in his introversion, his natural proclivity for isolation, because of which he even felt uncomfortable when he was among his circle of friends or members of his family. After a gathering of Eastern and Western Jews, he noted in his journal on March 11, 1915: »I felt as if I were made of wood, a coatrack placed in the middle of the meeting hall.« 39 Kafka's social isolation is closely related to his obsession with writing. »Considering I am nothing but literature, and can and want to do nothing else [...]«, 40 he stated on August 21, 1913, »everything that is not literature bores me, and I hate this, because it either disturbs me or holds me back [,..]«.41 However, Kafka's literary creations also seem to distance themselves from an existing society and reality. This is due to the fact that Kafka does not describe that reality, but rather comments on it and interprets it. Thus, to give one example, in a short passage, he does not confine himself to observing logs in the snow. He meditates on this realistic fact by commenting that those tree trunks, for all appearances, should be able to be moved easily, something which, however, is impossible. In »reality« they are decidedly one with the ground. »But«, as this short text concludes, »that, too, is only appearance«. 42 Kafka's vision of reality completes itself in an endless analysis of a perpetually postponed explanation ofthat reality. What can be explained in essence remains inexplicable. »His parables, fables, tales, and always incomplete novels«, George Steiner determined, »are commentaries in action in a sense both materially and both more diffusely Talmudic«. 4 3 Harold Bloom likewise stressed this aspect: Kafka and Freud are so strong and Jewish that we redefine the Jewish on their basis, but what is it about them that is Jewish? I think that finally their Jewishness consists in their intense obsession with interpretation, as such. 44

This particular opinion about writing derives from the fierce struggle between the world that lives in Kafka and the world in which Kafka lives, mediated by continual commenting and interpreting. These two worlds are separate and 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

Kafka, Briefe an Felice (note 16), 318. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 18), 731. Ibid., 579. Ibid., 581. Franz Kafka: Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1994, 3. George Steiner: A Note on Kafka's Trial. In: id., No Passion Spent. Essays 19781996. London: Faber & Faber 1996, 239-252, here 240. Harold Bloom: Foreword. In: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Schocken Books 1989, XIII-XXV, here XXIII.

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they clash dreadfully with each other, as he himself stated. 45 The combatants are deprived of certainty, steadfastness, or matter-of-factness. Literature, according to Kafka, is an »assault on the last frontier of earth«, and, »had Zionism not intervened, it could easily have developed into a new secret learning, a Kabala«. 46 Hans Dieter Zimmermann considered this journal entry to be a confirmation that Kafka was not only not a Zionist, but that he even experienced Zionism as a hindrance to his writing. The reason for this is that Zionism strives for an actual realization of all that is Jewish, in a state and as a people, whereas Kafka's literary creations assume first and foremost the impossibility of any rational manifestation here and now. 4 7 The impossibility of realizing a wish, a longing, or a struggle, is clearly expressed by Kafka, for instance, whenever there is mention in his work of making a decision. The motif of decision-making is relativized in countless modalities in his stories and novels. In the short text »Wishing to Become an Indian«, it is in particular the yearning for an instant readiness that the narrator himself lacks: »If one really were to be an Indian, instantly ready [...]«, the narrator sighs. 48 In »The Next Village«, the narrator is surprised at a young man's decision to ride to the nearest village, without fearing that the normal length of a lifetime is by far insufficient to do so. 49 And, in his famous »Before the Law«, the man from the country does, it is true, make a decision, but this decision entails never making a decision for the rest of his life to gain admittance to the Law. 50 With extraordinarily expressive power, Kafka summarized his existential and critical reserve with regard to making decisions in the comment, »My life is hesitating before being born«. 51 »Zögern vor der Geburt« is the most definitive form in which his seeking an »innere Wahrheit«, a truth where thinking and acting coincide, can be expressed. What remains is a yearning, a longing to explain the inexplicable. That this yearning and this longing continued to inspire him is evident from a wonderful anecdote that has meanwhile become well known, courtesy of Anthony Northey. During his stay in Merano in the spring of 1920, Kafka was walking through the city together with an industrialist acquaintance, and they saw a Hassidic Jew, dressed in a black coat, wearing a black hat, and his hair with side-locks. When Kafka's companion asked him what came to mind when he encountered such a fellow believer, he replied with a single word, »Homeland«. 5 2 The same Kafka would, however, describe his own situation two years later as follows: »Without forebears, without mar45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 18), 877. Ibid., 878. Zimmermann, Franz Kafka und das Judentum (note 13), 24If. Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten (note 42), 32. Ibid., 280. Ibid., 268. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 18), 888. Anthony Northey: Die Kafkas: Juden? Christen? Tschechen? Deutsche? In: Kafka und Prag (note 9), 11-32, here 3If.

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riage, without descendants. All reach out their hand to me: forefathers, marriage, and descendants, but too far from me.« 53 It is also the same Kafka who in Müntz during July 1923 cheerfully reports about the children from the »Jüdische Volksheim« in Berlin, little refugees from Eastern Europe. From his balcony he can see them playing in their summer camp: »Eastern Jews protected by Western Jews from the Berlin peril. Half the days and nights the house, the woods, and the beach are filled with singing.« »When I am amidst them«, wrote Kafka, »I am not happy, but I find myself on the threshold of happiness«. 54 In conclusion, allow me to cite one of the reflections Kafka wrote in 1912. This text was included shortly thereafter, in a somewhat revised version, in his first book publication, Betrachtung (Meditation), under the intriguing title »Entschlüsse« (»Resolutions«). As such it is a fitting conclusion to this paper which has focused on decisions and decision-making in Kafka. In this text, after having allowed all the events to sink in and after having listened to everything that was said, the narrator can only give himself the following advice: »to quash all by oneself what is left of the spirit of life, which means to enlarge still more the last quiet of the grave and not leave anything intact besides this.« 55 The bitter medicine that is being prescribed here, this seemingly forced resignation that has to serve as a weapon against the powers that assault one from the outside, is probably also the ultimate remedy by which Kafka hoped to remove himself from the resoluteness of his Zionist-oriented circle of friends. And, as is so often the case with Kafka, thoughts or situations are profiled with the portrayal of a gesture. Here, in the final sentence of »Entschlüsse« is found the following: »A characteristic movement for such a situation is rubbing one's little finger along one's eyebrows.« 56

53 54 55 56

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 18), 884. Kafka, Briefe (note 1), 436. Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten (note 42), 19. Ibid.

Andreas Β. Kilcher

Anti-Ödipus im Land der Ur-Väter: Franz Kafka und Anton Kuh

Warum hat keiner von all den Frommen - christlich Frommen, möchte man sagen die Psychoanalyse geschaffen, warum mußte man da auf einen gottlosen Juden warten? (Sigmund Freud an Oscar Pfister) Weil ich Jude war, fand ich mich frei von vielen Vorurteilen, die andere im Gebrauch ihres Intellekts beschränkten, als Jude war ich dafür vorbereitet, in die Opposition zu gehen. (Sigmund Freud, anläßlich seines 70. Geburtstags)

Im Oktober 1922 notierte Franz Kafka folgende Bemerkung: Es ist keine Freude sich mit der Psychoanalyse abzugeben und ich halte mich von ihr möglichst fern, aber sie ist zumindest so existent wie diese Generation. Das Judentum bringt seit jeher seine Leiden und Freuden fast gleichzeitig mit dem zugehörigen Raschi-Kommentar hervor, so auch hier. 1

Dieses Verständnis der Psychoanalyse als einer Art moderner »RaschiKommentar« des Judentums über sich selbst mag überraschen. Denn wie sollte ein Beschreibungssystem für psychische Zusammenhänge eine kulturelle, religiöse und politische Erscheinung wie das Judentum erklären können? Oder radikaler gefragt: Was hat Sexualität mit Religion, mit Kultur, mit Politik zu tun? Kurz zuvor, im Frühjahr 1921, erschien in Berlin eine Schrift, die Kafkas parabolische These der Psychoanalyse als »Raschi-Kommentar«, als Interpretationssystem jenes »dunklen Komplexes des allgemeinen Judentums«, wie er es gegenüber Feiice einmal bezeichnet hatte, 2 in extenso ausführte. Die Rede ist von Anton Kuhs Essay Juden und Deutsche. Der damals gerade dreißigjährige Wiener Journalist, der, wie noch zu zeigen ist, in Prag um 1920 nicht nur durch seine Feuilletons im Prager Tagblatt vor allem unter jüdischen Intellektuellen heftig debattiert wurde, unterzog in seiner Analyse des Zusammenhangs familiärer, religiöser und politischer Ordnungen die modernen Existenzformen des Judentums einer polemischen Kritik und hielt ihnen ein Judentum entgegen, das nicht nur die Familienzwänge des traditionellen, sondern auch, 1

2

Franz Kafka: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Hg. von Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1992, 529f. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Feiice. Hg. von Erich Heller und Jürgen Born. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1976, 699.

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wie Kuh es formulierte, die »Familienneurosen« und »-psychosen« des modernen Judentums überwinden sollte. Die Grundlage dieses »befreiten« Judentums war die Psychoanalyse, allerdings nicht primär in Sigmund Freuds Version, 3 sondern in ihrer kulturtheoretisch und zugleich Sozialrevolutionär radikalisierten Form von Freuds und C. G. Jungs Schüler, Kollege und Patient - und Anton Kuhs Freund und Schwager in spe - Otto Gross. Freuds Ödipus als dem mythischen Ur-Sohn der domestizierten, patriarchalen Familie und Gesellschaft stellte Gross, um es pointiert zu sagen, einen Anti-Ödipus 4 entgegen, einen Rebellen gegen Vater, Gesetz und Staat, der mit dem Ideal einer freien, brüderlichen bzw. schwesterlichen Liebe vor Augen die familiären, moralischen und politischen Ordnungen sprengt. Was Anton Kuh unter den Prager jüdischen Intellektuellen um 1920 zum Gegenstand einer öffentlichen Debatte machte, war in erster Linie die Adaption eben dieser revolutionären Psychoanalyse von Otto Gross auf das Judentum. Kafka nun partizipierte an dem zeitgenössischen Diskurs über Judentum und Zionismus auf vielfältige Weise, sei es rezeptiv als Leser von Texten, als Hörer von Vorträgen, als Diskussionspartner unter Freunden und Bekannten, sei es produktiv in subtilen Allusionen auf diesen Diskurs in seinen Texten, selten aber in expliziten und systematischen Ausführungen. Diese Art der Partizipation am Diskurs über Judentum und Zionismus wird sich bei Kafka auch und gerade im besonderen Fall von Anton Kuhs Juden und Deutsche und der Debatte darüber beobachten lassen. Insofern nicht nur Anton Kuh selbst, 5 sondern auch das Verhältnis von Kafka und Kuh bislang kaum untersucht wurde, 6 muß diese Nachprüfung einer produktiven Lektüre zunächst auch auf einer biographischen und historischen Ebene geklärt werden, um dann vor diesem Horizont Kafkas Interpretation des Judentums und des Zionismus um 1920 neu zu befragen.

3

4

5

6

Auch Freud hat die psychoanalytische Untersuchung der Religion für möglich gehalten (vgl. Theodor Reik: Das Ritual. Probleme der Religionspsychologie. Mit einer Vorrede von Sigmund Freud. Wien: Internationale Psychoanalytischer Verlag 1928). Ich entlehne den Begriff Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari: Anti-Ödipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1974. Vgl. dazu Andreas Kilcher: Der Sinn der Diaspora. Anton Kuh und sein Essay »Juden und Deutsche«. In: Das Jüdische Echo 48 (1999), 173-180; ders., Einleitung. Anton Kuh und sein Essay »Juden und Deutsche«. In: Anton Kuh: Juden und Deutsche. Hg. von Andreas B. Kilcher. Wien: Locker 2003, 7-65. Die Rolle von Anton Kuh für Kafka haben bislang Hartmut Binder (Kafka in neuer Sicht. Mimik, Gestik und Personengefüge als Darstellungsform des Autobiographischen. Stuttgart: Metzler 1976, 385-395) und Giuliano Baioni (Kafka. Literatur und Judentum. Stuttgart: Metzler 1994, 196-199, 269-271) in Ansätzen aufgezeigt, jedoch ohne den Verbindungen Kuhs zu Prag genauer nachzugehen.

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I. Wer also war Anton Kuh und worin besteht seine Bedeutung für die Prager jüdischen Intellektuellen? Als der Essay Juden und Deutsche Anfang 1921 erschien, war sein Verfasser in Prag längst bekannt. Dies lag weniger daran, daß der 1890 in Wien geborene Kuh einer alten Prager Familie entstammte sein Großvater David Kuh war ein bekannter Journalist und Politiker - und über die Mutter mit der Familie Kisch verwandt war, sondern vor allem daran, daß er seit 1912 regelmäßig für das Prager Tagblatt schrieb. 7 Daß auch Kafka Kuhs Feuilletons gelesen hatte, belegt ein Brief vom Oktober 1917 an Max Brod, in dem er Kuhs Rezension eines Stücks von Franz Werfel erwähnte. 8 Kafka hatte Kuh jedoch schon früher persönlich kennengelernt, und zwar spätestens auf einer Zugreise von Wien nach Prag gemeinsam mit Kuhs Freund und Schwager in spe Otto Gross im Juli 1917. Kafka befand sich auf dem Rückweg von Budapest, wohin er mit Feiice gereist war, als er in Wien einen Zwischenhalt einlegte, um Rudolf Fuchs zu treffen - am Abend des 16. Juli besuchten sie das Café Central. 9 Es wäre durchaus möglich, daß sich Kafka, Kuh und Gross bereits hier getroffen hatten, zählten doch das Café Central - neben dem Café Herrenhof in Wien, dem Café Arco in Prag - zu den ersten Adressen des notorischen Kaffeehausliteraten Anton Kuh. 10 In jedem Fall aber verbrachten die drei kurz darauf die gemeinsame Zugreise von Wien nach Prag. Drei Jahre später berichtete Kafka in einem Brief an Milena über diese denkwürdige Fahrt: Otto Gross habe ich kaum gekannt; daß hier aber etwas Wesentliches war das wenigstens die Hand aus dem »Lächerlichen« hinausstreckte, habe ich gemerkt. Die ratlose Stimmung seiner Freunde und Verwandten [...] erinnerte etwas an die Stimmung der Anhänger Christi, als sie unter dem Angenagelten standen. Ich kam damals gerade aus Budapest, wohin ich meine Braut begleitet hatte und fuhr dann, ganz verbraucht, meinem Blutsturz entgegen. Gross, Frau und Schwager [gemeint ist Anton Kuh, A. K.] fuhren mit dem gleichen Nachtzug. Kuh befangen-unbefangen wie immer sang und lärmte die halbe Nacht [...]. Gross aber erzählte mir etwas fast die ganze Nacht [...]. Er erläuterte mir seine Lehre an einer Bibelstelle [...]. Unaufhörlich zerlegte er diese Stelle, unaufhörlich brachte er neues Material, unaufhörlich verlangte er meine Zustimmung. ' ' 7

8

9

10

11

Zur Bibliographie von Kuhs Schriften vgl. Ulrike Lehner: Anton Kuh (1890-1941), in: Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur seit 1933. Hg. von John M. Spalek. Bd 4: Bibliographien: Schriftsteller, Publizisten und Literaturwissenschaftler in den USA; Teil 2. Η - M . Bern, München: Saur 1994, 1019-1049. Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1958, 186. Gemeint ist Kuhs Essay »Werfel-Matinée« {Prager Tagblatt, 10. Oktober 1917) der sich auf Werfeis Besuch aus dem Elysium bezieht. Vgl. Rudolf Fuchs: Kafka und die Prager literarischen Kreise. In: »Als Kafka mir entgegenkam ...«. Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch. Berlin: Wagenbach 1995, 103-106, hier 106. Vgl. Hermann Kesten: Dichter im Café. Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein 1983 (Ausgewählte Werke / Ullstein Taschenbuch; 37105), 371, 378. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Milena. Hg. von Jürgen Born und Michael Müller. Erw. Neuausg., Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1983, 78f. Vgl. ebd., 133f.

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Wie sehr ihn dabei Gross' Lehre trotz allem angesprochen hatte, zeigt sich daran, daß die drei kurz nach dieser Fahrt, am 23. Juli 1917, bei Max Brod in Prag zusammentrafen, wobei Gross den Plan zu einer dem Programm seiner anarchistischen Psychoanalyse folgenden Zeitschrift vorstellte, die Blätter zur Bekämpfung des Machtwillens, an der nicht nur Kuh und Werfel, sondern auch Kafka mitarbeiten sollte, dem dieses Projekt »sehr verlockend erschien«. 12 Daß gerade Milena 1920 Kafka nach Gross und Kuh fragte, war wiederum kein Zufall, denn sie selbst kannte beide, und zwar über ihren Mann Ernst Polak, mit dem sie seit 1918 in Wien lebte und der zusammen mit seinem Freund Franz Werfel zu dem Kreis um Kuh und Gross im Café Herrenhof zählte. 13 Polak und Kuh mußten sich im übrigen auch über Kafka unterhalten haben, denn in einem Artikel über die Literaten der Wiener Kaffeehäuser »Central« und »Herrenhof« von 1926 nannte Kuh Ernst Polak den »Geburtshelfer Werfeis, Kornfelds, Franz Kafkas«, was freilich ein Gefallen an Polak war. 1 4 Wie gut Milena und Kafka die Kuhs kannten, ist schließlich auch daran zu sehen, daß Kafka ihr im September 1920, offensichtlich auf ihre Frage hin, bestätigte: »Ja, Mizzi Kuh war hier, es ist ganz gut gewesen.« 15 Mizzi, eigentlich Marianne Kuh (1894-1948) war eine der drei Schwestern von Anton Kuh, die zum Gross-Kreis gehörten und die freie Liebe propagierten. Sie war mit Gross von 1915 bis zu seinem Tod im Februar 1920 liiert und hatte 1916 eine Tochter mit ihm, Sophie Templer-Kuh, heute Ehrenpräsidentin der Otto Gross-Gesellschaft. 16 Das Verhältnis von Kafka und Mizzi Kuh ist schwer zu beurteilen; offensichtlich aber haben sie sich »ziemlich gut gekannt«. 17 Man kann annehmen, daß die beiden bei Mizzis Besuch u. a. sowohl über den ein halbes Jahr zuvor verstorbenen Otto Gross, als auch über ihren Bruder Anton Kuh gesprochen haben, der, wie noch zu zeigen ist, ein knappes Jahr zuvor in Prag eine Reihe von aufsehenerregenden Vorträgen hielt. Mit Gross war auch Anton Kuhs jüngere Schwester 12

13

14

15 16

17

Vgl. Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 196: »Wenn mir eine Zeitschrift längere Zeit hindurch verlockend schien [...], so war es die von Dr. Gross, deshalb weil sie mir, wenigstens an jenem Abend, aus einem Feuer einer gewissen persönlichen Verbundenheit hervorzugehen schien«. Vgl. auch Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1974, 140. Vgl. dazu: Marta Kotyk-Marková: Die Publizistin Milena Jesenská. In: Kafka und Prag. Colloquium im Goethe-Institut Prag, 24.-27. November 1992. Hg. von Kurt Krolop und Hans Dieter Zimmermann. Berlin: de Gruyter 1994, 199-208; Alena Wagnerová: Milena Jesenská. Biographie. Mannheim: Bollmann 1994. Kuh, Luftlinien (Anm. 5), 26. Der Artikel »Central und Herrenhof« erschien in: Der Querschnitt 6 (1926), 612-617. Zu Polaks Bedeutung im Wiener Kaffeehauskreis um Werfel und Kuh vgl. das mündliche Zeugnis von Milan Dubrovic, in: Peter Stephan Jungk: Franz Werfel. Eine Lebensgeschichte. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1987, 141f. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (Anm. 11), 272. Für die Angaben danke ich Gottfried Heuer von der Otto-Gross-Gesellschaft, Berlin (http://www.ottogross.org). So formulierte es Sophie Templer-Kuh in einem Brief an mich.

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Nina Kuh liiert,18 die zudem mit Franz Werfel zeitweise in einer engeren Verbindung stand.19 Werfel war seinerseits nicht nur mit Gross, sondern bis in das New Yorker Exil mit Anton Kuh befreundet, wie er auch in seinem Nachruf auf ihn betonte.20 Kuh wiederum schrieb unter dem Titel »Kierling in der Literaturgeschichte« - gemeint ist Kafkas Sterbeort bei Wien - einen Nachruf auf Kafka, worin er für den damals noch weitgehend Unbekannten prophezeite: Später werden sie sein Leben [...] dem Pascals vergleichen; sie werden Zusammenhänge zwischen seinen Dichtung gewordenen Traumarbeiten und der Psychoanalyse aufdecken; der Name »Kleist« wird die Vergleiche krönen. 21

II. Wenn Kuh es unternommen hatte, »die Jahrtausendpsychose der Juden« zu analysieren,22 um nun einen genaueren Blick auf seinen Essay zu werfen, dann tat er dies, wie angesprochen, in erster Linie in den Begriffen der Sozialrevolutionären Psychoanalyse von Otto Gross. Zwar ließe sich der Horizont dieser Debatte - auch im Hinblick auf Kafka - durchaus weiter abstecken. Man könnte beispielsweise vermuten, daß die theoretischen und ideologischen Prämissen von Kuhs Psychoanalyse des Judentums auch in der Nähe dessen liegen, was Otto Weininger als Zusammenhang von Judentum und Sexualität gedacht hatte. Wie Weininger, über den übrigens im Februar 1921 auch Kafkas Freund Oskar Baum unter dem Titel »Judentum und Erotik« in Prag einen Vortrag hielt,23 untersucht Kuh »die psychische Eigenheit des Judentums«,24 allerdings macht Kuh Weininger selbst zum Gegenstand seiner Pathographie des Judentums. Vor allem aber zielt Kuh nicht auf eine typologische Neubegründung und 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

Offensichtlich haben die beiden Schwestern um Gross konkurriert; Nina versuchte ihn mit Kokain und Morphin zu sich zu bringen. Vgl. die in Anm. 16 genannte Quelle. Vgl. Norbert Abels: Franz Werfel mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1990 (Rowohlts Monographien; 472), 47. Franz Werfel: Anton Kuh (Nachruf)· In: Aufbau, Jg 7, Nr 5 (31. Januar 1941), 9. Werfel hat die Verhältnisse um Gross und dessen Beziehungen zu den Kuhs auch in seinem autobiographischen Roman Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (Wien: Zsolnay 1929) thematisiert. Werfeis selbst erscheint dort als »Ferdinand«, Gross als »Dr. Gebhart«, dessen Lebensgefährtin »Lisa« offensichtlich Marianne Kuh entspricht (vgl. etwa ebd., 422ff.). Anton Kuh: Kierling in der Literaturgeschichte. In: ders., Luftlinien (Anm. 5), 471— 472, hier 472. Anton Kuh: Juden und Deutsche. Ein Resumée. Berlin: Erich Reiss 1921, 6. Vgl. dazu Johannes Urzidil: Judentum und Erotik. In: Selbstwehr, Jg 15, Nr 7 (18. Februar 1921), Iff. Vgl. auch Oskar Baum: Otto Weininger. In: Juden in der deutschen Literatur. Essays über zeitgenössische Schriftsteller. Hg. von Gustav Krojanker. Berlin: Welt-Verlag 1922, 121-138. Vgl. Otto Weininger: Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung Wien: Braumüller 1903, 401.

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Radikalisierung, sondern vielmehr auf eine Überwindung der bürgerlich-patriarchalen Geschlechterdifferenz. Darüber hinaus hatte Kuhs Polemik gegen die modernen Formen des Judentums, anders als bei Weininger, keinen antijüdischen Affekt. Sie leistete vielmehr die Begründung eines, wie er es nannte, »befreiten« Judentums. In anderer Weise unterscheidet sich Kuh auch von Hans Blüher, wenn auch dessen Schrift Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (1917ff.) mit ihrer Kritik des bürgerlichen Primats der heterosexuellen Familie Gross und Kuh weitaus näherliegt als Weininger. Gross und Kuh teilen mit Blüher insbesondere die Arbeitshypothese, »daß die letzte Begründung für die Staathaftigkeit des Menschengeschlechts in seinem Eros zu suchen ist«,25 und nicht etwa in politischen und ökonomischen Fragen. Nicht zufallig nannte auch Kafka Gross' Zeitschriftenplan in einem Atemzug mit Blüher.26 Doch anders als Gross und Kuh, die die patriarchale Struktur der Familie als Keimzelle von Gesellschaft und Staat verstanden, unterschied Blüher die »Gesellschaft« als Ort des »mann-mannlichen Eros« vom »mann-weiblichen Eros« der Familie.27 Vor allem aber lässt sich der hier noch marginalere,28 in Blühers Secessio Judaica (1921) allerdings aggressiv zutagetretende Antisemitismus nicht mit Kuh vereinbaren und forderte nicht zufallig auch Kafkas Widerspruch heraus.29 Während Weininger und Blüher, letztlich der gesamte Diskurs der Psychologisierung und Pathologisierung des Judentums 30 im weiteren Horizont von Kuhs Juden und Deutsche stehen, ist doch die unmittelbare und explizit genannte Referenz Otto Gross' Sozialrevolutionäre Psychoanalyse. Im Namen des Freudianischen Unbewußten und von Johann Jakob Bachofens Mutterrecht verkündete Gross die Überwindung der vaterrechtlichen Instanzen der Macht: Staat, Religion, Wissenschaft und, als Keimzelle aller Macht überhaupt, Familie und Ehe.31 25

26

27 28

29

30

31

Hans Blüher: Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft. Eine Theorie der menschlichen Staatsbildung nach Wesen und Wert. Jena: Diederichs 1917, Bd 1,4. »Wenn mir eine Zeitschrift längere Zeit hindurch verlockend erschien (augenblicksweise natürliche jede), so war es die von Dr. Gross [...]. Wenn ich jetzt noch hinzufuge, daß ich vor einiger Zeit Werfel im Traum einen Kuß gegeben habe, falle ich mitten in das Blühersche Buch [Die Rolle der Erotik, Α. K.] hinein. [...] Es hat mich aufgeregt, zwei Tage lang mußte ich deshalb das Lesen unterbrechen.« Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 196. Vgl. Blüher, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (Anm. 25), 7. Blüher schließt die Juden grundsätzlich aus der männlich-erotischen Gesellschaft aus: »Mein grundsätzlicher Freundestypus ist germanisch [...], der jüdische Mannestyp wirkt spontan nicht auf mich.« (Ebd., 212) Vgl. Kafkas Brief an Robert Klopstock vom 30. Juni 1922 (Kafka, Briefe [Anm. 8], 380) und den Tagebucheintrag vom Mai 1922 (Franz Kafka: Tagebücher. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller und Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, 923f.). Vgl. etwa Fritz Wittels Der Taußude (1904) oder Rafael Beckers Die jüdische Nervosität (1918). Vgl. dazu Sander L. Gilman: Jüdischer Selbsthaß. Antisemitismus und die verborgene Sprache der Juden. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag 1993, 219ff. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 16-20. Zu Gross vgl. auch Emanuel Hurwitz: Otto Gross. Paradies-Sucher zwischen Freud und Jung. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1979;

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In seiner Übertragung von Gross' Lehre auf das Judentum nun verstand Kuh die jüdische Familie geradezu als Ursprung und Inbegriff patriarchaler Ordnung. Kuhs Beschreibung der jüdischen Familie ist dementsprechend vernichtend: »Der Vater, Ur-Besitzer, schwingt die Erhaltungsfuchtel. Die Mutter, in ihrem Glück verkrüppelt, hegt die Kinder als Krüppel; die Töchter sind lebendig aufgebahrtes, wie Topfblumen betreutes Verkaufsgut«, während die rebellischen Söhne »Schaum um den Mund, unterlaufenen Auges, an den Fesseln der Erinnerung zerren«, meist jedoch ohne vom Joch des »tausendjährigen Autoritätsgeistes« loszukommen. 32 Davon ausgehend verstand Kuh die jüdische Moderne wesentlich als Austragung eines Vater-Sohn-Konflikts, eines Konflikts zwischen »Rentner« und »Revolutionär«: Der Rentner, das ist bei ihnen [= den Juden, A. K.]: der Vater. Der Familienträger. Der Staatsmensch. Genauer gesprochen: der mit der Ursünde und dem geschlechtlichen Besitzgeist Solidarische. Der Revolutionär, das ist: der Sohn. Der Familienfeind. Der Weltmensch. Er will Sühnung der Erbschuld und eine Zukunft freier Beziehungswahl. 33

Kuhs »befreites Judentum« ist ein Judentum des rebellischen Sohnes, dessen Ausbruch, die jüdische Familie allerdings ständig aufzuhalten versucht: All dein Streben ist Stubensprengung, Weite, Errettung aus den Schleimfäden inzüchtigen Durchschautseins zur Tat hinan, zur Welt! - da wird jenes Wort laut und sagt: »Mitgefangen - mitgehangen! Du kommst uns nicht aus! Wir holen dich von den Sternen oben zu unserer Brüderschaft [...] herab. 34

Jüdische Identität in der Moderne besteht nach Kuh also in mehr oder weniger gescheiterten und verzweifelten Versuchen einer »Überwindung des Papa«. 35 Wenn Kuh bei seiner Analyse des Judentums von einer »Psychose« spricht, dann meint er diese Schwierigkeiten bei der Ablösung vom »jüdischen Papa«. Als Ausprägungen dieser jüdischen »Psychose« gilt Kuh folgerichtig, was üblicherweise zu den Formen des modernen Judentums gerechnet wird: Assimilation, Selbsthaß, Zionismus. Seine Kritik der Assimilation hatte Kuh bereits 1918 in einem mit »Pogrom« überschriebenen Artikel formuliert. Schon dieser Artikel stieß gerade in Prag auf großes Interesse: Ursprünglich für die pazifistische Zeitschrift Der Friede geschrieben, erschien er, mit ausdrücklicher Erlaubnis des Autors und mit einer Einleitung von Max Brod, ausgerechnet auch in der Selbstwehr. Was der zionistische Leser Brod an dem Artikel hervorgehoben hatte, war die Überraschung, daß es sich dabei nicht etwa um eine Apologie, sondern vielmehr um

32 33 34 35

Martin Green: Else und Frieda, die Richthofen-Schwestern. Stuttgart: Kindler 1976, 4 8 92; Jennifer E. Michaels: Anarchy and Eros. Gross' Impact on German Expressionist Writers. New York u. a.: Lang 1983 (Utah Studies in Literature and Linguistics; 24). Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 23f. Ebd., 50. Ebd., 5. Ebd., 24.

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eine polemische und zugleich ernstzunehmende Kritik der Assimilation handle. Kuh nämlich lokalisierte hier, wie auch in dem Essay Juden und Deutsche, die »Tragödie«, mehr noch: die »Schuld« des Judentums in seiner »Selbstverblendung und Selbstbelügung im Bündnis mit fremden Idealen«.36 Seine These über die Assimilation - »die Vordringlichkeit zu den fremden Idealen ist ihre Schuld« - erschien Brod als Ausdruck einer geradezu revolutionären »Bejahung des Judentums«, wie es eigentlich nur der Zionismus leisten konnte.37 Ebenso plausibel erschien ihm auch Kuhs Interpretation des Antisemitismus als der tragischen Konsequenz für die assimilierten Juden: »[...] am Ende schlägt man ihnen noch mit einem Axthieb den gebeugten Nacken durch. Ihres falschen Strebens Lohn ist: der Pogrom.«38 Dies ist die Kurzfassung dessen, was Kuh, neben einem Artikel im Prager Tagblatt Anfang 1921,39 in Juden und Deutsche in einem »150jährigen Rückblick« auf die Geschichte der »deutsch-jüdischen Gemütsallianz« von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg genauer ausgeführt hat. Was in der Aufklärung unter dem Vorwand »Humanität« und »Toleranz«, im 19. Jahrhundert in der schon weitaus pragmatischeren Gestalt des »Liberalismus«, anschließend im Namen der »Sozialdemokratie« als Strategien der Selbstauflösung - und nicht etwa der »Befreiung« - des Judentums erkennbar werde, mündete 1914, als dem »Finale nicht nur der jüdischen Irrtümer allein, sondern der Weltirrtümer« überhaupt, 40 in Deutschpatriotismus und Kriegsbeteiligung der deutschen Juden. Ob jüdische Aufklärung, Liberalismus, Sozialdemokratie oder deutscher Nationalismus - immer läßt sich der »tragische Irrtum« der Juden auf den einen Nenner der Assimilation bringen, »sich der fremden, [...] im letzten Ende feindlichen Sache als der eigenen anzunehmen.« Gemäß Kuhs Pathographie der jüdischen »Psychosen« ist der »jüdische Selbsthaß« nur eine allerdings radikale Überbietung der Assimilation. Damit definiert Kuh den »Selbsthaß« anders als Karl Kraus, der in Eine Krone für Zion (1899) die Verachtung der Ostjuden durch die Zionisten - paradigmatisch an Herzls Mauschel - als »jüdischen Antisemitismus« kritisierte.41 Die Pathologie des »jüdischen Selbsthasses«, den Kuh hier knapp zwanzig Jahre nach Weiningers und Kraus' Ansätzen, aber doch zehn Jahre vor Theodor Lessings Studie ausfuhrlich zur Diskussion stellte,42 ist allerdings komplexer als im Fall der Assi36 37 38 39

40 41

42

Anton Kuh: Pogrom. In: Selbstwehr, Jg 12, Nr 23 (21. Juni 1918), 2. Max Brod: Ein Wort über Anton Kuh. In: ebd., 1-2. Kuh, Pogrom (Anm. 36), 2. Anton Kuh: Antisemitismus und Deutschenhaß. In: Prager Tagblatt, Nr 25 (30. Januar 1921), 3. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 63. Vgl. Karl Kraus: Eine Krone für Zion. In: ders., Frühe Schriften 1892-1900. Hg. von Johannes J. Braakenburg. München: Kösel 1979, Bd 2, 298-314. Vgl. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Anm. 24), 402ff.; Theodor Lessing: Jüdischer Selbsthaß. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1930. Lessing verweist erstaunlicherweise an keiner Stelle auf Kuh, ebensowenig Sander L. Gilman in seiner Untersuchung über den Jüdischen Selbsthaß (Anm. 30). Zur (allerdings lückenhaften) Begriffsgeschichte vgl. ebd., 21 Off.

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milation: Hypersensibel und geradezu paranoid bezogen auf alles »Jüdische« spürt der »jüdische Antisemit« das »latente Jüdeln im Weltraum« auf, jedoch nur, um daran seinen »Vater- und Familienhaß« auszutragen und selbst »aus der Haut des Judentums in eine unbekannte, noblere zu fahren«. 43 Was Kuh als den Typus des in diesem Sinne ewig pubertierenden jüdischen Junggesellen beschrieben hatte, galt Otto Weininger, Arthur Trebitsch und vor allem Karl Kraus. An ihm diagnostizierte er die »psychotische« Disposition des »jüdischen Antisemitismus«, 44 dies erneut und polemisch verschärft in seiner skandalösen Stegreifrede vom 25. Oktober 1925 »Der Affe Zarathustras«, auf die Kraus mit einen Prozeß antwortete. »Psychoanalytisch gesehen«, so Kuhs Pathographie des jüdischen Junggesellen Kraus, »stellt sich der Intelligenzplebejer - den ich hier in seiner wienerisch-österreichischen und vorwiegend mosaischen Ausgabe definieren will [...], als ein mit unangenehmen Familienkomplexen beschwertes Wesen dar, aus dem Dunst der engen Stube stammend, nicht so sehr voll der edlen Liebe des freien Menschen als voll dieser falschen, verkrüppelten Mitleidsliebe des Menschen, [...] der an das Kreuz der >Mischpoche< geschmiedet ist.« 45 Die polemische Kritik der Assimilation und des jüdischen Selbsthasses schien auf eine zionistische Position hinauszulaufen. Zumindest aus zionistischer Sicht war es deshalb überraschend, daß Kuh auch den Zionismus in gewohnter Polemik kritisierte. Was er selbst als »Sendung des Judentums« verstanden wissen wollte, schien ihm jedoch gerade im politischen Zionismus weit verfehlt. 46 In seinem Essay kritisierte Kuh den Zionismus in analytischen Begriffen als Institutionalisierung des »Verwandtschaftsinstinkts« unter den jüdischen Söhnen. Die zionistische Losung - »Zurück« - ist ein »Ruf des Familien- nicht des Weltenbruders«. 47 »Wir trachten in die Welt, in die Welt!«, so der jüdische Anti-Ödipus Anton Kuh: Los von den Vätern und Richtern und Tempelhütem! Der Zionismus samtenes Patriarchenkäppchen. [...] Er bejaht, was verneinenswert, bar, was zerstörungswürdig: Familie, Ehe und den Gott der Rache. kritiklos Kanaan. Darum sagt seine Werbung auch: Komm zurück warme Stube. 48

aber trägt ein hält für kostEr akzeptiert zurück in die

Kuhs Polemik gegen den Zionismus geht jedoch über den Vorwurf der Perpetuierung der patriarchalen jüdischen Familienordnung hinaus. Sie richtet sich auch gegen die zionistische Reduktion der Diaspora zu einem »Zweitausendszufall«. Darin nämlich vermutet Kuh die Konstruktion weniger einer 43 44 45 46

47 48

Ebd., 39ff. Ebd., 38. Kuh, Luftlinien (Anm. 5), 168. Kuhs Aphorismus: »Die Psychoanalytiker: Asozia-Zionisten«, traf insofern auf ihn selbst zu, als er etwa bedeuten könnte: die Psychoanalyse ist die Paradoxie eines asozialen Zionismus (ebd., 300). Ebd., 25. Ebd., 26.

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jüdischen, als einer christlichen »Passionsgeschichte«, d. h. die Deutung der Diaspora als eines Leidens, das in der »Verheißung Kanaans« aufgehoben wird, eines Kanaan, daß zudem nach dem Muster der europäischen Nationalstaaten gedacht ist. 49 Gegen den »Imitationsnationalismus« des Zionismus appelliert Kuh deshalb daran, die zweitausend Jahre »der europäischen Verbannung« politisch-philosophisch umzusetzen und aus der Geschichte zu lernen: Sollte die europäische Lehrzeit des Judentums keinen Sinn haben, als daß es dort beginnt, wo die anderen enden? - enden und verenden? Der Leidensvorsprung und die Gasterfahrung, bestimmt, sich in Mißtrauen gegen jede Art von Volksbewußtsein umzuwerten, das vom Besitz statt vom Menschen ausgeht, sie sollten ihm zu nichts anderem nutze sein als einem »ismus« nach bewährten Mustern? 50

Als Gegenentwurf gegen die gemäß Kuh »pathologischen« Existenzformen des jüdischen Sohnes erst läßt sich verstehen, was er im Anschluß an den »Paradiessucher« 5 1 Otto Gross als anti-ödipale »Befreiung« des Judentums forderte: eine umfassende Loslösung von all den Werten, die die jüdische Vater-Familie setzte. Die »Sendung« und »Auserwähltheit« der Juden, von der Kuh nicht ohne messianisch-revolutionäres Pathos spricht, besteht zunächst darin, sich gegen alles zu stellen, »was Kultur, Sitte und Ordnung heißt«. 5 2 Nicht Opportunismus also, wie Kuh dem Zionismus - als Anpassung des Judentums an die nichtjüdischen Nationalismen - und der Assimilation - als Anpassung an die europäische Kultur und Gesellschaft - vorwirft, sondern Opposition ist die Aufgabe des Judentums: »Wir wollen in Offensive treten, um zu uns zu kommen«, 5 3 so die Losung von Kuhs Judentum der Befreiung. Es ist dies eine Befreiung letztlich von jener Instanz, die Machtund Autoritätsstrukturen wie Ehe, Familie, Nation, Krieg, etc. erst ermöglicht: von der Moral. Wohin nämlich, so Kuh in Anlehnung an Nietzsche, die »Wege« des Juden auch führen, »nur die Schicksalstreue bestätigt ihm das Ziel - jene Treue, die ihn wissen lehrte, daß ein freies Leben mehr wert ist als tausend Heldentode [...]. Und weiß und begreift er dies, dann kann ihm auch nicht mehr zweifelhaft sein, wozu er auserwählt ist: dazu nämlich, die Schuld jenes zerbrochenen >Du< zu sühnen und der widerspenstigen Welt die Erkenntnis aufzuzwingen, daß sie den Tod am lebendigen Leib mit allem Zittern und Zagen metaphysischer Wagnis überwindet, wenn sie die Moral in Stücke schlägt.« 5 4

49 50 51 52 53 54

Ebd., 27f. Ebd., 30. Vgl. Hurwitz, Otto Gross (Anm. 31). Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 106. Ebd. Ebd., 141.

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III. Mit diesem revolutionären Judentum vor Augen und in ebenso revolutionär gehaltenen Reden ist Anton Kuh Ende 1919 in Prag und kurz danach in Berlin aufgetreten. Am 25. November konnte man im Prager Tagblatt folgende Anzeige lesen: Vortrag Anton Kuh. Wie angekündigt, wird Anton Kuh am kommenden Samstag im Urania-Saal seinen ersten Vortrag halten. Der als Vortragsredner in Prag wiederholt gewürdigte Gast [dies spielt ζ. B. auf Mai 1918 an 5 5 ] wird, zunächst über die »sexuelle Revolution« sprechen. Kuh gilt auch in Wien durch seine besondere, geistsprühende und originelle Art des Sprechens als eine einzigartige Erscheinung im Vortragsaal. Dem Vortrag wird allgemeines Interesse entgegengebracht. Vormerkungen in der Urania-Kanzlei, Smetschkagasse 22. 5 6

Am 19. Dezember folgte eine begeisterte Rezension, die Kuh »als Mahnrufer zur Erotik« und »Rebell« »gegen eine sinnfeindliche Kultur-Entartung« würdigte. 57 Als Höhepunkt von Kuhs Auftritten wurde jedoch der kurz darauf gehaltene Vortrag zur »Tragik des Judentums« gefeiert. Am 23. Dezember 1919 kündigte das Prager Tagblatt fur den 30. Dezember an: »Vortrag Anton Kuh, >Die Tragik des JudentumsDer alte Goethe und der junge SchopenhauerAnton Kuh, dem Sprechen, dem »rhapsodischen Rächer und Zeuge und Täter des Geistes«; der Rezensent war Berthold Viertel (Anton Kuh, der Sprecher. In: Prager Tagblatt, Jg 43, Nr 108, 11. Mai 1918, 4). Prager Tagblatt, 25. November 1919, 5. Ebd., 19. Dezember 1919,4. Nur schon in Prag müßte man auch Johannes Urzidil nennen: Juden und Deutsche. In: Prager Tagblatt, Nr 272, 20. November 1921, Unterhaltungsbeilage. Vgl. auch die Rezension des Vortrags im Prager Tagblatt, Jg 45, Nr 1, 1. Januar 1920, 7. Wiederholt hat es Brod unternommen, Kafka einen latenten und unkonventionellen Zionismus nachzuweisen, am deutlichsten vielleicht in der Figur Richard Gartas, alias

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mus nachzuweisen, ein Zionismus freilich, der in Opposition zu all seinen offiziellen Formen steht, aber gerade deshalb, so Brod in seinem eindrücklichen Plädoyer für Kuh, alle Aufmerksamkeit verdient: Anton Kuhs Bedeutung sehe ich, zum Unterschied von vielen, die in ihm nur den geistreichen Ueber-Hanswurst verhätscheln, in seinem wahrheitsliebenden Ernst, der u. a. auch als rückhaltlose Bekennerschaft zum Judentum durchbricht. - Ganz oberflächlich betrachtet hat diese Bekennerschaft zumindest folgende nicht zu unterschätzende soziale Bedeutung: In Wiener und Prager Literaturklüngeln, in denen es bisher verpönt war, das Wort »Jude« auszusprechen [...], in solchen Salons inauguriert Anton Kuh mit der ihm eigenen Ungeniertheit vielstündige Diskussionen über das Judentum, in deren Verlauf er [...] das Wesen des Judentums als welterlösend bejaht und dem offiziellen Deutschtum allerlei Uebles [...], vor allem aber den assimilierten Deutschjuden das Allerpeinlichste nachsagt. Man höre und staune! - Anton Kuh ist kein Zionist. Besser gesagt: er kennt den Zionismus nicht so genau, daß sein Urteil über die Bewegung wesenhaft sein könnte. Aber Kuh ist (was viel, viel mehr wiegt als gesinnungstüchtiger Durchschnitts-Zionismus) auf seinem allerpersönlichsten eigenen Wege zur Bejahung seines Judentums gelangt, auf seine revolutionäre Art, die alles Lügenhafte, Pappdeckelne, Lebensunechte dort, wo sie es findet, bekämpft. Der Schrei dieses Outsiders möge gehört werden.60 Diesem Aufruf folgte in der Selbstwehr unmittelbar nach dem Vortrag im Urania-Saal von Ende 1919 u. a. Felix Weltsch, seit 1919 als Nachfolger von Siegmund Kaznelson leitender Redakteur der Selbstwehr. Weltschs ausfuhrliche Rezension setzt zwar auch mit einem Plädoyer ein. Doch ist die Bewunderung des Redners und Satirikers (die im übrigen nahelegt, daß auch Kafka den Vortrag gehört hatte) nicht ohne Vorbehalte gegen den Ernst der vermittelten »Wahrheiten«: Wie immer war der Vortrag Kuhs belebend, aufreizend, voll genial-unartiger Formulierungen, rhetorisch und schauspielerisch glänzend. [...] Uns [...] war es ein Vergnügen, daß man [...] gewisse gute Wahrheiten auch von einem Mann zu hören bekam, der gerade in Mode ist, was natürlich weder ein Vorwurf gegen Anton Kuh ist, noch ein Hindernis, anzuerkennen, daß der Vortrag wirklich gut war.61 Worin diese »gewissen guten Wahrheiten« bestanden, läßt sich daran erkennen, daß auch Weltsch in Kuhs Vortrag geradezu »einen nationaljüdischen Propagandavortrag« sah, »wie er mit solcher Pointiertheit und Schlagkraft wohl nur selten gehalten worden ist«. 62 Es liegt auf der Hand, daß sich Weltsch dabei zunächst auf Kuhs Kritik des »jüdischen Antisemitismus« und der Assimilation bezog.

60 61

62

Franz Kafkas, in dem Roman Im Zauberreich der Liebe (Berlin: Zsolnay 1928), etwa 409. Vgl. dazu den Beitrag von Mark H. Gelber in diesem Band. Brod, Ein Wort über Anton Kuh (Anm. 3), 1-2. -tsch [d. i. Felix Weltsch]: Die Tragik des Judentums (Vortrag Anton Kuh). In: Selbstwehr, Jg 14, Nr 1 (2. Januar 1920), 5. Ebd.

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Mit wunderbarer jüdisch-psychologischer Darstellungskunst zeichnete Kuh seine Judentypen, welche in verschiedenster Art, bewußt oder unbewußt, robust oder hysterisch, ihr Judentum verschleierten, vertuschten, verdrängten, überkompensierten. 63

Dem Eindruck, daß es sich bei Kuhs Vortrag um einen »nationaljüdischen Propagandavortrag« handle, widersprach jedoch Kuhs unübersehbare Zionismuskritik: Den Zionismus lehnt Kuh ab, da ihm entsprechend den so gewonnenen Resultaten seiner Dialektik der zuende gedachte Begriff Heimat als etwas wesentlich unjüdisches erscheint und die Heimatlosigkeit der Juden ihm mehr ist als zufälliges Weltschicksal. 64

Von einem »zionistischen Nationalismus« unterscheidet sich Kuh deshalb dadurch, »daß er im Grunde wieder allzu nah bei jener eben abgelehnten Humanitäts- und Menschheitsidee mündet«, was bedeutet, daß er letztlich in den Kategorien der Assimilation verhaften bleibt. 65 Während also Brod bei Kuh einen latenten, revolutionären Zionismus vermutete, erblickte Weltsch hinter Kuhs vordergründig nationaljüdischer Kritik der Assimilation letztlich nur wieder ihr eigenes Programm. Auf dieses Ergebnis kam der Großteil der zionistischen Kuh-Kritiken. Sowohl Felix Weltschs Cousin Robert Weltsch, der Kuhs im Mai 1920 in Berlin gehaltenen Vortrag über die »Tragik des Judentums« in der von ihm herausgegebenen Jüdischen Rundschau rezensierte, als auch Elias Hurwicz, der Kuhs Essay für Bubers Der Jude besprach, betonten in erster Linie seine Differenz zum Zionismus. 6 6 Vor allem an Robert Weltsch ließe sich zeigen, daß Kuh den Berliner Zionisten weit mehr als den Pragern als Problemfall erschien. Sie erkannten in seinem Judentum einen Proto-Zionismus, der auf der Strecke vom Selbsthaß zum Zionismus auf halbem Weg stehengeblieben und gerade deshalb unhaltbar war. Der Weg, den Kuh heute zu weisen versucht, ist ungangbar. Wenn er an dem jüdischen Kampfe aktiv teilnehmen will, so muß er tiefer in die jüdische Wirklichkeit hineinsteigen und muß auf der Entwicklungslinie, die viele vor ihm gegangen sind, nun noch den letzten entscheidenden Schritt tun, der eine Ueberwindung seines heutigen Standpunktes ist. 67

Um so bemerkenswerter ist es, daß Max Brod kurz nach dem Erscheinen von Juden und Deutsche nochmals das Wort für Anton Kuh ergriff, erneut, um in ihm den unorthodoxen, aber um so radikaleren Zionisten zu retten. Daß auch 63 64 65 66

67

Ebd. Ebd. Ebd. Elias Hurwicz: Völkerpsychologie: Anton Kuh: »Juden und Deutsche«. In: Der Jude 6(1921/22), 53-55. Robert Weltsch: Der Fall Anton Kuh. In: Jüdische Rundschau, Jg 25, Nr 21 (26. März 1920), 144-145.

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Kafka die Anfang April 1921 in der Selbstwehr - und auch an anderen Orten 68 - unter dem Titel »Der Nietzsche-Liberale (Bemerkungen zu dem Buch von Anton Kuh >Juden und Deutsche^« erschienene Rezension gelesen hatte, bezeugt ein Brief an Brod. 69 Auch hier unternimmt es Brod, trotz und auch gegen Kuhs manifeste Kritik ihm eine latente Verwandtschaft mit einer »Opposition innerhalb des Zionismus« nachzuweisen. 70 Was nämlich Kuh mit dem unorthodoxen, »linken Flügel« des Zionismus teile, sei - neben dem »Hauptvorzug: Die Ablehnung aller jüdischen Ausflüchte, Abstrafung aller Assimilation, mag sie unter bürgerlich-humanistischen oder unter sozialistischen Fahnen desertieren« - im Grunde seine gesamte Kultur- und Gesellschaftskritik: »die Tiraden gegen den jüdischen Intellektualismus, gegen die jüdische Unnaivität«, aber auch die von Gross her gedachte »Kritik der jüdischen Ehe«. 71 Entsprechend lautet Brods Fazit über Kuhs Buch: Interessant wie selten ein Buch. Es ist der äußerste Versuch, alle Erkenntnisse und Grundgefühle mit den Zionisten gemein zu haben, und - dennoch nicht Zionist zu werden. 7 2

IV. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser vielfältigen biographischen und intellektuellen Verbindungslinien Kuhs zu Prag lassen sich nun auch seine Spuren in Kafkas Schriften nachzeichnen. Sie manifestieren sich am deutlichsten um 1920 in den Ansätzen, in denen Kafka seinerseits eine Interpretation des Judentums und des Zionismus zu formulieren unternommen hatte. Anders, als seine Freunde Felix Weltsch und Max Brod hat sich Kafka kaum explizit, schon gar nicht systematisch, sondern vorwiegend implizit und allusiv mit Kuh - wie mit dem Diskurs über Judentum und Zionismus überhaupt - auseinandergesetzt. Er tat dies, indem er sich in einer palimpsestartigen Schreibweise auf Kuhs Texte bezieht, einzelne Argumente in unterschiedlich gut erkennbaren Wendungen und Formulierungen als Versatzstücke zitierend. 73 Kafka teilte deshalb auch 68

69 70

71 72 73

Bereits am 23. März 1921 erschien Brods Kuh-Rezension in der Jüdischen Rundschau, und erneut in dem von Brod und Felix Weltsch gemeinsam zusammengestellten Band Zionismus als Weltanschauung (1925). Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 318. Max Brod: Der Nietzsche-Liberale. In: Selbstwehr, Jg 15, Nr 13 (1./8. April 1921). Ich zitiere aus dem Wiederabdruck in: Max Brod / Felix Weltsch: Zionismus als Weltanschauung. Mährisch-Ostrau: Färber 1925, 28-38, hier 29. Ebd., 32-34. Ebd., 29. Ich beziehe mich auf Gerard Genettes Palimpseste. Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1993 (Edition Suhrkamp; N. F. 683: Aesthetica), als dem Minimum an Literaturtheorie für das Verständnis von Kafkas Partizipation am Diskurs über den Zionismus. Vgl. auch Andreas B. Kilcher / Detlef Kremer: Die Genea-

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nicht das Bestreben seiner Freunde, Kuh - ebensowenig wie sich selbst - in der Alternative Assimilation oder Zionismus zu verorten oder ihn auf eine Option festzulegen. In seiner allusiven Relation zum Diskurs über Judentum und Zionismus vermeidet und verhindert Kafka vielmehr politisch-ideologische Fixierungen. Er hebt einzelne Wendungen und Denkfiguren von Kuh hervor und integriert sie optional in seinen Schreibprozeß. Auch deshalb kann es bei der Frage »Kafka und das Judentum« oder »Kafka und der Zionismus« nicht darum gehen, zu klären, ob Kafka Zionist war oder nicht, sondern vielmehr darum, seine in der Tat vielseitige und aktive Partizipation am zeitgenössischen Diskurs über Judentum und Zionismus - hier an dem bislang noch kaum beachteten Beispiel Anton Kuh - zu analysieren. Aus dem Repertoire von Kuhs provokativen Interpretamenten zum Judentum hat sich Kafka am deutlichsten auf das Psychogramm des westjüdischen Sohnes und sein Verhältnis zum Zionismus bezogen. Wenn Kafka dabei der großen Sympathie folgte, die seine Freunde Felix Weltsch und vor allem Max Brod für Kuhs eigenwillige und provokative Interpretation des Judentums hatten, dann ging es ihm gerade nicht darum, bei Kuh so etwas wie einen latenten Zionismus zu entdecken. Was ihn hauptsächlich interessierte, war vielmehr Kuhs Pathographie des anti-ödipalen, nicht zur familiären und zionistischen Gemeinschaft sich fähig fühlenden jüdischen Sohnes. Es ist dies jene Figur, die nicht nur in Kafkas zahlreichen literarischen Söhnen, sondern auch in seinen Briefen und Tagebüchern als imago seines Selbst unübersehbar präsent ist. Dabei ist Kuhs jüdischer Anti-Ödipus keineswegs eine radikal neue Figur für Kafka, vielmehr bestätigt und klärt er ein Profil, an dem Kafka spätestens seit der »Verwandlung« arbeitete. In einer bemerkenswerten Passage seines Essays Juden und Deutsche hat dies Kuh seinerseits erkannt, indem er zur Beschreibung des Typus des jüdischen Sohnes, der die familiären und nationalen Erwartungen nicht zu erfüllen vermag, ganz offensichtlich auf Kafkas Gregor Samsa der »Verwandlung« rekurrierte; das Verhältnis von Kuh und Kafka ist folglich nicht einsinnig, sondern besteht vielmehr in einer wechselseitigen Lektüre und Bezugnahme. Die westjüdischen Söhne, so Kuh, »sind entsprungen, nicht frei. Sie können den Geruch des Zwingers nicht verlieren und nicht die wachsame Unruhe des Blicks, die dort gedieh, wo sich der Mensch, hart gepreßt und warm umschlungen, Ich-besessen und zu Tränen gerührt, am Menschen reibt und am Ende, wie es einer von ihnen genial beschrieb, in eine Wanze verwandelt«. 74 Während Kuh zur Charakterisierung des Psychogramms des westjüdischen Sohnes in Gregor Samsa seinen literarischen Prototyp vermutete, argumentierte nun Kafka bei seiner Beschreibung des Typus des westjüdischen Sohnes nicht weniger offensichtlich mit Kuhs Kategorien, wobei die

74

logie der Schrift. Eine transtextuelle Lektüre von Kafkas »Bericht für eine Akademie«. In: Textverkehr. Kafka und die Tradition. Hg. von Claudia Liebrand und Franziska Schlößler. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2004, 45-72. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 25.

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Anlehnung an Kuh bis in die Formulierungen geht. Im Herbst 1921 entwarf Kafka in einem Brief an seine Schwester Elli das Szenario einer »typischen Familie«, wobei er nicht zufällig die Tier-Metapher der »Verwandlung« aufgriff: »Jede typische Familie stellt zunächst nur einen tierischen Zusammenhang dar, gewissermaßen einen einzigen Organismus, einen einzigen Blutkreislauf.« 75 Diese Formulierung zitiert klar Kuhs Bestimmung der jüdischen Familie als einer »Wallung gleichen Blutes«, als eines »einzigen, gesellig-beklommenen Leibes [...] zermürbter Ich's«: »Sie hausten in Käfigen, Familie genannt - und rückten, ein Leib mit vielen Köpfen [...] am Eßtisch zusammen.« 76 »Familienerziehung« unterscheidet sich, so formulierte es Kafka, von der Menschenerziehung durch die Heranzüchtung unfreier »Familientiere« und besteht in nichts anderem, als »den Kindern das Persönlichkeitsrecht Schritt für Schritt« zu nehmen, mit dem Ziel, »das Kind in den Boden, aus dem es kam, zurückzustampfen.« 77 Ähnlich formulierte es Kafka bereits in den Anfang 1920 - also unmittelbar nach Kuhs Prager Vortrag und Felix Weltschs Rezension - begonnenen Er-Aufzeichnungen. Am 15. Februar ζ. B. entwarf Kafka ein Familienszenario, geschrieben aus der Perspektive von Kuhs westjüdischem Sohn: Ihm ist als lebe und denke er unter der Nötigung einer Familie die zwar selbst überreich an Lebens- und Denkkraft ist, für die er aber nach irgendeinem ihm unbekannten Gesetz eine formelle Notwendigkeit bedeutet. Wegen dieser unbekannten Familie und dieser unbekannten Gesetze kann er nicht entlassen werden. 78

Kafkas westjüdischer Sohn ist das »Familientier«, das ebenso verzweifelt wie erfolglos aus dem familiären und gesellschaftlichen »Gelass« auszubrechen aber auch ebenso verzweifelt wie erfolglos dazuzugehören sucht. Ohne Vorfahren, ohne Ehe, ohne Nachkommen, mit wilder Vorfahrens- Ehe-, und Nachkommens-Lust. Alle reichen mir die Hand: Vorfahren, Ehe und Nachkommen, aber zu fern fur mich. 79

(Jüdische) Familie und (zionistische) Gemeinschaft sind dem westjüdischen Anti-Ödipus doppelt unmöglich: er kann sich ihnen weder verschließen, noch anschließen. Er verharrt in dem Zwischenstadium einer »ewigen Pubertät«, das Anton Kuh am westjüdischen Intellektuellen beobachtet hatte. Kafkas Briefe an Feiice sind vielleicht der beste Beleg dazu: in ihnen sind Ehe- und zionistischer Gemeinschaftswunsch ebenso aneinandergekoppelt wie Beziehungs- und Gemeinschaftsflucht. In dem wichtigen Brief vom Juni 1921 an Max Brod - geschrieben unmittelbar nach dem Erscheinen von Kuhs Essay und Brods Rezension - geht es Kafka erneut um den Typus des westjüdischen Sohnes, nunmehr aber um seine Dispo75 76 77 78 79

Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 344. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 22f. Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 344ff. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 29), 857. Ebd., 884.

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sition als Schriftsteller. Im Epilog seines Essays nämlich formulierte Kuh die These, daß die jüdischen Söhne ihr ödipales Familienleiden insbesondere durch eine Flucht in die weltferne und unverläßliche Zone der »Worte« kompensieren: Was die Erlesensten unter den Juden heute als ihre Größe und Tragik empfinden, das ist die Eingesperrtheit ins Wort. Sie wehklagen über ein Zuwenig an Welt [...]. Niemals liebend erstummen dürfen, sondern auf der ewig ahasverischen Bahn der Behauptung sein! Der Bodenlosigkeit entrinnen durch Verwortung. 80

Dies nun schien Kafka eine denkbar plausible Bestimmung nicht nur seines eigenen, sondern des Schreibens der jüdischen Schriftsteller deutscher Sprache überhaupt zu sein: Es besteht in der doppelten Unmöglichkeit, vom Judentum loszukommen und neuen kulturellen Boden zu gewinnen. Dieses anti-ödipale Dispositiv der westjüdischen »Familientierchen« besteht nach Kuh in einem verzweifelten »Aktivismus« in der »Überwindung des Papa«. Genau so formuliert es Kafka: ihmnach besteht jenes Schreiben darin, »daß der Vaterkomplex von dem sich mancher geistig nährt, nicht den unschuldigen Vater, sondern das Judentum des Vaters betrifft. Weg vom Judentum [...] wollen die meisten, die deutsch zu schreiben anfingen, sie wollten es, aber mit den Hinterbeinchen klebten sie noch am Judentum des Vaters und mit den Vorderbeinchen fanden sie keinen neuen Boden. Die Verzweiflung darüber war ihre Inspiration.« 81 Das Schreibdispositiv der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur besteht, mit anderen Worten, in einer doppelten Bindung an zwei große kulturelle, religiöse, soziale und politische Systeme, an das jüdische und an das deutsche. Anders als etwa Brod leitete Kafka daraus nicht die Forderung einer nationaljüdischen Literatur ab. 82 Vielmehr differenzierte er die ödipale, deutsch-jüdische »Inspiration« in vier »Unmöglichkeiten« und nicht etwa Möglichkeiten, denn die deutsch-jüdische Literatur ist, so Kafka, »eine von allen Seiten unmögliche Literatur, eine Zigeunerliteratur«: Die Unmöglichkeit, nicht zu schreiben, die Unmöglichkeit, deutsch zu schreiben, die Unmöglichkeit, anders zu schreiben, fast könnte man eine vierte Unmöglichkeit hinzufügen, die Unmöglichkeit, zu schreiben. 83

Kafkas westjüdische, nicht-ödipalisierte »Zigeunerliteratur« ist das Schreiben im bodenlosen Raum zwischen den beiden großen, kulturellen FamilienSystemen der deutschen Literatur der Assimilation und der jüdischen Literatur des Zionismus. Das Psychogramm des westjüdischen Schriftsteller-Sohnes wird bei Kafka schließlich auch am Gegensatz zu jenem Sohn deutlich, der nach Kuh dem »zionistischen Bruderruf«: »Komm zurück - zurück in die warme Stube!« 84 80 81 82

83 84

Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 110. Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 337. Vgl. dazu Andreas B. Kilcher: Was ist deutsch-jüdische Literatur. Eine historische Diskursanalyse. In: Weimarer Beiträge 45 (1999), 485-517. Kafka, Briefe (Anm. 8), 338. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 25f.

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folge zu leisten vermag, der also das jüdische Ödipalisierungsritual erfolgreich hinter sich gebracht hat und an Familie und Gemeinschaft partizipiert. Daß dieser Ruf dem Programm vor allem des Kulturzionismus entsprach, macht die Rede eines anderen Prager Vortragenden deutlich, die dieser am 20. Januar 1909 unter dem Titel »Der Sinn des Judentums« gehalten hatte. Sie begründete den Einfluß von Martin Buber, der hier gemeint ist, auf den Zionismus in Prag. Buber nämlich formulierte die Alternative zwischen Westjudentum und Zionismus als Wahl zwischen Vergessen auf der einen und Erinnerung, »Erneuerung«, »Erfüllung« auf der anderen Seite: 85 »Fallen wir durch den Nebeltraum der Jahrtausende ins Vergessen, oder trägt uns der Mächte eine in die Erfüllung?« 86 Die Alternative von Vergessen und Erinnern ist letztlich diejenige von westjüdischer Vereinzelung und zionistischer Kollektivität. Für den Zionisten des kollektiven Gedächtnisses gilt deshalb nach Buber: Die Vergangenheit seines Volkes ist sein persönliches Gedächtnis, die Zukunft seines Volkes ist seine persönliche Aufgabe. [...] Diese natürliche, objektive Situation ist in dem Verhältnis [...] insbesondere des Westjuden zu seinem Volke nicht gegeben. 87

Kafka nun hat sich in dieser Alternative, wie der bekannte Brief an Milena vom November 1920 deutlich macht, auf der Seite des westjüdischen, nicht des zionistischen Sohnes gesehen: Wir kennen doch beide ausgiebig charakteristische Exemplare von Westjuden, ich bin, soviel ich weiß, der westjüdischeste von ihnen, das bedeutet, übertrieben ausgedrückt, daß mir keine ruhige Sekunde geschenkt ist, nichts ist mir geschenkt, alles muß erworben werden, nicht nur die Gegenwart und die Zukunft, auch noch die Vergangenheit, etwas das doch jeder Mensch vielleicht mitbekommen hat, auch das muß erworben werden, das ist vielleicht die schwerste Arbeit. [...] Nun habe ich aber zu allen diesen Verpflichtungen nicht die geringste Kraft, ich kann nicht die Welt auf meinen Schultern tragen, ich ertrage doch kaum einen Winterrock. 88

Der westjüdische Sohn Kafka vernimmt zwar den zionistischen Erinnerungsund Familienruf der Ur-Väter und seiner Brüder, doch vermag er ihm nicht zu folgen. Wie Kuhs anti-ödipalen, jüdischen Söhnen, die, »Schaum um den Mund, unterlaufenen Auges, an den Fesseln der Erinnerung zerren«, 89 ist auch denjenigen Kafkas der Weg »zurück« versperrt und das Land der Ur-Väter 85

86

87 88 89

Vgl. Andreas B. Kilcher: Dispositive des Vergessens bei Kafka. In: Erfahrung und Zäsur. Denkfiguren der deutsch-jüdischen Moderne. Hg. von Ashraf Noor. Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach 1999 (Rombach-Wissenschaft: Reihe Litterae; 67), 213-252. Vgl. auch ders., Kafka, Scholem und die Politik der jüdischen Sprachen. In: Politik und Religion im Judentum. Hg. von Christoph Miething. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1999 (Romania Judaica; 4), 79-115. Die Rede erhielt im Druck den Titel »Das Judentum und die Juden«, in: Martin Buber: Drei Reden über das Judentum. Frankfurt a. M.: Rütten & Loening 1911, 1131, hier 12. Ebd., 20f. Kafka, Briefe an Milena (Anm. 11), 294. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 24.

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» K a n a a n « , w i e es K u h bezeichnete - unerreichbar. V o n der Unerreichbarkeit K a n a a n s handelt auch K a f k a s Tagebucheintrag v o m 28. Januar 1922. K a f k a verstand hier, w i e d e r u m bis in die Formulierungen mit K u h übereinstimmend, das Verlassen des ackerbauenden Landes K a n a a n geradezu als »Schuld« gegenüber d e m Vater u n d als » V e r z w e i f l u n g « des Sohnes: [...] jetzt bin ich schon Bürger dieser anderen Welt, die sich zur gewöhnlichen Welt verhält wie die Wüste zum ackerbauenden Land (ich bin 40 Jahre aus Kanaan hinausgewandert). [...] Freilich, es ist wie die umgekehrte Wüstenwanderung mit den fortwährenden Annäherungen an die Wüste und den kindlichen Hoffnungen: [...] »ich bleibe doch vielleicht in Kanaan« und inzwischen bin ich doch schon längst in der Wüste und es sind nur Visionen der Verzweiflung. 90 » E n d e oder A n f a n g « - mit dieser Alternative beschrieb A n t o n K u h u m 1920 das Dispositiv der westjüdischen Schriftsteller-Söhne, f ü r die er im Epilog seines Essays die Figur des A h a s v e r zitierte: Zuweilen ist ihm, als müßte er rücklings ins Nichts abstürzen, als wäre das Wort, in dem er lebte, ein Sessel ohne Lehne. [...] Seltsame Zeichen gibt die Zeit. Was will es, das ein Jude [man darf annehmen, daß Herzl gemeint ist, Α. K.] die [...] Heerschar der neuen Brüder anführt? Bilder, Bilder! Etwas ist gemeint. Ende oder Anfang, Absturz aus dem Wort oder Rückkehr ins Allwort. 91 Ende oder A n f a n g , das wäre f ü r K u h ein kultureller W e n d e p u n k t : von A h a s v e r als d e m »ruhelosen Wortwandler« zu einem von patriarchalen Institutionen und Vorstellungen - Familie, Moral, Religion, Nation - befreiten Judentum, das in der Diaspora nicht die Tragik, sondern das Glück des Judentums erkennt, mehr noch: seine »Sendung« und »Auserwähltheit« zu einem »freien Leben«. 9 2 »Ich bin Ende oder A n f a n g « , mit eben dieser geschichtsphilosphischen Figur versuchte im Februar 1918 auch K a f k a - möglicherweise im Rekurs auf eine mit K u h g e m e i n s a m e Quelle 9 3 - zu beschreiben, w a s ihn von der Partizipation an »Familienleben, Freundschaft, Ehe, Beruf, Litteratur« hindere - oder 90

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Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 29), 893f. Vgl. ebd., 850: »Er lebt in der Zerstreuung. Seine Elemente, eine frei lebende Horde, Umschweifen die Welt.« Kuh, Juden und Deutsche (Anm. 22), 113. Ebd., 114. Die Figur »Ende oder Anfang«, die Kafka und Kuh hier fast zeitgleich, aber kaum in gegenseitiger Kenntnis benutzen, läßt eine gemeinsame Quelle vermuten. Naheliegend wäre etwa Nietzsche, in dessen Nachlaß Ende der neunziger Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts sich folgender Eintrag findet: »Das Glück meines Daseins, seine Einzigartigkeit vielleicht liegt in seinem Verhängnis: ich bin, um es in Rätselform auszudrücken, als mein Vater bereits gestorben, als meine Mutter lebe ich noch. Diese doppelte Herkunft, gleichsam als der obersten und untersten Sprosse der Leiter des Lebens - décadent zugleich und Anfang - dies, wenn irgend Etwas, erklärt jene Neutralität, jene Freiheit von Partei im Verhältnis zum großen Gesammt-Problem des Lebens, die mich auszeichnet, Ich kenne Beides, bin Beides.« Friedrich Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe. Hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. München, Berlin: dtv, de Gruyter 1988, Bd 13, S. 615. Für den Hinweis auf diese Stelle danke ich Hubert Thüring.

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befreie: der »Mangel des Bodens, der Luft, des Gebotes«, und damit letztlich auch die Unfähigkeit zur Erneuerung des Judentums im Zionismus. 94 »Fallen wir durch den Nebeltraum der Jahrtausende ins Vergessen, oder trägt uns der Mächte eine in die Erfüllung?« - das war für Buber die Alternative, in der es sich für Erinnerung zu entscheiden gelte. »Ende oder Anfang«, das war für Kuh die Alternative, in der es sich gegen Familie und Nationalismus und für ein befreites Judentum zu entscheiden gelte. »Ende oder Anfang«, das war für Kafka das unversöhnliche und unentscheidbare Nebeneinander von westjüdisch-antiödipaler Abwehr und zionistischer Affirmation familiärer und nationaler Gemeinschaftsbedürfnisse.

94

Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (Anm. 1) II, 98 (25. Februar 1918).

Vivian Liska

Nachbarn, Feinde und andere Gemeinschaften

C'est la littérature qui produit une solidarité active, malgré le scepticisme; et si l'écrivain est en marge ou à l'écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d'autant plus en mesure d'exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d'une autre conscience et d'une autre sensibilité. 1

In seinem Tagebuch schreibt Kafka von »diesem Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft [...] in dem ich mich angesiedelt habe«. 2 Es ist das einzige Land, das Kafka jemals wirklich bewohnte. Seine Geschichten, Briefe und Tagebucheinträge zeichnen immer wieder aufs Neue die Konturen dieses Landes nach. Dabei zeigen sie an dessen Grenzen zwei extreme Arten in der Welt zu sein auf: Isolation und hermetische Selbsteingrenzung auf der einen Seite, die Geschlossenheit eines totalen Gruppenzusammenhalts auf der anderen. Zum Ergreifendsten aus Kafkas Vermächtnis gehören emblematische Bilder von beiden Zuständen: hier der Eine, »einsam wie Franz Kafka«, ausgeschlossen, ohne Schutz und abgeschieden von jeglichem menschlichen Kontakt; dort, noch beängstigender, die Vielen, zusammengeschlossen, identisch und austauschbar, opake Elemente einer undurchdringlichen Einheit. Kafkas Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft entsteht durch seine in beide Richtungen weisende Sehnsucht und durch seine alternierenden Fluchten vom einen zum anderen. Im Leben war dieses Land »dazwischen« für Kafka gleich bedeutend mit Erstarrung, Leere und lebendigem Tod. In seinem Werk jedoch transformiert sich diese Region in eine kraftvolle und bewegliche Sprache, die gegen Grenzen anläuft und dabei innen und außen, das Identische und das Andere, ich und wir verstört. Die leblose Wüste ist in Kafkas Schriften nicht der Zwischenraum, sondern das, was jenseits der beiden Grenzen liegt: die radikalsten Formen von Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft: autonome Abgeschiedenheit und homogene Einmütigkeit. 1

2

Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari: Kafka. Für eine kleine Literatur. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1976 (Edition Suhrkamp; 807), 26. »Die Literatur produziert aktive Solidarität, trotz ihres Skeptizismus; und wenn sich der Schreibende am Rand oder außerhalb seiner Gemeinschaft befindet, so setzt ihn das um so mehr in die Lage, eine mögliche andere Gemeinschaft auszudrücken, die Mittel für ein anderes Bewußtsein und eine andere Sensibilität zu schaffen [...].« Franz Kafka: Tagebücher 1910-1923. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1973,341.

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Warum sollte man dies zum Ausgangspunkt nehmen, um über Kafka und den Zionismus, über ein mögliches Jenseits des Zionismus nachzudenken? Zweifellos war es die Sehnsucht nach Zugehörigkeit und dem Erlangen einer mit dieser Sehnsucht einhergehenden Selbstsicherheit, die ihn zum Zionismus hinzog; doch war es seine Angst, sich in einer Gruppe aufzulösen, die ihn davon abhielt, darin aufzugehen. Jenseits dieses persönlichen Schwankens, erkennt man in Kafkas Grenzland einerseits eine Abgrenzung zum Individualismus der Moderne, genauer zu den assimilierten Westjuden, und andererseits zu den Verfuhrungen kollektiver Ideologien. Allerdings wird Kafkas spezifische Einsicht in die Anziehungskraft und die Gefahren geschlossener und homogener Kollektive sowohl von den Versuchen verfehlt, sein Werk im Sinne irgendeiner Ideologie, einschließlich des Zionismus, zu vereinnahmen, als auch von dessen Gegenteil, nämlich es im Sinne einer omnipräsenten, politisch konzipierten Flucht vor Fixierung zu interpretieren. Deleuze und Guattari nennen diese Flucht »Deterritorialisierung« und verstehen sie als Abwehr, die gegen Faschismus, Stalinismus und Kapitalismus gleichermaßen gerichtet ist. Die »lignes de fuite«, die Deleuze und Guattari überall in Kafkas Werk entdecken, diese Fluchtlinien, die verhindern, daß sein Schreiben jemals auf festem Boden landet, beschreiben allerdings nur eine seiner Bewegungen. Kafkas Kämpfe finden als showdowns an Grenzen statt, dort wo sich Linien treffen, berühren und ineinander verhaken, wo gegensätzliche Kräfte wie die verschlungenen Körper jener feindlichen Nachbarn miteinander ringen, die Kafka in einer seiner traumartigen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen beschreibt. 3 Wenn die Verbindungen, die diese Linien herstellen, wenn die Markierungen ihrer Kreuzungen keine Antworten bieten - aber dafür würde man Kafka wohl kaum zu Rate ziehen - , so stellen sie die Fragen doch genauer. Manchmal verweisen sie, wie Walter Benjamins »destruktiver Charakter«, durch den puren Druck, den sie gegen die Hindernisse ausüben, auf einen »Weg, wo andere nur eine Mauer sehen«. 4 So wie es vielerlei Eingänge zu dem Bau des Kafka'sehen Werkes gibt die Eingangsbemerkung in Deleuzes und Guattaris Kafkabuch 5 - , gibt es mehrere Möglichkeiten, sich dem Verhältnis zwischen Kafka und dem Zionismus zu nähern. Ein erster und zweifellos unerläßlicher Weg besteht darin, Kafkas tatsächliche Beteiligung an den zionistischen Bewegungen seiner Zeit auf der 3

4

5

Ebd., 237: »Jeden Abend seit einer Woche kommt mein Zimmernachbar, um mit mir zu ringen [...] [M]eistens schließen sich unsere Körper gleich zum Kampf zusammen.« Walter Benjamin: Der destruktive Charakter. In: ders., Illuminationen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1977, 289-290, hier 290. Vgl. Deleuze / Guattari, Kafka (Anm. 1), 7: »Wie findet man Zugang zu Kafkas Werk? Es ist ein Rhizom, ein Bau. [...] Also steigen wir einfach irgendwo ein, kein Einstieg ist besser als ein anderer, keiner hat Vorrang«. Deleuze und Guattari tun so, als wären alle Zugangsweisen zu Kafkas Werk gleichwertig, doch ist ihre nicht nur eine sehr spezifische, sie lehnt mehr oder weniger implizit andere Methoden und Perspektiven ab.

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Basis historischer und biographischer Quellen zu rekonstruieren. Dabei besteht das wesentliche Ziel darin, ein genaueres Verständnis von Kafka als Person oder als paradigmatisches Beispiel eines westjüdischen Intellektuellen im Mitteleuropa Anfang des letzten Jahrhunderts zu erlangen. Dieses Ziel hat hervorragende Untersuchungen über Kafkas komplexes und schwankendes Interesse am Zionismus inspiriert. Ritchie Robertsons Studien, insbesondere seine Forschung zur historischen Diskussion um Gesellschaft und Gemeinschaft zu Kafkas Zeit, ist zweifellos eine wichtige Voraussetzung, um den Kontext von Kafkas Schriften zu gemeinschaftlichen Konfigurationen zu verstehen.6 Auf ähnliche Weise beleuchtet Giuliano Baioni Kafkas Konflikt zwischen seiner selbstkritischen Existenz als der Westjüdischste aller Westjuden, sein Hingezogensein zu einem gemeinschaftlichen Engagement und sein schuldbeladenes Aufgehen in der einsamen Berufung als Schriftsteller, und somit die Umstände, in denen Kafkas Überlegungen zu dem Einen und den Vielen entstanden sind.7 Versuche, über diese und andere bestehenden Untersuchungen zu Kafkas tatsächlichem Verhältnis zu Judentum und Zionismus hinauszugehen, müssten heute entweder esoterische Perspektiven einnehmen, oder sich auf ein Entdecken von Marginalien beschränken. Die zweite Herangehensweise besteht darin, allegorische Interpretationen seiner Schriften vorzunehmen und diese als Inventar von Analogien zu benutzen, deren Strukturen auf die eine oder andere Weise mit dem Judentum verwandt sind. Fragmente erkennbarer Judaica inmitten der Abstraktionen in den Kafka'schen Texten laden sicherlich dazu ein, das Schloß, das Gericht, die kaiserliche Botschaft und das Gesetz als Gott, die Thora oder Jerusalem zu interpretieren. Die Elemente der Geschichten werden als kabbalistische, chassidische oder messianische Ikonen gelesen, die Beschreibungen der diversen Kämpfe als Konfrontation zwischen Gott und seinem Volk, zwischen diesem Volk und seinem Anderen, diesem Volk und sich selbst, Ostjuden und Westjuden, assimilierten Juden und Zionisten, ganz zu schweigen von den verschiedenen Schattierungen des Zionismus, die dabei ins Spiel kommen. So eindrucksvoll diese Übersetzungen der Kafka'schen Texte in die verschiedenen Register des Judentums sind, die schiere Anzahl der möglichen Alternativen unterwandert jegliche Berufung auf verbindliche hermeneutische Kriterien und läßt die Fragen nach dem Legitimationsursprung jeder Deutung unbeantwortet. Eine dritte, vielleicht zwingendere, wenngleich sicherlich nicht weniger kontroverse Sicht auf dieses Thema besteht darin, jene Fragen durch Fragen der Relevanz zu ersetzen: was haben wir davon, Kafka zu lesen, wenn wir heute über Zionismus nachdenken? Kontrovers ist diese Perspektive nicht zuletzt, weil sie unweigerlich auf die Haltung derer verweist, die diese Frage stellen: Wer sind wir? Wenn wir Kafkas Geschichten lesen, verfügen wir über keinen 6

7

Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985. Giuliano Baioni: Kafka. Literatur und Judentum. Stuttgart: Metzler 1994.

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verifizierbaren Weg, die verschiedenen Gruppen und Gemeinschaften zu identifizieren, auf die Kafkas Fiktionen verweisen könnten. Jegliche Versuche, Korrespondenzen in der realen Welt herzustellen, offenbaren nichts anderes als die jeweilige Auswahl und die Interessen des Rezipienten. Statt also zu versuchen, die Bilder der Gemeinschaften und Kollektive in diesen Texten mit besonderen Referenzen in der Realität in Übereinstimmung zu bringen, ist es vielleicht aufschlußreicher, sich auf die internen und externen Dynamiken in Kafkas gemeinschaftlichen Konfigurationen als solche zu konzentrieren. Jeder Versuch, in seinen nicht-fiktionalen Schriften über eine Rekonstruktion der biographischen Entwicklung seines Hingezogenseins zur zionistischen Bewegung hinauszugehen, muß zwischen den vielfaltigen, mehr oder weniger expliziten und oft widersprüchlichen Aussagen wählen, die Kafka im Laufe seines Lebens zu diesem Thema gemacht hat. Diese Widersprüche auf Meinungsänderungen in verschiedenen Phasen seines Lebens zu reduzieren, verfehlt den spezifischen Beitrag, den Kafkas Werk zur Reflexion über den Zionismus und einer möglichen Perspektive darüber hinaus - heute leisten kann. Vielleicht sind es jedoch gerade diese zuweilen beunruhigenden Ambivalenzen und das Zögern innerhalb seiner Aussagen, die die wertvollsten Einsichten liefern. Man findet sie in Kafkas persönlichen und fiktionalen Schriften überall dort, wo er über die Versuchungen und Gefahren kollektiver Ideale und gemeinschaftlicher Lebensformen reflektiert. Sie sind vielleicht dort am eindringlichsten, wo er, dessen Name zu einem Attribut der ultimativen Erfahrung von Einsamkeit wurde, »wir« sagt.

Rede über die Jiddische Sprache In »Seul, comme Franz Kafka« bemerkt Marthe Robert, daß Kafka selten »wir sagt und wenn er es tut, ist es selten ohne Ambiguität«. 8 Dieses Zitat stammt von Roberts Kommentar zu Kafkas Tagebucheintrag von 5. Oktober 1911, in dem er sich erinnert: Bei manchen Liedern, der Ansprache, »jüdische Kinderlach«, manchem Anblick dieser Frau, die auf dem Podium, weil sie Jüdin ist, uns Zuhörer, weil wir Juden sind, an sich zieht, ohne Verlangen und Neugier nach Christen, ging mir ein Zittern über die Wangen. 9

Für Robert rufen diese Worte und der Gebrauch der ersten Person Plural Kafkas Erfahrung einer wirklichen Gemeinschaft in Gegenwart der jiddischen Schauspieler und seiner »tief empfundenen Antwort auf den mütterlichen Ruf der Schauspielerin« 10 hervor. In diesem Moment, schreibt Robert, nimmt Kaf8 9 10

Marthe Robert: Seul, comme Franz Kafka. Paris: Carmann-Levy 1979, 74. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 53. Robert, Seul, comme Franz Kafka (Anm. 8), 74.

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ka seinen Platz ein »parmi les jüdische Kinderlach de la grande famille qu'il a désertée« (»zwischen den jiddischen Kinderlach der grossen Familie, die er verlassen hat«). 11 Zweifellos fángt diese Passage aus Kafkas Tagebuch einen der außergewöhnlichen Momente ein, in denen er das Einheitsgefuhl einer Gemeinschaft erfuhr, die auf rein interne Beziehungen gründet. In der Erinnerung an seine zitternden Wangen vermittelt die Passage die gänzlich emotionale, wenn nicht sentimentale, auf alle Fälle aber unkontrollierbare Wirkung, die die Begegnung mit dem Judentum und der jiddischen Sprache an diesem Abend auf ihn hatte. Wenn man diese Erfahrung der Komplexität von Kafkas »Rede über die Jiddische Sprache« gegenüberstellt, die er wenige Monate später schrieb, wird deutlich, daß dieser Moment wohl kaum in eine Idee oder ein Ideal übersetzt werden kann. Zu dieser Rede, die als Einfuhrung zu einem Vortrag jiddischer Gedichte durch seinen Freund Itzchak Löwy verfaßt wurde, schreibt Robert: Quand [sic] il ne serait pas le texte admirable que nous connaissons, le Discours sur la langue yiddish aurait encore une valeur inestimable du seul fait de l'accord qu'il est capable de créer - non seulement entre Kafka et lui-même, entre lui et les Juifs, entre le Juif de l'Occident et le yiddish, mais entre lui et la langue allemande. 12 (Wäre diese Rede nicht der bewundernswerte Text als den wir ihn kennen, wäre sie dennoch von unschätzbarem Wert auf Grund der Übereinstimmung, die sie herstellt, und zwar nicht nur zwischen Kafka und ihm selbst, zwischen ihm und den Juden, zwischen Westjuden und dem Jiddischen, sondern auch zwischen ihm und der deutschen Sprache.)

Ist es wirklich »accord«, Übereinstimmung oder Harmonie, den dieser Text herzustellen versucht? Die Rhetorik der Rede spricht eine andere Sprache. Die Begegnung, die Kafka zwischen all den von Robert genannten Protagonisten in diesem Text inszeniert, kann eher als Konfrontation bezeichnet werden. Dabei offenbart und verstärkt die Rhetorik die Brüche in und zwischen ihnen, so daß alle Protagonisten jeweils in ihrer eigenen Abgeschlossenheit herausgefordert werden. Im Text ist tatsächlich die Rede von der »wahren Einheit des Jargon«, aber in Kafkas Beschreibung des Jiddischen, in der Funktion, die er ihm zuschreibt und in der Art wie er sein Publikum adressiert, zeigt sich weniger eine vereinheitlichende Umarmung als vielmehr ein provokativer Angriff auf die Selbstzufriedenheit und Gelassenheit seines Publikums, das in erster Linie Deutsch sprechende, assimilierte jüdische Establishment Prags. Einige Tage vor seiner Rede, am 8. Februar 1912, schreibt Kafka in sein Tagebuch, er erwarte, daß seine Rede aus ihm herausschießen wird »wie aus einem Flintenlauf«. 13 Einige Tage später erinnert er sich nicht nur an ein »stolzes, überirdisches Gefühl«, das er während seiner Rede hatte, sondern auch an

11 12 13

Ebd. Ebd., 85. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 156.

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seine »Kälte gegen das Publikum«. 14 Und tatsächlich: nach einem heimtückisch sanften Anfang, in dem er seinen Zuhörern versichert, sie würden weit mehr Jiddisch verstehen als sie glaubten, und in dem er vorgibt, volles Verständnis für ihre Angst vor dem Jargon zu haben, hält er ihnen einen Spiegel ihres sterilen und leeren Lebens vor: Alles nimmt seinen ruhigen Lauf. Wir leben in einer geradezu fröhlichen Eintracht, verstehen einander, wenn es notwendig ist, kommen ohne einander aus, wenn es uns paßt, und verstehen einander selbst dann. 15

Bezeichnenderweise wechselt Kafka hier von der ersten Person Singular, die er zu Anfang seiner Rede verwendete, zum Plural »wir«. Kafka erwartet von der Begegnung zwischen dem Publikum, zu dem er sich auch selbst zählt, und der jiddischen Sprache eine Störung seiner falschen »fröhlichen Eintracht«, in der die Beziehungen auf Notwendigkeit, Eigeninteresse und gegenseitiger Indifferenz beruhen. Einige der charakteristischen Merkmale der jiddischen Sprache, die Kafka in seiner Einleitung hervorhebt, sind tatsächlich weit davon entfernt, seinem Publikum zu gefallen. Die Art wie er das Verhältnis des Jiddischen zur respektablen deutschen Sprache beschreibt, ist alles andere als »harmonisch«. Er behauptet nicht nur, das Jiddische könne nicht ins Deutsche übersetzt werden, (obgleich es möglich ist, es ins Französische oder in andere Sprachen zu übersetzten), es ist auch kein Zufall, daß er die Worte »Blut« und »Tod« wählt, um diese Unmöglichkeit zu demonstrieren. Weder sein Hinweis, daß die Gaunersprache sich aus dem Jiddischen speist, noch daß es lediglich aus Fremdwörtern besteht und den nomadischen Geist seiner Vergangenheit beibehält, sollten es seinem Publikum einfacher machen, sich mit dem Jiddischen anzufreunden: [Der Jargon] besteht nur aus Fremdwörtern. Diese ruhen aber nicht in ihm, sondern behalten die Eile und Lebhaftigkeit, mit der sie genommen wurden [...] Völkerwanderungen durchlaufen den Jargon von einem Ende bis zum anderen. 16

Innerhalb der jiddischen Sprache werden alle Nationalsprachen, von denen es Worte borgt, erfaßt von »Neugier und Leichtsinn« und sie üben eine Zentrifugalkraft aus, so daß es einer großen Gegenkraft bedarf sie alle zusammenzuhalten. Kafka versucht nicht, seinen Zuhörern die jiddische Sprache als eine Art folkloristische Tradition schmackhaft zu machen; er präsentiert sie vielmehr als dynamische, heterogene und mobile Kraft, die die Ordnung, in der die Angesprochenen sich etabliert haben, stört. Obwohl er dann einige linguistische Regeln vorstellt, bleibt das Jiddische in seiner Beschreibung eben dieser »verwirrte Jargon«, in dem eine Kombination aus Willkür und Gesetz herrscht,

14 15

16

Ebd., 157. Franz Kafka: Rede über die Jiddische Sprache. In: Das Kafka-Buch. Eine innere Biographie in Selbstzeugnissen Hg. von Heinz Politzer. Frankfurt a. M.: FischerTaschenbuch-Verlag 1997 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 708), 94-97, hier 94. Ebd., 95.

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eine schwer zu fassende, kraftvolle Herausforderung an die Lebensart des westjüdischen Publikums. In der Mitte der Rede gipfelt diese provokative Beschreibung in einem triumphierenden Satz, der in völligem Widerspruch zur ersten, beruhigenden Aussage steht. Kafka sagt, er hoffe, »die meisten von ihnen, sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, vorläufig überzeugt zu haben, daß Sie kein Wort des Jargon verstehen werden«. 1 7 Erst nachdem er aus dem Jiddischen etwas Seltsames und Unheimliches gemacht hat, etwas, das nicht einfach in die geordnete Existenz seiner Adressaten integriert werden kann, führt er sie allmählich näher an das Jiddische heran: Von einer großen Ferne aus gesehen [...]; nicht nur aus dieser Ferne [...] sie dürfen einen Schritt näher [...] ganz nahe kommen sie schon [...]. Bleiben sie aber still, dann sind Sie mitten im Jargon. Wenn Sie aber einmal der Jargon ergriffen hat [...] dann werden Sie Ihre frühere Ruhe nicht wieder erkennen.18 Kafka möchte eindeutig sein assimiliertes Publikum für die Kraft des Jargons sensibilisieren. Doch war das letztendliche Ziel seiner Rede, die er stolz in seinen Tagebüchern als etwas beschreibt, das ihm ein Gefühl von Stärke gab, die er nie zuvor erlebte, nicht so sehr, sein Publikum von einer Idee oder Ideologie zu überzeugen, sondern den »ruhigen Lauf« der Dinge aufzuwühlen, in den es sich etabliert hat. Der Höhepunkt dieser Einfuhrung dürfte bei seinen Zuhörern in der Tat länger nachgehallt haben als es irgend ein Lob des Jiddischen bewirkt hätte: am Ende, schreibt Kafka, »[werden] Sie sich fürchten [...], aber nicht mehr vor dem Jargon, sondern vor sich selbst«. 19 Diese Angst, führt er fort, wäre unerträglich, würde sie nicht von einem neuen Selbstvertrauen begleitet. Das Ende seiner Rede ist gänzlich ironisch, wenn nicht gar sarkastisch: »Denn strafen wollten wir Sie nicht«. 20 Betrachtet man die Rede als Ganzes, so kann man wohl kaum auf eine harmonische Versöhnung zwischen Westjuden und dem Jiddischen oder zwischen dem Jiddischen und dem Deutschen schließen, wie dies Robert vorschlägt. Und wie verhält es sich mit diesem anderen accord, den Robert erwähnt, dem zwischen Kafka und sich selbst? Im letzten Satz des Textes wechselt Kafka unerwartet wieder zur ersten Person Plural: »Denn strafen wollten wir Sie nicht«. Kafka situiert sich hier im Lager des jiddischen Schauspielers und stellt eine Einheit mit ihm her: die letzten Worte der Rede legen nahe, daß seine Einführung zusammen mit Löwys Darbietung tatsächlich die Kraft besitzen soll, eine beunruhigende Erinnerung in den Köpfen und im Leben ihrer Zuhörer zu hinterlassen. Einige Absätze zuvor sagte Kafka »wir« als er von der Art sprach, wie die modernen Individuen in Indifferenz und Isolation neben einander her leben. Der Kreuzungspunkt zwischen den beiden sich widersprechenden »wir« be17 18 19 20

Ebd., 95. Ebd., 97. Ebd. Ebd.

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schreibt Kafkas Grenzland. Sicherlich übt die »Einheit« des Jiddischen hier die größere Anziehungskraft aus, aber nach Kafkas Beschreibung dieser Einheit zu urteilen, besteht ihre Anziehungskraft für ihn genau darin, daß sie, gänzlich heterogen und selbst von nomadischen Fremden und sich widerstreitenden Kräften durchzogen ist.

Ein Tagebucheintrag Der erste Tagebucheintrag, in dem Kafka den Zionismus erwähnt, ist seine kritische Besprechung von Max Brods Jüdinnen vom 25. März 1911. Sie ist vollständig aus der Perspektive eines wir geschrieben. Kafka macht drei Einwände gegen den Roman geltend: dem Roman, so Kafka, mangele es an einer Lösung der jüdischen Frage, an einem nichtjüdischen Beobachter und an einer jungen männlichen Hauptfigur. »Wir sind jetzt fast gewöhnt, in westeuropäischen Erzählungen«, schreibt er in dem ersten Kritikpunkt, »sobald sie nur einige Gruppen von Juden umfassen wollen, unter oder über der Darstellung gleich auch die Lösung der Judenfrage zu suchen und zu finden. In den >Jüdinnen< aber wird eine solche Lösung nicht gezeigt.«21 »Kurz entschlossen«, fährt er fort, »erkennen wir darin einen Mangel der Erzählung und fühlen uns zu einer solchen Ausstellung um so mehr berechtigt, als heute seit dem Dasein des Zionismus die Lösungsmöglichkeiten so klar um das jüdische Problem herum angeordnet sind [,..].«22 Sollte dieses »wir« des Anfangs nichts anderes als ein pluralis majestatis sein? Lesen wir den ersten Kritikpunkt an Brods Roman als den direkten Ausdruck von Kafkas Überzeugung, so erscheint er als eindeutiger Verfechter des zionistischen Gedankens, als einer, der von der Literatur erwartet, Antworten im Sinne der »Sache« zu liefern. Allerdings deutet ein gewisser Ton in dieser Passage daraufhin, daß unterhalb dieser scheinbar direkten Urteile ein interner Dialog stattfindet: der zögerliche Anfang, die Einsicht, daß die kritische Lektüre des Romans womöglich durch Gewohnheit und vorgefertigte Erwartungen geprägt ist und vor allem die Worte »kurz entschlossen«, die Kafkas kritische Bemerkungen einleiten, daß das Buch die Lösung der jüdischen Problematik außer acht läßt, offenbaren die Selbstbeobachtung eines schwankenden Geistes, der sich selbst zu einer Entscheidung drängt. Der zweite gegen Brods Roman gerichtete Kritikpunkt verstärkt diesen zwiespältigen Unterton. Dieser Mangel entspringt aber noch einem anderen. Den »Jüdinnen« fehlen die nichtjüdischen Zuschauer, die angesehenen gegensätzlichen Menschen, die in andern Erzählungen das Jüdische herauslocken, daß es gegen sie vordringt in Verwunderung, Zweifel, Neid, Schrecken, und endlich, endlich in Selbstvertrauen versetzt wird. 23 21 22 23

Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 36. Ebd. Ebd.

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Diese Passage scheint zu implizieren, daß nur durch das Vorhandensein einer Perspektive von außen das Jüdische sich »in seiner ganzen Länge aufrichten kann«. 2 4 Hartmut Binder versteht diese Passage als eine atypische ideologische Aussage Kafkas, die unter dem Einfluß einer Kritik des Zionisten Leo Hermann an Brods Buch entstand. Dieser bestand darauf, daß eine feindselige, nichtjüdische Präsenz im Roman notwendig wäre, um die zionistische Sache zu rechtfertigen. 25 Giuliano Baioni widerspricht Binder. Er erklärt Kafkas Aussagen als eine pragmatische Abwehr einer narratologisch motivierten Kritik, daß nämlich nichtjüdische Leser die jüdische Welt des Romans nicht verstehen würden, da sie keinen nichtjüdischen Standpunkt enthalte, mit der sie sich identifizieren könnten. 26 Baionis Interpretation schmälert die Bedeutung von Kafkas Aussage um seine Meinung zu verteidigen, Kafka wäre vom Judentum angezogen, weil es für ihn eine in sich geschlossene Welt sei: »Kafka betrachtet das Judentum immer von innen und erlebt es als ganz autonome Welt.« 27 Diese Ansicht wird durch die fast offensive Metapher, mit der Kafka seine Aussage illustriert, und die sowohl Binder als auch Baioni außer acht lassen, widerlegt: Das Judentum, schreibt Kafka, sollte sich nur manifestieren als ein Aufrichten unter den Augen eines »gegensätzlichen« Zuschauers So freut uns auch auf einem Fußweg in Italien das Aufzucken der Eidechsen vor unsern Schritten ungemein, immerfort möchten wir uns bücken, sehn wir sie aber bei einem Händler zu Hunderten in den großen Flaschen durcheinander kriechen, in denen man sonst Gurken einzulegen pflegt, so wissen wir uns nicht einzurichten. 28

Kafka besteht darauf, daß dieses Bild »universelle« Gültigkeit besitzt: wie jede andere Identität ist das Jüdische nur als unvorhersehbare, bewegliche Erscheinung, hervorgerufen durch die Gegenwart eines Anderen, eine Quelle der Faszination und der Freude, nicht aber als eine selbstgenügsame, in sich geschlossene Entität. Die letzten Worte dieser Stelle lauten: »so wissen wir uns nicht einzurichten«. Aber wer ist dieses »wir«? Wenn man eine Parallele zieht zwischen Kafkas Aussage, wie sich das Jüdische zeigen soll und dem Bild, das er hierfür benutzt, würde das »wir«, das Kafka hier mit dem einsamen Wanderer auf einem Fußweg in Italien identifiziert, mit dem nichtjüdischen, »gegensätzlichen« Zuschauer korrespondieren, und das Jüdische mit der Eidechse. Allerdings legt der restliche Text die Vermutung nahe, daß Kafka »wir« benutzt, um über die Frage des Jüdischen von innen heraus zu reflektieren. Kein Wunder, daß »wir uns nicht einrichten« können: es gibt eigentlich keine Heimat für ein solch schwer zu bestimmendes wir. Die einzige »Lösung der Judenfrage«, die Kafka hier im Sinn zu haben scheint, ist die »Auflösung der Judenmassen« - hier verweist er wahrschein24 25

26 27 28

Ebd., 36. Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden. Hg. von Hartmut Binder. Stuttgart: Kröner 1979, Bd 1,376. Baioni, Kafka (Anm. 7), 41. Ebd. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 36.

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lieh auf die geschlossene und homogene Gemeinschaft der Ostjuden - durch das Wiederaufleben einer anderen Art des Jüdischen, eine, die einem externen Beobachter in die Augen sieht. Die Passage impliziert, daß der Zionismus diese Aufgabe bewältigen kann, doch nur, wenn er eher an das »Aufzucken der Eidechsen« erinnert als an eine Flasche für eingemachtes Gemüse: statt einer eng verschlossenen Massenversammlung identischer Mitglieder, stellt sich Kafka dies hier als einen Zugewinn an Selbstvertrauen vor, der von der Begegnung mit dem antagonistischen Anderen gleichzeitig bedingt und unabhängig ist. Die Wortwahl der letzten Zeilen dieser Aufzeichnung, in denen Kafka seine dritte, etwas obskure Kritik an Brods Roman zum Ausdruck bringt, daß dieser nämlich merkwürdigerweise »jenen vordersten Jüngling entbehren [kann], der [...] die besten zu sich reißt«, bestätigt diese Sicht. 29 Der charismatische Jüngling, ohne den Brods Roman überraschenderweise auskommt, so mutmaßt Kafka, ist einer, der diejenigen, die ihm folgen, »in schöner radialer Richtung an die Grenzen des jüdischen Kreises führt«. 3 0 In diesem Bild ist die Bewegung zentrifugal, ihr Blick ist nach außen gewendet. Es legt den Vergleich mit einem sehr unterschiedlichen Bild der Vereinigung nahe, das wiederholt in Kafkas Schriften auftaucht: das Bild des »Reigens«.

Das Reigenmotiv In der berühmten Passage aus »Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer« heißt es: Wie groß und schön und liebenswert ihr Land war, jeder Landsmann war ein Bruder, für den man eine Schutzmauer baute und der mit allem was er hatte und war sein Leben lang dafür dankte, Einheit! Einheit! Brust an Brust, ein Reigen des Volkes, Blut, nicht mehr eingesperrt im kärglichen Kreislauf des Körpers, sondern süß rollend und doch wiederkehrend durch das endliche China. 31

Trotz der offensichtlichen Übertreibung, der atypisch exaltierten Parataxis und der Tatsache, daß sie eine totale Unterwerfung unter die Bruderschaft nahelegt, wurde diese meisterhafte Darstellung einer organischen Volksgemeinschaft häufig als ein verzückter Ausdruck des Kafka'schen Ideals interpretiert. Hartmut Binder geht sogar so weit, diese Passage als Beweis für Brods Intuition zu lesen, das Judentum nehme Kafka allmählich und in aller Ruhe in Besitz: Der hier gepriesene Zusammenhalt des Volkes und des Blutes im Kaiserreich des Ostens ist offensichtlich ein Bild für die von Kafka erstrebte, im Ostjudentum immer sichtbar gebliebene volkliche Einheit, die ihm ein Garant eines glücklichen Lebens war. 32 29 30 31

32

Ebd., 37. Ebd., 36. Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer. In: ders., Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1996, 289-304, hier 292. Kafka-Handbuch (Anm. 25), Bd 1, 505.

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Es gibt viele ähnliche Bilder der Einheit und Ganzheit in Kafkas Werk, aber es ist fraglich, ob auch nur eines dieser Bilder als unmittelbarer Ausdruck von Kafkas Hoffnungen gelesen werden kann. Wahrscheinlicher ist, daß diese Passagen genau jenen Ort der Ambivalenz herstellen, an dem das Ideal einer homogenen Gemeinschaft zugleich ein Objekt der Sehnsucht und eine Instanz des Terrors ist. In »Forschungen eines Hundes« beschreibt der erzählende Hund liebevoll die Solidarität der »Hundschaft« als das größte Glück, nach dem man sich sehnen kann, das »warme Beisammensein«, und vergleicht dieses mit der Indifferenz und Feindseligkeit der anderen Kreaturen. 33 Doch mit dem zweimal benutzten, wenig anziehenden Bild von Hunden, die als Kollektiv »alle auf einem Haufen« leben, evoziert Kafka hier ein ähnliches Bild wie im früheren Tagebucheintrag jenes der Flasche voller Eidechsen, die »durcheinander kriechen«. 34 Trotz des ambivalenten Tons, der in der Passage mitschwingt, enthält diese Beschreibung einer Gemeinschaft einen sehnsuchtsvollen Ton, der in einer Selbstbefragung des Hundes seinen Höhepunkt findet: Warum tue ich es nicht wie die anderen, lebe einträchtig mit meinem Volke und nehme das, was die Eintracht stört, stillschweigend hin [...] und bleibe immer zugekehrt dem, was glücklich bindet, nicht dem, was uns immer wieder unwiderstehlich aus dem Volkskreis zerrt. 35

Diese Beschreibung der Gemeinschaft von sieben Hunden in »Forschungen eines Hundes«, von dem erzählenden Hund dargeboten als Ereignis in seiner Jugend (und von mehreren Kritikern überzeugend interpretiert als eine autobiographische Reminiszenz an Kafkas früheres Hingezogensein zu den Schauspielern des jiddischen Theaters, das fur ihn der Inbegriff einer vereinten »Volksgemeinschaft« war), wiederholt das Bild des Reigens aus »Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer«: Das Heben und Niedersetzen ihrer Füße, bestimmte Wendungen des Kopfes, ihr Laufen und ihr Ruhen, die Stellungen, die sie zueinander einnahmen, die reigenmäßigen Verbindungen, die sie miteinander eingingen. 36

Die »reigemäßigen Verbindungen« entstehen hier durch eine Verschlingung der Figuren, die, so heißt es weiter, mit »großartiger Sicherheit« vollzogen werden. Das Bild des Reigens, das hier noch einen haltspendenden Kreis impliziert, erhält jedoch in einem anderen kurzen Prosastück, in dem Kafka die Konstitution einer Gemeinschaft in expliziter Form anspricht, eine eindeutig negative Konnotation.

33

34 35 36

Franz Kafka: Forschungen eines Hundes. In: ders., Erzählungen (Anm. 31), 411-455, hier 413. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 341. Kafka, Erzählungen (Anm. 31), 413. Ebd., 414.

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D e r Titel, den M a x Brod diesem Text gab, »Eine G e m e i n s c h a f t von Schurken«, wird der Komplexität von K a f k a s erstem Satz nicht gerecht: »Es w a r einmal eine G e m e i n s c h a f t von Schurken, d. h. es w a r e n keine Schurken, sondern gewöhnliche Menschen, der Durchschnitt. Sie hielten i m m e r zusamm e n . « 3 7 Der nur w e n i g e Zeilen lange Text fángt den M e c h a n i s m u s der H o m o genisierung ein, auf den nicht nur eine Schurkengemeinschaft, wie Brods Titel impliziert, sondern jede geschlossene G e m e i n s c h a f t sich verläßt. W e n n eines ihrer Mitglieder ein Verbrechen begeht, oder die Regeln bricht - w a s wiederu m »gewöhnlich« u n d »üblich« ist - u n d dadurch die Einheit der G e m e i n schaft auseinanderbrechen läßt, so berichtet er, »[dann] untersuchten sie es, beurteilten es, legten B u ß e n auf, verziehen udgl. Es w a r nicht schlecht gemeint, die Interessen des Einzelnen und der G e m e i n s c h a f t wurden gewahrt und d e m Beichtenden w u r d e das K o m p l e m e n t gereicht, dessen G r u n d f a r b e er gezeigt hatte.« 3 8 U m die Ganzheit der G e m e i n s c h a f t zu sichern u n d ihre H a r m o nie wieder herzustellen, m u ß die Differenzierung beseitigt werden, die durch die individuelle H a n d l u n g erzeugt w u r d e - u n d diese m u ß nicht unbedingt »etwas Schurkenhaftes« sein, sondern kann irgend eine F o r m der Differenzier u n g sein. Dies geschieht durch den Prozeß, der die H a n d l u n g des Individuums w i e d e r in das G a n z e integriert. Jede »Farbe«, die das Individuum zeigt, wird durch das H i n z u f u g e n ihrer K o m p l e m e n t ä r f a r b e neutralisiert, bis der Unterschied beseitigt ist: »So hielten sie i m m e r z u s a m m e n , auch nach d e m T o d e gaben sie die G e m e i n s c h a f t nicht auf, sondern stiegen im Reigen z u m H i m mel«. 3 9 D e r Reigen, der geschlossene Kreis, bei d e m alle auf eine g e m e i n s a m e Mitte gerichtet sind, sich gegenseitig anschauen u n d sich weigern, jegliche Unterscheidung, wie auch alles, w a s außerhalb liegt, anzuerkennen, wird zerstört in Anbetracht des Himmels, des Absoluten. Diese negative Beurteilung einer eng geschlossenen G e m e i n s c h a f t läßt Z w e i f e l an früheren Interpretation e n des Reigenbilds bei K a f k a a u f k o m m e n , die irrtümlich K a f k a s Sehnsucht dazuzugehören f ü r sein Ideal menschlicher Beziehungen halten; das Bild, das K a f k a hier v o m Reigen zeichnet, beantwortet vielmehr die Frage von K a f k a s H u n d in »Forschungen eines Hundes«: » W a r u m tue ich es nicht wie die anderen, w a r u m lebe ich nicht in Eintracht mit m e i n e m Volke.« 4 0

37

38

39 40

Franz Kafka: Eine Gemeinschaft von Schurken. In: ders., Erzählungen (Anm. 31), 353. Ritchie Robertson interpretiert diese Passage als Kafkas Mißtrauen und Kritik gegenüber Religionen im allgemeinen, und gegenüber dem Katholizismus im besonderen, die beanspruchen, Mittler zu sein zwischen dem Individuum und dem Göttlichen und die versprechen, daß die Beichte mit sofortiger Vergebung belohnt wird. Die Worte »untersuchten, beurteilten« deuten darauf hin, daß dieser Prozeß nicht unbedingt auf religiöse Gemeinschaften beschränkt ist, sondern auf die eine oder andere Weise für alle Gemeinschaften gilt. Vgl. Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judentum, Gesellschaft, Literatur. Stuttgart: Metzler 1988, 156. Kafka, Erzählungen (Anm. 31), 353. Ebd.

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Zweifellos verurteilt der Text implizit das Verhalten der Gemeinschaft. Die narrative Situation scheint eindeutig zu sein: ein unpersönlicher, allwissender Erzähler spricht in der Sprache eines Märchens - »Es war einmal ...« und aus weiser Entfernung von einer Gemeinschaft, von »denen«. Doch bei genauerem Hinsehen zeigt sich, daß diese einheitliche Perspektive gestört ist: »Es war einmal eine Gemeinschaft von Schurken, d. h. es waren keine Schurken, sondern gewöhnliche Menschen, der Durchschnitt«. 41 Diese »Selbstkorrektur« wird ein paar Zeilen weiter wiederholt. Zweimal verändert also der Sprecher sein Urteil von einer negativ konnotierten zu einer neutralen Aussage. Damit beschreibt er genau das, was passiert, wenn man die Schwelle von außen nach innen überschreitet: der kritische Blick von außen läßt sich auf, und von innen betrachtet werden die Regeln und Werte der Gemeinschaft neutralisiert, sie werden »gewöhnlich«, »üblich«, und zum »Durchschnitt«, sie werden - das Selbstverständliche. Bezeichnenderweise präsentiert Kafka diese Erkenntnis nicht als moralisches Urteil. Statt dessen durchläuft der Erzähler, der zunächst so distanziert, neutral und geschlossen scheint, selbst diesen Prozeß der Veränderung des Blickpunkts. Indem er mit gespielter Selbstverständlichkeit die Perspektive wechselt, verdoppelt er sich zu zwei Stimmen, die fortan den Text begleiten; mit einem einfachen »d. h.« überschreitet er jedes Mal die Linie, die die Gemeinschaft abgrenzt, ist sowohl Zuschauer als auch Mitglied, urteilend und an dem Reigen teilnehmend. Damit trägt er zur Formation einer anderen Figur bei, einer Figur, die zugleich nach innen und nach außen weist, einer Figur, die den Singular und den Plural in einem anderen »wir« zusammenschließt.

Gemeinschaft Ein anderer kurzer Text, von Max Brod »Gemeinschaft« genannt, kann als quasi symmetrisches Gegenstück zu »Eine Gemeinschaft von Schurken« gesehen werden. Beide Texte entlarven und zerlegen den Mechanismus, den eine geschlossene Gemeinschaft verwendet, um ihren Zusammenhalt zu sichern. Doch im Gegensatz zur vorherigen Geschichte, in der es um den Prozeß der internen Neutralisierung von Differenz und Abweichung geht, behandelt »Gemeinschaft« die Strategien, mit denen eine Gemeinschaft sich gegenüber ihrem Außen abgrenzt. Der Erzähler der Geschichte ist ein »wir« und spricht als Mitglied einer Gemeinschaft von fünf Freunden. Er erzählt von den Ursprüngen der Gruppe und ihrer beharrlichen Weigerung, einen Sechsten zu akzeptieren, der sich anzuschließen versucht: Wir sind fünf Freunde, wir sind einmal hintereinander aus einem Haus gekommen, zuerst kam der eine und stellte sich neben das Tor, dann kam oder vielmehr glitt, so leicht wie ein Quecksilberkügelchen gleitet, der zweite aus dem Tor und stellte sich unweit von ersten auf, dann der dritte, dann der vierte, dann der fünfte. Schließlich 41

Ebd.

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standen wir alle in einer Reihe. Die Leute wurden auf uns aufmerksam, zeigten auf uns und sagten: »Die fünf sind jetzt aus diesem Haus gekommen.« Seitdem leben wir zusammen, es wäre ein friedliches Leben, wenn sich nicht immerfort ein sechster einmischen würde. 4 2

Diese ersten Zeilen bestätigen und unterminieren zugleich den »Gründungsmythos« einer kleinen Gemeinschaft. Tatsächlich kamen die fünf aus demselben Haus, doch sichert oder rechtfertigt dieser gemeinsame »Ursprung« nicht ihren Zusammenhalt. Der Sprecher stellt sich in der ersten Person Plural vor, doch als er die Mitglieder der Gruppe aufzählt, wird er unpersönlich. Statt daß er sagt »ich kam als erster ... (zweiter oder dritter)«, benutzt er die unpersönliche Form für alle fünf und impliziert damit das Verschwinden seiner Individualität: die Mitglieder der Gruppe sind austauschbar geworden. Zunächst entsubstanzialisiert Kafka diesen Ursprung: Erst nachdem die fünf von außen identifiziert wurden, bildete die Gruppe eine Gemeinschaft. Dem Sprecher ist der Unterschied zwischen der eigentlichen Konstituierung der Gemeinschaft und ihrer Wahrnehmung von außen sehr wohl bewußt. Er weiß, daß einmal, d. h. irgendwann, die Freunde aus einem Haus, d. h. aus irgend einem Haus, kamen, und daß sie ohne offensichtlichen Grund eine Reihe bildeten. Erst als die Menschen draußen sie bemerken, die bestimmte Form verwenden, und sagen, »die fünf sind jetzt aus diesem Haus gekommen«, werden die fünf zu einer Einheit. Das Bild des »Quecksilberkügelchens«, mit dem ein Mitglied der Gruppe verglichen wird, beschreibt auf perfekte Weise die völlige Auflösung des Individuums in der Gemeinschaft. Die Konnotation der vollständigen Osmose dieses chemischen Elements legt es nahe, daß ein quasi natürliches Gesetz die Gruppe zusammenhält. Der Rest des Textes demaskiert nach und nach und schonungslos diesen Vorwand und offenbart den grausamen Mechanismus hinter diesem scheinbar natürlichen Zusammenhalt. Die Gruppe benötigt die Perspektive jener Menschen, die sie von außen wahrnehmen, um sich zu konstituieren-, sie muß den Sechsten immer wieder ablehnen um sich abzugrenzen und weiter bestehen zu können. Die Konturen der Gemeinschaft können nicht ein für alle mal definiert werden. Es ist der Prozeß einer kontinuierlichen Ablehnung eines anderen, der das Überleben der Gemeinschaft sichert. Das Herzstück des Textes besteht in einer ausführlichen, pseudo-logischen Erklärung des Erzählers, warum die Gruppe es ablehnt, daß der Sechste zu ihnen gehört. Er tut uns nichts, aber er ist uns lästig, das ist genug getan; warum drängt er sich ein, wo man ihn nicht haben will? Wir kennen ihn nicht und wollen ihn nicht bei uns aufnehmen. Wir fünf haben früher einander auch nicht gekannt, und wenn man will, kennen wir einander auch jetzt nicht, aber was bei uns fünf möglich ist und geduldet wird, ist bei jenem Sechsten nicht möglich und wird nicht geduldet. [...] Mag er noch so sehr die Lippen aufwerfen, wir stoßen ihn mit dem Ellenbogen weg. 4 3 42 43

Ebd., 373. Ebd.

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Was als apologetischer Rechenschaftsbericht über die Existenz und Handlungsweise der Gruppe beginnt, wird unmerklich zu einer Warnung vor einer spezifischen Herangehensweise, eine Gemeinschaft herzustellen und aufrechtzuerhalten. Der Text demaskiert nach und nach die fundamentale Selbstlüge dieser Gemeinschaft. Es wird offensichtlich, daß ein gemeinsamer Ursprung nicht ausreicht, die Gemeinschaft zusammenzuhalten. Da jegliche interne Bindung fehlt, wird der Zusammenhalt der Gemeinschaft nur durch den gewaltsamen Ausschluß eines anderen gewährleistet. Kafka unterminiert die Argumente, die der Sprecher zur Verteidigung des Verhaltens der Gemeinschaft anbringt, mit subtilen, linguistischen Strategien: er verwischt die Unterscheidung von Aktiv und Passiv, so daß die Wahrnehmung des Außenseiters als Störung durch die Gruppe verwandelt wird in seine Ausführung einer störenden Handlung: »Er tut uns nichts aber er ist uns lästig, das ist genug getan.« (Hervorhebung V. L.) Des weiteren scheint die Erklärung, die der Sprecher für die Ablehnung des Sechsten durch die Gruppe gibt, gemäß einer perfekten logischen Kausalität aufgebaut zu sein. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigt sich jedoch, daß diese Erklärung vollkommen tautologisch ist: Wir lehnen ihn ab, weil wir ihn nicht kennen. Wir fünf haben früher einander auch nicht gekannt [...] aber was bei uns fünf möglich ist und geduldet wird, ist bei jenem sechsten nicht möglich und wird nicht geduldet. Außerdem sind wir fünf und wollen nicht sechs sein.44 Schließlich wird die Legitimität der Gruppe nur noch mit der Erhaltung des status quo verteidigt: »Auch bei uns fünf hat es keinen Sinn, aber nun sind wir schon beisammen und bleiben es«. 45 Dieses Argument des Sprechers erinnert an das »warme Beisammensein« der Gruppe von sieben Hunden in »Forschungen eines Hundes«. Auch dort wird der Hund, der sich an das Treffen mit den sieben anderen Hunden erinnert - und die als Reminiszenz von Kafkas Begegnung mit den jiddischen Schauspielern gedeutet wurde - , von diesen als Störung wahrgenommen. Dort wird allerdings der Grund, warum er sie stört, expliziter dargestellt: sie wollen seine ständigen Fragen - also das Hinterfragen ihrer Existenzberechtigung - nicht. In diesen Bildern bleibt wenig von Kafkas Bewunderung für oder Neid gegenüber dem Gemeinschaftsleben. Sie zeigen vielmehr dessen dunkelste Seiten: wenn der pure Herdentrieb überhand gewinnt, lebt die Gemeinschaft von der Existenz des Parias. Die Ablehnung des Sechsten ist nichts anderes als ein Mittel, die Gruppe zusammenzuhalten. Dies wird durch ein weiteres Pseudo-Argument des Sprechers bestätigt, in dem er auf eine obskure gemeinsame Vergangenheit verweist um das Verhalten der Gruppe zu rechtfertigen: »Eine neue Vereinigung wollen wir nicht, eben auf Grund unserer Erfahrungen«. 4 6 Die Berufung auf vergangene Erfahrungen bleibt elliptisch: die einzige Erfahrung, die uns der 44 45 46

Ebd. Ebd. Ebd.

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Text mitteilt, ist genau der Prozeß des Ausschlusses selbst. Auf verschlagene Weise kommt der Sprecher Alternativen zuvor. So schließt er die Ablehnung jeglichen Dialogs mit dem Sechsten in sein Schlußargument ein. Wie bei den anderen Scheinbegründungen, bezieht es sich tautologisch auf sich selbst: »Lange Erklärungen würden schon fast eine Aufnahme in unsern Kreis bedeuten, wir erklären lieber nichts und nehmen ihn nicht auf.« 47 Und dann der letzte Satz: »Aber mögen wir ihn noch so sehr wegstoßen, er kommt wieder.« 48 Diese letzten Worte des Textes können auf unterschiedliche Weise gelesen werden. Man kann, wie Binder, glauben, daß sie einen »Triumph der Gerechtigkeit« bedeuten angesichts des diskriminierenden Verhaltens der Fünf, oder zumindest die ständige Präsenz einer glücklichen Verhinderung der letztendlichen Erfüllung des Ziels der Gruppe, den anderen zu beseitigen. Man kann aber auch die irreführende Perspektive des Sprechers hinter sich lassen und die Perspektive desjenigen einnehmen, der ausgeschlossen wird: Warum beharrt er auf seiner Aufnahme in den Kreis? Aus dieser Perspektive gelesen kann man in diesen letzten Worten das verzweifelte Klopfen des Außenseiters an der Tür und seine hoffnungslose Hoffnung, akzeptiert zu werden, erahnen. In Anbetracht des Grenzlandes, in dem Kafka seine Zelte aufgeschlagen hat, lassen diese letzten Worte beide Perspektiven offen. Sie verweisen gleichzeitig auf die Sinnlosigkeit und den Terror, der der Konstitution einer solchen Gemeinschaft innewohnt, sowie auf die ebenso sinnlose Sehnsucht, dazuzugehören. In erster Linie verbindet dieser Schluß den Blick derjenigen, die sich im Innern des Kreises befinden, mit denen draußen, und zeigt die unentwirrbare Verschränkung ihrer Anliegen und die gegenseitige Abhängigkeit ihrer Existenzen. Binder schließt mit der Aussage: »So sind sie schließlich weder fünf noch sechs.« 49 In der Tat verweist das »wir«, mit dem der Text beginnt, in diesen letzten Worten nicht mehr auf eine definierende Anzahl sondern auf eine Situation ungleicher, doch unabdingbarer Zusammengehörigkeit der Gruppe und des Anderen.

Ein anderes Wir Dieses Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft habe ich nur äußerst selten überschritten, ich habe mich darin sogar mehr angesiedelt als in der Einsamkeit selbst. 50

Diese Topographie deutet darauf hin, daß »einsam wie Franz Kafka« zu sein nicht mit Isolation und Abgeschiedenheit gleichzusetzen ist. Sein Grenzland reicht von einer sentimentalen Teilhabe an der Großen Jüdischen Familie bis 47 48 49 50

Ebd. Ebd. Kafka-Handbuch (Anm. 25), Bd 2, 365. Kafka, Tagebücher (Anm. 2), 341.

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zur kühlsten Beobachtung der Ausschlußmechanismen, auf denen die Kohäsion einer Gemeinschaft basiert. Intensiver als in der Einsamkeit lebte Kafka in der schwierigen Situation desjenigen, der ebenso die Versuchungen wie den Terror erkannte, »wir« zu sagen. Die Sehnsucht, einer größeren Einheit anzugehören, entspringt der Furcht, ein Niemand und im Nirgendwo zu sein. Kafkas Schreiben erkennt das Versprechen, in der Gemeinschaft von dieser Gefahr erlöst zu werden, demaskiert es jedoch als Illusion. Zwar gibt es in dem Grenzland, das Kafka schmerzhaft erlebte, keinen festen Boden unter den Füßen, aber jenseits der beiden Grenzen, dort wo die Bewegung zwischen Anziehung und Flucht zum Stillstand kommt, treffen ihre gegensätzlichen Kräfte aufeinander und schließen sich zu einer Falle, die keine Alternativen offen zu lassen scheint. Doch setzen Kafkas Schriften gelegentlich Kontrapunkte zu dieser Ausweglosigkeit. Indem Kafkas Werk auf die Ansprüche auf Einheit und Ganzheit und auf die Interdependenz von Ungleichem, ja Antagonistischem, verweist, eröffnet es Perspektiven und unerwartete Verbindungen über die Grenzen hinweg. Indem es das Unbekannte vertraut macht, schafft es Verbindungen zwischen fremden Bereichen and erweitert den Horizont des Möglichen. Indem es das Bekannte verfremdet, läßt es nicht hinterfragte Verbindungen und selbstgerechte Gewißheiten auf. Wo sich diese Bewegungen kreuzen, entstehen ein anderes »wir« und eine andere Gemeinschaft, in der undurchdringliche Mauern porös werden und ebenso verbinden wie sie trennen.

Iris Bruce

Jewish Education: Borderline and Counterdiscourses in Kafka

In Kafka scholarship little is known about Franz Kafka's interest in Jewish education, and Max Brod later reproached himself for not having stressed this topic enough: Wenn ich meiner Biographie einen Vorwurf machen kann, so ist es nicht der, daß ich Kafkas jüdisches und zionistisches Gefühl zu viel, - sondern der, daß ich es zu wenig hervorgehoben habe. [...] Allzu kurz habe ich auch Kafkas Eintreten für die Gründung einer modernen jüdischen Schule in Prag behandelt. 1 (If I were to reproach myself for my biography, it is not because I stressed Kafka's Jewish and Zionist sympathies too much, but rather because I emphasized them too little. [...] Far too briefly did I discuss Kafka's support for the foundation of a modern Jewish school in Prague.)

The establishment of this small Jewish Elementary School (1920-1942) has a long history and was the subject of controversy in the Prague Jewish community. I will provide the historical background to this controversy, document Kafka's involvement in educational matters, and situate three of his literary works within an educational framework: »Bericht fur eine Akademie« (»A Report to an Academy«, 1917), »Forschungen eines Hundes« (»Investigations of a Dog«, 1922), and »Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse« (»Josephine, the Singer, or the Mice People«, 1924). 2 Zionist texts and polemical debates of this period often borrowed »offensive« animal metaphors from antiSemitic discourses, and Kafka's animals, too, represent familiar borderline metaphors where Zionist and anti-Semitic discourses merge. Though his apes, dogs, and mice have upset many post World War II scholars, ironically, in 1

2

Max Brod: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre. In: id., Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1959, 221-299, here 271. Unless otherwise indicated all following translations from the German are my own. The following editions will be used for Kafka's stories. The German texts appear in Franz Kafka: Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa. Hg. von Roger Hermes. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1996 (Fischer Taschenbuch; 13270), 322-333 (»Bericht für eine Akademie«), 411—455 (»Forschungen eines Hundes«), 518-538 (»Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse«). The English translations are taken from Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Ed. by Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken 1971, 250-259 (»A Report to an Academy«), 278-316 (»Investigations of a Dog«), 360-376 (»Josephine, the Singer, or the Mice People«).

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K a f k a ' s time such animal metaphors were e m p l o y e d as counterdiscourses in ideological battles amongst Jews themselves. T h e foundation of the Jewish Elementary School which K a f k a , Brod, and other Zionists p r o m o t e d for m a n y years was really a kind of » W i e d e r e r ö f f n u n g « 3 (reopening) because a Prague Jewish School had existed before. In 1782 the first »deutsch-jüdische Hauptschule« (German-Jewish High School) w a s opened in Prague. 4 But, all State elementary education b e f o r e 1868 w a s connected to the Catholic church. 5 Thus, interest in separate Jewish schools existed quite naturally. B y 1868, there were already »fifteen private elementary schools, ten for boys and five for girls«. 6 This situation changed w h e n [...] the so-called May Laws of 1868 and the Imperial School Law of 1869 [...] provided for the separation of church and state in all areas of public life, including education. [...] The legislation of 1868 provided not only for the secularization of elementary education but also opened the ranks of students and teachers in such establishments to members of all religious groups. The main reason for the perpetuation of separate Jewish elementary schools in Bohemia had vanished. 7 T h u s in the late 1860s and early 1870s, interest in Jewish schools gradually declined, and in 1873, »in der, ach so kurzen liberalen Ä r a Österreichs« (»the liberal era in Austria, which was, sadly, so brief«), 8 the »Kultusgemeinde« (regional school board) in Prague decided that they had to go with the times and close the school. A n e w s p a p e r article f r o m 1870 reports that the Jewish pupils were to be divided b e t w e e n the other schools in order to avoid segregation. This was a decision of the city o f Prague: Am 28. Juni d. J. faßte der Prager Stadtrath den Beschluß, die in der Josefstadt bestehende Haupt- und Unterrealschule mit Schluß des Schuljahres 1869-70 aufzulassen, und die israelitische Jugend auf die übrigen städtischen Schulen, und namentlich mit Rücksichtname auf ihre Nationalität auf die deutschen Lehranstalten zu verweisen, weshalb auch an die Leiter derselben wegen unaufweigerlicher Aufnahme dieser Schüler die erforderlichen Weisungen ergingen. 9 (On June 28 th of this year, the Prague City Council decided not to close the high school and the technical school in the Josefstadt at the end of the school year in 1869-70, and to spread out the Jewish youth over the other city schools. In consid3 4

5

6 7 8 9

Max Brod: Jüdische Schule. In: Der Jude 5 (1920/21), 345-348, here 345. Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden. Hg. von Hartmut Binder. Stuttgart: Kröner 1979, vol. 1, 22. - The opening of the school is also discussed in the Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr. Unabhängige jüdische Wochenschrift, no. 5, August 10, 1917. Hillel J. Kieval: The Making of Czech Jewry. National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988 (Studies in Jewish History), 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 4If. Brod, Jüdische Schule (note 3), 345. Die Prag-Josefstädter Schulfrage. In: Politik (Prague), vol. 4, no. 308, November 8, 1870, 1. Newspaper clipping from the archives of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

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eration of their nationality, they were to be sent to the German schools and the teachers at these schools were told to integrate these students immediately.)

Max Brod parodies the prevailing liberal outlook inherent in this statement: »Sollte wirklich die Verschmelzung des Menschengeschlechts [...] >ohne Unterschied zwischen Jude und Christ< auch nur um eine Minute länger verzögert werden?« 10 (»Should one really delay the melting together of humankind - whether Jewish or Christian - by another minute?«) Bringing Jewish and Christian children together in one school was indeed made law, and the city demanded that the curriculum be adjusted so as to make no distinction between them: Diese anderweitige, entsprechende Sorge für den Unterricht der israelitischen Jugend wird [...] dahin näher präzisiert [...] daß die Hauptgemeinde verpflichtet ist, auf ihre Kosten für den Unterricht der israelitischen Jugend in Prag, in gleicher Weise, wie für den der katholischen Jugend derart zu sorgen, daß bei Benutzung der bereits bestehenden und etwa noch zu errichtenden städtischen Unterrichtsanstalten kein Unterschied zwischen katholischen und jüdischen Kindern stattzufinden hat. 11 (The respective changes required for the education of the Jewish youth are defined in such a way that the municipal authority is obliged to support the education of the Jewish youth in the same way as they support the education of the Catholic youth and that no difference between Catholic and Jewish children be made.)

As a result of these changes, Jews became ever more assimilated, identified more and more with the local culture, and sent their children to German educational institutions: »[...] die jüdischen Schüler wurden jedoch noch 1900 zu 90 % auf deutsche Schulen und Universitäten geschickt.« 12 (»In 1900 up to 90 % of the Jewish students were sent to German schools and universities.«) The first open criticism of the educational system coincided with the appearance of the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr (Self-Defense) in 1907. Growing anti-Semitism had been the main reason for launching the paper, and one concern among many was »die von Tag zu Tag brennender werdenden Fragen der jüdischen Schule« (»the from day to day increasingly urgent questions concerning the Jewish School«). 13 One of the targets of Jewish polemics in these years was the anti-Semitic nature of the »deutscher Schulverein« (German School Association). In July 1908 Selbstwehr reported on the front page that the Austrian government only marginally defeated the »Antrag Schmid« (the Schmid motion), which called for counting and minimizing the number of Jewish children in schools. Selbstwehr demanded that Jews withdraw their membership from the German School Association (»Juden, tretet aus dem deutschen Schulverein aus!« 14 ) Caught up in the heated Czech-German school

10 11 12 13 14

Brod, Jüdische Schule (note 3), 345. Die Prag-Josefstädter Schulfrage (note 9), 1. Kafka-Handbuch (note 4), 25. Selbstwehr, December 25, 1908, 1. Der deutsche Schulverein. In: ibid., July 3, 1908, 1.

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battle, the Jews felt increasingly left out and perceived the urgency for establishing their own school: Die Juden müssen mit allem Nachdruck und der höchstmöglichen Energie eine Schule verlangen, welche bei Beibehaltung aller modern fortschrittlichen Errungenschaften die sichere Gewähr bietet, daß das jüdische Kind jüdisch bleibt und mit den geistigen Schätzen des Judentums bekannt und vertraut gemacht wird. 15 (Jews must demand forcefully and with utmost energy a school which retains all new and progressive methods, and at the same time ensures that the Jewish child remains Jewish and will be acquainted with the spiritual treasures of Jewish culture.) Selbstwehr entreated parents to take action by not paying membership fees to the anti-Semitic »Schulverein«, 1 6 and in the following years, too, in 1909 and 1910, Selbstwehr did not let its readers forget about the Schmid motion. 1 7 Besides this issue, there were other major problems in the educational system. For instance, children could not take an adequate number of religion classes. To be sure, there were Talmud Torah schools and Yeshivas for the religious, 18 but for the average Jewish child who went to the public school, Jewish teaching was under-represented because education was paid for by the State and preference was given to Christian religion classes: Aber während Schüler katholischen Glaubens 2 Stunden wöchentlich Religionsunterricht genießen, der doch ausschließlich aus öffentlichen Mitteln dotiert ist, muß sich eine stattliche Anzahl jüdischer Schüler mit zwanzig, ja sogar zehn Unterrichtsstunden pro Jahr begnügen. 19 (While Catholic students are given 2 hours of religion classes weekly, and this teaching is paid for with government money, a large number of Jewish students have no more than twenty, and sometimes only ten religion classes all year.) Moreover, in Jewish religion classes, children of all ages were mixed together, which did not make for effective teaching. A further acute problem was that the rabbis, who taught religion classes, often had little schooling themselves. Selbstwehr calls these »würdelos[e] Zuständfe]« (»undignified conditions«): Es ist ganz ausgeschlossen, daß für die Zukunft Männer, die oft nur eine Volkschule absolviert haben [...] die Erzieher unserer Jugend werden. [...] Es ist unhaltbar, wenn Leute Trauungs- und Leichenreden halten, von denen die meisten weder die deutsche noch die böhmische und am allerwenigsten die hebräische Sprache vollkom-

15 16 17 18

19

Zur Schulfrage. In: ibid., September 4, 1908, 2. Vom deutschen Schulverein. In: ibid., October 30, 1908, 1. Selbstwehr, June 25, 1909, 1; ibid., May 27, 1910, 1. Aharon Moshe Rabinowicz: The Jewish Minority. In: The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1 (1968), 155-265,214. Der Religionsunterricht an öffentlichen Volksschulen im Lichte konfessioneller Gleichberechtigung. In: Selbstwehr, January 29, 1909, 2.

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men beherrschen. [...] Man kann Männern dieser Art unmöglich weiter die religiöse und nationale Erziehung unserer Jugend belassen. [...] 20 (It is out of the question that men who have often no more than elementary schooling will be the educators of our children in the future. [...] It is unacceptable, when people who make wedding and funeral speeches are barely able to master the German, the Czech, or the Hebrew language. [...] One cannot leave men like these in charge of the religious and national education of our youth. [...]) Private J e w i s h schools a p p e a r e d to b e t h e o n l y alternative, and t h e r e f o r e b y 1910 a »Jüdischer Schulverein« ( » J e w i s h School A s s o c i a t i o n « ) w a s established a n d it o r g a n i z e d lectures o n e d u c a t i o n w i t h i n the c o m m u n i t y . 2 1 Soon, h o w e v e r , g r o w i n g C z e c h n a t i o n a l i s m interfered w i t h these e n d e a v o u r s . B y 1913, C z e c h nationalist pressure led to the closing o f nearly all G e r m a n - J e w i s h private schools in all C z e c h s p e a k i n g areas. 2 2 B r o d in particular b l a m e d the assimilated C z e c h J e w s f o r this d e v e l o p m e n t : Man muß wissen: diese Judäo-Tschechen haben eine Zeitlang ihren Lebensberuf darin gesehen, jüdische Schulen zu zerstören. [...] Es wurde zu viel Deutsch in ihnen unterrichtet, in Orten mit völlig tschechischer Bevölkerung. [...] Keine einzige Schule von den vielen in Böhmen blieb erhalten. 23 (This needs to be said: for a time these Judeo-Czechs saw it as the main purpose of their lives to destroy Jewish schools. [...] Too much German was spoken in them, in towns with an entire Czech population. [...] Of the many schools which existed in Bohemia, not a single one survived.) A b o u t a year a f t e r these events, w e h a v e the first d o c u m e n t a r y evidence of K a f k a ' s interest in J e w i s h education.

20 21 22

23

Zur Rabbinerfrage. In: ibid., May 1, 1914, 5. Cf. ibid., April 15,1910. Christoph Stölzl refers to an »Epilog auf die letzte deutsch-jüdische Schule« in Selbstwehr (February 7, 1913) in: Chr. Stölzl: Kafkas böses Böhmen. Zur Sozialgeschichte eines Prager Juden. München: Text & Kritik 1975, 52. Kieval remarks: »Indeed Jewish Czech nationalists, such as J. S. Kraus, had been agitating for the closure of the German-Jewish schools [...] since the early 80s.« (The Making of Czech Jewry [note 5], 49). For further discussion of Czech and Czech Jewish nationalist pressure as far back as the 1880s see ibid., 46^-8, 50-58. Kieval has also established that attempts to »purge the German-Jewish elementary schools in the countryside« were especially strong between 1894 and 1907 (ibid., 51). Moreover, the following: »In 1906 the Czech-Jewish National Union announced with satisfaction that [...] fifty-two German-Jewish schools in Czech linguistic districts had been closed since the organization first began its campaign in 1893. At least two public German schools, which were attended primarily by Jewish students, likewise were closed. And, in at least two other locations, the German-Jewish private schools had been replaced by Czech-Jewish institutions. [...] Of the 114 private schools that had existed in 1885, only 5 remained.« (Ibid., 53) Brod, Jüdische Schule (note 3), 347.

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Kafka's interest had much to do with the cultural Zionism he absorbed in mediated form through his friends Hugo Bergmann (1883-1975) and Max Brod, who had infused the philosophy of Ahad Ha-am (1856-1927) with their own ideas. Bergmann, in his article »Jawne und Jerusalem« (1914), 24 for instance, acknowledges the significance of Ahad Ha-am but explicitly distances himself from several of his philosophical principles and aligns himself with Bin Gorion's theoretical writings, as well as with those of Martin Buber (18781965). Kafka was not fond of Buber's writings, 25 but he took Bergmann's cultural or practical Zionism very seriously. As a matter of fact, he considered Bergmann's subsequent book of essays Jawne und Jerusalem (1919) so important as an introduction to the general principles of Zionism that he wanted to send a copy to his friend and doctor Robert Klopstock (1899-1972) in 1921. 26 He may have done so, since this copy is missing from Kafka's personal library. In »Jawne und Jerusalem«, Bergmann places great emphasis on an inner regeneration in the Diaspora, which, he argues, is just as significant as all the work for Palestine. One important goal to strive for is to teach Jewish content in Jewish schools: [...] wir können vom Zionismus verlangen, daß er uns, denen er noch nicht die Möglichkeit geben kann, nach Palästina zu gehen, die Möglichkeit gibt, unsere Kinder hier so jüdisch zu erziehen, als es nur möglich ist. 27 ([...] we can demand from Zionism that it will provide those of us, who are not able to go to Palestine yet, the opportunity to give our children as much Jewish education here as we possibly can.)

Like Kafka, Bergmann believes this to be more important than political and theoretical Zionism. He insists:

24

25

26

27

Hugo Bergmann: Jawne und Jerusalem. In: id., Jawne und Jerusalem. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1919, 34-42. - Kafka owned this work and greatly admired it. Kafka found Buber's Hassidic tales »unerträglich« (»intolerable«) and called them »lauwarmfe] Sachen« (»tepid things«). Cf. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Hg. von Erich Heller und Jürgen Born. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1976 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 1697), 257, 260. English Translation by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken 1967, 161, 164. In the following quoted as LF with the corresponding page numbers of the German/English edition. December 1921. See Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfort a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1975 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 1575), 365, 514, η. 32. For the English edition, cf. id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans, by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken 1958, 314. Bergmann, Jawne und Jerusalem (note 24), 15. Selbstwehr contains many articles on the lack of, and the possibilities for, a Jewish education: there is, for example, a series on »Die Erziehung der jüdischen Jugend«, May 2, 1913, 2-3 and ibid. May 9, 1913, 2.

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Nicht durch die Wahl von Ausschüssen und Kommissionen werden wir vorwärts kommen, sondern einzig und allein durch völkische Kleinarbeit, die jeder von uns leisten wird. 28 (We will move forward not by the creation of committees and commissions, but only and above everything else by small völkisch community work, which every one of us can accomplish.)

In this regard, Bergmann was very active himself. In 1913 he taught Hebrew classes at the »Klub jüdischer Frauen und Mädchen in Prag« (»Jewish Women and Girls' Club in Prague«), 29 and he was also involved in community plans, drawing up proposals for Jewish institutions, involving even the »Gründung eines hebräischen Kindergartens« (»establishment of a Hebrew kindergarten«). 30 The phrase »Völkische Kleinarbeit« (»small community work«) well describes Kafka's own Zionist activities, which included not only attending »jüdische Elternabende« (»Jewish parent meetings«) but also his interest in the »Notschule« (»Refugee School«) for Jewish refugees during World War I, his active support for the Berlin Jewish People's Home in 1916, and finally his involvement with the first Jewish Elementary School in Prague. On February 14, 1914 Kafka went to his first Jewish parents' meeting in the Hotel Bristol. There he attended a lecture on »Die Erziehung der jüdischen Jugend« (»The Education of the Jewish Youth«) by Prof. Hugo Stein, 31 who argued that Judaism should be revived foremost in the family: Kann man nicht alte Geschichte jung machen, wenn man Chanuka, Purim etc. im Familienkreise festlich begeht? [...] Warum verbannen wir die jüdische Kunst aus unseren Zimmern, warum reihen wir soviel Unbedeutendem in unseren Bücherkästen nicht jüdische Literatur und Philosophie an? Haben wir keinen Raum für Zeitschriften und Zeitungen, die von dem Leben unserer Brüder berichten? 32 (Why can we not make old history young again by celebrating Chanukah and Purim, etc. with the family [...] Why do we ban Jewish art from our rooms, why do we not add Jewish literature and philosophy to the many unimportant items on our book shelves? Do we have no room for journals and newspapers which report on the lives of our brothers?)

Stein argued that the Jewish woman was of primary importance. Unfortunately, her present status was not that of an equal and still needed to be raised. 28 29 30 31

32

Bergmann, Jawne und Jerusalem (note 24), 15. Selbstwehr, October 15, 1913, 7. Selbstwehr, October 31, 1913, 3. Franz Kafka: Tagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller und Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, 637. Stein's lecture of February 14 is printed in Selbstwehr (march 6, 1914, 2—4). Hartmut Binder also mentions this lecture: Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift Selbstwehr. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 41 (1967), 283-304, here 294. Selbstwehr, March 6, 1914, 4.

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He also stressed that education should not lead to the typical Jewish »Beamtenlaufbahn« (»civil servant career«) but rather »[n]ur zu Berufen, zu denen wir Liebe und Kraft in uns fühlen« (»only to professions for which we feel love and strength«), such as »im Handwerk und Gewerbe, wo gerade stets ein Mangel an fachlich geschulten Kräften sich bemerkbar macht« (»in trade and craft, where there is always a lack of skilled workers«). 33 Kafka mentions that his sister Ottla attended another meeting the following day; 34 otherwise there are no further personal comments by Kafka on these events. A few months later, on August 2, 1914, World War I broke out and Prague suddenly found itself flooded with Jewish refugees from the East, and with them came many children who were in need of an education.

The Jewish Refugees and the »Notschule« World War I forced thousands of Jews in Galicia and Bukowina to leave their homes and move West. They settled mostly in the big cities, such as Prague, Vienna, and Berlin. In Prague a »Hilfskommitee« (»relief committee«) was established to help these refugees. Brod and his mother, as well as Kafka himself, 35 were among the many who distributed clothing and food. Kafka was also very supportive of the schools which were quickly organized. 36 In January 1915 a »jüdische Schulkanzlei« (»head office of the Jewish School Board«) was created in Prague to be in charge of Jewish schools in the city and in the provinces. 37 Thus, sooner than anyone had expected, the Zionists suddenly had a Jewish school in Prague, and they even had the Jews to go with it. As Brod remarks: »Ganz unvermerkt hat sich in Prag eines unserer Postulate wie von selbst erfüllt: die nationale jüdische Schule.« 38 (»One of our postulates has fulfilled itself virtually unnoticed, so to speak: the National Jewish School.«) In May 1915 Prof. Dr. Alfred Engel, an important figure in Prague Zionist activities, described the progress they had already made: Eine Mädchen- und Knabenvolksschule mit 16 Klassen und Abteilungen, 8 Fortbildungsschulen sind vor geraumer Zeit entstanden. [...] Heute wirken 51 Lehrer und Lehrerinnen, darunter viele Mittelschulprofessoren, an der Schule [...]. 39

33 34

35 36 37 38

39

Ibid., 3. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 31), 637; id., The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923. Ed. by Max Brod. Trans, by Martin Greenberg, with the Cooperation of Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken 1949,21. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 31), 698f.; Kommentar, 169; Diaries 1914-23 (last note), 97f. Selbstwehr, October 30, 1914, 1-2. Ibid., January 7,1916,7. Max Brod: Erfahrungen im ostjüdischen Schulwerk. In: Der Jude 1 (1916/17), 32-36, here 33. Selbstwehr, May 21, 1915, 3.

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(An elementary school for girls and boys was launched a short while ago, 16 classes and divisions. [...] Today there are 51 male and female teachers at the school, among them many high school teachers.) In the following m o n t h s m a n y other smaller schools came into existence w h i c h served mostly practical purposes. 4 0 During the years 1 9 1 5 - 1 9 1 8 , M a x Brod taught classes on »Weltliteratur« (»world literature«) at the R e f u g e e School, first only out of a feeling of duty. Soon, however, he c a m e to idealize the students as »bis ins Innerste rechte Jüdinnen, in j ü d i s c h e m Milieu, in alter Sitte und Sittlichkeit durchzogen, durchpulst von j ü d i s c h e m Wissen. [...]« 41 (»true Jewesses in their innermost being, brought u p in a Jewish environment, according to old customs and morals, infused with Jewish knowledge«). K a f k a attended some of these classes, 4 2 and stressed B r o d ' s energy and dedication in a letter to his fianceé Felice Bauer a year later: [Max hat] in diesem Winter einen Cyclus von 11 Vorträgen gehalten, daneben 2 Stunden wöchentlich in der Flüchtlingsschule vor über 50 Mädchen, mit denen ich letzthin auf einem Ausflug beisammen war, und eine Stunde in einem zionistischen Mädchenklub. 43 (Max held a course of 11 lectures this winter, as well as lecturing at the refugee school for 2 hours a week to more than 50 girls, whom I joined on an outing the other day, and for 1 hour in a Zionist girls' club.) This letter reveals that K a f k a also participated in other cultural activities with the group. He certainly did not write m u c h literature in 1915. In the following year, too, his literary production w a s slow. In addition to his involvement with the r e f u g e e children in Prague, he n o w b e c a m e entirely absorbed b y a n e w educational matter - the foundation of the »Jüdisches V o l k s h e i m « (»Jewish P e o p l e ' s H o m e « ) in Berlin. 40

41 42

43

In July we hear: »Seit 2. Juli 1915 besteht eine Haushaltungsschule für Mädchen, welche im Kochen, Obsteinsieden, Gemüsebau, Geflügelzucht u. Molkereiwirtschaft unterrichtet werden. Den Kostenaufwand bestreitet das k. k. Ministerium des Innern. Neu errichtet wurden für Knaben Kurse für Holzarbeiten und Klebearbeiten und eine neue Parallelabteilung (4. Mädchenklasse).« (Selbstwehr, July 30, 1915, 1) - »Since July 1915 we have had a housekeeping school for girls, who are instructed in cooking, canning fruit, vegetable gardening, poultry farming, and dairy farming. All costs are covered by the Interior Ministry. New classes for boys on wood working and pasting and a new parallel class [4 th grade for girls] were established.« Brod, Erfahrungen im ostjüdischen Schulwerk (note 38) 34. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 279, 512 note 16; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 242,471, note 55 (August 7, 1920). Moreover, in January 1915 Kafka mentions that he knows »die Lembergerin« (Kafka, Tagebücher [note 31], 715, Diaries 1914-23 [note 34], 107): Fanny Reiß, who was from Lemberg, was in Brod's class (Kommentar, 175). On April 14, Kafka records a visit to Brod's class in his diary: »Die Homerstunde der galizischen Mädchen« (»The Homer class for the Galician girls«); Kafka, Tagebücher (note 31), 734; Kommentar, 181; Diaries 191423 (note 34), 119. LF 660 / 470, May 30, 1916.

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The »Jüdisches Volksheim« The Jewish People's Home opened on May 18, 1916. It was located in the Jewish slum of Berlin, the »Scheunenviertel«, where most of the refugees from Eastern Europe had settled during World War I, and its goal was the education of the Jewish proletariat. The first yearly report 44 is dedicated to Max Brod, Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, and others for their constant help and support. This report was typed by Kafka's fiancée Felice. 45 When she sent a copy of it to Kafka, he replied: »Was fur eine persönliche Bedeutung diese Blätter fur mich haben!« (»Oh, the personal significance these pages have for me!«) 46 The report gives detailed information about the organization of the People's Home and the available educational facilities. There were kindergartens, youth clubs, dance and music lessons, Hebrew classes. Even though both boys and girls received Hebrew lessons, the genders were generally kept separate. While the girls were sewing or learning about »Pflichten gegenüber der Familie, die jüdische Frau« (»duties towards the family, the Jewish woman«), 47 the boys had classes on book binding and instruction in a »Tischlerwerkstatt« (»joiner's workshop«), a »Gartenbaugruppe« (»gardening group«) was planned 4 8 The emphasis in the home lay clearly on practical education, on »Fortbildung der heranwachsenden Jugend, insbesondere auf dem Gebiete des Handwerks und der Landwirtschaft« (»continuing education of the growing youth, especially in the domain of trade and agriculture«). 49 The Zionist model realized here is very similar to what was presented in theory at the first parents' evening that Kafka attended in 1914. Despite his enthusiastic response to the report, Kafka found it flawed: »Vor allem aber immer wieder: Hochmut ist in dem Bericht.« (»But above all, and continuously, there is arrogance in the report.«) 50 He always stressed that it was important not to forget who was being helped. For him the Western Jews needed the Eastern Jews and not the other way round: »hier genügt nicht Zionismus und schweifende Begeisterung« (»Zionism and sweeping enthusiasm are not enough«). 51 Gershom Scholem's views on the People's Home lend support to Kafka's apprehensive remark. Scholem describes »eine Atmosphäre ästhethischer Ekstase« (»an atmosphere of aesthetic ecstasy«) where poems by Franz Werfel would be read out aloud. 52 Kafka was as skeptical as Scholem about the kind of education the Eastern European refugee children would receive: 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Das jüdische Volksheim Berlin, Erster Bericht (Mai/Dezember 1916). Many thanks to Hermann Simon (Berlin) for sending me this document. LF 708, 719 / 509, 517, September 26 and October 7, 1916. LF 725 / 521, October 9, 1916. Das jüdische Volksheim Berlin (note 44), 11. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 19. LF 725 / 522, October 14, 1916. Ibid. Gershom Scholem: Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Jugenderirtnerungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1977 (Bibliothek Suhrkamp; 555), 102.

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Man wird [...] versuchen, die Pfleglinge [...] der Geistesverfassung der Helfer und in noch weiterem Abstand der Lebenshaltung der Helfer anzunähern, d. h. also dem Zustand des gebildeten Westjuden unserer Zeit. [...] Damit wäre sehr wenig erreicht. Hätte ich ζ. B. die Wahl zwischen dem Berliner Heim und einem andern, in dem die Pfleglinge die Berliner Helfer [...] und die Helfer einfache Ostjuden aus Kolomea oder Stanislau wären, ich würde mit riesigem Aufatmen, ohne mit den Augen zu zwinkern, dem letzteren Heim den unbedingten Vorzug geben. 53 ([...] one will try to imbue the children [...] with the spirit and more indirectly the mode of life of their helpers. In other words, one will try to raise them to the standard of the contemporary, educated, West European Jew [...] With that, not much would be achieved. If, for instance, I had to choose between the Berlin Home and another where the pupils were the Berlin helpers [...] and the helpers simple East European Jews from Kolomyja or Stanislawow, I would give unconditional preference to the latter Home with a great sigh of relief and without a moment's hesitation.) In contrast to many Western Zionists, Kafka like S c h o l e m stressed the importance o f a formal religious education (even though he made it quite clear that he did not see this as a possibility for himself): »[...] das Halten der Gebote ist nichts Äußeres, im Gegenteil der Kern des jüdischen Glaubens [...]«(»[...] keeping the commandments is not an outward thing; on the contrary, it is the very essence o f the Jewish faith«.) 5 4 On Felice's first visit to the People's H o m e she witnessed a heated debate between Scholem and Siegfried Lehmann, one o f the organizers, w h o w a s presenting a talk on »Das Problem der jüdisch-religiösen Erziehung« (»The Problem o f Jewish-Religious Education«). On this occasion Scholem demanded: »[...] man m ö g e doch, statt sich mit solchem U n f u g und literarischen Geschwätz zu befassen, lieber hebräisch lernen und zu den Quellen gehen« 5 5 (»rather than waste o n e ' s time with silliness and literary nonsense, one might do better learning Hebrew and going back to the sources«). When Felice recounted S c h o l e m ' s arguments to Kafka, he sided with Scholem: Die Debatte, von der Du erzählst, ist charakteristisch, ich neige im Geiste immer zu Vorschlägen wie denen des Hr. Scholem, die das Äußerste verlangen und damit gleichzeitig das Nichts. Man muß eben solche Vorschläge und ihren Wert nicht an der tatsächlichen Wirkung messen, die vor einem liegt. Übrigens meine ich das allgemein. Der Vorschlag Scholems ist ja an sich nicht unausführbar. 56

53 54 55

56

LF 697 / 500, September 12, 1916. LF 700 / 502, September 16, 1916. Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (note 52), 103. Years later Scholem discovered Kafka's interest in these matters (104): »Wie beschreibe ich mein Erstaunen, als fünfzig Jahre später Kafkas Briefe an Feiice Bauer veröffentlicht wurden und ich dort las, daß Kafka sich entschieden auf meine Seite gestellt hatte.« (»How can I describe my astonishment when - fifty years later upon the publication of Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer - I read in those letters that Kafka had decidedly taken my side.«) LF 703f. / 505, September 22, 1916.

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(The discussion you describe is typical; theoretically I am always inclined to favor proposals such as those made by Herr Scholem, which demand the utmost, and by so doing achieve nothing. So one simply mustn't appraise such proposals and their value by the actual result laid before one. I think this is generally applicable. Actually, Scholem's proposals in themselves are not impracticable.)

A year later Kafka himself decided to go »back to the sources« by studying Hebrew, which he pursued until the end of his life. Mostly, Kafka encouraged Felice and gave moral and practical support, by providing her with appropriate reading material for herself, as well as for the children. He sent whatever Jewish materials were available and suitable and kept informed as to what books were being published. Thus, he notified her, »[i]m Jüdischen Verlag soll ein Chanukabuch erscheinen« (»The Jüdische Verlag is supposed to be bringing out a Hanuka book [,..]«)57 - a volume which he acquired for himself.58 But the educational value of these texts was considered first, and Jewish books per se were not necessarily considered appropriate. Max Brod, for example, suggested a work by Scholem Aleichem and Kafka remarked: Mir aber - und schließlich auch ihm - scheint es zu ironisch und kompliciert für Kinder. Dagegen werde ich ein gutes Rätselbuch und vielleicht auch ein Beschäftigungsbuch Dir schicken, ich muß es nur finden.59 (But to me - and to him too in the end - it seems too sarcastic and complicated for children. Instead, I will send you a suitable puzzle book, and a work book as well, that is if I can find it.)

Similarly, he judged the Hanuka play, which he had seen with his nephew, to be »recht unbrauchbar« (»quite useless«).60 Stories from the Bible by Scholem Asch were a different matter: »Das einzige, was ich augenblicklich weiß, wären Geschichten aus der Bibel (oder ähnlich) von Scholem Asch.« (»The only thing I can suggest offhand would be > Stories from the Bible< (or some such title) by Sholem Asch.«)61 Kafka is referring here to Asch's Kleine Geschich-

57 58

59 60 61

LF 740 / 533, November 3, 1916. Moaus Zur. Ein Chanukkahbuch. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1918. S. J. Agnon and Hugo Herrmann were preparing this edition, which was supposed to appear in the winter of 1914, but the publication was delayed because of the outbreak of World War I. Gershom Scholem also participated in this project. Moaus Zur includes historical information about the origin of Hanuka and the wars of the Maccabees, a translation of psalms and rabbinical teachings, an old Yiddish text from 1771 in transliterated German, a section on how Chanukah was celebrated, including prayers and excerpts from the Shulchan Aruch, and essays on the significance of the Menorah. It is very suitable for educational purposes. LF 711 /510f., September 26, 1916. LF 740 / 533. LF 709 / 511, September 26,1916.

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ten aus der Bibel (1914), 62 an aggadic retelling of Genesis. He feared that it might be a little »zu kindlich« (»too childish«), 63 since Felice had told him that the girls were reading classical drama already; so he sent Peretz's Volkstümliche Erzählungen64 (Popular Tales) along. 65 Until December 1916 we hear that books from »jüdische Buchhändler« (»Jewish booksellers«) 66 are on their way to Felice for the children. However, he does not forget to include Dickens' Little Dorrit as well. Such »Völkische Kleinarbeit« reconciled Kafka with overtly ideological and political forms of Zionism. 6 7 Increasingly, he came to regard the Zionist movement in very practical terms as a necessary means to a more important goal. 68 His friend Felix Weltsch (1884-1964), a committed Zionist himself and editor of Selbstwehr, rightly described the importance of political Zionism as secondary for Kafka: »[Kafka] war freilich dem Zionismus nach und nach immer näher gekommen [...], aber die zionistische Bewegung hatte immer nur den Charakter der Wegbereitung, nicht aber des Antrie62

63 64

65 66 67

68

Schalom Asch: Kleine Geschichten aus der Bibel. Berlin, Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag 1914. Incidentally, this book was advertized in Selbstwehr, no. 22, May 1914, 5. LF 713/512. Isaac Leib Peretz: Volkstümliche Erzählungen. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag 1913. The book was advertized in Selbstwehr in 1913 (May 30, 1913, 1] and excerpts also appeared in 1915 (April 30, 1915, 3). The tales included in this volume are folktales based on Jewish folklore, some dealing with biblical folklore, in particular with the prophet Elijah, others with kabbalistic and Hassidic folklore. LF 713/512, September 29, 1916. LF 746 / 538, December 14, 1916. Cf. »Die Hauptsache sind die Menschen, nur sie, die Menschen« (LF 694 / 498, September 11, 1916: »The main thing is the human element, only the human element«). And: »solltest Du [...] erkennen, daß ich kein Zionist bin - so würde es sich bei einer Prüfung wohl ergeben - dann fürchte ich mich nicht und Du mußt dich nicht furchten, Zionismus ist nicht etwas, was Menschen trennt, die es gut meinen.« (LF 697f. / 501, September 12, 1916: »should you [...] realize that I am not a Zionist - which would probably emerge from an examination - it wouldn't worry me, nor need it worry you; Zionism is not something that separates well-meaning people.«) He said this to Felice in early August, i. e. before her involvement with the People's Home began: »Jedenfalls mußt Du Dich vor dem Jüdischen Volksheim wegen des Zionismus, den Du nicht genügend kennst, nicht fürchten. Es kommen durch das Volksheim andere Kräfte in Gang und Wirkung, an denen mir viel mehr gelegen ist. Der Zionismus, wenigstens in einem äußern Zipfel, den meisten lebenden Juden erreichbar, ist nur der Eingang zu dem Wichtigern.« (LF 675 / 482, August 2, 1916: »Anyway, you need have no qualms about the Jewish Home as regards Zionism, with which you are not sufficiently familiar. Through the Jewish Home other forces, much nearer to my heart, are set in motion and take effect. Zionism, accessible to most Jews of today, at least in its outer fringes, is but an entrance to something far more important.«) In September Felice finally went to the »Volksheim« and Kafka responded enthusiastically: »Daß Ihr endlich zusammengekommen seid, Du und das Heim, ist natürlich das Wichtigste, alles andere wird [...] sich von selbst ergeben.« (LF 693 / 498; September 11, 1916: »That you have at last got together, you and the Home, is certainly the most important thing; everything else [...] will solve itself.«)

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bes.« 69 (»To be sure, Kafka had come ever closer to Zionism [...], but the Zionist movement was never the driving force for him; he always saw it only in terms of preparing the way.«) Kafka's letters to Felice end in December/early January 1917. There are no further letters until September 1917 when Kafka informs her of his Tuberculosis, which leads to their break up. This explains why we hear no more about the Jewish People's Home in their correspondence. But in 1917 there was a general renewed interest in Jewish education in Prague, and many reports in Selbstwehr comment on parent meetings and on the history of the first Jewish School of 1782. After 1917, there are an increasing number of voices requesting the establishing of »Das jüdische Volksheim in Prag« (»The Jewish People's Home in Prague«). 70 Though this project was never realized, Brod and others spent the following years planning a Jewish elementary school. The first parents' meeting in connection with it was held on November 6, 1917. Brod discussed the evening with Kafka, but neither of them was present. 71

The Jewish Elementary School of Prague At the end of the world war possibilities increased for realizing many existing projects for starting up Jewish national schools: After the formation of the Republic, the demand of the Jews for the right to set up their own school system was based on the Minorities Protection Treaty of 1919, which had been incorporated into the Czechoslovak Constitution, and according to which all national minority groups in the country had the right to set up private schools and other educational institutions where they would be free to teach their own religious and secular subjects in their own language. 72

Indeed, historians have shown that »[t]he question of education came to be one of the major public issues which preoccupied the parents of school children in the 1920's«. 73 In Prague, Max Brod became vice-chairman of the newly founded Jewish National Council, which was very involved in educational matters. However, the opposition to the Elementary School in Prague reveals what a heated political issue it was. Brod and other Zionists fought for six years in order to realize this project, which was continually opposed by assimilated 69

70 71

72 73

Felix Weltsch: Franz Kafkas Geschichtsbewußtsein. In: Deutsches Judentum. Aufstieg und Krise. Gestalten, Ideen, Werke. Hg. von Robert Weltsch. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1963 (Veröffentlichung des Leo Baeck Instituts), 271-288, here 278f. Selbstwehr, no. 18, January 1918, 3^1. Max Brod / Franz Kafka. Eine Freundschaft. Briefwechsel. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1989, 483, note 71 and 191. Rabinowicz, The Jewish Minority (note 18), 215. Aryeh Sole: Subcarpathian Ruthenia, 1918-1938. In: The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1 (1968), 125-154, here 142.

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Jews. 7 4 It was the Czech Jewish assimilationists w h o opposed the school most vehemently, and they occupied the administrative positions that needed to be consulted in this matter. 7 5 T o get around their objections, it w a s decided to adopt Czech as the language of instruction and this is w h y , in the end, the school became »eine jüdische Privatschule mit tschechischer Unterrichtssprache u n d besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutschen« 7 6 (»a Jewish private school with Czech as the language of instruction and with particular consideration for German«). W h e n the elementary school finally opened on September 6, 1920, 7 7 M a x Brod m a d e an opening speech w h i c h K a f k a and Brod had supposedly written together: » G e m e i n s a m mit mir setzte er die feierlichen E r ö f f n u n g s w o r t e auf, die ich zu sprechen die Ehre hatte.« 7 8 (»Together with m e he formulated the festive words, w h i c h I had the h o n o r to speak.«) The school started out with only seventeen students. 7 9 For the first ten years the president of the school w a s Viktor K o h n ( 1 8 8 5 - 1 9 5 7 ) , a school-mate of B r o d ' s , w h o w a s also related to the father's side of K a f k a ' s family. Like K a f k a and Brod, K o h n had also been involved with the Jewish r e f u g e e s during W o r l d W a r I: he had been the

74

75

76

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78 79

Binder, Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift Selbstwehr (note 31), 296, regards this as an obvious expression of the nationalistic impulse behind these educational activities: »Gerade der Widerstand der Assimilanten gegen die Schule läßt das Bekenntnis zur bewußt jüdischen Erziehung, die in vielen Beiträgen der >Selbstwehr< als Kernstück der jüdischen Erneuerung verstanden wurde, als Schiboleth nationaljüdischer Gesinnung erscheinen.« (»It is precisely the assimilationists' opposition to the school which turns the promotion of Jewish education, understood generally as the driving force behind Jewish rejuvenation, into a shibboleth for a national Jewish consciousness.«) Brod discusses the opposition encountered from Czech assimilated Jews at length in his article »Jüdische Schule« (note 3), 345-348. For further information about the school see Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 1), 27If. See: Günstige Erledigung der Angelegenheit der jüdischen Schule. Eine jüdische Schule in Prag [Successful Settlement of the Jewish School Affair. A Jewish School in Prague], In: Selbstwehr, September 8, 1920, 2. On September 8, 1920 the first Jewish school was opened in Brünn (ibid., October 1, 1920, 4-5). Here, the language of instruction was German: »Die erste Klasse der jüdischen Volksschule und die erste Klasse des jüdischen Reformrealgymnasiums sind eröffnet« (»The first class of the Jewish Elementary School and the first class of the Jewish Reform Secondary School have opened«, ibid., 4) »Final approval for the creation of Jewish national schools was given on August 28, 1920, and the first nationally oriented Jewish elementary school with Czech as the language of instruction opened in Prague on September 6 of that same year.« (Rabinowicz, The Jewish Minority [note 18], 215). Cf. also: »Günstige Erledigung der Angelegenheit der jüdischen Schule: Eine jüdische Schule in Prag« (Selbstwehr, September 8, 1920, 2-3); and Brod, Jüdische Schule (note 3), 345. Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 1), 27If. Brod, Jüdische Schule (note 3), 345.

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»founder of a centre for the absorption, accommodation and treatment of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe upon the cessation of World War I«.80 For the first year (1920/21), there exists only one class record book. 81 The basic subjects were taught (i. e. languages, zoology, biology, arithmetic, geography), and the teaching was innovative because it was visually oriented: much of it was done through pictures of animals, birds, plants, and other subjects or objects. In the following (second) year, 1921/22, Kafka persuaded his sister Valli to send her daughter Lotte to the school. At this time there were already two classes. Lotte was taught by a young teacher named Arnstein, whom Kafka highly respected. 82 Lotte's older sister, Marianne Steiner (1913-2001), recollected: Erwin Arnstein was a marvellous teacher and all children, myself included, adored him. His method, for Prague of that time, was revolutionary indeed. The children were asked to call him Erwin (not »Herr Lehrer« as was the custom then); he introduced plasticine and encouraged the children to use their imagination and create models of everyday life: a wedding, a funeral, etc. When he left Prague with his fianceé Klara, we children were heartbroken. 83

In 1922 Lotte's mother Valli became involved in the school as well, in the sense that she »would help out on outings to the countryside, supervising the children«.84 Kafka himself participated in parents' evenings, and if he was unable to attend, as in July 1922 when he was in Planà, he generally kept informed about school activities. On this particular occasion he read his friend Felix Weltsch's review article (in Selbstwehr) on the parents' evening he missed.85 Kafka was especially interested this time because his sister Valli had spoken, and he also asked Brod for further details: »Wie war (in intimer Hinsicht) der Elternabend? Wie hat meine Schwester gesprochen? Hat man Schüler fur nächstes Jahr?« (»How did the Parents' Evening go (on the personal level)? How did my sister speak? Have they pupils for next year?«)86 Brod recalled: [...] er sorgte dafür, daß im Laufe der Jahre alle seine schulpflichtigen Familienmitglieder (vier Nichten, ein Neffe) in diese Schule eintraten, die der in Prag regieren-

80

81

82

83

84 85

86

Amira Kohn-Trattner, personal correspondence (1995/96). Many thanks to Amira Kohn-Trattner for the information she shared with me about her grandfather. The documentary material on the school was made available to me through the help of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Cf. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 463; Kafka-Handbuch (note 4), 575; Binder, Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift Selbstwehr (note 31), 295. Many thanks to the late Marianne Steiner for this information (letter to the author, March 16, 1995). Ibid. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 389; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 337, beginning of July 1922. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 393; Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 341, July 12, 1922.

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den Assimilation ein gesundes Zurückgreifen auf die jüdischen Grundkräfte der Seele entgegensetzte. 87 ([...] he saw to it that over the years all of his family members who were of school age were to attend this school, which holds against the assimilation which reigns in Prague a sound reaching back towards the basic forces of the soul.)

Here Brod is exaggerating slightly. Kafka's nephew Felix (1911-1940) was too old already for the Elementary School. Instead, in the fall of 1921, Kafka encouraged his sister Elli (1889-1941) to send her son Felix away from the assimilationist home environment to the new, experimental, innovative non-Jewish school in Hellerau, 88 which furthered the children's creativity and free expression. But her response was not enthusiastic and there is no proof that Felix ever went there. Kafka's niece Marianne Steiner does not remember »Felix having been sent to Hellerau, but Franz tried to persuade Elli to send her daughter Gerty (1912-1972) there, but she was sent to Switzerland, I think to Lausanne«. 89 Nevertheless, the urgent tone in Kafka's letters to his sister reveals the accuracy of Binder's interpretation: »[Kafkas] Interesse an der Erziehung wurzelt [...] in der von ihm erkannten Mißlichkeit westjüdischer, und das heißt fur ihn assimilantisch bestimmter Erziehungsmethoden. [...]« (»[Kafka's] interest in education originates [...] in what he perceived to be Western Jewish educational methods, and that means for him those which are determined by assimilationist thinking.«) 90 Indeed, what counted most for Kafka was to prevent the young children from receiving this assimilationist upbringing. Elli's son, Felix, had spent all of his ten years in Prague, and Kafka regarded this as absolutely detrimental: [...] diese zehn Jahre sind überdies in Prag verbracht, in dem von Kindern nicht abzuhaltenden besondern Geist, der gerade in Prager wohlhabenden Juden wirkt, [...] der in Dir ist, so wie in mir. [...] Vor dem das eigene Kind retten können, was für ein Glück! 91

87 88

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Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 1), 272. Many thanks to Niels Bokhove, who alerted me to the fact that this school was not Jewish. Since there were no Jewish schools nearby, the innovative educational methods were decisive for Kafka: »[...] es gibt blutnähere und vielleicht wichtigere Schulen in Palästina, aber in der Nähe und weniger riskant wohl keine außer Hellerau.« (Kafka, Briefe [note 26], 339; Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors [note 26], 290; autumn 1921: »There are schools in Palestine which are more akin to us and perhaps more important. But for proximity and minimal risk there is probably nothing like Hellerau.«) »Hellerau was founded in 1909 as a garden city outside of Dresden. [...] It had [...] Emile Jaques-Dalcroze's School for Eurythmies which Kafka had visited in 1914. In 1921 a progressive school, the Neue Schule, was established; A. S. Neill (1883-1973), later the creator of Summerhill, was a cofounder.« (Ibid., 477, note 78) Steiner, Personal Correspondence. Binder, Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift Selbstwehr (note 31), 295. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 339f.; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 290f., autumn 1921.

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(Nevertheless these ten years have been spent in Prague where prosperous Jews are affected by a particular spirit from which children cannot be shielded [...], which is in you as well as in me. [...] To be able to save one's own child from that, what good fortune!) In F e b r u a r y 1923, t h e teacher E r w i n Arnstein left the school w h e n h e and his w i f e e m i g r a t e d to Palestine. In M a y 1923 Selbstwehr printed an article b y A r n s t e i n f r o m T e l A v i v o n the f r o n t p a g e . 9 2 A r n s t e i n returned to P r a g u e after a y e a r or t w o to obtain his doctorate and stayed f o r a b o u t t w e l v e m o n t h s ; t h e n he w e n t b a c k to Palestine. K a f k a n e v e r s a w h i m again, b u t M a r i a n n e Steiner, w h o visited A r n s t e i n in J e r u s a l e m in 1950, recalls that h e s h o w e d h e r » K a f k a ' s slim b o o k >Der H e i z e n « , a g i f t f r o m the author w i t h the inscription: » F ü r E r w i n Arnstein, in D a n k b a r k e i t f ü r das Glück, das v o n i h m a u s g i n g . « (»For E r w i n Arnstein, with m a n y t h a n k s f o r the h a p p i n e s s w h i c h h e e m a n a t e d . « ) 9 3 Until shortly b e f o r e his d e a t h K a f k a k e p t i n f o r m e d a b o u t school affairs t h r o u g h family, friends, as well as t h r o u g h his r e a d i n g o f Selbstwehr.94 T h e E l e m e n t a r y School in P r a g u e w a s n o t an isolated occurrence. S m a l l schools m u s h r o o m e d in n u m e r o u s places. S o m e started out u s i n g G e r m a n , b u t t h e y too eventually shifted to C z e c h . 9 5 M o r e o v e r , there w e r e even H e b r e w schools. In M u k a c e v o ( S u b c a r p a t h i a n R u t h e n i a ) , B e n K o r d a , a student in a H e b r e w secular e l e m e n t a r y school w h i c h o p e n e d in 1925, recalls the tension b e t w e e n the Zionists and the religious groups: Then, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of Zionists, a Hebrew secular school started. I don't know whether father was a Zionist, but I was transferred there to start my learning career in a new language (all the subjects were in modern Hebrew). To this day I marvel at how they succeeded to get the go ahead and then in organizing a school. At first we had only one teacher, one Mr. Graeber. [...] It's a pity that all that effort came to virtually nothing. For after 5 years I was removed from that school, father probably gave in to some scare mongerers (there were rumors about the future validity of the school). Who knows? There was also strong pressure from a part of the Jewish community headed by the famous Rabbi Spira, who denounced Zionism and virulently opposed a secular Hebrew school. Allegedly in the 1930s Rabbi Spira went as far as to put the school under »kherem« (the closest »English« term is perhaps anathema; [...] it is the most severe form of excommunication), an extreme act in Jewish tradition. [...] 96 92 93 94

95 96

Erwin Arnstein: Schabath in Tel Aviv. In: Selsbtwehr, May 18, 1923, 1. Steiner, Personal Correspondence. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 463; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 396, November 1923. Rabinowicz, The Jewish Minority (note 18), 216. Ben Korda, unpublished personal memoirs. The »Hebrew Gymnasium in Mukacevo« was opened in 1925 (Rabinowicz, The Jewish Minority [note 18], 216). For the controversy surrounding this and other such schools also see Sole, Subcarpathian Ruthenia (note 73), 145: »[...] the greater the Zionists' success in impressing upon parents the importance of a modern Hebrew education, the greater the opposition they aroused, both among the Orthodox and the assimilationists. [...] The centre of rabbinical opposition was the yeshiva of the Rabbi of Mukacevo«. Cf. Gustav Fleischmann: The Religious Congregation, 1918-1938. In: The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1 (1968), 267-329, here 274.

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The director of this school was Chaim Kugel, whose name was familiar to Kafka. In fact, he mentions him in his Hebrew notebooks. 97 Kugel also became dean of a »Hebrew Reform Gymnasium« in Mukacewo. 98 These schools were small and relied heavily on community support. Other more successful Zionist educational projects were of course the agricultural schools which were established to prepare individuals for life in Palestine. In March 1920 Kafka asked Brod to help his sister Ottla procure a place in Köln at the »Hachschara«, one such agricultural school. 99 Kafka remarks, »[e]s liegt mir sehr viel daran« (»I care very much about this«) and even promised to donate a thousand crowns to the Jewish National Fund if Ottla was successful. 100 A month earlier, Kafka had urged Minze Eisner, a young woman he had befriended, to join another Jewish agricultural school. 101 As a matter of fact, he himself planned to attend one in Berlin. However, as it turned out, he was much too weak for the physical work, and instead he only attended classes at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for Jewish Studies). Given this historical overview, I would now like to turn to Kafka's literary texts in order to illustrate how his involvement with Zionist educational and other related matters manifests itself here as well.

»Bericht für eine Akademie« A Zionist, anti-assimilationist stance is most obvious in »Bericht fur eine Akademie« (»A Report to an Academy«, 1917). When the story was first published in Martin Buber's journal Der Jude (The Jew), Max Brod immediately identified it as a satire on assimilation. 102 The ape Rotpeter can be seen as a 97

98 99

100 101 102

Many thanks to Hans-Gerd Koch (Forschungsstelle Wuppertal) who asked me to date these documents. In these notes Kafka refers to a gathering with Hugo Bergmann, which allows us to identify the documents as possibly originating in 1923 when Bergmann had just returned from Palestine. The name Kugel is noted down as well, which perhaps indicates that he was being discussed. If »Kugel« indeed refers to the Zionist Chaim Kugel, he is identical with the later mayor of a suburb of Tel Aviv after World War II. A publication of Kafka's Hebrew Notebooks is presently being prepared by Alfred Bodenheimer. Sole, Subcarpathian Ruthenia (note 73), 144f. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 264, 511, note 2; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 228, 467, note 9, March 1920. Ibid., 264 / 228, March 1920. Ibid., 263 / 226. »Ist es nicht die genialste Satire auf die Assimilation, die jemals geschrieben worden ist! Man lese sie nochmals im letzten Heft des >JudenJewJew< in his work, and why it is precisely in Kafka that this mysteriously suppressed name finds the contemporary genius most worthy to glorify it.« (M. Robert: As Lonely as Franz Kafka. New York: Schocken 1986, 22). Robert believes that this must be deliberate: »On ne peut s'empecher de penser qu'ici, on se trouve devant une omission volontaire, un silence prémédité.« (»One cannot help thinking that we are dealing with a deliberate omission here, an intentional silence.«) (id., Mes parents ne sont pas venus. In: Evidences 5 [1953], no. 33, 1-2, 10-16, here 1) Jean Jofen attributes the absence of »Jewish« markers in Kafka's work to selfhatred when she writes about Kafka's »need to obscure« and argues that this shows »how carefully Kafka tried to hide all traces of these sources, in order to identify himself as a German writer, and how painstakingly he disguised his material by using ambiguous words and non-Jewish locales and omitting key words« (J. Jofen: The Jewish Mystic in Kafka. New York et al.: Lang 1987 [American University Studies:

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m a n y contemporary Zionists, though, these were the very diseases they were trying to combat. They firmly believed that assimilation had m a d e the Jewish mind sick. M a x Brod even talked about »Strukturerkrankungen der jüdischen Seele« (»structural afflictions of the Jewish soul«) 1 2 5 and humorously suggested that as a remedy the Jewish people needed »mindestens zweihundert Jahre Ferien und gute L u f t « 1 2 6 (»at least 200 years of holidays and fresh air«). For K a f k a and his friends, then, Zionism represented a first step towards regeneration. That the representation of the Jew as ape verges on literary anti-Semitism and w o u l d lend itself to exploitation by anti-Semitic p r o p a g a n d a is not to be denied, but so w o u l d the work of m a n y a Yiddish writer w h o writes within the satiric m o d e (such as M e n d e l e M o y k h e r Sforim), and the same can be said of m a n y Zionist texts as well. M u c h Zionist writing during K a f k a ' s lifetime w a s borderline in the sense that anti-Semitic discourses and Zionist discourses w e r e often indistinguishable. A s Anita Shapira puts it: The Jewish national movement derived most of its diverse concepts and paradigms from the conceptual arsenal of the European national and social movements. Yet this same fruitful reservoir was also tapped at the same time by the anti-Semitic movements. [...] It is useful to recall that, consciously or not, there has been a constant dialogue since the end of the 19th century between the anti-Semitic movement and the Jewish national movement. 127

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Series 1, Germanic Languages and Literature; 41], xii). Jofen also believes that Kafka accomplished eliminating >difference< in his writing by eliminating »all foreign elements« (ibid., viii). She even goes as far as ascribing this intention to him: »To present himself as a German writer, he cleans up his language, transposing the Jewish idiom into a different culture and different setting.« (ibid., xi) For a more scholarly discussion of Kafka's self-hatred see Ritchie Robertson: The Problem of »Jewish Self-Hatred« in Herzl, Kraus and Kafka. In: Oxford German Studies 16 (1985), 81-108. Max Brod: Bemerkungen zur Judenfrage. In: Der Jud ist schuld ...? Diskussionsbuch über die Judenfrage. Basel: Zinnen-Verlag 1932, 363-365, here 364. Brod here elaborates on self-hatred as well (363f.): »Die Dauerkritik aber, der das Judentum und jeder einzelne Jude ausgesetzt ist, erzeugte Mißtrauen gegen sich selbst, den typisch jüdischen Selbsthaß [...].« (»The constant criticism to which Judaism and every single Jew is continually subjected has engendered self-mistrust, the typical Jewish selfhatred [...].«) Max Brod / Felix Weltsch: Zionismus als Weltanschauung. Essays. Mährisch-Ostrau: Färber 1925), 136. Quoted in Klara Pomeranz Carmely: Max Brod und Franz Kafka. Die Situation in Prag. In: id., Das Identitätsproblem jüdischer Autoren im deutschen Sprachraum von der Jahrhundertwende bis zu Hitler. Königstein/Ts.: Scriptor 1981 (Monographien Literaturwissenschaft; 50), 131-169, here 143. Anita Shapira: Anti-Semitism and Zionism. In: Modern Judaism 15 (1995), no. 3, 215-232, here 219-220. See also Noah Isenberg's discussion of Zionism within the framework of modernism. He concludes: »It is no wonder that Zionist rhetoric shared a great deal with that of other nationalist, anti-assimilationist, and antimodern ideologies.« (N. Isenberg: Between Redemption and Doom. The Strains of

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Given these historical realities, how representative of the discourses of the period would K a f k a ' s stories be if they did not contain anti-Semitic elements or Jewish self-hatred? Yet, as with Max Mandelstamm or Mendele, K a f k a ' s intention was not anti- but pro-Semitic. Either writer would have been very surprised to be called anti-Semitic in the post-Holocaust sense of the word. In a letter to his lover Milena in 1920, Kafka uses the term »anti-Semitic« in a »positive« sense, calling one of her articles »ausgezeichnet, scharf und böse und antisemitisch und prachtvoll« 1 2 8 (»excellent, cutting and mean and anti-Semitic and splendid«). Kafka was therefore not only aware of the »offensive« elements in his satires; he approved of them. Thus, he urged Elsa Brod (who read »Bericht« at a public gathering) not to leave anything out: »Und sollte im Text etwas Schmutziges sein, lassen Sie es nicht aus; wollte man wirklich reinigen, wäre j a kein Ende.« (»And should the text contain something dirty, don't leave it out. If one wished to clean it up really, there would be no end to it.«) 129 The ape, for one, is not interested in anyone's judgement; his concern is to report: »Im Übrigen will ich keines Menschen Urteil, ich will nur Kenntnisse verbreiten, ich berichte nur, auch Ihnen, hohe Herren von der Akademie, habe ich nur berichtet.« (»In any case, I am not appealing for any m a n ' s verdict, I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.«) 1 3 0 Unlike Rotpeter, the narrators in »Josefine die Sängerin« (»Josephine the Singer«) and »Forschungen eines Hundes« (»Investigations of a Dog«) do not reject their cultural identity and heritage. Placed within an educational context, these stories examine various »Wissenschaften« which form part of the narrators' cultural heritage. However, in both texts the scientific or artistic value of these »sciences« is cast into doubt.

»Forschungen eines Hundes« More than any other story, »Forschungen eines Hundes« (1922) illustrates well Kafka's famous remark, »[...] [ich] habe nicht den letzten Zipfel des davonfliegenden jüdischen Gebetmantels noch gefangen wie die Zionisten. Ich bin Ende oder Anfang« (»[...] [I] have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayermantle - now flying away from us - as the Zionists have. I am an end or a

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German-Jewish Modernism. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press 1999 [Texts and Contexts], 13) Franz Kafka: Briefe an Milena. Hg. von Jürgen Born und Michael Müller. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1986 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 5307), 207. Kafka, Briefe (note 26), 197; Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (note 26), 168, mid-November 1917. Ibid.

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b e g i n n i n g « ) . 1 3 1 In » F o r s c h u n g e n « there is n o school f o r t h e y o u n g »scholarly d o g « 1 3 2 w h o is so c u r i o u s a n d e a g e r to learn. 1 3 3 N o e n c o u r a g e m e n t c a n b e e x p e c t e d f r o m the d o g c o m m u n i t y either, b e c a u s e these d o g s are r e s i g n e d to their fate, filled w i t h apathy, a n d old b e f o r e their time. T h e p r o b l e m is that t h e narrator is pretty m u c h o n his o w n : [...] [Selbständigkeit] war in meinem Fall umso nötiger, als ich nicht die eigentliche Methode der Wissenschaft befolgen konnte, nämlich die Arbeiten der Vorgänger zu benützen und mit den zeitgenössischen Forschern mich zu verbinden. Ich war völlig auf mich allein angewiesen [...]. 134 (In my case [independence] was all the more necessary as I was not able to employ the real method of science, to avail myself, that is, of the labors of my predecessors, and establish contact with contemporary investigators. I was entirely cast on my own resources. [...]) T h e d o g narrator's lonely research illustrates h o w frustrating and self-defeating individual, isolated attempts at Jewish self-education are in this environment w h e r e the m a i n tension is b e t w e e n Zionists and the traditional cultural heritage. L i k e m a n y Zionists, the d o g narrator, too, believes it c a n n o t b e right that the d o g s adhere to rules w h i c h are detrimental to their existence as a c o m m u n i t y , » f e s t h a l t e n d an V o r s c h r i f t e n , die nicht die der H u n d e s c h a f t sind, j a eher g e g e n sie gerichtet« (»holding f i r m l y to laws that are not those of the dog w o r l d , b u t are actually directed against it«). 1 3 5 T h e d o g m e t a p h o r is m o r e than a m e t a p h o r d r a w n f r o m anti-Semitic d i s c o u r s e , 1 3 6 in that it satirically depicts the » H u n d e l e b e n « ( » d o g ' s life«) m a n y J e w s led in t h e Diaspora, w h i c h is characterized b y »ein e n d l o s e s Irren« (»an endless aberration/wandering/error«). 1 3 7 T h e narrator

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134 135 136

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Franz Kafka: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1980 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 2067), 89; id., Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings. With notes by Max Brod. Trans, by Ernst Kaiser and Ethne Wilkins. London: Seeker & Warburg 1954, 114. The following discussion of »Forschungen« within a Zionist framework is a reworking of my earlier article: Iris Bruce: Aggadah Raises Its Paw Against Halakha. Kafka's Zionist Critique in Forschungen eines Hundes. In: Journal of the Kafka Society of America 16 (1992), no. 1, 4-18. Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985, 83. »[...] ich war noch ein ganz junger Hund, alles gefiehl mir, alles hatte Bezug zu mir ...« (»[...] I was still quite a puppy, everything pleased me, everything was my concern«). Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 413; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 280. He is filled with »Forschungsbegierde« (ibid., 424 / 289: »thirst for knowledge«). Ibid., 4 2 7 / 2 9 3 . Ibid., 4 1 3 / 2 8 0 . This is what Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka (note 124), 15, argues: »Iff...] a Jew is a dog, then the Dog is a Jew«. Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 436; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 300, translation modified.

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is bothered by this, and his Zionist sympathies are obvious in his desire to escape the »dog's life« and to question and speak up where the others are silent: »Wir sind die welche das Schweigen drückt, welche es förmlich aus Lufthunger durchbrechen wollen, den andern scheint im Schweigen wohl zu sein [...].« (»We are the dogs who are crushed by the silence, who long to break through it, literally to get a breath of fresh air; the others seem to thrive on silence [,..].«) 138 The dog's rebellion begins in his youth when he starts investigating and questioning the dogs' obsession with »Nahrungswissenschaft« (»the science of nurture«): 139 »[...] sie beschäftigt uns seit Urzeiten, sie ist der Hauptgegenstand unseres Nachdenkens [...].« (»[...] it has occupied us since the dawn of time, it is the chief object of all our meditation [...].«) 140 The sheer amount of material available for studying is simply exasperating: »[...] an Materialien fehlte es nicht, leider, der Überfluß ist es, der mich in dunklen Stunden verzweifeln läßt [...].« (»[...] there was no lack of material; it is the rich overabundance, unfortunately, that casts me into despair in my darker hours [...]·«) 141 Kafka's humorous word combination, »Nahrungswissenschaft«, can be taken to refer to Jewish dietary restrictions and by extension to the Talmud where a plethora of commentary literature discusses the suitability of different kinds of food from the point of view of religious ritual. Truly, the rabbinic commentaries surpass the understanding of most »dogs«: [...] es ist eine Wissenschaft geworden, die in ihren ungeheuren Ausmaßen nicht nur über die Fassungskraft des einzelnen, sondern über jene aller Gelehrten insgesamt geht und ausschließlich von niemandem andern als von der gesamten Hundeschaft und selbst von dieser nur seufzend [...] getragen werden kann [...]. 142 ([...] it has grown into a province of knowledge which in its prodigious compass is not only beyond the comprehension of any single scholar, but of all our scholars collectively, a burden which cannot be borne except by the whole of the dog community, and even then with difficulty and not quite in its totality. [...])

The narrator therefore questions the need for this »science«: Und alle diese unendliche Mühe - zu welchem Zweck? Doch nur um sich immer weiter zu vergraben im Schweigen und um niemals und von niemand mehr herausgeholt werden zu können. 1 4 3 (And all this ceaseless labor-to what end? Merely to entomb oneself deeper and deeper in silence, it seems, so deep that one can never be dragged out of it again by anybody.)

138 139 140 141 142 143

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.,

432 / 297. 454 / 293. 421 / 286. 421 /286f. 435 / 299.

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Thus, it is not only the laws o f the d o m i n a n t society, but the d o g s ' o w n laws, the Scriptures themselves, w h i c h are seen as furthering a defeatist attitude within the community, and the narrator e v e n imputes to the dogs that they actually w a n t this. T h e s e charges are typical of Zionist discourse in K a f k a ' s time. A h a d H a - a m , f o r instance, wrote, »daß die Juden aus d e m V o l k der Schrift die Sklaven der Schrift g e w o r d e n sind [...]« (»that the Jews are n o longer the people of Scripture but the slaves of Scripture«). 1 4 4 A n d , K a f k a ' s friend H u g o B e r g m a n n insisted: »Die Juden w o l l e n das Galuth« ( » T h e Jews w a n t the Galuth [Exile]«). 1 4 5 B e r g m a n n later d e f e n d e d K a f k a ' s story against charges o f a n t i - S e m i t i s m ( w h e n it w a s p u b l i s h e d in H e b r e w f o r the first time), and argued that it c o n tained »lauter A n d e u t u n g e n auf den zionistischen T r a u m des j ü d i s c h e n Leb e n s « ( » m a n y allusions to the Zionist d r e a m o f J e w i s h life«). 1 4 6 T h o u g h this is correct, Z i o n i s m in this text is n o t r e p r e s e n t e d as an alternative. T h e Zionists, too, are c o n c e r n e d w i t h » N a h r u n g s w i s s e n s c h a f t « as t h e y are particularly obsessed with » B o d e n b e a r b e i t u n g « (»preparation of the ground«), 1 4 7 a term which is part of a characteristic and easily identified lexicon. M a n y o f the Zionist publications that K a f k a read dealt with practical matters such as the preparation of the land, 1 4 8 and even though K a f k a himself cared about it, he doubted that m a n y

144

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147 148

Cited in Adolf Böhm: Die Zionistische Bewegung. Eine kurze Darstellung ihrer Entwicklung. 2. Teil, Berlin: Welt-Verlag 1920, 85. Kafka owned this book. See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 120), 109. Bergmann, Jawne und Jerusalem (note 24), 36. Hugo Bergmann: Franz Kafka und die Hunde. In: Mitteilungsblatt der Irgun Olej Merkas Europa 40 (1972), no. 34/35, 4. Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 440; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 303. In some of these publications which Kafka owned there are reports on »Über die Kulturpflanzen Palästinas« [On the Cultivated Plants of Palestine], »Die Bedeutung der Einführung des Karakulschafes fur die Landwirtschaft Palästinas« [The Significance of Introducing Karakul Sheep for Farming in Palestine], or »Baumwollernte in Palästina in 1911« [Cotton Harvest in Palestine in 1911]. See: Palästina-Heft der Weit (Köln), vol. 14, no. 41/42 (October 17, 1910), 1023-1027; Palästina. Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas (Wien), vol. 9, no. 7/8 (August 1, 1908), 191 ff. Other works have sections on »Bodengestaltung, Fruchtbarkeit« [Landscaping, Fertile Soil], »Klima« [Climate], »Landwirtschaft« [Agriculture]. There are references to a »Pflanzungsverein >Palästinasinging< is part of their tradition, their cultural heritage: Trotz unserer Unmusikalität haben wir Gesangsüberlieferungen; in den alten Zeiten unseres Volkes gab es Gesang; Sagen erzählen davon und sogar Lieder sind erhalten, die freilich niemand mehr singen kann. 165 (Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing.)

Josefine's »art«, then, represents a tradition in decline since what used to be »Gesang« (singing) has now become »Pfeifen« (piping/whistling/squeaking). At the same time, many have flatly denied the mice any musical talent. The narrator explains that he finds it hard to explain their musicality in view of the commonly held opinion, »[daß] unser Geschlecht im ganzen Musik nicht liebt [...]. Ich habe oft darüber nachgedacht, wie es sich mit der Musik eigentlich verhält. Wir sind doch ganz unmusikalisch [...]« (»[that] we are not in general a music-loving race. [...] I have often thought about what this music of hers really means. For we are quite unmusical [,..]«) 166 Considering that the mice metaphor is drawn from anti-Semitic discourses, the charge of »Unmusikalität« (»lack of musical gifts«) 167 finds its strongest expression in Richard Wagner's »Das Judentum in der Musik« (1850). 168 Kafka is conveying the stereotype here, while at the same time acknowledging that the music the mice are producing now in 164 165 166 167 168

Ibid., 5 1 9 / 3 6 1 . Ibid. Ibid., 5 1 8 / 3 6 0 . Ibid., 529 / 369. For a discussion of Josefine's singing and Wagner see Mark M. Anderson: Kafka's Clothes. Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992, 197; Sander L. Gilman: On Difference, Language, and Mice. In: id., Franz Kafka. The Jewish Patient. New York: Routledge 1995, 1 ^ 0 .

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the form of Josefine's »singing«, at the end of a long history of cultural repression, might not be art. The narrator in »Josefine« admits he half belongs to the opposition which does not grant her singing the status of art: »diese Opposition, zu der auch ich halb gehöre.« (»the opposition, with which I too am half in sympathy.«) 169 It is unlikely that Kafka internalized the anti-Semitic stereotypes so much that he simply reproduced them here without critical distance. How would one then explain that he enjoyed Yiddish songs, or that he has Josefine singing until her last breath? Kafka knew Yiddish songs, hasidic music and dances, as well as »temple melodies« from the synagogue. He loved the music of the Yiddish theatre and sang along: »Ich glänzte, wenn sie [Frau Klug] sang, ich lachte und sah sie an, die ganze Zeit während sie auf der Bühne war, ich sang die Melodien mit, später die Worte [...].« (»I beamed when she [Ms. Klug] sang, I laughed and looked at her all the time while she was on the stage, I sang the tunes along with her, later the words [...].«170 Moreover, Max Brod was very musical, wrote about Jewish music, and composed his own songs. When the Eastern European Jewish refugees came to Prague in 1914, Brod's greatest enjoyment came from the hasidic music sung during the services which he, as well as Kafka, attended. 171 Selbstwehr, too, contains many articles over the years announcing musical evenings and celebrating Eastern European Jewish music as >authentic< folk music. 172 As for average »temple melodies«, Kafka is less enthusiastic. At one time he described them humorously as annoying; 173 another time (1922/23) he remarks the lament is useless: 169 170

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Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 521; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 362. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 31), 217) ; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 127, November 1, 1911. Max Brod: Jüdische Volksmelodien. In: Der Jude 1 [1916/17], 344-345, here 344: »Ich habe jetzt, seit die galizischen Flüchtlinge nach Prag gekommen sind, oft ostjüdischem Gottesdienst beigewohnt - dem schlechthin Erhabensten was mir je in meinem Leben zu fühlen vergönnt war.« (»Since the Galician refugees have come to Prague, I have often attended the Eastern European Jewish prayer services - the most sublime feeling ever that I have been fortunate enough to experience.«) In his description of the services, Brod was very enthusiastic about the hasidic melodies. Kafka, too, attended those prayer services. In May 1915, he spent a whole day with the refugees and went to a prayer service with them: »Heute Gottesdienst in der Teingasse, dann Tuchmachergasse, dann Volksküche.« (Kafka, Tagebücher [note 31], 745, Kommentar, 184) The translation of the Diaries (note 34), 128, erroneously has: »Church services on Teingasse today, then Tuchmachergasse, then the soup kitchen«. The references to Tuchmachergasse and the soup kitchen clearly refer to activities with the Jewish refugees. It is unlikely that Kafka went to church in the Tein church with or without them. Rather, he uses the neutral term »Gottesdienst« which does not have to refer to Christian services. Many thanks to Fred Krantz for discussing Jewish music with me. »[...] es genügt, daß unter meinem Balkon mit dem mir zugekehrten Gesicht ein junger halbfrommer ungarischer Jude im Liegestuhl liegt, recht bequem gestreckt, die eine Hand über dem Kopf, die andere tief im Hosenschlitz und immer fröhlich

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Die Klage ist sinnlos (wem klagt er?), der Jubel ist lächerlich (das Kaleidoskop im Fenster). Offenbar will er doch nur Vorbeter sein, aber dann ist das Jüdische unanständig, dann genügt doch für die Klage, wenn er sein Leben lang wiederholt »Ich Hund, ich - Hund und so fort« und wir alle werden ihn verstehn, für das Glück aber genügt das Schweigen nicht nur, sondern es ist das einzig Mögliche. 174 (The lament is senseless (to whom does he complain?), the jubilation is ridiculous (the kaleidoscope in the window). Obviously all he wants is to lead the others in prayer, but then it is indecent to use the Jewish language, then it is quite sufficient for the lament if he spends his life repeating: »Dog-that-1-am, dog-that-I-am,« and so forth, and we shall all understand him, but for happiness silence is not only sufficient, it is indeed the only thing possible.) In »Forschungen«, the scholarly dog admired the music dogs and their art, especially because there was no sound, and he was greatly impressed b y their »Mut« (»courage«) and »Kraft« (»power«). 1 7 5 In »Josefine«, the narrator m a y not admire her »singing«, but he does acknowledge that everyone w h o sits in front of her understands her: »Und w e n n man vor ihr sitzt, versteht man sie; Opposition treibt man nur in der Ferne; w e n n man vor ihr sitzt, weiß man: was sie hier pfeift, ist kein Pfeifen.« (»And w h e n you take a seat before her, you understand her; opposition is possible only at a distance, w h e n you sit before her, you know: this piping of hers is n o piping.«) 1 7 6 The phrase »when you sit (take a seat) before her«, which is repeated twice here, identifies Josefine as some kind of »Vorbeter« (someone who leads others in prayer [piping]). A s a matter of fact, Jewish m u s i c was beginning to establish itself as an art f o r m in the synagogues in Western Jewish culture. Generally it did suffer f r o m

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den ganzen Tag Tempelmelodien brummt. (Was für ein Volk!)« (Kafka, Briefe [note 26], 330) - »It is enough if under my balcony, his face turned toward me, a young half-pious Hungarian Jew lies in his reclining chair, comfortably outstretched with one hand over his head, the other thrust deep into his fly, and all day long cheerfully keeps on humming temple melodies. (What a people!)« (Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors [note 26], 283, end of May/beginning of June 1921) Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen (note 131), 240; id., Wedding Preparations (note 131), 326. Sometimes Kafka did not like the Yiddish plays either, »weil sie [...] in ein Jammern ausarten [...]« (Kafka, Tagebücher [note 31], 349; id., Diaries [note 31], 215, January 6, 1912: »because they degenerate into a wailing«). As for the indecency of the »lament«, the »scholarly« dog sees the music dogs in »Forschungen« as »unanständig« (»indecent«): »[...] sie hatten ja alle Scham von sich geworfen, die Elenden taten das gleichzeitig Lächerlichste und Unanständigste, sie gingen aufrecht auf den Hinterbeinen. Pfui Teufel! Sie entblößten sich und trugen ihre Blöße protzig zur Schau [...].« (Kafka, Erzählungen [note 2], 417; id., Complete Stories [note 2], 283f.: »[...] they had flung away all shame, the wretched creatures were doing the very thing which is both most ridiculous and indecent in our eyes; they were walking on their hind legs. Fie on them! They were uncovering their nakedness, blantantly making a show of their nakedness [...].«) Ibid., 4 1 6 / 2 8 2 . Ibid., 521 /362.

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the fact that cantors or other performers had very little musical training. Thus, »The first synagogue choirs were quite an experience to the congregations who had been annoyed by singing habits perpetuated by inertia alone or by barren experimentation.« 177 A sign of greater »art« was the introduction of organ and choir to the synagogue. These were relatively new and innovative additions that Kafka was familiar with because his friend Oskar Baum (1883-1941) played the organ in the synagogue. 178 Kafka and Brod in any event preferred the more »authentic« services with the Eastern European refugees (without organ or choir) to the innovations of the assimilated Western congregations. There is no accompaniment to Josefine's song - neither by a musical instrument, nor by a choir. Josefine's art, if one can call it that, is without artifice and completely natural. It distinguishes itself from the other »Pfeifen« (piping) perhaps only through its vulnerability, »höchstens durch Zartheit oder Schwäche« (»at most [...] through being delicate or weak«). 179 But its peculiar strength lies in creating a feeling of togetherness and imparting momentary peace. Her singing is a struggle during which everyone is silent. But then she stops: In den dürftigen Pausen zwischen den Kämpfen träumt das Volk, es ist, als lösten sich dem Einzelnen die Glieder, als dürfte sich der Ruhelose einmal nach seiner Lust im großen warmen Bett des Volkes dehnen und strecken. 180 (Here in the brief intervals between their struggles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at ease in the great, warm bed of the community.)

Thus, even if Josefine's piping is not »singing«, her music brings about a harmony which evokes an understanding of the mice people's shared history, similar to the intended effect of Theodor Herzl's famous refrain - »Wir sind

177

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The »Improved Service« and Its Music. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica (note 150), vol. 12, 644-655, here 650. When Kafka's friend Oskar Baum (1883-1941) returned to Prague in 1902 from his studies in Vienna, he worked »at first as organist in the synagogue in the Jerusalem Street« (see Citibor Rybar: Jewish Prague. Notes on History and Culture. A Guidebook. Praha: TV Spektrum 1991, 205). Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 520; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 361. It is significant in this respect that Kafka describes the teaching at the Hochschule fìir die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin as equally fragile, and even as slightly grotesque, as »eher merkwürdig bis zum Grotesken und darüber hinaus bis zum Zarten (nämlich das Liberalreformerische, das Wissenschaftliche des Ganzen)« (Kafka, Briefe [note 26], 470; id., Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors [note 26], 403, December 19, 1923: »rather odd to the point of grotesquerie and beyond that to the point of intangible delicacy (namely the liberal-reformist tone and scholarly aspects of the whole thing)«). Kafka also called the Hochschule a »Friedensort« (»a refuge of peace«) (ibid., 470 / 402). Perhaps related to this is that, when Josefine stops singing, the audience feels peaceful. Kafka, Erzählungen (note 2), 530; id., Complete Stories (note 2), 370.

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ein Volk, Ein Volk.« (»We are a people, One people, united.«) - which echoes through his Der Judenstaat {The Jewish State, 1896). But this is the Zionist dream. In real life, Josefine's mice music is an art form which »pfeift auf dem letzten Loch« (is on its last legs/gasp). She represents a late phase of a once heroic musical past, and her fate is clear: she will disappear like all the other heroes of her people and will soon be forgotten: »vergessen sein wie alle ihre Brüder« (»forgotten like all her brothers«). 181 Ironically, Kafka writes that she will merge »happily« (»fröhlich«) 1 8 2 with her people, who are »[ein] Volk [...] [das] bedingungslos vor niemandem kapituliert« (»[a] people [...] [who] as a whole [] surrender unconditionally to no one«). 183 Like Josefine, the Jewish Elementary School which Kafka supported disappeared without a trace. After Kafka's death, it kept growing. Initially, a class was added every year, and by 1924/25 there were five classes. Kafka's sister Valli (1890-1942) remained a teacher or helper at the school during the following period and until the Nazi invasion. In 1924 the school received additional teaching materials, pictures for Hebrew and German lessons, for example. The inventory of the school (1926-1938) shows that much of this material (visual aids and other teaching instruments, even practical items such as a hammer and other tools) was passed on from the School for War Refugees probably the old »Notschule« in Prague during World War I. In 1926, after it had formerly kept boys and girls apart, the Elementary School became mixed with boys and girls placed together in one class. At this time another fundamental change took place which altered the curriculum drastically. From 1925/26 on, the curriculum had to be approved every two years by the District School Committee, whose members were not Jewish: as a result, increasingly less Jewish content was taught in these later years. Moreover, in the nineteenthirties the student numbers grew: in 1933 grade one ran parallel classes, in 1934 grades one and two were parallel classes (while grades three, four and five stayed single classes), in 1935 the first three grades ran parallel classes. In these years, Dr. Richard Feder, a rabbi in Prague, was very involved in reforming religion classes. Interestingly, a Czech book by Feder on Jewish culture was part of Kafka's personal library. 184 In the early thirties, with increasingly less Jewish content in the curriculum, the teachers agreed that a Hebrew textbook by Feder would be used to complement the other texts: »[...] Dr. Feders Hebräisches Lehrbuch [ist] von der I. bis zur V. Klasse nebenbei zu benuetzen.« (»Dr. Feder's Hebrew textbook is to be used on the side from

181 182 183 184

Ibid., 538 / 376. Ibid. Ibid., 5 3 2 / 3 7 1 . Zidovské Besídky. Kniha Prvn í Pro zabavu a pouceni dospelesjsi mladeze zidovske [Jewish Book of Entertainment, vol. 1: For the Entertainment and Instruction of the Grown up Jewish Youth], Ed. by Richard Feder. Roudnice: Nákladem Vlastním 1912. See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek (note 120), 34.

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grades one to five.«)185 On May 24, 1933, plans were sent to Prague from Jewish schools in Vienna with which Feder and others were working on the »Schaffung einer einheitlichen Lehrplanung fur die Volks-Bürger- und Mittelschulen [Realschule] in Prag« (»creation of a unified curriculum for the elementary, nine-year elementary, and [scientific] secondary schools in Prague«). 1 8 6 In these plans from Vienna, information was sent about a Jewish classical secondary school, »Gymnasium« (5 classes), a nine-year elementary »Bürgerschule« [Hauptschule] (3 classes) and a regular elementary school, »Volksschule« (classes). But none of these plans ever materialized. In 1936 the Prague Elementary School documents show that there was hardly any Jewish content taught, 187 except for a few handouts, which were typed up, on »Ijar, Dr. Jonas Jeiteles, Scholem Aleichem, Theodor Herzl and Nathan Birnbaum«. It was in these years that the school became increasingly important, especially after September 1940 when Jewish children were expelled from all other schools. In the end the Jewish Elementary School was the only one that would take them in and the only school that could employ Jewish teachers. In the archives of the Jewish Museum of Prague there are hundreds of job applications for the year 1940 with teachers desperately applying for an opening at the school. The teachers that were hired had excellent qualifications; the teaching was evidently superb. But there were at least sixty children in each class, and with every new transport to the camps, literally from one day to the next, the teachers and students would constantly be replaced by others. It is possible that Kafka's sister Valli was teaching at this time; there were so many students in need of teachers that much of the teaching did not even take place on the school's premises any more but in various locations and in private homes in Prague. Valli stayed until October 1941 when she was deported to Lodz with a transport. 188 The school remained open until 1942 when the last children and teachers were sent to the concentration camp Terezin (Theresienstadt). Here, some teaching continued under the guidance of Drs. Richard Feder and Leo Baeck, both of whom survived the war. Richard Feder, the lesser known of the two, was the only one of his family to survive. After the war he became the Rabbi of Prague. 185 186 187

188

Archival material in the Jewish Museum of Prague: Letter by Dr. Gustav Sicher, η. d. Note from May 15, 1933 (archival material in the Jewish Museum of Prague). The following entries constituted the curriculum: »Inge und die Osterhasen« [Inge and the Easter Bunnies], »Mit Sand und Klang das Jahr entlang« [With Singing and Music Through the Year], »Dies und das im Ernst und Spaß« [This and That in Earnest and Fun], »Ferien an der See« [Holidays by the Ocean], »Lustige Geschichten« [Funny Stories], »Rübezahl«, »Robinson Crusoe«, »Was du willst« [Whatever you want], »Tausend und eine Nacht« [A Thousand and One Nights], »Die Schildbürger«, »Reineke Fuchs«, »Gullivers Reisen« [Gulliver's Travels], I would like to thank Arno Parik for this information (personal correspondence March 6, 1993), and for translating many Czech documents, which allowed me to reconstruct the history of the school on my second visit to the Jewish Museum in Prague. He was also instrumental initially for putting me in touch with earlier students of the Jewish Elementary School.

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By August 1942, though, students and teachers were gone and a »Jüdisches Zentralmuseum« (»Jewish Central Museum«) replaced the Elementary School. It has frequently been said that the Nazis intended this museum to be a »Museum einer ausgestorbenen Rasse« (»museum of a race which has died out«), but there seems to be little evidence for this. They certainly used it to store many stolen artifacts, not only from Prague but from all over Germany as well. After the War, the Czech government, which took charge of the museum and the school, neglected them - only very few people remembered their existence.189 Czech authorities retained the Jewish Museum in the same location where the Nazis had misused it. This is the same building that had at one time also been the home of the Jewish Elementary School of Prague.190

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Figure 2: Jiri Kraus' 1940/41 Report Card from the Jewish Elementary School of Prague

Gabriel Moked

Kafka's Gnostic Existentialism and Modern Jewish Revival

Kafka's gnostic and agnostic existentialism can be regarded as a magnetic emotional pole in a spiritual field whose powerful thematic and experiential lines and coordinates lead to and demarcate various semantic domains in his writing, including the realm of Judaism. Yet, from a genetic and phenomenological point of view that takes as a point of departure Kafka's biographical background and his own sense of his position as an individual of Jewish origin in the midst of German culture, the relationship between Kafka's existentialism and Judaism lends itself to a reverse reading. It leads not from existentialism to Judaism, but rather the opposite: from certain currents in Judaism to Kafka's gnostic existentialism. Furthermore, when examining the impact of Kafka's Jewish background on his writing, one must take into account, along with his personal experience as a Jew and intellectual, some basic themes and principles of Judaism. These themes include the biblical concepts of law and justice and the dialogue with the transcendent Godhead, as well as some kabbalistic and Hassidic notions - e. g. the multiplicity of transcendent and partially immanent authorities (or, at least of their representatives), the unique teacher-disciple relation, and the attitude toward the »other«. Let us first consider some representative instances of Kafka's existentialism, ranging from »The Metamorphosis« to The Trial and The Castle. I prefer to define this brand of existentialism, which focuses on and gives expression to the struggle of the subject against an incomprehensible and unjust reality, as a gnostic and agnostic existentialism and not as either a religious or secular one. In any event, the religious-secular dichotomy is not an exhaustive classification of existentialism. But perhaps it is relatively easier to explain why Kafka's existentialism is not a religious one, especially not in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term »religious«, than to measure Kafka's distance from secular existentialism. Kierkegaard links the incomprehensibility of objective reality and of the human position within it to the »leap into faith«, a faith in the transcendent dialogue and in dialogue within transcendence. Kierkegaard based his leap into faith on Christian dogma. For Kierkegaard, Christ Himself is the supreme subjective vertex of the Holy Trinity, which makes possible the apparently impossible: attributing value to every finite and lost subject in the midst of an infinite reality. In the traditional version of modern religious existentialism, there is nothing to rely on except subjectivity itself; therefore the leap into faith redeems the subject (who approximates the »knight of faith« paradigm) from

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the distressing unfathomable sovereignty of space, time, and matter. Existential distress stems from the finality of the subject against the background of infinity, from the injustice implied by most aspects of materialistic reality, and from what may be regarded as its hostility toward the subject, as well as from the ad absurdum incomprehensibility of non-spiritual reality. The leap into faith, according to Kierkegaard, bridges the gaps between the finite spirit and infinity, between justice and injustice, between incomprehensibility and sparks of understanding - three abysses and unbridged contrasts which coalesce and constitute the chasm engulfing human existence. Of the gaps between reality and desire, the contrast between justice and injustice is the most painful for us, and it offends the sense of justice of humanity as a whole. However, perhaps it is also guilt, that is, the guilt of the individual and of the whole human race, that lies at the core of this state of affairs. Can one really assume that Job, Gregor Samsa, and Joseph K., and the millions who died in the gas chambers of the Holocaust and during other apocalyptic events, are the victims of cosmic injustice beyond any collective or personal guilt? In the literary and historical instances cited above, the redeeming leap into faith is the very essence of religious existentialism. One may recall the prototypal story of Abraham in this context. The leap into faith assists humans in terms of overcoming injustice and the absurdity inherent in existence. This redemption is supposedly made possible through the assumed dialogue with the transcendent Entity. Although such a dialogue is characterized by paradoxical aspects, it may well be, according to the credo quia absurdum principle, that the dynamics of religious belief, detached from both metaphysics and physics, dispel the more profound absurdity of a reality without God. In our postmodern era, the leap into faith can fulfill another role. Today, the very existence of the subject is considered to be doubtful and far less selfevident than in the past. This is due to the combined conceptual/theoretical pressures exerted by modern physicalism and linguistic neo-behaviorism, as well as by postmodern deconstruction. Actually, the leap into faith in its postmodern version might lead to the rehabilitation and reconstitution of the deconstructed subject. It is as if the belief in the supreme Subject and in the possibility of carrying on a dialogue with Him paves the way to a revival of the belief in the existence of a finite subject (even when leaving aside the issue of the immortality of the soul and assuming that death is still unconquered). This revival enables humankind to believe in the mental existence which transcends quarks, genes and neurons, body and language. Thus, religious existentialism and religious personalism are perceived as the only guarantees for the secure existence of the subject. They are not merely guarantees for a more just world. The principle »extra fidem mulla salus« is, accordingly, converted into the principle of »extra fidem mulla subjectivitas«. But it is obvious that the worlds of Gregor Samsa and The Trial, or the worlds of The Castle and America do not coincide with the sphere of religious existentialism. Gregor and Joseph K. are no »knights of faith«, even though Kafka's debt to Kierkegaard is evident

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in his writing and Kafka acknowledges him. There is a well-known paragraph in Kafka's diary where he clearly articulates his deep affinity with the Danish thinker, but he also points to the significant differences between them, which do not derive from Kierkegaard's existential approach per se, but rather from the differences between the religious versions of existentialism. One is geared to some orthodox faith, while the other is non-religious, although perhaps nonatheist, in its existential approach. Before further analyzing Kafka's writing within the context of religious existentialism - which sets up and shapes the »right wing«, so to speak, of his gnostic and agnostic existentialism - let me enlarge upon his relation to the secular, »left wing« existentialism as formulated by Sartre and Camus in The Stranger, The Plague, Behind Closed Doors, and The Wall. (I refrain here from discussing Kafka's work in connection with Heidegger's analysis of Dasein and Being, although both »Geworfenheit« and the »Entwurf« of existential struggle are present in Kafka. I prefer to concentrate on a comparison with Sartre and Camus, two distinct representatives of secular existentialism.) With regard to Sartre, it is clear that his avowed and well-argued atheism, which is linked to his phenomenological ontology, is quite alien to Kafka, whose own brand of existentialism is affiliated to his perception of meaning. For Kafka, an enormous coded network of meanings is the heart of the human condition, forming a universal and cosmic cryptology (an approach resembling, to some extent, Kabbalistic notions). A less puritanical and abstract, and much more colorful, expression of this approach is typical of Bruno Schulz, a literary and spiritual disciple of Kafka and his first translator into Polish. Kafka would have never endorsed Sartre's maxim that »outside the subject, there's no meaning«, even if the gate to a definite meaning is designed on each occasion for one particular subject only (as in »The Parable of the Law«), and subjective yearning is directed toward a search for meaning. There is another difference between Kafka and Sartre. Despite Sartre's attempts to reconcile his notion of the arbitrary project with Kierkegaard's approach to decision and values, it is hard to define what the actual relation of the Kierkegaardian subject to the concept of freedom is. In fact, it is doubtful whether the Kierkegaardian subject is at all compatible with the Sartrean concept of freedom. Sartre himself attempted to reduce this seemingly blatant incompatibility and claimed that Abraham, the knight of faith, had freedom of choice. The Kafkaesque subject remains somewhat at odds with the total freedom ascribed by Sartre to the pour soi within each particular biographical framework, limited only by several contingent facts of birth and disappearance. According to Sartre, the individual does not possess only one singular sort of posse, or individual potentiality (which is the subjective, Kierkegaardian analogue of the Aristotelian potentiality of species) - for along the linear sequence of our biography, there exist almost infinite junctions of decision mediated by a comprehensive but arbitrary project. In contrast to this, Kierkegaard's individualistic subjectivity denies the anonymous ontos of Sartre's pour soi, and resembles Kafka's subjectivity. Indeed, Kafka's subject is not a Sartrean free

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and non-personal consciousness, although in his writing Kafka represents the human condition of »Everyman«. The above observation, however, only partly explains the complex relations between the three existential thinkers whose thought is revealed in philosophical reflections and literary texts. Thus, despite Kafka's Kierkegaardian affiliations, an analysis from another angle will show that the meaningless suffering of Gregor Samsa is closer to Sartre's atheist world and to the 20 th -century world of monstrous »totalitarities«, threats of annihilation and alienation, than to the Socratic and Christian aspects of Kierkegaard's existentialism. Another version of existentialism, partly influenced by Kafka, is that of Camus. Unlike Sartre, Camus endorses a hospitable atheist existentialism, devoid of the Sartrean nausea and imbued with a perception of nature as a glorious constellation of elements - a far cry, indeed, from Sartre's view of nature as a revolting and redundant set of objects. But Camus also differs from Kafka. As a pronounced and complete atheist, Camus objects to Kafka's secretive layers of multiple meanings hidden at the center of reality, and the former's Mediterranean affinities and sunny landscapes bear no resemblance to the gloomy and almost neo-Gothic Northern background prevalent in Kafka's writing and thought. In Camus's novels, anxiety, strife, alienation, and even violence dwell in golden-blue scenes, and this discrepancy too fully highlights the inexplicable nature of the human condition. The analyses and descriptions proposed here are synchronic and not diachronic ones, and are essentially based on a comparison between spiritual attitudes and values. However, from the diachronic point of view, Kafka's role as a great precursor of the abstract-symbolical genre in world literature, as well as in Jewish-Israeli letters, should be always emphasized, notwithstanding the differences between the various representatives of this abstract - and one may say, almost cubist - symbolism. The work of Borges, for instance, whose gnostic existentialism is akin to that of Kafka, demonstrates the above-mentioned diachronic influence, while Kafka's influence on Camus is especially evident in The Stranger and The Plague. In Israeli literature, too, the abstract symbolism of S. Y. Agnon, A. B. Yehoshua, and Y. Averbuch-Orpaz can be traced back to Kafka. At this theoretical junction, before proceeding with my exposé, I wish to add a methodological remark. Thus far, I have discussed Kafka's work from mixed philosophical and literary perspectives or by relying on philosophical and literary texts, because Kafka's unique existential position - and, to a lesser degree, also Kierkegaard's position - does not find its expression in a regular academic array of philosophizing. Rather, it is embedded in, and actualized by, a literary output, which constitutes one of the two new genres in modern fiction. I term this genre founded by Kafka abstract symbolism. His precursors in the 19 th century were Kleist and Gogol. The other new genre is the stream-ofconsciousness novel. Abstract-symbolical fiction is characterized by a condensed, intensive narrative, replete with symbolical, but not allegorical, impli-

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cations, and almost bare of all psychological and perceptual descriptions not directly linked to the main symbolical theme. This kind of narrative, exemplified in its purest and most perfect form in Kafka's novels and short stories, continuously evolves around its symbolic axis and never deviates from its gravitational field. It renounces the need for mimetic depiction of historical background and actual social stratification - the hallmarks of realist prose and replaces psychological characterization with psychological relations to the existential struggle. To some extent, at least the beginning of Kafka's literary activity can be construed as an expression of psychoanalytic dynamics. Indeed Kafka, as we all know, was no realist. But, he neither conforms to the modernism of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, nor did he endorse the stream of perceptual and conceptual consciousness underpinning their writing. Kafka's modernism is cubist in essence and form alike. However, surrealist shades coexist with cubist ones within the framework of his abstract symbolism and require further consideration and research even apart from their psychoanalytical implications. Several themes in Kafka's writing may be analyzed in terms of their relation to philosophical motives in Judaism. In this context, it is important to consider »Kafka's >legal< or juridical fiction«, that is to say fiction which refers to and heavily relies on the formalized and symbolized frameworks of struggle pertaining to legal issues. This juridical or jurisprudential fiction relies heavily on Kleist's »Michael Kohlhaas« and also on the novels of Dostoevsky, while at the same time it manifests an affinity with certain aspects of biblical narrative. These aspects, which are neither romantic nor primarily epic, nor lyrical, cannot be defined as »realist« in the customary mimetic usage of the term. Still, they convey important facts of the human condition. Accompanied by legendary or historical coloring, biblical figures - from Jeremiah to Job - are portrayed against the background of their struggle for justice and for a meaningful rendering of national and personal history. Options of the biblical narrative seem to be mediated by and subjected to reflections in a sort of juridical and symbolical prism, which, alongside the feeling of Divine mission, crystallizes the various plots and events. In modernist symbolical fiction such as Kafka's, the uncompromising, single-minded and insistent search for meaning and justice is carried on in the midst of a very dynamic, and sometimes even adventurous, plot. Kleist's »Michael Kohlhaas« presents an earlier instance of the juridical motive, in which symbolical and abstract, as well as realistic, themes are formalized and mediated by means of »legal fiction«. It might be argued that Kleist's novel, as compared with Kafka's various works, retains more of its historical context (the era of the Reformation). This argumentation is potentially misleading, because it accounts for the disproportionate weight placed upon the symbolical-legal dimension, rather than the historical one. Even quantitative research may easily locate and highlight Kleist's literary and ethical preferences. When the description of a minor legal detail takes up so much more literary space than that of a battlefield where thousands of people died, it is

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quite evident that for Kleist the primal injustice - the despoiled horses of Michael Kohlhaas - and the legal battle in the courts are of greater consequence than the events they caused. Following Kleist's lead, Kafka adopted the juridical motive and incorporated the strand of »legal fiction« into his abstract symbolism. The Trial and The Castle are two manifestations of this legalistic narrative integrated into a primarily symbolical-abstract fictive structure, wherein bureaucratic procedures attract to its orbit secondary satellite descriptions of urban and rural landscapes and of the psychological semi-cubist profiles and reactions of the fictional protagonists. Although obsessed with justice and attempts to occupy a meaningful place in the world, Kafka's ethnical protagonists are not merely representatives of modernism within the various abysses of the 20 th century. They are also descendants of Jewish spiritual genealogy and a moralistic tradition. This tradition includes a striving for both transcendent approval and affirmation and for a comprehensive, organizing narrative which explains one's fate and justifies one's status as a human being. Furthermore, while describing these enormous struggles projected on an infinite legal plane, Kafka actually stepped beyond the rigid boundaries of legal fiction, and continued the inner development of biblical fable and parable. From his narrative emerges a complex gnostic myth of modern demons and demiurges, who cast their diabolical shadow upon the transcendent quest. There is a considerable similarity between Kafka's gnosticism and the Kabbalistic notions concerning the decline, or fall, of divine sparks into layers or »shells« ( in Hebrew »klippot«) of evil where the victory of justice is rarely revealed. Still, this fascinating similarity must not obscure Kafka's purely modern contribution to the ethnical and theological narrative of the bible. Rooted in a semantic and experiential space which lies outside the realm of epic narrative, romanticism, or lyricism, and perhaps also beyond the Christian sphere of mercy, it is Kafka's commitment to the Abrahamic narrative together with certain affinities with the Kabbalah and with the religious existentialism of Hassidic Tzaddikim such as Rabbi Mendele of Kotsk and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov that makes him one of the greatest spokesmen of 20 th century revival of the Jewish genius. In this regard, Kafka's status as a Jewish author is of major significance, since he expresses a certain continuity of Jewish spiritual affinities and thoughts, and not merely as an individual Jewish genius. Kafka as an individual genius of Jewish origin, resembling on this count Marx, Einstein, and Freud, needs no further elucidation. However, the affinities of his work with various philosophical trends in Jewish thought do demand a certain amount of explanation. The implications of Kafka's gnosticism should be evaluated, while leaving for further extended discussion the exact weighting of the relation, or proportion, between hostile reality per se versus the guilt inherent in the inadequacy of the individual. For Kafka, the depiction of malicious possibilities embedded in modern reality is governed by accurate premonitions concerning dehumani-

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zation and annihilation. It seems that Kafka, endowed with extraordinary foresight, could already in the first quarter of this century prophesy the worst outcome of totalitarianism - including the Holocaust. These horrors are perhaps not more extreme than those the people of Israel would have to suffer, according to Deuteronomy 27 and 28, as a punishment for their sinful disregard of the covenant with the transcendent God, and for disobeying His laws. As Kafka progresses from describing the ultimate dehumanization of Gregor Samsa to the metaphysical-transcendent scenes and spaces of his three great novels, an obscuring gnostic and agnostic gray aura hides the deeper nature of the supreme authorities who determine the fate of the cosmos and its inhabitants. In any event, on the basis of Kafka's writing, at the center of reality there operates a huge and complex system of codes, whose signals are directed both at the non-human dimensions of reality and at the human protagonists of the Kafkasque narrative. Thus, the discussions with the priest and Tittorelli and the great parable of the encounter before the gate of the law in The Trial, and the »Nature Theatre of Oklahama« in America, represent, as in a glass darkly, a dialogue with dimly and vaguely understood authorities and dimensions in an existential, cosmic, and metaphysical drama. At the very center of its stage are the problems of an ethnical system and the fate of the subject. At the infernal pole of this drama, there occur and are enacted the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa and the death of Joseph K., while at the other, more benevolent and hopefully redemptive end, the subject is perhaps granted an affirmation of his existential status. Or, at the least, within the framework of a dialogue with the supreme authorities, the promise is given to include the interlocutor in some sort of cosmic »New Deal«. It is indeed paradoxical that Franz Kafka, the greatest Jewish writer in the twentieth century, whose work embodies the essence of Jewish genius, operates outside of the realm of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. While Kafka's visionary presentation of Justice, which is at odds with the transcendent element, and his gloomy anticipation concerning totalitarian mechanisms and mass murder were articulated in lucid German, most of the Hebrew literature of his time had a completely different artistic and social agenda. It focussed, in the main, on a mimetic description of either the Jewish life in the Diaspora or of the newly built Zionist settlement in Palestine. Without ignoring the historical value of this kind of literary development of modern Hebrew letters, it seems that the avant-garde Jewish writers of the first decades of this century, notably Kafka and Schulz, and not their realistic Hebrew contemporaries, contributed most to the development of modern Jewish textual genius. However, before considering the greatest Hebrew novelist, S. Y. Agnon, in this context, it is pertinent to refer to two Hebrew modernists, both contemporaries of Kafka, whose work was written during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Uri Nissan Gnessin was by the first decade of the century an important precursor of the stream-of-consciousness vein in modern fiction, although his literary activity took place within the narrow confines of the

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community of Hebrew letters. He is unknown outside its boundaries. And, the beginning of a rudimentary existentialism can be detected in the work of Yosef Chaim Brenner, an expressionist Hebrew writer and a conscientious social critic, who had come to Eretz-Israel before World War I and was later killed in Jaffa by Arabs during the riots of 1921, only a few years before Kafka's death. But, in contrast to Gnessin's and Brenner's nearly modernist writing, the mainstream Zionist (and non-Zionist) Hebrew prose written in Kafka's time in the Diaspora as well as in Palestine was typically realistic or naturalistic. This prose strove to become the dominant literary expression of the Hebrew-speaking segment of the Jewish intelligentsia in the tiny yishuv in Eretz-Israel. It attempted at the same time to utilize the romantic landscapes and language of the bible. In addition to these two semantic-national endeavors, it also had to struggle with the enormous challenges inherent in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken, and not only written, language. Accordingly, only very few writers in the period between 1900-1920 can be considered as precursors of modernism in Hebrew literature. Gnessin, who vacillated between Chekhovian lyricism and an experimental stage of the stream-of-consciousness genre, was one of those few. Yet, only two Hebrew writers of that period may be regarded as somewhat close to Kafka in terms of their literary Gnostic extistentialism: Yosef Chaim Brenner and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Brenner boldly portrayed the existential situation of the non-believer, characterized nonetheless by religious yearning, and this brand of existentialism enables us to regard Brenner as a distant and relatively unknown Hebraic relative of Kafka and Camus. He adds an important experiential layer to the expressionistic-realistic narrative of his otherwise austere moralistic stories. Apparently, he implemented the advice of the old Tolstoy and cleansed his fiction of any ornamentation. The ethnical aspect in Brenner's writing is evident in his emphasis on the need for redemption of the individual and of the Jewish nation as a whole. Still, the anti-aesthetic character of his writing (which is also an ethical credo) reflects his intense longing for a simple, healthy life devoid of aesthetic, romantic, or decadent mannerisms. Brenner attempted in his writing to create a new way of life for Jewish intellectuals who became Hebrew-speaking Zionist pioneers in Palestine. For Kafka, his distant spiritual kinsman, this notion basically remained but a wish. Kafka considered the possibility of mastering Hebrew and coming to EretzIsrael in order to lead a healthier life, close to nature and far from the European megalopolis. It would have presumably meant renouncing the Diasporic status of an outsider or the status of the Jewish »other«. But, he never actualized this optional existential project. Brenner came to Eretz-Israel in order to escape from the »curse of the Diaspora« and its non-productive way of life, to be out of the reach of European anti-Semitism. He was a sort of gnostic rebel. He attempted to begin a new life, only to find his tragic death, ironically enough, at the hands of Arabs in Palestine, while Kafka continued to struggle with his malady in Europe.

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It would be no less ironic to imagine Kafka as an immigrant in the microscopic Jewish settlement in Eretz-Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century, under the combined pressure of language transition, the depressing economic situation of the pioneers, and the zealotry of the embryonic bureaucracy of the Zionist labor movement. Let us also remember that the integration of the German-speaking wave of aliya from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in Palestine occurred only much later, mainly in the second half of the 1930s, and only then could it exert any real influence on the Hebrew yishuv. In addition to Brenner and Gnessin, their younger contemporary and the greatest Hebrew writer of the 20 th century, the Nobel prize winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon, belongs in this context, since he developed from the 1930s on an abstract symbolic narrative. In addition to The Book of Deeds, a volume of short stories influenced by a Kafkaesque way of seeing reality, he wrote two great gnostic and symbolical twin-stories: Forever and Iddo andEinam. (»Iddo« and »Einam« are fictitious archaic names of lost tribes and languages.) After having written several essays and a book which refer to these two tales in light of my book on Kafka's »The Metamorphosis«, I met Agnon, and to my utter amazement he told me that he had never read Kafka. Kafka's books, which I did actually see in his library, were, as he claimed, perused by his wife only. Agnon also asserted that he was closer aesthetically to Thomas Mann than to Kafka, since Mann is modernist but also realist, and, for Agnon, the latter was the principal grandmaster of German prose. An objective analysis and comparison of texts prove beyond any doubt that Agnon, at least in The Book of Deeds, Iddo and Einam, and Forever, continues the great symbolical-cum-abstract tradition of Kafka, no less than Borges. Especially in the tale Forever, widely regarded as the ultimate symbolical chef d'oeuvre of Agnon, he appears as the grand master of mythological abstract fiction imbued with gnostic undertones, resembling both Kafka's Great Wall of China and Borges's Circular Ruins (a story which he did not know, indeed could not have known, when writing Forever). It is fascinating that when Agnon turns to the sphere of existential reality depicted against the background of archaic legend, or to further »existentialization« of the same Hassidic tales that influenced Kafka in the wake of Buber's work, and abandons the realistic genre, he abandons at the same time the frontal analysis and depiction of social and national issues manifested in the Jewish Zionist cultural renaissance. Instead, Agnon connects existential problems of the individual with problems of relationship versus transcendence, the renewal of inner meanings and mythical strata of tradition. In other words, Agnon's symbolical abstract tales, in contrast to other parts of his work and partly resembling Kafka's narrative, are imbued with reference to relations between individual existence and the world of civitas dei and archaic cults, which replace the depiction of national or national-religious concrete and political realities. It is significant that the greatest Hebrew writer of our time seems to prove, just like Kafka, that the dialogue with biblical and post-biblical narratives of Judaism and their reference to

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transcendence require a certain existential affiliation to the modern human condition and modern (if not postmodern) texts. This dialogue is not necessarily found within the realm of Zionist discourse and realistic fictive depictions of Israel. The greatest Diasporic Jewish novelist and the greatest Hebrew modern writer resemble each other in this respect. It must, however, be understood that even the symbolical-abstract part of Agnon's writing may be regarded as having important national dimensions or significance, not only because of some specific spiritual aspects but also, perhaps primarily, because of an essential linguistic fact. The semantic dimensions of the Hebrew language in Agnon and their associations reverberate with reference to the entirety of Jewish history. The reverberations of biblical, Talmudic, medieval and kabbalistic Hebrew constitute a linguistic route into the heart of Judaism, even in abstract stories that do not seem not refer to overt Jewish themes. This linguistic dimension is, of course, non-existent in Kafka's writing. Against this field of a comparison between biblical and kabbalistic themes and modern reality, and also taking into account the dialogue between writing in German, the language of Goethe, Kafka, and the Nazi movement, on the one hand, and the Hebrew language and Jewish tradition, on the other, it is necessary to examine critically Kafka with regard to the Holocaust and the national renaissance of the Jewish people. Kafka's relationship with the Zionist movement and Eretz-Israel does not occupy a central place in my reflections; but, Kafka anticipated in his diaries and letters the possibility and hope that the Zionist pioneers in Palestine - and here one may emphasize again his affinities with writers like Brenner - would develop and give expression to a kind of healthy and productive life, close to nature, based on physical work, and substantially different from the Jewish way of life in the Diaspora. Moreover, the pioneers' agricultural colonies, far away from the European metropolises and anti-Semitism, obviously could represent for him also a way of physical salvation from the Gestapo-like arrests, expulsion, and annihilation enacted by a totalitarian regime, first imagined, and then real, of which Joseph K. is the main symbolical victim. The vision of the Essene-like communes in Eretz Israel, which combined ancient and modern standards of Judaism and human redemption in general, was a partly real and partly Utopian option which Kafka seems to take into account. However, I do not regard this subsidiary vision as the main route leading from Kafka's life or work to his main relationships with the spirit of Jewish genius in the modern age. The real renaissance of the Jewish genius in Kafka's work developed against the background of high modernism itself and its principal themes, and not in connection with Zionist national revival.

Eveline Goodman-Thau

Metamorphosis as Messianic Myth. Dream and Reality in the Writings of Franz Kafka

Wirkliche Realität ist immer unrealistisch [...].' Ich will schreiben mit einem ständigen Zittern auf der Stirn. 2 Der Messias wird erst kommen, wenn er nicht mehr nötig sein wird, er wird erst einen Tag nach seiner Ankunft kommen, er wird nicht am letzten Tag kommen, sondern am allerletzten. 3 1

The fascination which Kafka's words have among readers is of such a particular force, that it bears in it an almost initial apocalyptic moment, when no historical solution seems feasible for uprooted humankind, binding beginning and end together and undoing our historical sense of time. The advent of the Messiah is only possible when all expectations, all hopes, and all human calculations have ceased - indeed, the very last day will have to pass and only then, »am allerletzten« - that is, when all last days have past, may he come. This moment is neither in the realm of memory nor a »recognition of the origin« in the sense of going back to the Ursprung of things, but rather a direct encounter with a reality starker than reality itself. It entails a breaking through the boundaries of thought in Western tradition, a going into exile from history, language, and the self, relinquishing all grounding in metaphysics or ontology, and opening oneself up to the notion that the thought that reaches being is the exact equivalent of being open to thought.

1

2

3

Das Kafka-Buch. Eine innere Biographie in Selbstzeugnissen. Hg. von Heinz Politzer. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1977 (Fischer Bücherei; 708), 208. Franz Kafka: Tagebücher 1910-1923. Hg. von Max Brod. Lizenzausgabe, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1951, 141. Cf. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923. Ed. by Max Brod. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1975 (Penguin Modern Classics ), 105: »[...] I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead. [...]« (November 5, 1911) Franz Kafka: Die acht Octavhefte (Das dritte Octavheft. Dezember 4, 1917). In: id., Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M: Fischer 1986, 41-118, hier 67.

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In this real presence, beginning and end m e r g e into the m o m e n t at hand, and it is K a f k a , w h o in true Jewish Messianic tradition, a c k n o w l e d g e s this m o m e n t with a resounding Hineni - » H e r e I a m ! « To be here, in this sense, m e a n s not only to abandon all cognition, but to k n o w that all cognition is a fiction of our imagination: Ich kenne den Inhalt nicht, ich habe den Schlüssel nicht, ich glaube Gerüchten nicht, alles verständlich, denn ich bin es selbst.4 Reality, as w e k n o w it, is a dream and K a f k a is constantly obsessed with Sehnsucht5 - the lust of seeing - to awaken f r o m this nightmare, f r o m an artificial world of consciousness, in which no interruption is possible, where all doubt is silenced and the individual struggle, the anguish of the rational animality of the subject, struggling within the c o n f i n e m e n t of his finitude, is c a l m e d b y the p o w e r of Logos. It entails a struggle of life and death on the part of the individual, both symbolic and universal, not to surrender to self-delusion, to silence the endless and timeless drone of silence, or that nothingness which ends all difference, and instead give oneself over to a long-repressed yearning for heaven. T h e actuality w h i c h K a f k a seeks is not fulfillment, but satisfaction b e y o n d desire, redemption of all desire: Der Messias wird kommen, sobald der zügelloseste Individualismus des Glaubens möglich ist - , niemand diese Möglichkeit vernichtet, niemand die Vernichtung duldet, also die Gräber sich öffnen. [...]6 Thus, the Messiah symbolizes for K a f k a not the d a w n of a »brave n e w world«, but the ability for each and every individual to (finally) face the world in its »virtual reality«. Life, as w e live it, is for K a f k a a constant struggle for the deferment of fulfillment against preconceived notions, fictional relationships, fragments o f reality and dream, held together b y the bare threads of consciousness and loosened only b y the encounter with its end in death, radiating a healing aura over those left behind: Nach dem Tod eines Menschen tritt selbst auf Erden hinsichtlich des Toten für eine Zeitspanne eine besonders wohltuende Stille ein, ein irdisches Fieber hat aufgehört, ein Sterben sieht man nicht mehr fortgesetzt, ein Irrtum scheint beseitigt, selbst für die Lebenden eine Gelegenheit zum Atemschöpfen, weshalb man auch die Fenster des Sterbezimmers öffnet, - bis sich dann alles doch nur als Schein ergibt und der Schmerz und die Klagen beginnen.

4 5

6

Ibid., November 24, 1917, 65. Ibid., Fragmente aus Heften und losen Blättern, 163-302, hier 245: »Meine Sehnsucht waren die alten Zeiten, / meine Sehnsucht war die Gegenwart, / Meine Sehnsucht war die Zukunft [...].« Ibid., Das dritte Octavheft, November 25, 1917, 65.

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Das Grausame des Todes liegt darin, dass er den wirklichen Schmerz des Endes bringt, aber nicht das Ende. Das Grausamste des Todes: ein scheinbares Ende verursacht einen wirklichen Schmerz. Die Klage am Sterbebett ist eigentlich die Klage darüber, daß hier nicht im wahren Sinn gestorben worden ist. Noch immer müssen wir uns mit diesem Sterben begnügen, noch immer spielen wir das Spiel. 7 S i n c e life is a lived lie, o n e c a n n o t die in the true sense o f the w o r d . D e a t h itself is r o b b e d o f its authentic qualities, of finality a n d pain. K a f k a suffers u n d e r the b u r d e n of the falsehood of this w o r l d and cannot flee, since he has t w o o p p o n e n t s . L i f e is a constant battle b e t w e e n these, b e t w e e n the absolute, a l l - c o n s u m i n g l a w (Sein) and earthly existence (that w h i c h is, or a c c o r d i n g to H e i d e g g e r ,

Dasein).

T h e protagonists are, h o w e v e r , at all t i m e s h e himself. W i t n e s s i n g the death o f a n o t h e r h u m a n b e i n g is in fact e x p e r i e n c i n g t h e p a i n o f o n e ' s o w n life, lived as a constant lie, a b e l y i n g o f reality itself: Er hat zwei Gegner: Der erste bedrängt ihn von hinten, vom Ursprung her. Der zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorn. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn nach vorn drängen und ebenso unterstützt ihn der zweite im Kampf mit dem Ersten, denn er treibt ihn doch zurück. So ist es aber nur theoretisch. Denn es sind ja nicht nur die zwei Gegner da, sondern auch noch er selbst, und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten? Immerhin ist es sein Traum, daß er einmal in einem unbewachten Augenblick - dazu gehört allerdings eine Nacht, so finster wie noch keine war - aus der Kampflinie ausspringt und wegen seiner Kampfeserfahrung zum Richter über seine miteinander kämpfenden Gegner erhoben wird. 8 T o b e t h e j u d g e o v e r t i m e a n d eternity, life and death, to p r e s i d e over the c o n flicting

forces o f the Self, caught in the scissors of time b e t w e e n beginning and

end, is a futile effort, even in a dream, dreamt in a reality darker than any existing darkness. 9 It entails finding an archimedian point: to j u m p out o f the line 7 8

9

Ibid.,, Das vierte Octavheft, February 2, 1918, 90. Franz Kafka: ER. Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahre 1920. In: id., Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlaß. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1969, 216-222, hier 222 (»He has two opponents. The first one harries him from the rear and has been doing so ever since the very beginning. The second one blocks his passage forward. He battles with both. Actually the first one assists him with his battle with the second one, for he wants to push him forward; and likewise, the second one assists him in his battle with the first one, for he, of course is thrusting him back. But it is only theoretically that way. For, after all, not only the two opponents are there, but he himself is there too; and who really knows what his intentions are? Yet, all the same, it is his dream that at some time, at an unguarded moment - that of course requires a darker night than has ever yet existed - he will leap forth out of the fighting line and because of his combat experience will be elevated to the position of judge over his opponents who are battling with one another.«) It reminds one of the darkness of the abyss in the biblical story of creation, before the separation between light and darkness after the creation of light (Genesis 1,2).

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of fire, a point which cannot be reached, even in a dream. No dialectics can help one out of this existential dilemma. The Kierkegaardian solution is not possible: An dem geringen Positiven, sowie an dem äußersten, zum Positiven umkippenden Negativen, hatte ich keinen ererbten Anteil. Ich bin nicht von der allerdings schon schwer sinkenden Hand des Christentums ins Leben geführt worden wie Kierkegaard und habe nicht den letzten Zipfel des davonfliegenden Gebetsmantels noch gefangen wie die Zionisten. Ich bin Ende oder Anfang. 10

But, neither is the Jewish solution, even in its Zionist, most liberal interpretation, nor in its assimilated version, as witnessed in the famous letter to his father, a viable option. Neither personal redemption, the Kierkegaardian solution, nor communal redemption, the Zionist one, is an escape from the impasse. Every attempt to flee the »radius« of ever-new-beginnings is futile. 11 To be the sole judge over the world does not mean for Kafka however to liberate himself from guilt, but rather the opposite: »Jemand mußte Josef Κ. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.«12 So reads the first sentence of The Trial. What one has to liberate oneself from is the false accusation of guilt, in order to come to the true one. The false accusation - the notion of original sin, to be accused of an unknown »sin« - is far worse than to be held responsible for a real one. It in fact blocks the way to realizing one's own existential guilt as a real presence: Wir sind nicht nur deshalb sündig, weil wir vom Baum der Erkenntnis gegessen haben, sondern auch deshalb, weil wir vom Baum des Lebens noch nicht gegessen haben. [,..] 13

Our knowledge of good and evil is limited and therefore misleading. It gives us a false sense of security in life, a basis which Kafka rejects. He refuses to leave judgement to the Last Day and demands a different stance: Traum die Hand bewegt, um eine Erscheinung zu vertreiben, ich aber bin vorgetreten und kämpfe unter überlegter sorgfältigster Ausnützung meiner Kräfte. Warum bin ich vorgetreten aus der für sich zwar lärmenden, aber in dieser Hinsicht beängstigend stillen Menge? Warum habe ich die Aufmerksamkeit auf mich gelenkt? 10 11

12 13

Kafka, Das vierte Oktavheft (note 7), February 25, 1918, 89. Cf. Kafka, Diaries (note 2), January 23, 1922, 404: »I have not shown the faintest firmness of resolve in the conduct of my life. It was as if I, like everyone else, had been given a point from which to prolong the radius of a circle, and had then, like everyone else, to describe my perfect circle round this point. Instead, I was forever starting my radius, only constantly to be forced at once to break it off. [...] The center of my imaginary circle bristles with the beginnings of radii, there is no room left for a new attempt; no room means old age and weak nerves, and never to make another attempt means the end. [...]« Franz Kafka: Der Prozess. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1986, 7. Kafka, Das dritte Octavheft (note 3), January 18, 1918, 74. (»We are guilty not only because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the tree of life.«)

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Warum stehe ich jetzt in der ersten Liste des Feindes? Ich weiß nicht. Ein anderes Leben schien mir nicht des Lebens wert. [...] 1 4 For K a f k a , these are not merely rhetorical questions. T h e y are answered in myth, the images of his stories, w h i c h are b e y o n d allegory and symbol but most o f all, b e y o n d metaphor. 1 5 T h e y represent ultimate reality expressed in language open to metamorphosis.

2 Let us n o w e m b a r k u p o n a short theoretical excursus to clarify the connection b e t w e e n myth, image in language, and metamorphosis. Ernst Cassirer, in his f a m o u s w o r k An Essay on Man}6 has pointed to the kinship between myth and language, b y showing that both are based on a very general and very early experience of a social rather than of a physical nature. L o n g before children begin to speak, they discover m a n y other f o r m s of c o m munication, creating a social universe with their surroundings. »Primitive m a n « , according to Cassirer, »transfers this first elementary social experience to the totality of nature. T o h i m nature and society are not only interconnected b y the closest bonds; they f o r m a coherent and indistinguishable whole. N o clear-cut line of demarcation separates the two realms. N a t u r e itself is nothing but a great society - the society of life.« 1 7 Gradually, h u m a n kind begins to realize that the world of nature is not necessarily a safe place; m a g i c does not really control the p o w e r s of nature. Nature is not inexorable, and it does not always fulfill m a n k i n d ' s d e m a n d s , as it does not understand his language. A f t e r all hope to subdue nature has been frustrated, a n e w relation b e t w e e n language and reality emerges: »The m a g i c function o f the w o r d was elipsed and replaced b y its semantic function.« 1 8 T h e transition took place in G r e e k philosophy, Cassirer argues, 1 9 and Heraclitus still belongs to those ancient physiologists, w h o s e entire interest is concentrated on the world of p h e n o m e n a , the world of »becoming«. H e seeks not 14

15

16

17 18 19

Kafka, Fragmente aus Heften und losen Blättern (note 5), 245. (»Naturally everyone fights, but I fight more than others do; most people fight as if in sleep [...] but I have stepped forth, and I fight with the most careful and well-considered utilization of all my powers. Why did I step forth from the crowd, that of itself is certainly noisy, but in this respect is alarmingly quiet? Why did I call attention to myself? Why am I now at the head of the enemies list? [...]«) Kafka, Tagebücher (note 2), December 6, 1921, 550: »Die Metaphern sind eines in dem vielen, was mich am Schreiben verzweifeln läßt.« Ernst Cassirer: An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1964 ['1944]. Ibid., 110 Ibid., 111. Ibid.

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the fact of change, but its principle of transformation, which cannot be found in a higher sphere, in an ideal or eternal order. Not the material but the human world is the clue to the search for meaning of the cosmic order, and in this human world, the faculty of speech, Cassirer observes, occupies a central place. The key to the understanding of the universe lies therefore in the understanding of the meaning of human speech, as a basis of the coherence of life in its entirety. Early Greek thought passes thus from a philosophy of nature to a philosophy of language. But here the problems are even greater, and until the present day, we encounter perhaps no greater problem than the question of »the meaning of meaning«. 20 At this juncture, as with magic and language, the relationship of myth and religion becomes important. Of all the phenomena of human culture, myth and religion are mostly defiant of logical analysis. Myths appear as a chaotic mass of incoherent ideas. Even if we can trace their historical roots, their power reaches beyond time, place, and person, even beyond the foundations of faith and morals. Cassirer points out that all attempts to intellectualize myth - to explain it as an allegorical expression of a theoretical or moral truth - have failed: They ignored the fundamental facts of mythical experience. The real substratum of myth is not a substratum of thought but of feeling. Myth and primitive religion are by no means entirely incoherent, they are not bereft of sense or reason. But their coherence depends much more on unity of feeling than upon logical rules. This unity is one of the strongest and most profound impulses of primitive thought. If scientific thought wishes to describe and explain reality it is bound to use its general method, which is that of classification and systematization. Life is divided into separate provinces that are sharply distinguished from each other. [...] But the primitive mind ignores and rejects them all. Its view of life is a synthetic, not an analytical one. [...] There is no specific difference between the various realms of life. Nothing has a definite, invariable, static shape. By a sudden metamorphosis everything may be turned into everything. If there is any characteristic and outstanding feature of the mythical world, any law by which it is governed - it is this law of metamorphosis. [...] In this regard the savage very often proves his superiority to the civilized man. [...] What is characteristic of primitive mentality is not its logic but its general sentiment of life. Primitive man does not look at nature with the eyes of a naturalist who wishes to classify things in order to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. [...] His view of nature is neither merely theoretical nor merely practical; it is sympathetic.21

The fundamental feature of myth is not functional; it does not express a special direction of thought or human imagination. It is rather an »offspring« of human emotion, and it is precisely »its emotional background, [which] imbues all its production with its special colors«, 22 which defies classification. Myth, like religion, is not opposed to rational investigation, but in this process, its transformative power is lost. It is precisely here where the thought and 20 21 22

Ibid., 112. Ibid., 8If. Ibid.

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poetic activity of Kafka has its roots. The power of metamorphosis as a creative force of myth is awake in almost every sentence and imbues his writings with a self-knowledge beyond knowledge. Kafka tries to break through the categories of logical, coherent thought. He uses strange images that shock language rooted in metaphysics to bring out their hidden root-meanings and to rescue meaning from transcendence and root it once again in the stark reality of everyday experience. It can be classified as »mythical poetics within the boundaries of logical language«, which exercises a destructive power upon conventional coherent categories of human thought and meaning. It is in this respect the very opposite of a mysticism which would try to escape and undo reality. Kafka constantly creates real situations and relationships in order to undo their trappings. Kafka describes his own writing as an »assault upon the last earthy frontiers«, which has to be carried out in order to create the »true human being«: All such writing is an assault upon the frontiers; and if Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbala. There are intimations of this. Though of course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth. 23

The creation of literature serves here as an attack on a fixed interpretation of history as expressed in institutionalized forms of religion - it represents a return to myth. A mythical consciousness, as Cassirer argues in Part Two of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, serves as a »unitary energy of the human spirit: as a self-contained form of interpretation, which asserts itself amid all the diversity of the objective material it presents«.24 [...] Its basic form does not unfold and imprint itself on new motifs and figures in the manner of a simple natural process [...]. The separate stages of its development do not simply follow but rather confront one another, often in sharp opposition. [...] And this dialectic can be shown not only in the transformation of the contents of the mythical consciousness but in its dominant »inner form«. It seizes upon the function of mythical formation as such and transforms it from within. This function can operate only by continuously producing new forms - objective expressions of the inner and outward universe as it presents itself to the eye of the myth. 25

Cassirer attacks here, in particular, the positivistic philosophy of history and culture of Comte, which assumes a hierarchial model of cultural development, dividing this development into three stages: the »theological«, the »metaphysical«, and the »positivist«. »In the first, man transforms his subjective desires and ideas into demons and gods; in the second he translates them into abstract

23 24

25

Kafka, Diaries (note 2), January 16, 1922, 399. Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical Thought. Trans, by Ralph Mannheim. New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1977, ['1955], 235. Ibid.

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concepts«; and it is only in the last stage that he can distinguish between the »inner« and the »outer«, differentiating between inner and outer experience. 26 In this scheme the »mythical-religious consciousness« is overcome and disappears completely. Comte's system thus culminates not only in a system of positivistic philosophy, argues Cassirer, but also of positivist religion. Outside criteria determine Comte's »trois états«, not permitting a purely immanent evaluation of mythical-religious consciousness. Cassirer shows, on the other hand, that the inward dynamics of this »mythicalreligious consciousness« can only be disclosed by showing that myth and religion have within themselves their own source of motion: That from their beginnings down to their supreme productions they are determined by their own motives and fed by their own wellsprings. Even when they pass far beyond these first beginnings they do not abandon their native spiritual soil. Their positions do not suddenly shift into negations; rather, it can be shown, that every step they take, even in their own sphere, bears as it were, a two-fold omen. To the continuous building up of the mythical world there corresponds a continuous drive to surpass it, but in such a way that both the position and the negation belong to the form of the mythical - religious consciousness itself and in it join to constitute a single indivisible act. The process of destruction proves on closer scrutiny to be a process of self-assertion; conversely, the latter can only be affected on the basis of essence and meaning of the mythical-religious form. 27

Kafka uses in his writing the mythical-religious power of destruction as a creative device. In an act of self-assertion, he constantly tries to surpass the beginning, leaving it behind as a positive residue, to be turned to at any given moment. But, at the same time he destroys its initial intention, changing the direction of its flight in mid-air. The mythical womb is a fruitful soil for myriads of such beginnings: Bereshit bara - means »God creates the beginning« and introduces the possibility of transformation by translating, as in the Zohar: »In the beginning did God create the et of heaven and earth.« The Hebrew word et is comprised of the first and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The affinity of Kafka to kabbalist thought has been pointed out by Gershom Scholem: Kafka [...] ist der erste der sich die Frage vorgelegt (und bejaht) hat, ob das Paradies mit der Vertreibung des Menschen nicht mehr verloren hat als der Mensch selber [...]. Vielleicht weil wir nicht wissen, was mit dem Paradies geschehen ist, hat er jene Erwägungen darüber angestellt, warum das Gute ,in gewissen Sinne' trostlos sei [...]. Darum haben seine Schriften [...] für manchen heutigen Leser etwas von dem strengen Glänze des Kanonischen - des Vollkommenen das zerbricht. 28

26 27 28

Ibid. Ibid, 237. Gershom Scholem: Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala. In: id., Judaica 3. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1987 [' 1970] (Bibliothek Suhrkamp; 333), 264-271, here 271.

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Kafka's return to myth is in a way an answer to Nietzsche's Gott ist tot (»God is dead«), which did not gain its notoriety for having lamented the disappearance of faith. It is a revolt against being locked into language, which has lost its grounding. The scientific certainty that replaced faith was, for most people of his time, not based on the rational universality from which it sprang. The loss of faith had produced a deep cultural crisis and its symptoms were generally felt. Kafka's faith in the indestructibility of the true human being stems, to my mind, from his »faith« in myth, as a means of renewal, without losing one's core. It is in the power of each human being to discover the universal: to be an end in oneself is to be a beginning. »Being« as such, cannot replace human experience, which can neither be defined by negation of the negation nor by an idealistic notion of a search for the »Good« or the »Promise of Eternal Happiness«, here on earth or in a »never-never« land. To understand this crisis of language one should bear in mind that Cassirer had distinguished three stages in the development of linguistic forms: the mimetic, the analogical, and the symbolic expression. In the first stage, there is no tension between the linguistic sign and the intuitive content to which it refers; the two dissolve in one another and achieve a mutual coincidence. The mimetic sign strives to absorb its content. The phenomenon of language is only achieved when there is a separation between sign and content. Only then linguistic meaning is achieved, as the separation between sound and signification occurs. In the beginning the word has a »power of its own«. It belongs to the »sphere of mere existence«. »It does not point to an objective content but sets itself in its place; it becomes.« Cassirer argues that it is a kind of Ur-sache (a cause, or, literally, »original thing«), »a power which intervenes in empirical events [,..]«. 29 Consciousness must turn away from it in order to grasp its »symbolic function«. »All writing begins as a mimetic sign, an image and at first the image has no significatory, comunicative character. It rather replaces or >stands for< the object.« 30 Kafka lives this Ur-sache (beginning) in a very intense way. He senses, therefore, the distortion of language, and thus the very distortion of reality by its description: Long before the written sign was understood as an expression of an object, it was feared as a substantial embodiment, as it were, of the forces that emanate from it, as a kind of demonic double of the object. Only when magical feeling pales does man's attention turn from the empirical to the ideal, from the material to the functional. 31

In Kafka's writings we encounter a desire to return to language its original awe - its magical power. Since this is no longer possible by mere language signs of

29 30 31

Cassirer, Symbolic Forms (note 24), 237. Ibid., 238. Ibid.

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words, these words must become transformatory. The images which he conjures are the expression of metamorphosis, which he himself undergoes: »[...] Man furchtet manches. Daß vielleicht die Körperlichkeit entschwindet, daß die Menschen wirklich so sind wie sie in der Dämmerung scheinen [.,.]«:32 Ist euch nicht so, daß Ihr vor lauter Hitze mit den wahrhaftigen Namen der Dinge euch nicht begnügen könnt, davon nicht satt werdet und über sie jetzt in einer einzigen Eile zufällige Namen schüttet. Nur schnell, nur schnell! Aber kaum seid ihr von ihnen weggelaufen, habt ihr wieder ihre Namen vergessen. Die Pappel in den Feldern, die ihr den »Turm von Babel« genannt habt, denn ihr wolltet nicht wissen, daß es eine Pappel war, schaukelt wieder namenlos und ihr müßt sie nennen: »Noah, wie er betrunken war.« 33

The creation of the world and the creation of language are joined as the »Tower of Babel« teeters, saturated with power, into destruction. The poetic images constantly change their outer linguistic garments, tearing the seams of conventional meaning, endlessly transforming themselves and their objects in the process. No longer is there a fixed connection between sign and signification. Even the symbolic faculty is instrumentalized and drawn into this whirlpool of mixed and multiple meanings. Associations are experiencing a free fall; they are no longer anchored in the certainty of a semiotic system and structure. Beyond the allegorical and the symbolic, Kafka brings us to a point of no return, where not only the »truth« is destroyed, but the very connection between man and object ceases to be the aim of linguistic endeaver, ere the object takes hold, like a Golem,34 of itself, becoming its own master and controlling the human faculty which dominates the world through the power of the word. The individual images, produced by the objects themselves, become masters of the universe, creators of their own meaning, fragments of reality.The hold, which human consciousness possessed over concrete things and phenomena, resulting in a more or less coherent order, is thus destroyed and the destructive transformatory power of reflective and creative intuition and imagination comes fully to the fore: Die Sprache kann für alles außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt nur andeutungsweise, aber niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise gebraucht werden, da sie, entsprechend der sinnlichen Welt, nur vom Besitz und seinen Beziehungen handelt. 35

32 33 34

35

Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes (note 8), 43. Ibid., 32. Cf. Eveline Goodman-Thau: Golem, Adam oder Antichrist - Kabbalistische Hintergründe der Golemlegende in der jüdischen und deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. In: Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik. Zwischen Magie und Trope. Hg. von Eveline Goodman-Thau, Gerd Mattenklott und Christoph Schulte. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1999 (Conditio Judaica. Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur· und Kulturgeschichte; 7), 81-134. Kafka, Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg, Nr 57. In: id., Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (note 3), 34.

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It is here that the core of Kafka's Messianic myth finds its true expression: it is not only rooted in language, but in the very essential product of human expression: in history itself. Language, History, and the Self are thus for Kafka, as for modern thought, the three pillars which bind tradition and modernity together, providing a framework of postmodern discourse, which is rooted in a poetic hermeneutics allowing us to read literature and philosophy as closely connected expressions of life.

3 In this context, it should be remembered that the quest for the meaning of life, and thus history, had originally been the meeting place between God, humans, and the world. The history of western thought can indeed be traced along these lines. The relationship between God, humans, and the world, divides the history of modern philosophy into three parts: the first deals with God, the second with the human soul, and the third with the corporeal objects of the world. God is the creator of all matter; the soul constitutes human consciousness; and matter is outside of the human being. Only God is creator; soul and body are created. Thus God, humans, and the world are the pillars of western metaphysics, which in post-Christian philosophy are reduced to Humankind and World. The anthropological nature of philosophy becomes apparent when observing the emancipation of humankind from the divine cosmos of the Greeks and the Creator God of the Bible, until, in the end, humans create their own universe. The difference between humankind, conscious of the universe and the physical world, which does not possess this consciousness, finds its expression in the division in modern science between mathematics, natural sciences, and historical humanities. According to this division, Descartes determined, at least historically, the beginning of modernity. For Descartes, the reflection of mankind regarding its own consciousness was the precondition for a true understanding of the world. Immanuel Kant was the last major philosopher of western thought who looked at the world from a mathematical-physical perspective. After him, the preoccupation with the natural world shifted from philosophy to the natural sciences. After Hegel, who developed a philosophy which regards history as a totality, philosophy turned more and more to its own history and drew its strength from the sources of the historically oriented humanities. History, as an open-ended book connecting time and eternity, is now a closed chapter, and the work of »Messianic myth« and »metamorphosis« is left to people like Nietzsche and Kafka, among others. It should also be borne in mind that since Dilthey, as in the case of Husserl, Jaspers, and Heidegger, the »concept« world no longer denotes the natural world, that is, the world of nature. Rather, it denotes the historical world of

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humankind as a »Totalhorizont«, as an »In-der-Welt-Sein«. When observing this development, it becomes clear that the relationship between the self and the historical order which surrounds humans is of utmost importance. It is this, which Kafka questions. It is as if the entire universe, having rebelled against human order and history, became fragmented beyond repair. This inner state of chaos is deeply felt by Kafka. He reacts to it and projects it on the outer world: it is he who must keep the pieces together at all cost. Thus, the world of strange things and animals - as animated objects - symbolizes the final battle and mutiny against the human domination of language and history, which threatens to destroy its master. As all other totalities, that of language and that of history have lost their meaning. The self, in its fragmented and useless form, is now a totality in itself. Fragmentation has replaced coherence; uselessness has replaced functionality, meaninglessness has replaced meaning. Thus, writing is for Kafka a form of prayer for wholeness: »Schreiben als Form des Gebetes,«36 It expresses his Messianic hopes for redemption, as an end to history, but at the same time the beginning of another world, where all things and human reactions to this world are arrranged in a different order and for a different purpose. As life has lost all meaning, so has death as the ultimate Utopian hope of personal redemption. But, by abandoning all hope, another goal is reached: the self. In a letter to Max Brod dated July, 5 1922, Kafka described its abyss: [...] [das Schreiben ist] der Lohn für den Teufelsdienst [...]. Dieses Hinabgehen zu den dunklen Mächten, diese Entfesselung von Natur aus gebundener Geister, fragwürdige Umarmungen und was alles noch unten vor sich gehen mag, von dem man nichts mehr weiß, wenn man im Sonnenlicht Geschichte schreibt. Vielleicht gibt es auch anderes Schreiben, ich kenne nur dieses; [...] [der Schriftsteller] ist der Sündenbock der Menschheit, er erlaubt den Menschen eine Sünde schuldlos zu genießen, fast schuldllos. 37

Writing as Messianic hermeneutics38 is Kafka's way to live a life without sin, but the price is high: it means making a pact with the devil, protagonist of the judgement, who questions all human designs concerning the meaning of the world, to give up hope for the sake of hopelessness, failure for the sake of success, lies for the sake of truth, darkness for the sake of light. It means giving up 36 37

38

Kafka, Fragmente aus Heften und losen Blättern (note 5), 252. Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. Hg. von Max Brod und Klaus Wagenbach. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1994, 384, 386. (»[...] [writing] is the reward for service to the Devil. This descending to the dark powers; this unleashing of the spirits that are by nature chained; questionable embraces and everything that may be going in down there that one no longer knows anything about up here when one is writing stories in the sunlight. Perhaps a different kind of writing exists, too; I know only this. [...] I only know this [...] [the writer] is the scapegoat of mankind; he allows man to enjoy a sin without guilt, almost without guilt.«) Cf. Eveline Goodman-Thau: Zeitbruch. Zur messianischen Grunderfahrung in der jüdischen Tradition. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1995.

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the notion of an aim for the sake of reaching one's goal. The paradoxical intensity serves as a shield for Kafka from getting lost in a meaningless totality, where the existence of the self must flee into the opposite, to save itself, not as a dialectic device, but as a place of no return. This apologetic paradigm reveals the self to itself. Kafka wrote to Brod in October 1917: Was sagst du zu diesem blendenden Stück Selbsterkenntnis [...]. Wenn ich mich auf mein Endziel hin prüfe, so ergibt sich, daß ich nicht eigentlich danach strebe, ein guter Mensch zu werden und einem höchsten Gericht zu entsprechen, sondern, sehr gegensätzlich, die ganze Menschen- und Tiergemeinschaft zu überblicken, ihre grundlegenden Vorlieben, Wünsche, sittlichen Ideale zu erkennen und mich dann möglicherweise bald dahin zu entwickeln, daß ich durchaus allen wohlgefällig würde und zwar - hier kommt der Sprung - so wohlgefällig, daß ich, ohne die allgemeine Liebe zu verlieren, schließlich als der einzige Sünder, der nicht gebraten wird, die mir innewohnenden Gemeinheiten offen, vor aller Augen ausführen dürfte. 39

This letter also appears in his diaries 40 designated as an excerpt from a letter to Felice Bauer. The fact that Kafka entrusts this testimony verbatim to Max Brod, to his diaries, and to his fiancée is ample proof of its truth. This passage is a testimony to Messianic metamorphosis. Kafka has finally gained the insight that the very gist of the Messiah is that the world had judged him in a wordly court, a »tribunal of men and animals«, but that this is indeed a false judgement, and that therefore from that time on, all judgements have been false: »[...] Was trag ich auf meinen Schultern? Was für Gespenster umhängen mich?« 41 These queries have replaced the cry of Jesus carrying the cross. All wordly striving for the good is in vain, since it is distorted. All human values are only the expression of the »mean and sordid elements intrinsic« to humankind, which are now exposed in Kafka. He is the prototype of a human Antichrist, who sins like all others without being punished. This is the Messianic core of Kafka's thought, which makes all the vanities of this world transparent. It rips the veil off all deceit, by consciously deceiving, without practicing any actual deception. Having been robbed of ultimate truth and betrayed by constant lies, Kafka tries to find his way home. The ever-present return in his writings to the idea of judge and judgement is thus unavoidable. 39

40 41

Kafka, Briefe (note 37), 178. (»What do you think of this brilliant piece of selfknowledge? If I examine myself with respect to my ultimate goal, I find that I am not actually striving to become a good person and to measure up to the requirements of a supreme court of justice; but very much to the contrary, I am trying to view and assess the entire community of man and animals, to recognize their fundamental preferences, wishes, ethical and moral ideals, and, so as soon as possible, to develop myself so as to be thoroughly pleasing to everyone: indeed, so pleasing - here comes the »leap« - that ultimately I, as the only sinner who will not be roasted, may openly, in full view bring out all the mean, sordid elements intrinsic to me. Kafka, Diaries (note 2), 387 Franz Kafka: Vom jüdischen Theater. In: id., Das achte Oktavheft, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (note 3), 113-118, hier 118.

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The question is: who is the judge of history? Is it a wordly court that can only judge in history, and is therefore bound to fail? Or, is it a divine judge, who is absent from history? For Kafka, there remains only the overpowering figure of his father, who in truth is not ready to play any constructive role and ultimately leaves his son, suspended between heaven and earth, without the force of gravity. For Kafka, the Jew, this dilemma assumes an even greater dimension, as in his time Zionism - and other national, pseudo-messianic movements in Central Europe emphasized historical and political decisions and acts as the sine qua non for future national redemption. The personal and the communal not only depend on each other here, but they actually determine each other in the end. K a f k a ' s search is in fact rooted in the tradition of Eastern-European Messianic thought, which considers the individual act, that is the redemptive function of man, as the core of Messianism. It is what Martin Buber denotes as the Ichvorgang. In a letter to Hugo Bergmann, written in December 1917, exactly at the time of Kafka's Selbstzeugnis to Brod, Buber stated: Never can the ascent of man to God, the rebirth of man, be regarded as a Messianic event; only the redemptive function of man can be. Through the redemptive function, the redemptive deed of Messianic individuals, the absolute future prepares itself in the present, in every present. The consummation of the future is beyond our consciousness - like God; its enactment is accessible to our consciousness - like man's experience of God. I believe in the fulfillment of the end of days, which may not be anticipated by anything transient. [...] But precisely from this it follows, that the consummation cannot be a past event; it is not localized in a precise place of the historical past; and it also follows that it may not be transformed from an event within the world ( Weltvorgang) into an event within the I (Ichvorgang). The worldevent must be experienced in the I (as self-redemption) [...].42 The source of transformation cannot be located in an historical event outside the individual: it must come from the inside, from the place where history and biography intersect. 43 For Buber, as for Kafka, the emphasis on the importance of the deed for Messianic experience is quintessential. For the former it ends in a prophetic »I and Thou paradigm«; for the latter it ends in a confrontation with the crisis of Westernized Jewry engulfed in the catastrophic historical events of the First World War and the search for Jewish revival. Robbed of a past and of a future, history implodes within the individual »I«, tearing it apart and opening it up to a different dimension of time.The Zionist view placed less emphasis on the individual's spiritual redemption and concentrated on the salvation of the nation. Kafka was caught in the middle. Neither option was open to him. Thus, the rad-

42

43

Quoted in: Paul Mendes-Flohr: From Mysticism to Dialogue. Martin Buber's Transformation of German Social Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1989 (The Culture of Jewish Modernity), 107. See Goodman-Thau, Zeitbruch (note 38), 9.

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ical solution of action, which will indeed redeem the individual and the world in a way unknown to both, is opened in the very last moment, when the gatekeeper closes the gate, which was meant only for him, but not recognized until then. This is the ultimate revelation, a true apocalyptic, revelatory moment. In re-interpreting the beginning, Kafka creates a new end: Die Erbsünde, das alte Unrecht, das der Mensch begangen hat, besteht in dem Vorwurf, den der Mensch macht und von dem er nicht abläßt, dass ihm ein Unrecht geschehen ist, dass an ihm die Erbsünde begangen wurde. 44

Original sin is something which was not committed by humankind, but something done to humans, according to Kafka. Therefore, humans are not able to feel real guilt, since they are declared guilty for a crime they did not commit. Constant suffering from false accusations becomes for Kafka an existential state of the soul. Thus every Ur-teil in the sense of Teilnahme an das Ur-geschehen (taking part in the original sin), that is, in the recognition of an original wrongdoing, is at the same time the beginning of self-knowledge. A search for self, which is the leading thread of his writing in search of self-redemption, is a process of metamorphosis for which the world is not yet ready.

4 It is important here to trace Kafka's journey of self-discovery, from its beginning to its end through three stories: »The Judgement« (1912), 45 »The Metamorphosis« (1915) 46 and »Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk« (1924). 47 These texts may serve in a way as a triology and »Schlüsselroman« for his entire œuvre - in the sense of creation, revelation, and redemption.

»The Judgement« In a diary entry of February 11, 1913, triggered by reading the proofs of »The Judgement«, which he had composed at one feverish sitting shortly after Yom Kippur. Kafka recorded his sense of how »the story came out of [himself] like a real birth, covered with filth and slime«. 48 The birth of this story, which ends in the son's condemnation to death by his father, and the son's subsequent suicide jump from the bridge, that is death, is here described as a birth! The

44 45

46 47 48

Kafka, ER (note 8), 219. Franz Kafka: The Judgement. In: id. The Complete Stories. Ed. by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken 1946, 77-89. Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis. In: ibid., 89-140. Franz Kafka: Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. In: ibid., 360-379. Kafka, Diaries (note 2), 214.

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condemnation results in death, which is at the same time the birth of selfknowledge, when all delusions and illusions, which the protagonist Georg has lived with all his life, are finally resolved. He cannot kill his father, who on the one hand represents all the lies of society and is the »cause« of Georg's life lived as a big lie. On the other hand, his father has triumphantly shown him all this as self-mirroring. Thus, Georg must kill himself - to be born. Projection is turned inward. Here the tyrannical father of Freud meets the God of Judgement, rising in wrath against human delusions of happiness. Since Kafka is not intent on proving anything, father and son are in the end redeemed: Er beweist nur sich selbst, sein einziger Beweis ist er selbst, alle Gegner besiegen ihn sofort, aber nicht, dass die ihn widerlegen (er ist unwiderlegbar), sondern dadurch, daß sie sich beweisen. 49

On September 15, 1912, a week before Kafka wrote »The Judgement« he stated in his diary: Verlobung meiner Schwester Valli. // Aus dem Grunde / der Ermattung / steigen wir / mit neuen Kräften, / Dunkle Herren, / welche warten / bis die Kinder / sich entkräften. / Liebe zwischen Bruder und Schwester - die Wiederholung der Liebe zwischen Mutter und Vater. Die Vorahnung des einzigen Biographen. Die Höhlung, welche das geniale Werk in das uns Umgebende gebrannt hat, ist ein guter Platz, um sein kleines Licht hineinzustellen. Daher die Anfeuerung, die vom Genialen ausgeht, die allgemeine Anfeuerung, die nicht nur zu Nachahmung treibt. 50

It seems as if through the immanent engagement and prospect of his sister's marriage, Kafka is confronted with his ultimate Oedipal and anti-Oedipal dilemma. His relationship with his father is played out in his relationship to his mother and his sister, to Felice Bauer, and to women in general. »Love between brother and sister« is an ideal love, which has from time immemorial been the paradigm for selfless and pure devotion. In the Song of Songs Shulamit, the lover, says the following about her long-last, found lover: »I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her who conceived me.« 51 The home as a womb and a place of birth common to both brother and sister becomes here, for Kafka, the hollow, where his work is conceived and protected by its own light, emanating into the world. It reminds us of the light which emanates from the gateway of the Law in »Before the Law«, 52 just before the 49 50 51 52

Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes (note 8), 218. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 2), 290. Song of Songs, 2,4. Franz Kafka: Before the Law. In: id., The Complete Stories (note 45), 3—4, here 4: »At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live.«

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doorkeeper slams it shut in the protagonist's face. The relationship to women as the relationship to the Law and Judgement fills the space between father and son, and is in turn constantly filled with his writing. It is intimately connected with his sense of language and his playing with words, names, and letters. A striking example is found in a diary entry of May 27, 1914: Mutter und Schwester in Berlin. Ich werde mit dem Vater abends allein sein. Ich glaube, er furchtet sich, heraufzukommen. Soll ich mit ihm Karten spielen? (Ich finde die »K« häßlich, sie widern mich fast an und ich schreibe sie doch, sie müssen für mich sehr charakteristisch sein.) Wie sich der Vater verhielt, als ich F. berührte. 53

Disgust and lust, attraction and rejection between father and son, and fiancée and son, create an entangled net of subject/object relations in which desire and fear alternate. Devouring/being devoured is for Kafka the way he lives his Oedipal dilemma. It is a struggle of life and death, in which the persons close to him are mere puppets in the theater, real figures in fictitious reality, beyond the dialectics or the dichtomy between the two possibilities. A diary entry of February 14, 1914 on his devasting relationship with Felice is pertinent here: »There will certainly be no one to blame if I should kill myself, even if the immediate cause should for instance be F.'s behavior. [...]« 54 He goes on to recall a scene pictured by him »half asleep«: »in anticipation of the end«, he would have his farewell letter to her ready in his pocket. »I should come to her house, should be rejected as a suitor.« At all times, the real reason must be stated as Anlaß for his deed, which is already decided in advance. The pretext must be there at all cost, to give weight to the main reason: The letter, however, would say that I was jumping off because of F., but that even if my proposal had been accepted, nothing essential would have been changed for me. My place is down below. I can find no other solution. F. simply happens to be the one through whom my fate is made manifest; I can't live without her and must jump, yet - and this F. suspects - I couldn't live with her either. Why not use tonight for the purpose [...]. 55

It is similar in almost every one of his stories: a situation must be created, in order to undo it. Every attempt is bound to fail, not because of K.'s inability to succeed, but in order to create a safe haven for his existence within history and society, which must at all cost reflect the very opposite of his inner self. His literary building blocks are therefore at all times constructed in such a way that they not only can tumble at the slightest touch, but that their very construction serves this purpose. Kafka's writing has often been described as wanting to show the absurdity of life. To my mind, it is quite the opposite: it expresses its seriousness, the deep seated alienation, the inability of being grounded, in the family or in society. Kafka expresses this lack of grounding in the »Great Wall 53 54 55

Kafka, Diaries (note 2), 375. Ibid., 259. Ibid.

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of China«, 56 when he refers to the »Tower of Babel«. According to a Chinese scholar, the building of the »Tower of Babel« had failed, not for the reason given in the Bible; rather, it was »bound to fail because of the weakness of the foundations«. 57 This immediately acquires a »universal quality« through the next, albeit ironic, sentence: In this respect at any rate our age was vastly superior to that ancient one [...] that however was not what our scholar was concerned to prove; for he maintained that the Great Wall alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel.58 Language is his dilemma, that is language as rootedness and meaning in history. »The Judgement«, »The Metamorphosis«, and »Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk« can actually be seen as beginning, middle, and end of Kafka's above described journey of an everlasting search for belonging. The question is summarized in Kafka's statement: »Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.« 59 In the same vein, but in a paradoxical fashion typical of his writings, the fear of connection pervades them all at the same time, especially the connection with a woman, which threatens to take the place of the erotic desire for writing, the very medium of his search. Everything seems to be determined in advance. In his argument for and against marriage he states: The connection with F. will give my existence more strength to resist [...] What I remember about Flaubert and Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents' beds, laid out for the night, Max's marriage. Yesterday my sister said, all the married people (that we know) are happy, I don't understand it [...]. The fear of connection of passing into the other [...]. In the past, especially, the person I am in the company of sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising moved as I otherwise am only when I write. If through the intermediation of my wife I could be like that in the presence of everyone! But then would it not be at the expense of my writing? Not that, not that! 60 Here the triangle sister-wife-writing becomes unmistakably clear.

56 57

58 59

60

Franz Kafka: The Great Wall of China. In: id., The Complete Stories (note 45), 235-248. Ibid, 238f.: »I say this because during the early days of building a scholar wrote a book in which he tried to prove that the Tower of Babel failed to reach its goal, not because of reasons universally advanced, or at least that among those recognized reasons the most important of all was not to be found. [...] he also claimed [...] that the tower failed and was bound to fail because of the weakness of the foundation. [...] he maintained that the Great Wall alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel. First the wall, therefore, and then the tower. [...]« Ibid. Das Kafka-Buch (note 1), 252; Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (note 3), 280. Kafka, Diaries (note 2), 211.

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5 »The Judgement« is one of the stories which expresses the relationship to the father as a central theme, which in later stories (also in the famous »Letter to the Father« 61 ) is replaced by his writing on the theme of the Law. Written, as already mentioned, shortly after Yom Kippur, the Night of Judgement, (night is indeed a moment of birth) the story developed in him »[...] as if [he] were advancing on water«. 62 I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under my desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. [...] Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back. [...] The trembling entrance into my sister's room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, »I've been writing until now.« The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.63 Of the thoughts which went through his head he writes: Many emotions carried along in the writing, joy, for example, [...] thoughts about Freud, of course [...].64 In his description, we find in a nutshell all the elements of »The Metamorphosis«. His legs stiff under the table, remind us of the stiff Gregor, who in »The Judgement« was still called Georg and whose spiritual birth (and death) Kafka could still analyze. The sexual doubles entendres of going into the sister's room trembling in the morning in order to read his work aloud or stretching before the maid and noticing the undisturbed bed »as if it had just been brought in« are a Vorschau of what is to become reality in »The Metamorphosis«: »I, only I, am the spectator in the orchestra.« 65 It is Kafka who writes himself and is being written. In reading the proofs of the story, Kafka looks at himself and interprets his characters' relationships analytically: The friend is the link between father and son, he is their strongest common bond. Sitting alone at his window, Georg rummages voluptuously in his consciousness of what they have in common, believes he has his father within him, and would be at peace with everything if it were not for a fleeting, sad thoughtfulness. In the course of the story the father, with the strengthened position that the other, lesser things they share in common give him - love, devotion to the mother, loyalty to

61

62 63 64 65

Franz Kafka: Brief an den Vater. In: id., Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (note 3), 13-51. Kafka, Diaries (note 2), September 23, 1912, 212. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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her memory, the clientele that he (the father) had been the first to acquire for the business - uses the common bond of the friend to set himself up as Georg's protagonist. Georg is left with nothing; the bride, who lives in the story only in relationship to the friend, that is, to what father and son have in common, is easily driven away by the father since no marriage has yet taken place, so she cannot penetrate the circle of blood relationship that is drawn around father and son. What they have in common is built up entirely around the father, Georg can feel it only as something foreign, something that has been independent, that he has never given enough protection, that is exposed to Russian revolutions, and only because he himself has lost everything, except his awareness of the father does the judgement, which closes off his father from him completely, have so strong an effect on him. 66

It is a rare instance in literary history that we have a document, which is not a self-confession, but an interpretation of self, through writing. Here the genius of Kafka comes to the fore. By creating his own subtext, by writing his own myth, he indeed transforms himself and is transformed. The story's power is so strong, that only about five months later the interpretation - as the interpretation of a dream - becomes clear to him. It provides him with food for self-knowledge which is of course limited; otherwise we could say Kafka would stop writing. »The Metamorphosis« is Kafka himself, since his father cannot really protect him from himself. In »The Judgement« his Doppelgänger is the friend who binds him to, but also separates him from, his father, as in the case of his fiancée. Not being able to connect with or to separate from, either the friend, or his fiancée, and having lost everything except his awareness of his father, he is devastated by the death sentence, since he has lost his last link to this world. That »The Judgement« serves as a root myth for »The Metamorphosis« becomes even clearer from the rest of Kafka's testimony: Georg has the same number of letters as Franz. In Bendemann, »mann« is a strengthening of »Bende« to provide for all the yet unforeseen possibilities in the story. But Bende has exactly the same number of letters as Kafka, and the vowel e occurs in the same place as does the vowel a in Kafka, and the vowel e occurs in the same place as does the vowel a in Kafka. Frieda has as many letters as F. and the same initial, Brandenfeld has the same initial as B., and in the word »Feld« a certain connection in meaning, as well. Perhaps even the thought of Berlin was not without influence and the recollection of the Mark Brandenburg perhaps had some influence. 67

We might add that the name Gregor of »The Metamorphosis« is almost identical to Georg. The additional letter - to remain in Kafka's style - refers indeed to Frieda and Felice. Not being able to attain the woman through marriage, he (Georg/Kafka) becomes her through mythical metamorphosis. It is a way of escaping not only his own inability to act by attaining independence, but of showing that all elements of the story are interdependent, and at

66 67

Ibid., 214. Ibid., 215.

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the same time dependent on him as a subject, which in its turn expresses his need and despair of writing as a paradigm of his struggle for independence. Writing's lack of independence of the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled by their own laws; only writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a despair. 68

Playing with letters, with names, with places, and with activities is for Kafka an exercise to demonstrate the inability to connect intention and action, thought and word, since they are not free but rather dependent. 69 The maid who tends the fire, the cat who warms herself, the old man who is being warmed - all can depend and thus respond to the need for warmth and connection; they can be helped [...]. For Kafka, »only writing is helpless as it cannot live in itself«. It depends on connections which are impossible and therefore it is »despair« or a »joke«. The letters of Kafka's name, written as Georg, Gregor, Felice, Frieda, or Franz (he bears the same initial as his fiancée) do not bear the »as yet unforeseen possibilities in them«, their redemptive and transformative power, which his fictional characters are striving for. Even if in Bende the »e« occurs in the very same place as the »a« in Kafka, it is an illusion to think that by changing the vowel 7 0 a true metamorphosis as final redemption in history can take place. »The Judgement« is a parable of the Lost Son, redeemed by the father. Georg had remained at home; he had looked after his father's business, but neglected his soul. When his mother died, the friend tried to persuade Georg to come to St. Petersburg and »enlarge upon the prospects of success for precisely Georg's branch of trade«. 71 Georg did not want to answer him, since his success was infintesimally greater than that of his friend [...].

But then came the moment of truth: his engagement to Frieda Brandenberg. He cannot tell his friend about it. He might perhaps come to the wedding, but he would have to go away alone. »Alone - do you know what that means?« 7 2 he explains to Frieda and she understands all: »Since your friends are like that Georg, you shouldn't ever have got engaged at all.« 73 In the end, he writes the letter, hoping against hope to really find happiness: [...] let me just say, that I am very happy and as between you and me the only difference in our relationship is that instead of a quite ordinary kind of friend you will 68 69 70

71 72 73

Ibid., 398. Cassirer, An Essay on Man (note 16), 109ff. It should be remembered that in Hebrew only the consonants are written and the vowels are spoken. Kafka, The Judgement (note 45), 79. Ibid, 79f. Ibid, 80.

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now have in me a happy friend. Besides that, you will acquire in my fiancée [...] a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is not without importance to a bachelor. 74

Again Kafka identifies completely with Georg. He becomes him and lives through him as in a bachelor friendship with someone of the opposite sex, with Frieda his fiancée! The ensuing encounter with his father is again a »preparation« for what will happen in »The Metamorphosis«: Initially his father is in the dark, although he looms large: »My father is still a giant of a man«; 75 in a dark little room, but also in Georg's mind at least, he is in the dark about the real state of affairs: the fact is, for him, that his son has been cheating him in the business. Also, or more than anything else, he has deceived him about his friend in St. Petersburg. The father first suggests to his son that the friend is a fiction: »... I beg you, Georg, don't deceive me. It's a trivial matter, it's hardly worth mentioning, so don't deceive me. Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?« Georg rose in embarrassment. »Never mind my friends. A thousand friends wouldn't make up to me for my father.«76

He must take care of his father and carries him as a child-bride into the front room. And while doing this, he tells him the story of his friend. »[...] I remember that you used not to like him very much [...] But then, later, you got on with him very well. [...]« 77 He carried his father to bed in his arms [...] »Am I will covered now?« [...] »Am I well covered up?« [...] »Don't worry, you're well covered up.« 78

And then bedlam breaks loose. The father jumps on the bed and screams: »[...] Of course I know your friend. [...] And that's why you had to lock yourself up in your office - [...] - just so that you could write your lying little letters to Russia. But thank goodness a father doesn't need to be taught to see through his son. And now that you thought you'd got him down, so far that you could set your bottom on him, [...] then my fine son makes up his mind to get married!«79

For Georg it is a breakthrough: »His friend in St. Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew too well, touched his imagination as never before.« 80 He sees him in the wreckage of his empty plundered warehouse, among broken showcases: »Why did he have to go so far away!« 81

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Ibid. Ibid, Ibid, Ibid, Ibid, Ibid, Ibid, Ibid.

81. 82. 83. 84. 84f. 85.

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»Because she lifted up her skirts [...] and in order to make free with her undisturbed you have disgraced your mother's memory, betrayed your friend and stuck your father into bed so he can't move. [...]« 82

Now all is out in the open; his entire life has been revealed. »But your friend hasn't been betrayed after all!« cried his father, emphasizing the point with stabs of his forefinger. »I've been representing him here on the spot.« ... »You comedian!« 83

Georg cannot help saying otherwise and here as before, joke and despair are mixed. »Yes, of course«, [the father continues,] »I've been playing a comedy! A comedy! That's a good expression! [...] Do you think I didn't love you, I, from whom you are sprung?« 84 [...] »How you amused me today coming to ask me whether you should tell your friend about your engagement. He knows it already, you stupid boy, he knows it all! I've been writing to him, for you forgot to take my writing things away from me. That's why he hasn't been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letter unopened and in his right hand he holds up my letter to read through.« 85 »For years I have been waiting for you to come with some such question! [,..]« 86 »Your mother had to die, she could not see the happy day, your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you see what condition I am in. [...]« 87 »I suppose I wanted to say that sooner. But now it doesn't matter.« [...] »So now you know what else is there in the world, till now you have only known yourself [...]. An innocent child,yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! - And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!« 88

The charwoman Georg runs into when he dashes down the stairs cries appropriately »Jesus«89 and he, before jumping off the bridge, calls out: >»Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same< [,..].«90 Too scared to live revelation, Georg chooses death and rebirth. And indeed, Georg is resurrected as Gregor Samsa. Awakening »one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect«.91 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Ibid. Ibid, 86. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 88.

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Crime and punishment - dreams become reality. Now the process of revelatory self-knowledge can proceed.

6 The scope of this study does not allow for a detailed analysis of Kafka's »The Metamorphosis«; therefore I will only take up some motives previously pointed to in our and Kafka's reading of »The Judgement«. Georg Bendemann has become Gregor Samsa, a commercial traveller whose cloth samples are put into a new focus. His main worries have been train connections - not human ones. His main concern is saving enough money to pay back his parents' debt to his chief. Only then would he be really free of any authority and judgement, of the lies of life. Suddenly, all this is no longer possible, as he has become an insect. His family keeps knocking at his door, calling his name: »Gregor open the door«. 92 But his many legs fail him. The chief clerk himself arrives. His sister is whispering from the right hand room. Her name is Grete and she is to become the living link between Gregor and his family, bringing him food, arranging his room, even bringing in his mother at one time. In the beginning he speaks, but since >they< are so frightened at his changed voice (»That was no human voice« 93 is the clerk's remark), Gregor remains quiet. They want to bring a doctor, then a locksmith; in the end Gregor manages to turn the key himself and is revealed. He still tries to save the situation, making a long speech to the chief clerk, trying to save his job. But this attempt, too, fails and Gregor reflects hereafter: If only his sister had been there! She was intelligent; she had begun to cry when Gregor had been lying quietly on his back. And no doubt the chief clerk, so partial to ladies, would have been guided by her; she would have shut the door of the flat and in the hall talked him out of his horror. But she was not there, and Gregor would have to handle the situation himself. 94

It is again the sister who will this time not save him from »authority« (the woman he is in mortal fear of, but who will cure him »from his horror«). The mother is still present and Gregor appeals to her, but then it is the father who drives him with his stick back into his room and banishes him from the human world. His rocking motions and feeble cries for help (»Mother, Mother« 9 5 ) were of no avail. She had cried: »Help, for God's sake help«, had backed

91 92 93 94 95

Kafka, The Metamorphosis (note 46), 89. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 102. Ibid, 103.

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away, »as if in absence of mind«, 9 6 upsetting a big coffeepot »pouring coffee in a flood over the carpet«. 97 Nourishment turns into filthy slime. »Pitilessly Gregor's father drove him back, hissing and crying >Shoo!< like a savage.« 98 The break is now complete between father and son, but also something else has occurred: for the first time in his life, the son becomes a threat to the father. The roles are reversed; it is no longer the chief clerk (as a judge) who intimidates his subject. The father is mortally afraid of his son and strikes back, pushing Gregor the insect back into his room. This time a »death sentence« is impossible, because the father would have to carry it out himself and that he will not do ... yet. (He tries it later on by throwing apples at him.) His mother keeps wanting to visit him: »Do let me in to Gregor, he is my unfortunate son. Can't you understand that I must go to him?« 9 9 His sister helps him feel comfortable in his room and Gregor hides under the sofa to protect them from his sight. They move his writing desk, so he can move around more freely. All this was anticipated in the above quoted diary entries about his writing, as being the »lowest depth of existence«. 100 The connection with life, his human life, is thus maintained through his mother and his sister. »>[...] doesn't it look,< his mother says whispering as to preclude Gregor from hearing, removing his possessions, >as if we were showing him by taking away his furniture, that we have given up hope of his ever getting better and are just leaving him coldly to himself? [...]«Blümale oder die Perle von Warschaus« 2 His extended Christmas weekend was certainly not as unproductive as he himself thought at the time, since December 25 th is the date when he composed his often discussed essay on »minor literatures«, under the spell, perhaps, of the compelling impact of his conversations with Löwy. Little attention, if any, has been paid however to two fascinating vignettes that he sketched immediately before and after this theoretical essay, and they endow it with an existential and contextual framework. The two texts deal with an essential rite of Jewish life, namely circumcision. The occasion was the circumcision of Kafka's nephew, Felix Hermann, which took place in the morning of December 24 th . During the evening of the same day, Kafka went for a walk with his friend Löwy. From their conversation, he gained knowledge about the performance and customs of circumcision among »Ostjuden« in Russia, which he zealously transcribed into his diary on the next day. Both descriptions are built carefully along the same pattern. First comes a detailed account of the procedure; then follows Kafka's commentary on its social 1

2

Franz Kafka: Tagebücher 1910-1923. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1986, 156. All further page references to the diary are to this edition. Ibid.

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significance: circumcision in Prague, circumcision in Russia, »Westjuden«, »Ostjuden«, facts, then interpretation. The parallel structure is striking, indicating the attention Kafka devoted to the composition of these two diary entries. The account of the Prague circumcision is interesting because of its matter-offact, prosaic details, which deprive it of the spiritual character this type of religious event would normally radiate. Kafka describes at length the position of the child, wrapped with bandages, and the ritual gestures of the »mohel« (circumciser), including stretching the prepuce through a metal instrument and cutting it, then pulling down the remaining skin over the glans to close the wound. This is an accurate description of the Jewish circumcision ritual, which includes »milah,« the circumcision itself, then »pri'ah,« tearing and pulling back the skin. In his eyes, this antique custom takes on an overtly mundane aspect: [...] dann erfolgt mit einem fast gewöhnlichen Messer, einer Art Fischmesser, der Schnitt. Jetzt sieht man Blut und rohes Fleisch, der Moule hantiert darin kurz mit seinen langnägeligen zittrigen Fingern und zieht irgendwo gewonnene Haut wie einen Handschuhfinger über die Wunde. 3

In his account, Kafka reduces circumcision to a repellent and primitive act of ritual mutilation. The circumciser, who handles the operation like one who cuts meat or fish in a kitchen (»Fischmesser«, »Blut und rohes Fleisch«), is a loathsome, short man with curvy legs, »der schon zweitausendundachthundert Beschneidungen hinter sich hat« 4 (»who already has two thousand and eight hundred circumcisions behind him«). His having practiced circumcision on an almost industrial scale evidently does not warrant a minimal observance of the rules of hygiene, such as trimming his fingernails or washing off the blood of his hands, before putting a finger with a drop of wine into the mouth of the child. The wine is supposed to have an anaesthetic effect. Kafka underlines this point: »[...] der Moule Wein trinkt und mit seinen noch nicht ganz blutfreien Fingern etwas Wein an die Lippen des Kindes bringt.« 5 For Kafka, the mixture of wine and blood, introduced into the mouth of an innocent child by an adult who also butchers him, hearkens back in some unclear way to the Christian mystery of the Eucharist, where the believers partake of Christ's blood when drinking wine. The child is the victim of an ancient Jewish ritual, which is a representation of circumcision that appears frequently in Christian imagery and folklore. It is often related to the accusations of ritual crime. 6 This contributes to make the child in Kafka's account appear in a way 3 4 5 6

Ibid., 150; December 24, 1911. Ibid. Ibid. On this subject, see the fascinating book by Christine Fabre-Vassas: La bête singulière. Les juifs, les chrétiens et le cochon. Paris: Gallimard 1994 (Bibliothèque des sciences humaines), in particular p. 165: »Pour les chrétiens [...] si la circoncision doit faire partie du >rituel de mort< au cours duquel les juifs sont censés tuer, saigner et se partager le corps des enfants chrétiens, comme le dit et le montre l'imagerie du

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as a Christian victim of an obsolete and cruel Jewish law nobody understands any longer. Kafka is totally estranged from the ritual he witnesses in his family; he reacts to it almost with the same prejudices characteristic of Christians in his time. The description ends with the soothing mention of the blessing said by those present, wishing the small child who has now entered the covenant to reach someday »knowledge of the Torah, a happy marriage, and good deeds«. 7 In the context of Kafka's description, however, this blessing sounds rather like a hypocritical conclusion to a cruel and meaningless act. The circumcision in Russia is presented in a totally different way. Kafka starts out by recalling the numerous customs which surround the birth of the child in the first eight days of his life. Kabbalistic signs are hung on the walls to protect the mother and the child from evil spirits. At no time are the mother and the child left alone in the house; children from the »Cheder« are brought over to say prayers; festive and communal meals are scheduled every day. More than a hundred relatives and friends gather together for the circumcision ceremony. Kafka's second description of the act of circumcision, however, is in no way more appealing than the first one. The Eastern European »mohalim« are generically presented as drunkards with red noses and smelly mouths. In addition to the already described stages of »milah« and »pri'ah«, they also perform »metzitzah«, which is described as follows: Es ist daher auch nicht appetitlich, wenn sie, nachdem der Schnitt ausgeführt ist, mit diesem Mund das blutige Glied aussaugen, wie es vorgeschrieben ist. Das Glied wird dann mit Holzmehl bedeckt und ist in drei Tagen beiläufig heil. 8

The procedure of »metzitzah«, requiring the »mohel« to take the circumcised penis into his mouth which effects the suction of the blood, had usually been banned in Western Europe, after several cases occurred where syphilitic circumcisers had infected new born Jewish infants while performing the ritual act. 9 Here again, Kafka's description, which is bound to sound horrendous according to modern Western European standards and rules of hygiene, is closed with a soothing remark concerning the rapid healing of the wound. Each of the two accounts is followed by a short description of the social significance of the ritual of circumcision. In Prague, Kafka stresses that none of the members of his family are able to follow the prayer concluding the meal, aside

7 8 9

crime rituel, c'est bien que cette infime effusion de sang propre au judaïsme [...] est pour les chrétiens dans un rapport métonymique avec l'autre rite de sang. Dans cette perspective, tout rite juif est criminel, et les diverses >cérémonies< des juifs ne seraient que les figures d'un meurtre toujours répété, d'une quête incessante de sang.« Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 150. Ibid., 155; December 25, 1911. See Dr. M. G. Salomon: Die Beschneidung, historisch und medizinisch beleuchtet. Braunschweig: Vieweg 1844. See also the work of Sander L. Gilman and Jay Geller; for the latter's article: Blood Sin. Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identity. In: Faultline 1 (1992), 1-48.

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from the two grandfathers. Kafka portrays the assimilated »Westjuden« subjected to this archaic ritual as a generation embarked on an ineluctable »transition«, which is accepted passively. Circumcision is for them no longer a living tradition, but a formal rite, nothing more than a historical testimony of the past: »diese an ihrem letzten Ende angelangten religiösen Formen hatten schon in ihrer gegenwärtigen Übung einen so unbestrittenen bloß historischen Character [,..].« 10 The social life of the »Westjuden« is characterized by a gap between the generations, the isolation of the individual, and alienation from tradition, which becomes the object of historicization and distancing. This social pattern is diametrically opposed to that of Eastern European Jewish society, which features, on the contrary, a great frequency of gatherings, warranting a strong social cohesion: [...] so ist es für sie [die Ostjuden] noch eigentümlicher, daß sie so oft bei jeder möglichen Gelegenheit zusammenkommen, sei es zum Beten oder zum Studieren oder zur Besprechung göttlicher Dinge oder zumeist religiös begründeter Festmahlzeiten, bei denen nur sehr mäßig Alkohol getrunken wird. Sie fliehen förmlich zueinander.11

»Ostjuden« have their own networks of sociability. They »stick together«, not least because of their exclusion from the hegemonic society to which they are subjected. As Kafka alludes: they »flee one to the others«. The two diary entries devoted to circumcision address a number of interesting problems. On the level of individual psychology, they reveal to us quite a lot about Kafka's relationship to the body. Circumcision is a way of marking Jewish identity on the body, more precisely on the male body, that includes an element of violence. But circumcision is also a social ritual, and the way Kafka, as a member of the assimilated Prague Jewish scene, confronts it, is informed by the understanding of this religious tradition in his time. The texts present us with a wealth of material dealing with the body, physical violence, sexuality, religion, focusing on the inscription, marking, and transmission of identity. They bear the sign of the opposition between »Ostjuden« and »Westjuden«, the modern individual and the ancient community. My goal in this paper is to investigate how all these elements combine in Kafka's own representations. Kafka's relationship to his own body is an uneasy one. He suffers from poor health, is plagued by headaches, problems with his diet and digestion. His bodily appearance varies between that of a dandy and that of a clumsy old bachelor. 12 In his own mind, this dissatisfaction with his own body prevents him from being productive in any other way:

10 11 12

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 150. Ibid., 155. About Kafka's stiff and poorly tailored clothes, as well as his resulting stooped deporture, see the diary entries of December 31, 1911 and January 2, 1912. See also Mark M. Anderson: Kafka's Clothes. Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. New York: Clarendon Press 1992.

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Sicher ist, daß ein Haupthindernis meines Fortschritts mein körperlicher Zustand bildet. Mit einem solchen Körper läßt sich nichts erreichen. Ich werde mich an sein fortwährendes Versagen gewöhnen müssen. 13

In contrast to his perception of his own body, Kafka is fascinated by the gestures and poses of the actors of the Yiddish theater he has recently discovered. His diaries are full of long descriptions, even close-ups, focusing on the actors' slightest movements. 1 4 Indeed, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss shows in his essay on the »techniques of the body«, bodily movements are in fact a social construction which strongly differs from one culture to another. 15 Mauss has used the term »habitus« to designate the way people in different parts of the world use their body to perform daily actions, such as walking, swimming, talking, or smiling. This »habitus« corresponds to »techniques« transmitted from generation to generation, which are part of a cultural and social identity. Kafka is fascinated by the bodily movements of the Yiddish actors, precisely because he is fascinated by their culture and identity. He tries to read their gazes, expressions, or gestures, as he would in a text, in such a way as to disclose to him their inner being. To him, they seem to move around »as light as a feather« (»federleicht«), not encumbered by any weight of their own. They were a living illustration of the frequently used term »Luftmenschen« (»people living off the air«), a notion which circulated widely at the time. Their bodies seemed weightless. They appeared as »Leute, die in einer besonders reinen Form Juden sind, weil sie nur in der Religion, aber ohne Mühe, Verständnis und Jammer in ihr leben«. 16 In the same way, Kafka became infatuated with the body language of Frau Tschissik, because it expressed »die Wahrheit des ganzen, und infolgedessen die Überzeugung, daß ihr nicht die geringste ihrer Wirkungen genommen werden kann, daß sie unabhängig ist vom Schauspiel und von uns«. 17 Despite these feelings and expressions, when Kafka finds himself in the company of gesticulating and singing »Ostjuden«, he feels stiff and physically unable to move naturally: »Ich wie aus Holz, ein in die Mitte des Saales geschobener Kleiderhalter.« 18 All of these passages offer a sophisticated phenomenology of the body, a complex sociological and cultural comparative study, where the body is unveiled as much more than mere physiology, and comes to express either »authenticity«, as in the case of the »Ostjuden«, or, for Kafka himself, alienation.

13 14

15

16 17 18

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 126; November 21, 1911. See for example his description of Löwy, ibid., October 20, 1911, 78, and Frau Tschissik, October 21, 22, 1911, 82f. Marcel Mauss: Les techniques du corps. In: Journal de Psychologie, vol. 32, no. 3 4, March 15 - April 15, 1936, reprinted in id., Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Quadrige/PUF 1993, 363-386. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 61; October 5, 1911. Ibid., 83; October 22, 1911. Ibid., 339; March 11, 1915.

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The body becomes thus a vector and sign of a deeper (Jewish) identity. In this »symbolic construction of the body«, 1 9 Kafka expresses his own physical and spiritual unease most clearly through his recurrent fantasms of the body subjected to physical violence, torture, or dissection. Among the many instances of these, he dreams of a blind child who has been equipped with glasses, the sidepieces of which go right through the child's cheeks and have been screwed to her jaws. 2 0 He compares his own excruciating headaches to the feeling of »a tiny flickering and cool flame«, then to the sensation of a knife cutting slowly, almost painlessly, into his own brain. 21 Obviously, Kafka readily visualizes and stages his own pain in scenes of torture. Given this context, one may understand more easily why Kafka is so puzzled by the action of the knife and its cutting of the body during the circumcision. The fact that this act of violence is ritualized and receives a religious significance, that it even establishes the identity of the newborn as a Jew, is of foremost importance for him. It is certainly not accidental that Kafka appends to his diary entry of December 25 th , after his description of circumcision in Russia, the section where he mentions his own Hebrew name, Amschel (given to him on the day of his own circumcision), as well as a genealogy of his family on the maternal side. Circumcision, in anthropological terminology, is a »rite de passage«, an initiatory rite sanctioning the entrance of the child into the covenant with God. 2 2 The circumcision ritually inscribes the newborn in time, space, family, community, in a lineage of ancestry as well as in the »lineage of a community of believers«. 23 For Kafka, this inscription has become closely associated with pain and violence, just as he establishes in his diary a constant link between his own physical and existential pain. 19

20

21 22

23

I borrow this term from David Le Breton: Anthropologie du corps et modernité. Paris: PUF 1990, 13. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 56; October 2, 1911. See also ibid., 349; September 14, 1915: »Die ergiebigste Stelle zum Hineinstechen scheint zwischen Hals und Kinn zu sein [...].« Ibid., 58; October 4, 1911; ibid., 67; October, 9, 1911. See Arnold van Gennep: Les rites de passage. Paris: Emile Nourry 1909. However, van Gennep does not attribute any significance to the fact that circumcision is performed on the male sexual organ: »Cutting off the foreskin is exactly equivalent to pulling out a tooth (in Australia), to cutting off the little finger above the last joint (in South Africa), to cutting off the ear lobe or perforating the ear lobe or the septum [...]« (103). However, my claim is that the locus of the penis cannot be considered as irrelevant. I am borrowing the concept of »lineage of believers« from the important work of Danièle Hervieu-Léger: La religion pour mémoire. Paris: Cerf 1993. See in particular p. 180, about rite as an inscription of the memory of the founding events of the lineage group: »ce qui spécifie le rite religieux par rapport à toutes les autres formes de ritualisation sociale, c'est que la répétition régulière des gestes et paroles fixées dans le rite a pour fonction d'inscrire dans le déroulement du temps (en même temps que dans le déroulement de la vie de chaque individu incorporé à la lignée) la mémoire des événements fondateurs qui ont permis à la lignée de se constituer.« (My emphasis)

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Another striking aspect which pertains to both of Kafka's accounts of circumcision is the representation of the figure of the »mohel«, the circumciser, Among the significant characteristics of the »mohel«, three are common to both accounts: he is an old man; he performs the act in a routine manner; he arouses disgust because of his slovenliness and lack of hygiene. It is not the only example where Kafka depicts members of the religious establishment in such a way. The description he provides of religious Jews is more often than not tinged with deprecation and disgust. In the Alt-Neu-Synagogue of Prague during Kol Nidre, Kafka notices the »Börsengemurmel«, the »Ostjuden« wearing only their socks (and no shoes, according to the custom), and the family of the »Bordellbesitzer«.24 The yeshiva is described as a filthy place where students never wash, never change the sweaty clothes, in which they sleep, dressed up, on benches. Similarly, the Rabbi of Zizkov, whom he visited with his friend Langer a few years later, makes a wild impression on him because of his unpolished manners: Das stärkste väterliche Wesen macht den Rabbi. »Alle Rabbi sehen wild aus«, sagte Langer. Dieser im Seidenkaftan, darunter schon Unterhosen sichtbar. Haare auf dem Nasenrücken. Mit Fell eingefaßte Kappe, die er immerfort hin und her rückt. Schmutzig und rein, Eigentümlichkeit intensiv denkender Menschen. Kratzt sich am Bartansatz, schneuzt durch die Hand auf den Fußboden, greift mit den Fingern in die Speisen - wenn er aber ein Weilchen die Hand auf dem Tisch liegen läßt, sieht man das Weiß der Haut, wie man ein ähnliches Weiß nur in Vorstellungen der Kindheit gesehen zu haben glaubt. Damals allerdings waren auch die Eltern rein.25

The omnipresence of dirt at the very core of the religious world extends, in Kafka's representation, even to the »mikve«, the ritual bath used for purification: Das jüdische Reinigungswasser [...], das nur den irdischen Schmutz der Seele abzuwaschen hat, dessen äußerliche Beschaffenheit daher gleichgültig ist, das ein Symbol, daher schmutzig und stinkend sein kann und auch ist, aber seinen Zweck doch erfüllt. Die Frau kommt her, um sich von der Periode zu reinigen, der Thoraschreiber, um sich vor dem Aufschreiben des letzten Satzes eines Thoraabschnittes von allen sündigen Gedanken zu reinigen. 26

All these excerpts circle again and again around the same dialectics of purity and impurity, the objective presence of dirt against the possibility of a spiritual cleansing of the soul. Religion, represented by the patriachal figure of the Rabbi, is at the same time dirty and pure. He is of a purity Kafka only remembers from his early childhood, a time characterized for him by sexual innocence, that is ignorance about the sexual life of one's parents. This opposition 24 25 26

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 54f.; October 1,1911. Ibid., 348f.; September 14, 1915. Ibid., 89f.; October 27, 1911. See also the following paragraph about the religious custom among »Ostjuden« to dip their fingers in water to get rid of evil spirits, a tradition he explains »rationalistically« by the fact that during sleep, the fingers could accidentally have come in contact with »alle möglichen Körperstellen, die Achselhöhlen, den Popo, die Geschlechtsteile« (90).

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between bodily impurity and spiritual purity recurrs in his depiction of the institution of the »mikve«. While most Eastern European »mikves« certainly did not comply with modern hygienic standards, Kafka noted that the »mikve« is used simultaneously by married women after their period (and in fact before resuming sexual intercourse with their husbands), as well as by »sofrim«, Torah scribes, who might have conceived sinful (meaning sexual) fantasies. All these passages show that for Kafka, religious tradition is intrinsically associated with the patriarchal figure (father, Rabbi), which is itself suspected of, or linked with, the sin of sexuality. This link between religious practice and impurity, owing to sexuality, is indeed blatant in both circumcision accounts; Jewish circumcision, of course, is a ritual act that concerns the male sexual organ. One may gain further insight into this matter by considering more closely the figure of the »mohel«. As an older man and member of the religious clergy, the »mohel« inevitably also evokes the patriarchal figure. Circumcision has been linked by psychoanalysis, in particular by the Freudian school, with castration, a form of punishment the father could inflict on the child for coveting the mother. 27 This theory emphasizes the sexual rivalry existing between father and son. The circumciser could then be interpreted as a variation of the castrating father. There are several places in Kafka's »Letter to his Father« that confirm that such a competition, on a sexual basis, is rampant in his consciousness. As a child, the frail Franz Kafka felt threatened by his father's physical superiority: »Ich war ja schon niedergedrückt durch Deine bloße Körperlichkeit.« 28 When they went swimming together, Kafka could hardly bear the sight of his naked father in the dressing cabin they would sometimes share, and preferred that his father undress first, so that he himself could remain as long as possible alone in the cabin so as not to be confronted with this shaming defeat: »Ich mager, schwach, schmal, Du stark, groß, breit.« 29 A psychoanalytical reading would clearly recognize here the feeling of inferiority of the child facing the larger or oversized penis of the father. In this case, the feeling of inferiority extended to his entire being. Another area of this father/son competition is marriage. Kafka viewed marriage as »der großartigste und hoffnungsreichste Rettungsversuch«, 30 which he might undertake in order to gain independence from his domineering father. Attaining the status of married man and pater familias can obviously be counted among the achievements of the father in an area where Kafka himself has 27

28

29 30

See in particular Sigmund Freud: Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old-Boy [1909], reprinted in id., The Sexual Enlightenment of Children. New York: Collier 1963, 4 7 183. See also Theodor Reik: Ritual/Psychoanalytic Studies. London: Hogarth Press 1931, and Geza Roheim: The Eternal Ones of the Dream. New York: International University Press 1969, 68-79. Franz Kafka: Brief an den Vater. In: id., Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1986, 119-162, here 123. Ibid., 123f. Ibid., 151.

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utterly failed. Kafka insisted though that for himself, marriage would have been an incommensurably greater victory over himself than it had been for his father, thus turning his inferiority rhetorically into a form of superiority: »Ich wage zu sagen, daß Dir in Deinem ganzen Leben nichts geschehen ist, was für Dich eine solche Bedeutung gehabt hätte, wie fur mich die Heiratsversuche.« 31 But his major grief resides in his father's attitude regarding marriage and sexuality. Kafka recalls that as an adolescent he once started to reproach his father for having neglected his sexual education. The young Kafka admittedly started boasting in front of his father with information and experience he did not have at the time. His father, undisturbed by such matters, bluntly offered a piece of advice about how to circumvent the dangers of sexual life (was he advising a form of »safe sex« or using condoms?). Kafka felt so much put to shame by his father's answer that he instantly dropped the subject with which he had originally intended to impress him. His commentary on this episode is closely linked to his views on dirt and purity. Kafka felt that his father recommended to him »the dirtiest thing there was«, while he himself remained pure: Das, wozu Du mir rietest, war doch das Deiner Meinung nach und gar erst meiner damaligen Meinung nach Schmutzigste, was es gab. Daß du davor sorgen wolltest, daß ich körperlich von dem Schmutz nichts nach Hause bringe, war nebensächlich, dadurch schützest Du ja nur Dich, Dein Haus. Die Hauptsache war vielmehr, daß Du außerhalb Deines Rates bliebst, ein Ehemann, ein reiner Mann, erhaben über diese Dinge. Das verschärfte sich damals für mich wahrscheinlich noch dadurch, daß mir auch die Ehe schamlos vorkam und es mir daher unmöglich war, das, was ich Allgemeines über die Ehe gehört hatte, auf meine Eltern anzuwenden. Dadurch wurdest Du noch reiner, kamst noch höher. [...] So war also fast kein Restchen irdischen Schmutzes an Dir. Und eben Du stießest mich, so als wäre ich dazu bestimmt, mit ein paar offenen Worten, in diesen Schmutz hinunter. Bestand die Welt also nur aus mir und Dir, eine Vorstellung, die mir sehr nahelag, dann endete also mit Dir diese Reinheit der Welt, und mit mir begann kraft Deines Rates der Schmutz}2

This obsession with preserving his purity through either celibacy or marriage was expressed in the diary repeatedly and even summarized by Kafka in a small table, which reads: Rein bleiben Junggeselle Ich bleibe rein

Verheiratet sein Ehemann Rein? 3 3

One may interpret Kafka's obsession with purity as an attempt to define his own personality and identity by strongly delimiting it against the overwhelming and »dirty« personality of his father. Marriage and sexual life, which Kafka often conceived as antithetical to creative writing, constituted a domain that had been 31 32 33

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 154f. Franz Kafka: Fragmente aus Heften und losen Blättern [August 20, 1916], In: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem lande (note 28), 173.

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already so totally preempted by his father, that he only could forsake it entirely. 34 He believed that he might be capable of finding his own identity by overcoming his body (his poor health, his sexual needs) and retreating into literature. It is therefore not accidental that between the two circumcision accounts Kafka has inserted his well known and often discussed essay on the literatures of small nations. Needless to say, Kafka envied the status of the writer in small nations. For Kafka, a national minority group, such as the one represented by Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe, produces a literature which, first, strengthens the unity of the national consciousness, and second, is strongly linked to the current political life of the nation. Literature thus becomes »dieses Tagebuchführen einer Nation, das etwas ganz anderes ist als Geschichtsschreibung«. 3 5 (»writing the diary of a nation, which is totally different from historiography«). The link between circumcision, history, and literature, which Kafka establishes here on the pages of his own diaries, that is in the place where he daily inscribes his own life and living thoughts, calls for closer attention. On one hand, circumcision is the most obvious way (male) Jews inscribe identity on their bodies. The permanence of identity is inscribed neither on paper nor in books, but on the living body, and on the very organ whose function is reproduction, the transmission of life. On the other hand, literature for Kafka is, in the case of a writer in a small nation, a way to inscribe the identity of the nation and to ensure its survival. This process is different from the one epitomized by a historian when writing an historical work. In fact, it is closer to the act of a writer recording in a diary the process of his own life. Here again, Kafka draws on his usual distinction between »Ostjuden« and »Westjuden«. As Kafka has shown when reporting about the circumcision in his Prague family, for the Westernized Jews, circumcision is merely a remnant, termed by Kafka »den veralteten frühem Gebrauch der Beschneidung und ihrer halbgesungenen Gebete«. Accordingly, Kafka's relatives can at best only develop a historical interest in the procedure. 36 However, regarding minor literature and citing the example of Yiddish specifically, Kafka claims that the historicization of the literary past is impossible, because the literary work continues to influence current political life: Besonders wirkungsvoll zeigt sich die in den obigen Richtungen schöpferische und beglückende Kraft einer im einzelnen schlechten [sie] Literatur, wenn damit begonnen wird, verstorbene Schriftsteller literaturgeschichtlich zu registrieren. Ihre unleugbaren damaligen und gegenwärtigen Wirkungen werden etwas so Tatsäch-

34 35 36

See Kafka, Brief an den Vater (note 28), passim. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 151; December 25, 1911. It is remarkable that their attitude runs parallel, ironically, to the approach of the German-Jewish historians associated with the »Wissenschaft des Judentums«, who, in the eyes of their Eastern European critics, were only be able to approach Jewish history as they would a fossilized past.

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liches, daß es mit ihren Dichtungen vertauscht werden kann. Man spricht von den letzteren und meint die ersteren, ja man liest sogar die letzteren und sieht bloß die ersteren. Da sich jene Wirkungen aber nicht vergessen lassen und die Dichtungen selbständig die Erinnerung nicht beeinflussen, gibt es auch kein Vergessen und kein Wiedererinnern. 37

Kafka pictures here a world where the writing of history, in this particular case literary history, need not lead to a reification or a historicization of literary works. What is essential is not so much the written word, the inscription of the past in a canonical corpus of writing, but something much more volatile and changing, that is its »Wirkung«, its effect, even its continuous efficacy in the present. In the same way, Kafka presented elsewhere the Yiddish language as »a spoken language that is in continuous flux [and that] the people will not leave to the grammarians«.38 He maintained that history would not freeze literature into a canon of dusty »great works«.39 Taking this idea a little further one could even claim that Kafka shows an extreme resistance to the written word as a form of the calcification of life. Kafka is certainly fascinated by Eastern European Jewish tradition, although less so by its canonical Hebrew texts, and rather more so by its most volatile and unfixed form, Yiddish popular theater. In another fascinating and paradoxical vignette, which he devoted to the system of learning typical of the »yeshiva«, Kafka insisted that these are not places where Jewish tradition is transmitted, but rather where it is subverted and undermined by »maskilic« ideas. The »yeshivot« are not for him a conservatory of Torah learning, but on the contrary »Ausgangsstätten des abtrünnigen Fortschritts« »aus diesen Schulen [sind] in der letzten Zeit alle fortschrittlichen Dichter, Politiker, Journalisten und Gelehrten hervorgegangen«.40 In a similar way, the reverence which the community of a »small nation« apparently pays to the traditional texts is unveiled by Kafka as a mere stratagem to insure their continuous study and centrality, which would not be warranted by the actual value of the texts per se:

37 38

39

40

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 152. Franz Kafka: Rede über die jiddische Sprache. In: id., Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (note 28), 306-309, here 306. This imperative of mobility and flexibility of the act of writing is so important to him that Kafka applies it even in his own work. Malcolm Pasley has demonstrated that Kafka's writing method relies on spontaneity and fluidity, and that Kafka's manuscripts offer support for his thesis of the »gradual completion of the story as it is being written«. He claims that Kafka's texts thus depend to an extreme degree on the concrete circumstances in which they were written, which makes his writing technique all the more similar to that of the diary. See Malcolm Pasley: The Act of Writing and the Genesis of Kafka's Manuscripts. In: Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle. Ed. by Mark M. Anderson. New York: Schocken 1989, 210-214. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 173f.; January 7, 1912.

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Die alten Schriften bekommen viele Deutungen, die gegenüber dem schwachen Material mit einer Energie vorgehn, die nur gedämpft ist durch die Befürchtung, daß man zu leicht bis zum Ende vordringen könnte, sowie durch die Ehrfurcht, über die man sich geeinigt hat. 41

For Kafka, the goal is not the Torah, but the commentary, the discussion led in the »yeshiva«, which is a place of living exchange and the cement of the community. The Law itself, as one can see in his fictional work, is almost always forgotten or removed, as in »Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer«, or inaccessible, as in »Vor dem Gesetz«. This situation characterizes one of Kafka's major and most violent short stories, »In der Strafkolonie«. The penal colony, established long ago in the tropics by a remote state, is facing a gradual process of disintegration of its traditions, represented emblematically by a machine devised by the former Commandant. The machine is in fact an instrument of torture and execution which inscribes on the body of the sentenced person the text of the law he has been found guilty of transgressing. I would like to claim that the analogy between this form of execution and that of the Jewish ritual of circumcision has certainly been intended by Kafka. Both are about the inscription of the Law on the body. Both are attempts to save from oblivion an ancient Law that is no longer understood by the present day community. Kafka even remarks in another place that cruel forms of punishment were common among the ancient Jews: »Aus der alten Geschichte unseres Volkes werden schreckliche Strafen berichtet. Damit ist allerdings nichts zur Verteidigung des heutigen Strafsystems gesagt.« 42 This confirms the significance of the literary constellation circling around guilt, trial, and capital punishment in Kafka's writings, but it now needs to be linked to the question of Jewish identity and its transmission. An important similarity between »In der Strafkolonie« and Kafka's representation of Judaism is the importance of both the text and its commentary. The Officer, now the only believer in the old order, feeds into the machine the drawings of his predecessor, the former Commandant. These drawings, which are carved onto the prisoner's body, are described as »labyrinthartige, einander vielfach kreuzende Linien, die so dicht das Papier bedecken, daß man nur mit Mühe die weißen Zwischenräume erkannte«. 43 However, the text of the Law itself is actually minimal compared to the extent of the commentary, since »die wirkliche Schrift umzieht den Leib nur in einem schmalen Gürtel: der übrige Körper ist fur Verzierungen bestimmt.« 4 4 One can thus infer that engraving 41 42

43

44

Ibid., 153; December 25, 1911. Kafka, Fragmente aus Heften und losen Blättern (note 33), 235. These notes follow the texts of two short stories, »Zur Frage des Gesetzes« and »Die Truppenaushebung«, which are related topically to each other. Franz Kafka: In der Strafkolonie. In: id., Erzählungen. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1986, 151-177, here 159. Ibid. One recognizes in the relation between the text of the Law and its commentary the exact configuration between the Torah and the Talmud, which is also reproduced

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only the text of the Law onto the body of the convict might not be sufficient to kill him. The prisoner dies because of the intricate network of arabesques which accompanies the Law and has made it unrecognizable and unreadable. He dies under the weight of the accumulated Jewish tradition, 45 a tradition that is no longer living, but has become dead and deadly. Another fundamental element common to »In der Strafkolonie« and the circumcision entries in Kafka's diaries is the focus on the tortured body. While carving the Law onto a body might recall the technique of tattooing, here, no ink is used (as it might be for a book), but rather the very blood of the person sentenced to death makes the sign visible. The procedure is utterly revolting and forms an obscene version of the Passion of Christ. It takes the convict six hours to experience the Law on his own body and finally to understand his sentence. It takes six more hours to die from the wound and torture which has taught the prisoner the ancient wisdom. This form of execution, for which the entire community used to gather for the greatest pleasure and instruction of women and children, has become totally incomprehensible to the modern and civilized European man. The Traveler, who is asked to take sides, can only condemn the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution: »Die Ungerechtigkeit des Verfahrens und die Unmenschlichkeit der Exekution war zweifellos.« 46 However, in ancient times all the members of the community were utterly convinced that this was the highest form of justice: »alle wußten: Jetzt geschieht Gerechtigkeit.« 47 Kafka draws on a subtle combination of references to the Old and the New Testaments, the Jewish as well as the Christian canonical texts, in order to delineate an ancient order, including the primitive ritual of human sacrifice, witnessed by the entire community of believers. 48 This reading provides enough evidence to support the idea that the circumcision accounts and the text of »In der Strafkolonie« are intimately linked. However, that Kafka chooses to represent the exacerbation of violence, culminating in human sacrifice, in order to depict an instance of the inscription of the Law, still calls for an explanation.

45

46 47 48

in a certain way in the graphical layout according to which they are printed onto the body. Another similar description, which uses almost the same words, is provided by Kafka concerning an Eastern Jew with a shrill voice: »Füllt mit dem Filigran der Rede bis zur Qual eingebrannte labyrinthartige Rinnen aus.« See Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 339; March 11, 1915. Kafka, In der Strafkolonie (note 43), 162. Ibid., 164. Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985, 154. Robertson suggests that Nietzsche's Genealogie der Moral (11,7), which cites the »religious exploitation of suffering as >Heilsmaschinerie«< might be a possible source of Kafka's story. One could also point to chapter 11,3 of the same work, »Mnemotechnik«: »Man brennt etwas ein, damit es im Gedächtnis bleibt: nur was nicht aufhört, weh zu tun, bleibt im Gedächtnis.« This comes close to the ideas of Freud and Derrida developed below.

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In anthropological terms, circumcision can be seen as a modified form of sacrifice. A wide-ranging study conducted among 108 primitive societies, including a range of different peoples, such as Rwala Beduin, Thonga, Tiv, Kazak, and ancient Hebrews presented the correlation between circumcision and specific social features. The research showed that major circumcision ceremonies are mainly practiced in societies with powerful and sometimes massive »fraternal interest groups« that are threatened by internal or external warfare, and thus are faced with the »dilemma of fission«.49 Such dilemmas of fission occur in particular when the family itself is beginning to break up. Therefore, the authors of the study conclude that [...] a circumcision ceremony is a surveillance ritual by which members of a strong fraternal interest group, particularly the most influential members, assess and minimize the likelihood of fission by requiring a public demonstration of loyalty of any man who has a son. 5 0

Circumcision thus represents a minor sacrifice demanded as a sign of allegiance to the existing lineage group. Obviously, such a theory can be used to explain the origins of circumcision among the ancient Hebrews. But, I believe that it can also say something about the reasons for its maintenance and significance in Kafka's own time and milieu, and perhaps even for Kafka's own interest in it. The psychoanalytical interpretation of circumcision (mentioned already) need not be viewed as a contradiction to this anthropological one. Regarding Kafka specifically, they may be seen to address different issues; the first one deals with his own unconscious in relationship to his father, while the second one with collective representations, some of which might have influenced Kafka as a member of a delimited group, namely Prague Jews. Prague Jewish society, threatened by disintegration and pressure to assimilate from within and without, certainly could be seen as a »fraternal interest group«, highly concerned by the »dilemma of fission« and the collapse of family bonds. It is therefore not surprising that among Prague Jews (as well as among most Diaspora Jews today), circumcision remains one of the most widely observed traditional Jewish rituals. In anthropological terms, the ritual of circumcision also functions as a form of social memory. It is therefore highly revealing to compare it with Freud's own representation of the functioning of memory. Freud represents metaphorically the structure of the psychical apparatus as that of a writing machine, and the psyche itself as a kind of text. In a seminal essay on »Freud and the Scene of Writing«, Jacques Derrida has investigated Freud's representation of memory from the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) to his »Notes on the Mystic Writing-Pad« (1925). In 1895, Freud attempted to explain memory in the manner of the natural sciences, that is, as an engraving of furrows on the 49

50

Karen Ericksen Paige / Jeffery M. Paige: The Politics of Reproductive Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press 1981, 123. Ibid., 148f.

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neurones, that then retain a printed trace: »The memory of an experience, that is its continuing operative power (Macht), depends on a factor which is called the magnitude of the impression and on the frequency with which the same impression is repeated.« 51 Working with his own concepts of »trace« and »difference«, Derrida carefully investigated how, progressively, Freud developed his representation of the psychic mechanism as constituted by signs (Zeichen), registration (Niederschrift), and transcription (Umschrift). In his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud recalled that the popular tradition of interpreting dreams treats them as a kind of cryptography (Geheimschrift) that requires a »decoding method« (Chiffriermethode). 52 Freud himself constantly used metaphors of pictograms, rebuses, and hieroglyphics, to represent the writing of dreams, since for him the dream-content was like a transcription of the dream-thoughts into another mode, for example in a pictographic script (Bilderschrift) or picture puzzle (Bilderrätsel). 53 In later texts written in 1925, Freud again refined his psychographic metaphor, speaking of the »mise en scène« of the dreams and taking up the problem of the apparatus in terms of scriptural concepts. In »Notes on the Mystic Writing-Pad«, the mnemonic apparatus (Erinnerungsapparat) is compared to a »mystic pad«, a writing device made of a slab of wax covered with a transparent sheet of celluloid, which allows for the inscription of a text through a pointed stylus scratching its surface. However if one lifts the covering sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, the writing vanishes, while the permanent trace of what is written is retained upon the wax slab itself. 54 Derrida summarizes: In following the advance of the metaphors of path, trace, breach, of the march treading down a track which was opened by effraction through neurone, light or wax, wood or resin, in order violently to inscribe itself in nature, matter, or matrix; and in following the untiring reference to a dry stylus and a writing without ink; and in following the inexhaustible inventiveness and dreamlike renewal of mechanical models - the metonymy perpetually at work on the same metaphor, obstinately substituting trace for trace and machine for machine - we have been wondering just what Freud was doing. 55

Derrida offers the logical answer to the rhetorical question he has just asked: indeed, the complicated machinery of writing (without ink, with a stylus) also stands for copulation, the sexual act. But Derrida goes farther and affirms that the representation of this machinery actually erases the subject from the picture: »The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one's own presence, and is con51

52

53 54 55

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth 1975ff., vol. I, 300, quoted by Jacques Derrida in: Freud and the Scene of Writing. In: id., Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978, 196-231, here 201. Freud, Standard Edition (last note), IV, 97; Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing (last note), 207f. Ibid., 277f„ quoted by Derrida, 217f. Ibid., XIX, 228f, quoted and commented by Derrida, 223-228. Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing (note 51), 229.

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stituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance«, 56 that is death. Even more, »the machine is dead. It means death. Not because we risk death in playing with machines, but because the origin of machines is the relation to death. In a letter to Fliess [...] Freud, evoking his representation of the psychical apparatus, had the impression of being faced with a machine which would soon run by itself. But what was to run by itself was the psyche and not its imitation or mechanical representation.« 57 It is of course difficult to know how much of Freud's writings Kafka had read. Some of the Freudian corpus analyzed by Derrida was obviously published after Kafka wrote »In der Strafkolonie«. However, I would claim that Kafka's story, which deals with the impression of the ancient Law on the body, is also informed by Freud's representation of the process of memory. Kafka's text is concerned precisely with Freud's metaphor of memory as a machine, an apparatus of writing that is at the same time linked with the sexual act, the use of power and violence, and the death of the individual. The functioning of the machine is both obscene and deadly. What is inflicted upon the prisoner is a death sentence that inscribes on his body the Law of the community, while requiring his sacrifice as an individual. The writing machine is deadly, although it functions metaphorically as a representation, or even as a substitute, for the deficient individual memory of the prisoner. In his sleep, the prisoner has forgotten to obey the Law, and he is being punished by a public »mise en scène« of what the remembrance of the common Law should have been. However, this theatrical performance of the mandatory social memory puts the individual to death. I certainly do not wish to claim that Kafka could have known all the implications of Freud's representation of memory illuminated by Derrida. But, I certainly am inclined to believe that »In der Strafkolonie« represents for Kafka the end of a long period of reflection and literary representation of the perpetuation and inscription of social and religious tradition, which Kafka felt to be in conflict with his individuality. His writings indicate that he tackled this issue in a variety of ways, including a confrontation with its religious, social, anthropological and psychoanalytical dimensions. In his work, the concepts of body and torture, religion and sexuality, text and commentary, writing and memory, appear again and again in changing constellations and tropes. As the poet Paul Celan has noted in his poem »Einem, der vor der Tür stand«, by translating »brit milah« (circumcision) as »beschneide das Wort«, these words which signify »circumcision« also may mean »covenant of the word«. 58 Circumcision, text and tradition are thus already linked in the Hebrew term. Kafka

56 57 58

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 227. The poem, which would require a separate interpretation, deals with the Prague Rabbi Low, the creator of the Golem. Some of its formulations recall Kafka's circumcision texts. See Paul Celan: Die Niemandsrose. Sprachgitter. Gedichte. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1980 (Fischer-Taschenbücher; 2223), 40.

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also tried to address the difficult problem of the inscription of identity onto the body and into the text. He linked it with torture, because for him the process of memory was a painful process of inscription and fixation. For Kafka, »pinning down« or »nailing down« his own identity, whether onto the body or into the text, would mean fixing an individual identity that refused to let itself be encapsulated and remained ever-changing. As he noted: »What do I have in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.« 59

59

Kafka, Tagebücher (note 1), 55; January 8, 1914.

David A. Brenner

Uncovering the Father: Kafka, Judaism, and Homoeroticism

The veiling of the father's body [...] takes a variety of forms in Israelite religion: the prohibition on making images, the aversion of the gaze of characters who see God, and the submerging of the listener's perspectives into the perspective of God. This cloaking of the deity's sex, the invitation to be a virtuous son of Noah, calls for a new way of thinking about what has traditionally been regarded as a growing Israelite discomfort with anthropomorphism. 1 I think it is reasonable to say that had Kafka lived a century or two earlier, had he grown up in a pious milieu with his schooling entirely in the classic Jewish curriculum of sacred texts, his qualities of mind would have made him an excellent Talmudist, a first-rate exegete, and a brilliant weaver of kabbalistic homilies. 2 One of the keenest readers of the Bible since the masters of the Midrash, and an intermittent or incipient student of later Jewish texts, [Kafka] saw, after all, that character and plot and narrative motif, the entanglement of individual destinies in the untidiness of the quotidian, could be used as vehicles for the representation of God, man, creation, and the process of revelation. 3

In my recent research, I have been applying to Kafka's life and writing recent historiographical and theoretical reflections that articulate alternatives to Jewish and non-Jewish heterosexisms. In the following paper, I wish to explore the dimensions of the relationship between Kafka's male characters and their fathers - both divine and temporal fathers. In so doing, I critically rehabilitate and synthesize two of the most misunderstood approaches in Kafka Studies: namely, Kafka as »Jewishly literate« (pace Max Brod, Gershom Scholem, Robert Alter, and Karl Erich Grözinger) and Kafka as »homoerotic«, if not a »practicing« homosexual. I begin with Daniel Boyarín, whose critical project in numerous essays is to pinpoint the invention of Jewish »heterosexuality« in nineteenth-century Western Europe. In particular, Boyarín expands our understanding of Jewish cultural history by uncovering the decisive role of gender in the autobiographically inflected projects of Freud and Herzl. Breaking with the conventional understand-

1

2

3

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz: God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism. Boston: Beacon Press 1994, 121 Robert Alter: Kafka as Kabbalist. In: Salmagundi 98/99 (Spring/Summer 1993), 8699, here 90. Ibid., 93.

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ing of Otto Weininger as an anti-feminist, »self-hating Jew«, Boyarín examines him as a thinker, indeed as the discursive practitioner of »Judaism as gender«. The implications of Boyarin's approach for Kafka studies are complemented by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's pathbreaking work in the origins of Judaic civilization, culminating in 1994 with the publication of God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism. Eilberg-Schwartz, an historical anthropologist, locates ancient Jewish culture in a double-bind between love of a male God and homophobia towards His body. This tension is relieved by veiling and/or not representing God's body, as well as by feminizing men (e. g., through circumcision) in distinction to surrounding cultures. Eilberg-Schwartz outlines what was in the Talmud at least a minority tradition and in Kabbalah and Hassidism a majority tradition. Following Freud, he contends that the fear of male-to-male erotic relations results in a distancing of the (most) beloved Male into the authoritative Father figure: Freud's analysis of Schreber's case [...] provided the foundation for Freud's thoughts about the homoerotic and religion [...]. When a man confronts a male God, he is put into the female position so as to be intimate with God. The masculinity of Israelite men was thus most secure when God turned his back, hid his face, or kept himself covered in a cloud or in the heavens. 4

And glossing Freud's Totem and Taboo - written and published around the same time as Kafka's literary breakthrough - Eilberg-Schwartz (like Boyarín) uncovers Freud's suppression of the consequences of Oedipal desire: if the male child does not desire to kill the father to possess the mother, it remains for him to become the »passive« recipient of the father's male sex. Eilberg-Schwartz's research reveals cracks in a hegemonic Jewish heterosexism going back to the Mishna and Gemara. In fact, oppositional voices in Judaic civilization were not unknown to Kafka, including rabbinic Judaism, the Hassidic tales, the legends of Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion, and the plays and stories of the modern Yiddish canon. Kafka's early protagonists, especially in the »stories of punishment« (his term) - »Das Urteil«, »Die Verwandlung«, and »In der Strafkolonie« - vacillate between expressions of loving devotion to a God-like father figure and (hetero)sexual concerns deemed egotistical. 5 Just as Moses may not contemplate God naked, particularly His Phallus, so too do Georg Bendemann, Gregor Samsa, and the Officer in the penal colony recoil from the literal or figurative sex of their overdimensional father figures. The Holiness Code of Deuteronomy similarly links three distinct prohibitions: against making material images of God, against undressing one's parents, and against violating (hetero)sexual norms. For Eilberg-Schwartz, the figure of Moses symbolizes a very general rabbinic anxiety about the conflict of being mar4 5

Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus (note 1), 137f. I follow Anderson in using the term >(hetero)sexual< inasmuch as Kafka's references to autoeroticism in his writings suggest that autoeroticism is as problematic as homoeroticism in the cultural systems which Kafka addressed in his life and work.

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ried to an earthly woman and loving a divine male. Correspondingly, Kafka's own infamous anxiety oscillates between living {Leben) and writing (Schreiben), the latter characterized in an important statement as »a form of prayer«.6 While the male fear of homoeroticism is, arguably, deeply inscribed in Judaic and other traditions, both Boyarín and Eilberg-Schwartz provide resources for interrogating »muscle Jewry« (Muskeljudentum, coined by Max Nordau) and the historical sources and discourses of heterosexist Judaisms. It is important to recall that the Zionist tradition of the tough Jew is an anachronism prior to the nineteenth century. Up until that point, at least among East European Jewry, the gentle, »effeminate« Talmud scholar (or yeshiva bokher) functioned as the cultural male ideal. At the very least, the yeshiva bokher was a marriage - and potential erotic - object for Jewish women. In the limits of this essay, I can only outline how Kafka was »consciously and unconsciously« influenced by the historical problematic of an embodied male God. This deep structure, I contend, influenced Jews over the longe durée - the Israelites more than other ancient Near Easterners, and the rabbis of the Talmud more than early Christians. And, as outstanding scholarship has demonstrated in recent years, this fundamental problematic is reflected in the work and lives of other fin-de-siècle European Jews, such as Freud, Weininger, and Schreber. Their examples provide a basis from which to unsettle conventional binaries in Kafka scholarship such as »eroticism vs. asceticism« and »clothing vs. art«. For Mark Anderson, the author of Kafka's Clothes,7 being in the realm of »clothing« or »Verkehr« is equivalent in Kafka's writings to being bereft of or exiled from the Sacred. This might be put differently, but no less radically: the realm of uncovering brought Kafka closer to the realm of the sacred. The verse epigraph to his earliest extant text, Beschreibung eines Kampfes (1904-06), invokes as much: Und die Menschen gehn in Kleidern Schwankend auf dem Kies spazieren, Unter diesem großen Himmel, Der von Hügeln in der Ferne Sich zu ferneren Hügeln breitet.

Commentators such as Anderson have correctly noted how this imagery is sacred, but it is at least as phallic as it is sacred. Early on in Beschreibung, Kafka's semi-autobiographical narrator is feminized. (Boyarin's preferred term would be »femmenized«.) Specifically, he expects (or hopes?) that he will be murdered with a dagger.

6

7

See also Kafka's claim in his diaries that he was »nothing else but literature.« Franz Kafka: Tagebücher. Kritische Ausgabe, hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller und Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, 579. Mark M. Anderson: Kafka's Clothes. Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. New York: Oxford University Press 1992.

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In Kafka's private and public writings, the frequency of such homoerotic images (often with knives) suggests a desire to be penetrated. The most famous image of penetration may be the conclusion to Der Proceß where Josef K. is stabbed in agony. In a perceptive essay based on a reading of the unabridged diaries, Anderson explains: Kafka's disgust with (hetero-)sexual relations fits conveniently into this image [Brod's image of Kafka as a religious writer for the modern, post-Nietzschean age]: a saint who eschews all earthly temptation for the sake of his writing. But disgust is precisely what is lacking in Kafka's characterization of desire between men. Though it may provoke a variety of emotional responses ranging from simple affirmation and childlike fascination to near-sublime moments of terror and pain, homosexual desire does not trigger the same order of emotional denial that the mere thought of marriage and heterosexual relations induced. 8

Anderson notes that »[t]his same discrepancy between >disgustinganimallike< heterosexual intercourse on the one hand, and seductive, eroticized fantasies about powerful men on the other, informs much of Kafka's literary work«.9 Here I would only add that the fantasies of powerful men are also informed by the long-standing Judaic discourses I am outlining here. They fit more than »conveniently« (Anderson's term) into the image of Kafka as a religious writer, or at least as a writer who wrote regularly (as if »religiously«!). Doubtless, the relationship is complex between embodied authors and their sexual fantasies, on the one hand, and disembodied aesthetics and a transcendent God, on the other. Attending to just such complexities in a differentiated analysis, Eilberg-Schwartz writes: [T]he thought of God having a penis is shocking. Most Jews and Christians think of God the father as lacking a body and hence as beyond sexuality. Without a body, God obviously can have no sexual organ. But from where does the idea of a disembodied God come? What if, historically speaking, it is discomfort with the idea of God's penis that has generated the idea of an incorporeal God? What if this uneasiness flows from the contradictions inherent in men's relationship with a God who is explicitly male? 10

Such a deity is problematic for our conceptions of masculinity and sexuality, and is thus responsible for a conflicted image of masculinity in the history of monotheism:

8

9 10

Mark Anderson: Kafka, Homosexuality and the Aesthetics of >Male Cultures In: Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction. Ed. by Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1996, 79-99. »Ironically, what Brod [in his abridgements] left untouched were precisely these >disgusting< heterosexual relations that Kafka repeatedly characterized as a violation of his identity, as a journey away from the strange or >eigentümliche< self that marked him as a writer.« (Ibid., 96) Ibid., 89. Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus (note 1), 1.

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The issue of homoeroticism arises in ancient Israel because the divine-human relationship is often described in erotic and sexual terms. Marriage and sexuality are frequent biblical metaphors for describing God's relationship with Israel. 11

When »Israel« follows other gods, »she« is seen to be whoring. At the same time, the metaphorical feminization of »Israel« belies »the nature of the relationship in question: it is human males, not females, who are imagined to have the primary intimate relations [if not sexual relations] with the deity.« 12 According to Eilberg-Schwartz, an eroticized intimacy with God would not have been eroticized [...] if human masculinity was not so strongly associated with procreation in ancient Judaism [...] . The sexlessness of the father God was problematic in a culture defined by patrilineal descent. A man was expected to reproduce, to carry on his line, yet he was also understood to be made in the image of a God who was essentially celibate. 13

In retrospect, we are aware of how Christianity would ultimately de-sex the deity, but the emphasis on earthly male procreation continued to coexist uncomfortably in later Judaism with the valorizing of asceticism, most notably in the medieval mystical literature (as noted by Grözinger). Halakhic Judaism today still expresses the problematic of an embodied deity insofar as observant men are required to have a garment covering the penis when praying and insofar as the transmission of oral law (i. e., Talmudic learning) is equated with the fathering of children. Indeed, a man's teacher is regarded as more important than his parents. 14 In the canonized version of the Hebrew Scriptures, the ambivalence about God's sex is indicated most forcefully when Moses intentionally averts his gaze when God passes before him (Exodus 33). For the deity permits the prophet to see His body, but only from the rear. This matter is crucial for Eilberg-Schwartz: »The word that is rendered as >my face< {pänäy) is more equivocal than translations suggest. Panay can also mean >my front sideoptimistischen< und der >pessimistischeneher für< oder >eher gegen< den Zionismus? - , sondern als Problem und Gegenstand seiner literarischen Produktion zu rekonstruieren.

I Ich muß daher zumindest grob skizzieren, wie ich mir Kafkas literarische Produktionsweise vorstelle, bevor ich sie auf der Grundlage des Urtextes des politischen Zionismus - Theodor Herzls Der Judenstaat - exemplarisch vorführen kann. An anderer Stelle habe ich versucht, drei m. E. wichtige Kennzeichnungen dieser Schreibweise analytisch zu kombinieren: zunächst die Annahme Heinz Hillmanns, daß Kafka seine Dichtung als Problemlösungsspiel 1

Vgl. Franz Kafka: Briefe an Feiice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Hg. von Erich Heller und Jürgen Bom. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1976, 444.

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einsetze; sodann den Hinweis Karl-Heinz Fingerhuts, daß Kafkas geschlossene Bildwelten eine Andeutungs-Stilistik hervorbrächten, die sehr unterschiedliche Sachverhalte im Konnotationfeld seiner Symbolik lediglich streiften, ohne jedoch konsistente sekundäre (metaphorische) Bedeutungsebenen entstehen zu lassen; und schließlich die These von Deleuze und Guattari, daß es sich bei Kafkas Texten nicht um die - wie immer prekären Mitteilungsversuche eines expressiven Subjekts handele, sondern um die Protokollierung von Experimenten mit einer sehr konkreten zeitdiagnostischen Funktion. 2 Nimmt man Kafkas umfangreiches Expertenwissen als Versicherungsbeamter einmal ernst - anstatt es einfach als >entfremdete Arbeit< ad acta zu legen, dann lassen sich seine literarischen Texte als »intensive Protokolle< beschreiben. In der syntagmatischen oder protokollarischen Dimension dieser Text auf der Ebene der w ö r t lichen Bedeutung< der Geschichten - entfaltet Kafka eine Poetik des Unfalls, deren tragende Kategorien sich im zeitgenössischen Diskurs der Unfall- bzw. Sozialversicherung - also auch in den Akten und der Fachliteratur seines Büros - wiederfinden: den minimalen Fehler, der im Verlaufe des Geschehens maximale Auswirkungen zeitigt; die Frage der Anerkennung und Kompensation des Mißgeschicks; die tendenzielle Pathologisierung des Klagenden und seine notgedrungene Einrichtung einer sekundären oder para-normalen Lebenslage. 3 In der paradigmatischen oder intensiven Dimension - der Ebene der symbolischen Konnotationen - wird die protokollarische Strenge des narrativen Syntagmas durch ein Gewimmel von Referenzthemen, -diskursen und -Zeitaltern konterkariert: von der modernen Situation des Künstlers über die Situation der Juden in der Diaspora und den Zionismus bis hin zur Lage des Habsburgerreiches, Mitteleuropas und der modernen Nationen insgesamt; von Literatur, Ästhetik und Religion über die Sozialpolitik, die Psychoanalyse und die Pädagogik bis zur Biologie und Philosophie; von der griechisch-römischen Antike und der jüdisch-christlichen Überlieferung über die mittelalterliche Mystik bis zur modernen Zeitgeschichte. Hier entsteht die Kafka von Walter Benjamin attestierte >Grundlosigkeit< seines Erzählens. 4 Denn innerhalb der diversen Re2

3

4

Vgl. Benno Wagner: Der Unversicherbare. Kafkas Protokolle [Ms., Siegen 1998]; Heinz Hillmann: Kafkas »Amerika«. Literatur als Problemlösungsspiel. In: Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert. Analysen und Materialien zur Theorie und Soziologie des Romans. Hg. von Manfred Brauneck. Bamberg: Buchner 1976, Bd 1, 135-167; Karl-Heinz Fingerhut: Bildlichkeit. In: Kafka-Handbuch in zwei Bänden. Unter Mitarbeit zahlreicher Fachwissenschaftler hg. von Hartmut Binder. Bd 2: Das Werk und seine Wirkung. Stuttgart: Kröner 1979, 138-176; Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari: Kafka. Für eine kleine Literatur. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1976 (Edition Suhrkamp; 807), 12. Für das Konzept des »minimalen Fehlers« vgl. Michel Foucault: L'évolution de la notion d'individu dangereux dans la psychiatrie légale. In: Déviance et Société 5 (1981), Nr 4, 403^22, hier 419ff.; einige für Kafka unmittelbar relevante Fachtexte über das Phänomen der »Anspruchsneurosen« sowie über die Rehabilitation von Unfallverletzten habe ich an anderer Stelle untersucht (Wagner, Der Unversicherbare [Anm. 2], Kap. 2). Vgl. Walter Benjamin / Gershom Scholem: Briefwechsel 1933-1940. Hg. von Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1980, 272; sowie Stéphane Moses: Zur

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ferenzbereiche läßt sich keine feste Hierarchie, kein archimedischer Punkt, kein »Zentralnerv« ausmachen, wie Gershom Scholem ihn gerne in Kafkas Judentum gesehen hätte. 5 Keine Lektüre wäre in der Lage, eine ursprüngliche Ordnung< der durch Katkas Geschichten in Resonanz gesetzten Referenzfelder und diskurse herzustellen. Vielmehr löst jede individuelle Lektüre der Geschichten je spezifische Resonanzen zwischen den konnotierten Serien aus, sofern sie nicht gewaltsam auf die Entschlüsselung einer verborgenen Bedeutung abstellt. Damit freilich ist die Frage nach Kafkas Schreibweise noch nicht beantwortet; vielmehr läßt sie sich jetzt erst wirklich stellen. Was bedeutet nämlich >Referenz< im hier verwendeten, produktionsästhetischen Sinne? Geht es um die intuitive Erfassung von Zusammenhängen, von denen der Schreiber, wie Scholem im Hinblick auf die kabbalistische Mystik meinte, »nichts gewußt« hat? 6 Hat Brecht recht, wenn er, laut Benjamin, Kafka attestiert: »Die Bilder sind ja gut. Der Rest ist eben Geheimniskrämerei. Der ist Unfug«? Folgen wir einfach seinem Hinweis an Benjamin, daß man auch gegenüber Kafka die Frage nach dem Wesen durch die Frage nach der Praxis ersetzen müsse: »Was tut er? Wie verhält er sich?« 7 Dann stoßen wir auf eines jener »guten Bilder«, die uns über die Geheimniskrämerei des Geheimniskrämers mehr mitteilen als alle Bekenntnisse des Autors und alle Erinnerungen intimer Freunde: »Alles fugte sich ihm zum Bau«, beginnt eine autopoetologische Notiz aus dem im Spätwinter 1918, »fremde Arbeiter brachten die Marmorsteine, zubehauen und zueinandergehörig. Nach den abmessenden Bewegungen seiner Finger hoben sich die Steine und verschoben sich. Kein Bau entstand jemals so leicht wie dieser Tempel oder vielmehr dieser entstand nach wahrer Tempelart. Nur, daß auf jedem Stein - aus welchem Bruche stammten sie? - unbeholfenes Gekritzel sinnloser Kinderhände oder vielmehr Eintragungen barbarischer Gebirgsbewohner zum Ärger oder zur Schändung oder zu völliger Zerstörung mit offenbar großartig scharfen Instrumenten für eine den Tempel überdauernde Ewigkeit eingeritzt waren.« 8 Die Vielstimmigkeit der Kafkaschen Geschichten resultiert zunächst einfach daraus, daß er mit vorgefertigten Bildbeständen arbeitet, die er sprichwörtlich von überall her bezieht: Aus dem Kino wie aus dem Traum, aus der täglichen

5 6 7

8

Frage des Gesetzes. Gershom Scholems Kafka-Bild. In: Franz Kafka und das Judentum. Hg. von Karl Erich Grözinger, Stéphane Moses und Hans Dieter Zimmermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum 1987, 13-34, hier 31. Vgl. Benjamin / Scholem, Briefwechsel (letze Anm.), 174. Vgl. Moses, Zur Frage des Gesetzes (Anm. 4), 18. Benjamin über Kafka. Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichnungen. Hg. von Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1981 (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft; 341), 151. Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß. In: ders., Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden. Nach der Kritischen Ausgabe hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag 1994 (1244112452), Bd 6, 223.

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Beobachtung wie aus dem Gespräch, vor allem aber, so behaupte ich, aus einer fieberhaften und kontinuierlichen Lesetätigkeit.9 Wenn Hanns Zischler über9

Für Kafkas Tempel-Bau-Isotopie sind beispielsweise die folgenden Referenztexte von Belang: zunächst die Einleitung zu Gabriel Tarde: Die sozialen Gesetze. Skizze zu einer Soziologie. Leipzig: Klinkhardt 1908 (Philosophisch-soziologische Bücherei; 4), iii: »[...] was nützt es denn, wenn wir uns mit solchen großen, einheitlichen Konstruktionen, mit solch einem Gesamtbau ermüden? Diejenigen, welche uns folgen, haben ja doch nicht eiligeres zu tun, als diesen Aufbau niederzureißen, um die Bausteine anderweitig zu verwenden oder um sich einen ganzen Flügel davon anzueignen. Ist es nun nicht besser, man erspart ihnen die Mühe des Niederreißens und gibt ihnen seinen Gedanken gleich in Bruchstücken? Jedoch für die Wenigen, die gern wieder zusammenfügen, was ihnen bruchstückweise geboten wird, wird es nicht ohne Nutzen sein, wenn ich den verstreuten Teilen meines Werkes einen Entwurf, eine Skizze beifüge, die den Gesamtplan dessen aufweist, was ich gern ausgeführt haben wurde, wenn ich Mut und Kraft dazu gehabt hätte.« Sodann Ewald Banse: Auf den Spuren der Bagdadbahn. Weimar: Duncker 1913 (Abenteuer und Forschungen im Orient; 4), 143: »[...] es ist anzunehmen, daß mindestens der größte Teil der Steppe in Feld kann umgewandelt werden, wenn erst einmal Sicherheit herrscht und die unzähligen Steinbrocken aufgesammelt sind. Die Lavaregion bleibt natürlich für immer unbenutzbar und ist höchstens als Steinbruch zu verwerten.« Schließlich natürlich Friedrich Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra, zit. nach ders., Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1988, Bd 4, 153f.: »Wahrlich, ihr könntet gar keine bessere Maske tragen, ihr Gegenwärtigen, als euer eignes Gesicht ist! Wer könnte euch erkennen! / Vollgeschrieben mit den Zeichen der Vergangenheit, und auch diese Zeichen überpinselt mit neuen Zeichen: also habt ihr euch gut versteckt vor allen Zeichendeutern! / Und wenn man auch Nierenprüfer ist: wer glaubt wohl noch, dass ihr Nieren habt! Aus Farben scheint ihr gebacken und aus geleimten Zetteln. / Alle Zeiten und Völker blicken bunt aus euren Schleiern; alle Sitten und Glauben reden bunt aus euren Gebärden.« Zarathustra formuliert hier mit der ihm eigenen Deutlichkeit die Rahmenbedingungen für eine zukünftige Kafka-Forschung. Ihr kann es nicht mehr ausschließlich um die Beantwortung der Frage gehen, ob Kafka denn nun diesen oder jenen Text wirklich gelesen< habe. Kafka ist ja tot, seine wenigen Aufzeichnungen sind geplündert, und selbst wenn er noch am Leben wäre ... Ebensowenig freilich kann sie sich auf die mentalitätshistorische Platitüde zurückziehen, dieses oder jenes Bild, diese oder jene Redeweise hatten eben damals >in der Luft gelegengelesen< hat (man >weiß< es ja schon), daß Kafka auf das Buch von Tarde durch einen 1915 in der Neuen Rundschau erschienenen Aufsatz des prominenten Sozialökonomen Franz Oppenheimer aufmerksam geworden sein dürfte, wenn er den für sein Schreibprojekt höchst signifikanten Titel nicht schon früher in einem Verlagskatalog gesehen hat. Während man in Oppenheimers Aufsatz (Wir und die Anderen. Gedanken zur Völkerpsychologie. In: Neue Rundschau, H. 2, 1915, 1585-1604) über die Rolle der Völkerpsychologie für die Diagnose und Bewertung des Weltkrieges unter anderem eine komplette Vorlage für Kafkas Lufthunde-Isotopie (Forschungen eines Hundes) findet,

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z e u g e n d vorfuhrt, wie K a f k a das zuerst v o n Lichtenberg benannte V e r f a h r e n des cross-reading, der transversalen »Lektüre« im k o m p l e x e n ästhetischen R a u m der G r o ß s t a d t , im K o n t e x t m o d e r n e r V e r k e h r s - u n d M e d i e n s y s t e m e

weiterent-

wickelt, 1 0 dann w ä r e d e m h i n z u z u f ü g e n , daß er dieses V e r f a h r e n auch im R a u m des gedruckten Textes fortfuhrt. K a f k a s eigene poetische Leistung besteht erst darin, die derart intermedial hybridisierten u n d verdichteten Bildbestände gegen den Strich der konventionellen Lektüre zu einer eigenständigen ästhetischen F o r m zu rearrangieren, den T e m p e l ungeachtet des Gekritzels der Kinder u n d Barbaren zu errichten. Die A u f g a b e einer produktionsästhetisch orientierten A n a l y s e w ä r e d e m n a c h nicht schon damit erfüllt, die Steine nach H e r k u n f t u n d A u f s c h r i f t zu katalogisieren. Vielmehr wäre sie auch mit der Frage nach d e m Bauplan und nicht zuletzt mit der Frage nach der Funktion u n d d e m A n l a ß des B a u e s konfrontiert. So w ä r e auch der Zionismus nicht lediglich als Motiv, sondern zuallererst als problématique

im Sinne Althussers, als ein K o m p l e x v o n Fragestellungen, der

nicht auf der Oberfläche des erzählten Textes w i e d e r z u f i n d e n wäre, sondern nur »vor d e m Horizont einer bestimmten theoretischen Struktur«, 1 1 d. h. hier: nur in der protokollarischen D i m e n s i o n der K a f k a s c h e n Geschichten.

enthält das Buch Tardes, demzufolge das soziale Band aus nichts anderem bestehe als aus einer Verkettung zahlloser sich überkreuzender Nachahmungsakte, nicht nur wichtige Vorlagen für Kafkas Affen-Protokoll, sondern auch grundlegende theoretische Aus- und Weitelformulierungen seiner Nachahmungs-Poetologie. Ewald Banses Buch gehört zum Strom jener Reiseberichte, die Kafka phasenweise verschlungen hat, es behandelt zudem eines jener imperialen Eisenbahnprojekte, die neben der von Anthony Northey dokumentierten Familiengeschichte und der zionistischen Kolonisierungsliteratur (hier besonders Arthur Ruppin) zu den wichtigsten Referenzbereichen des Kaldabahn-Protokolls gehören (dazu ausfuhrlich Wagner, Der Unversicherbare [Anm. 2], Kap. 2, sowie ders., Die Wahrheit über die Kaldabahn. Erinnerungen eines Lesers [in Vorbereitung]). Auch ohne Berücksichtigung der bis in die Antike zurückreichenden künstlerisch-politischen Tradition der Bau-Isotopie (Piatons Politela ist hier eine Quelle von erster Bedeutung), ohne den Blick auf ihre Funktion im zeitgenössischen Diskurs des >nation buildingauf schwankendem Boden< befinden: in jener Welt der durch keine letzte Gewißheit recodierbaren Wahrscheinlichkeiten, die die Welt unseres Prager Experten fur Unfallstatistik ist. Die Kafka-Forschung gerät hier, um das Bild zu variieren, >ins Schwimmern. Immerhin bezeichnet das Schwimmen, ähnlich wie das Denken und das Lesen, nicht nur eine Notlage, sondern u. a. auch eine Fertigkeit. Und immerhin erinnern wir uns, daß auch Columbus seine Reise nicht zu Pferde angetreten ist. 10

11

Vgl. Hanns Zischler: Kafka geht ins Kino. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag 1998 (rororo; 22376), 32f. Vgl. Louis Althusser / Etienne Balibar: Das Kapital lesen. 2 Bde, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1972 (Rowohlts deutsche Enzyklopädie; 336/337 - rororo: Wissen), Bd 1,28.

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11 Das alles war vorauszuschicken, um den Stellenwert der folgenden Untersuchung im Rahmen einer umfassenden Analytik der Kafka-Protokolle zu verdeutlichen: Herzls Judenstaat bildet nur einen von zahlreichen Steinhaufen in einem von zahlreichen Steinbrüchen Kafkas; und es handelt sich um den genau deshalb begrenzten, vorläufigen Versuch, gerade aus dieser Spur in Kafkas Werk Hinweise über sein Verhältnis zum Zionismus zu entnehmen. Theodor Herzl war Medienprofi: Bühnenschriftsteller, Feuilletonist und Auslandskorrespondent der Wiener Neuen Freien Presse in Paris. Sein unter dem Eindruck der Dreyfüs-Affäre innerhalb weniger Tage fieberhaft niedergeschriebener Judenstaat ist daher nicht bloß die Gründungsurkunde, sondern vor allem auch der zündende Funke des politischen Zionismus. »Niemand ist stark oder reich genug, um ein Volk von einem Wohnort nach einem anderen zu versetzen«, kommentiert Herzl die von einigen Großmäzenen gesponserten, aber erfolg- und zukunftslosen Kolonisationsversuche in Palästina bis dato: »Das vermag nur eine Idee. Die Staatsidee hat wohl eine solche Gewalt.« 12 Herzls Geniestreich, der den Zionismus zu einer weltumfassenden Bewegung werden läßt, besteht darin, dieser Staatsidee eine absolut moderne Form zu geben: in streckenweise traumhaft-phantastischen Passagen fugt er alle wichtigen Elemente der klassischen Staatspolitik mit den modernsten Diskursen der Biopolitik und der Sozialtechnik zu einem Neo-Mythos des Gelobten Landes zusammen. Es handelt sich, wie der Untertitel der Schrift explizit verspricht, um den »Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage«. Es ist, so lautet meine These, gerade die Verbindung überlieferter Symbole und Motive mit den modernsten Machtmitteln der Zivilisation, die den Judenstaat zu einem bevorzugten Steinbruch für Kafkas Tempel hat werden lassen. Das möchte ich nun am Beispiel dreier Themenbereiche - Sammeln, Bauen und Ernähren - demonstrieren. Einige Wochen nach Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges, im Oktober 1914, schreibt Kafka ein Rätsel für Benjamin. Er nimmt die Arbeit an dem in seiner Schublade verschollenen Amerika-Roman kurzfristig wieder auf, um vor einer Pferderennbahn ein paar verloren wirkende, arbeits- und mittellose Menschen zu versammeln, unter ihnen der Protagonist des Romans, Karl Roßmann. »Diese Rennbahn«, schreibt Benjamin in seinem großen Kafka-Essay, »ist zugleich ein Theater, und das gibt ein Rätsel auf«. 13 Nun wird man ein Rätsel nicht lösen, wenn man es zuvor nicht sorgfaltig lesen will. In Kajkas Version des Romans befindet sich der Ort der Handlung keineswegs im einstigen Pionierstaat Oklahoma, sondern in der Nähe einer großtstädtischen Metrostation, und das Natur12

13

Vgl. Theodor Herzl: Der Judenstaat. Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage. Leipzig, Wien: Breitenstein 1896, 15. Walter Benjamin: Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages. In: ders., Gesammelte Schriften. Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem hg. von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1980, Bd II.2, 409-438, hier 417.

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theater von Oklahama, eine riesige Organisation, benutzt die Rennbahn nur als eine seiner zahlreichen Sammelstellen. Es gibt also gar keine Identität, sondern bloß eine pragmatische Verbindung zwischen Rennbahn und Theater, und es gibt zudem, mitten in jenem »geschichtlichen Knotenpunkt«, von dem Benjamin so gerne schreibt, 14 ein Vor-Bild fur diese immerhin bemerkenswerte Verbindung. »Wie läßt sich eine Menge ohne Befehl nach einem Punkte hin dirigieren?«, formuliert Herzl im Abschnitt über das »Phänomen der Menge« eine Grundfrage seines Staatsbildungs-Projekts. Er inszeniert dann scherzhaft einen Wettbewerb mit einem Wohlthäter vom Typ des zionistischen Mäzens: Einer dieser Wohlthäter, den wir den Baron nennen wollen, und ich möchten eine Menschenmenge an einem heissen Sonntagnachmittag auf der Ebene von Longchamp bei Paris haben. Der Baron wird, wenn er jedem Einzelnen 10 Francs verspricht, für 200.000 Francs 20.000 schwitzende, unglückliche Leute hinausbringen, die ihm fluchen werden, weil er ihnen diese Plage auferlegte. Ich hingegen werde diese 200.000 Francs als Rennpreis aussetzen für das schnellste Pferd - und dann lasse ich die Leute durch Schranken von Longchamp abhalten. Wer hinein will, muss zahlen: 1 Franks, 5 Franks, 20 Franks. Die Folge ist, dass ich eine halbe Million Menschen hinausbekomme, der Präsident der Republik fahrt à la Daumont vor, die Menge erfreut und belustigt sich an sich selbst. [...] ich habe für die 200.000 Francs eine Million an Eintrittsgeldern eingenommen. Ich werde dieselben Leute, wann ich will, wieder dort haben; der Baron nicht - der Baron um keinen Preis. 15

Die Verbindung des Pferderennens mit dem Theater ist hier bereits augenfällig. Das Pferderennen ist das Spektakel, das Herzl an die Stelle des Entbehrungsethos setzt, welches die mythischen Wanderungen der Juden mit den damals aktuellen Kolonisationsversuchen in Palästina verbindet. »Wir zahlen ihnen nicht, wir lassen sie zahlen. Nur setzen wir ihnen etwas vor«, artet die Parole des organisatorischen Arms des Judenstaates, der Jewish Company, die die Ökonomie der Askese durch die des kollektiven, medial implementierten Enthusiasmus ersetzt. 16 »Die Society of Jews«, heißt es über den politischen Arm, »ist der neue Moses der Juden. Die Unternehmung des alten grossen Gestors der Juden in den einfachen Zeiten verhält sich zur unserigen, wie ein wunderschönes altes Singspiel zu einer modernen Oper, wir spielen dieselbe Melodie mit viel, viel mehr Violinen, Flöten, Harfen, Knie- und Bassgeigen, elektrischem Licht, Decorationen, Choren, herrlicher Ausstattung und mit den ersten Sängern.« 17 Es ist dieses propagandistische Theater, das an die Stelle des blinden Flecks des von Herzl für obsolet erklärten Gesellschaftsvertrages nach Rousseau, das an die Stelle der »Natur der Verhandlung« 18 tritt. 19 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ζ. B. am 12. November 1934 an Werner Kraft. Vgl. Benjamin über Kafka (Anm. 7), 98. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Anm. 12), 60f. Ebd., 60. Ebd., 70. Ebd., 67. Herzls Bild läßt sich unmittelbar auf Richard Wagners Projekt einer national-mythischen Territorialisierung der Musik beziehen. Wie Mark Gelber zeigt, gibt die Wagner-

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K a f k a s Naturtheater von Oklahama ist in weiten Zügen von Bildern wie diesen inspiriert. Verändert freilich ist die Atmosphäre der Szenerie und der Ton der Schilderung. Dies zunächst einfach dadurch, daß K a f k a die Perspektive des medienpsychologisch abgeklärten Rezipienten einnimmt. Schon die Plakatwerbung für das Naturtheater, das allen eine Zukunft als Künstler verspricht, erweckt zwar einige Aufmerksamkeit, scheint aber »nicht viel Beifall zu finden«. »Es gab soviel Plakate, Plakaten glaubte niemand mehr. Und dieses Plakat war noch unwahrscheinlicher als Plakate sonst zu sein pflegen.« 2 0 Karl R o ß m a n n entscheidet sich immerhin, das Geld für die Metro-Fahrt z u m Rennplatz von Clayton zu investieren und findet dort auch richtig die von Herzl versprochene moderne Oper mit ihren Instrumenten, Choren und Dekorationen. Wiederum freilich ist die Publikumsresonanz enttäuschend, »es gab nicht viele Zuhörer«, und die wenigen sind mehr als zögerlich, die Schranken zur Rennbahn zu passieren, obwohl der Eintritt sogar frei ist. Vielleicht liegt es auch daran, daß die Musik-Instrumente zwar hervorragend sind, wie Karl bei der Begegnung mit einer als trompetender Engel fungierenden alten Bekannten feststellt, die Musikanten aber offenbar furchtbare Dilettanten, die statt Musik bloß Lärm erzeugen. 2 1

20

21

Oper geradezu den psychotechnischen Boden der imaginären Staatsgründung Herzls ab. »I worked at it daily, until I was completely exhausted«, notiert Herzl über den Produktionsprozeß. »My one recreation was on evenings when I could go to hear Wagner's music, and particulary >Tannhäuserbodenlose< Schreibweise für den Deutschunterricht präparieren zu wollen. Tatsächlich gibt es auch bei Kafka eine Deutschdidaktik; diese produziert freilich kein schulkompatibles Prüfungswissen, sondern bloß dessen irreversible Zersetzung: »Wir sind keine Semiten, welche in ihrer Dogmatik eine Geschichte nicht haben«, schreibt ein anderer Auskunftgeber Kafkas, der deutsche Orientalist, Kulturphilosoph und Antisemit Paul de Lagarde in seinen Deutschen Schriften, um die kulturelle Besonderheit jeder neuen Generation seines Volkes zu betonen, und weiter: »Von Gott

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Von seiner Bekannten erfährt Karl nun auch einiges über die Organisation des Naturtheaters. Wie für Herzls Projekt besteht das Prinzip seines unfehlbaren Erfolges in seiner schieren Größe (es ist immerhin »das größte Theater der Welt«), 22 und wie der Judenstaat mit der Jewish Company verfugt das Naturtheater über ein weitverzweigtes System von Niederlassungen und Sammelstellen in jeder Stadt. Der Zweck dieser Organisation bei Herzl läßt auch die narrative Grundlinie des Kafka-Romans schlagartig hervortreten. Es geht um nicht mehr und nicht weniger als um die Überschreibung der jüdischen Mythos der Wanderung: aus der wilden Wanderung »hinaus in die Wüste« soll, so Herzl, eine »Wanderung mitten in der Cultur« werden. 23 Nicht mehr vom »Weltzufall« getragen gestoßen und geschleudert, nicht mehr im »bewußtlosen Zuge« von »Heuschreckenschwärmen« soll die »neue Judenwanderung« erfolgen, sondern »nach wissenschaftlichen Grundsätzen«, auf der Basis modernster Statistik und Logistik. 24 Schließlich ist diese Wanderung selbst nicht zuletzt ein demographisches Regulierungsmanöver, resultiert der Antisemitismus nach Herzl doch aus einer Überproduktion »mittlerer Intelligenzen«,25 durch das jüdische Volk, die nach der legalen Emanzipation als »fürchterliche Concurrenz für den Mittelstand« der jeweiligen Wirtsvölker erschienen seien und nun durch die planmäßige Wanderung abfließen könnten. 26 »Keine Flucht« ist diese Wanderung, sondern ein »geordneter Zug unter der Controle der öffentlichen Meinung«, der sich als »aufsteigende Classenbewegung« vollzieht: »Erst die Verzweifelten, dann die Armen, dann die Wohlhabenden, dann die Reichen.« 27 Die Natur des Naturtheaters, daran läßt Herzl keinen Zweifel, resultiert aus der »Verbindung der zweiten Natur« der Bevölkerungsstatistik mit den modernen Mitteln der politischen gibt es nur Ein Stück, und Schweinefleisch darf nicht gegessen werden [...] - mit CTrompeten in der verständlichen Einfachheit eines Infanteriesignales jedem Schmerze, jeder Frage, jeder Freude des Menschenherzens entgegengeblasen, seit 1500 vor Christus - so wähnt man ja - oder seit 620 nach Christus geblasen, und immer aufs neue geblasen, - es gibt Leute, welche sich mit so ärmlicher Musik begnügen können: wirkliche Deutsche vermögen es nicht.« (Paul de Lagarde: Über die Klage, daß der deutschen Jugend der Idealismus fehle. In: ders., Deutsche Schriften. Gesammtausgabe letzter Hand. Zweiter Abdruck, Göttingen: Dieterich 1891, 373-384, hier 375). Hier etwa wird das zionistische Stereotyp der modernen Oper nicht nur durch jenen deutschantisemitischen Diskurs überschrieben, dem es eigentlich entstammt (die Wagner-Oper); vielmehr läßt sich das ganze Naturtheater selbst, wie ich später noch andeuten werde, ebensogut als >deutsche< Inszenierung lesen, wird also Lagardes Antisemitismus auf die >deutsche Seite< zurückgewendet. Das alles ist keinesfalls als impliziter Vorwurf zu verstehen: Das Deutsche, die Didaktik, die Schule, die Lehrer, die Germanistik und die Germanisten können sich nur dadurch vor dem Verschwinden in Kafkas literarischer Resonanzmaschine retten, daß sie diese selbst verschwinden lassen. 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kafka, Der Verschollene (Anm. 20), 305. Vgl. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Anm. 12), 16. Vgl. ebd., 71. Ebd., 22. Vgl. ebd., 25. Ebd., 16.

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Inszenierung: »Die großen Gemeinden erhalten große Schauplätze für ihre Tätigkeit. Alles gliedert sich auf natürliche Weise.« 28 Kafkas Roßmann ist eine jener »mittleren Intelligenzen«, ein ehemaliger europäischer Mittelschüler, dessen ziellose Wanderung durch Amerika in vielen Punkten auf die alte Wüstenwanderung anspielt, bis sie eben den vermeintlichen Wendepunkt des Naturtheaters erreicht. Hier durchlaufen alle Neugeworbenen eine minutiöse bürokratische Aufiiahmeprozedur, bevor sie nach einem Empfangsessen zum wartenden Zug geleitet werden. Dabei handelt es sich offenbar um die erste Welle des Herzl-Szenarios, die Armen und Verzweifelten: »Was für besitzlose verdächtige Leute waren hier zusammengekommen und wurden doch so gut empfangen und behütet!«, wundert sich Karl. 29 So teilen denn Herzl und Kafka auch die symbolische Geographie ihrer Entwürfe: Europa als der Kontinent der erstarrten kulturellen und sozialen Verhältnisse, Amerika als das Land des technischen Fortschritts, Palästina/Oklahama aber als das transamerikanische Musterland, mit allen Segnungen des Hochkapitalismus, doch ohne seine sozialen Härten. Wie steht es aber mit den hierin beschlossenen Verheißungen bei Kafka? Wie steht es insbesondere mit dem auf den Werbeplakaten des Theaters gegebenen Versprechen, alle seien willkommen, man habe für jeden Platz. Ist das Naturtheater für Roßmann ein neuer Anfang, oder ist es nur der Anfang vom Ende? Herzl hatte im Hinblick auf die oft recht abenteuerlichen Kolonisierungsversuche jüdischer Mäzene immerhin eingeräumt: »Ich glaube nicht, dass es sich Dem oder Jenem nur um einen Sport gehandelt habe; dass Der oder Jener arme Juden wandern liess, wie man Pferde rennen lässt.« 30 Kafka läßt dieses Szenario dennoch wiederkehren, freilich gekürzt um das entscheidende Element der Konkurrenz: in den Aufnahmskanzleien des Naturtheaters, die sich in den Buchmacherhäuschen der Rennbahn befinden, bleibt keiner auf der Strecke, und alle Namen erscheinen schließlich »auf dem Apparat, auf dem beim Rennen die Namen der Sieger veröffentlicht werden«. 31 Achad Ha-am, einer der Begründer des Kulturzionismus, hatte Herzl gerade diese technisch-formale Seite seines Projekts zum Vorwurf gemacht und angemerkt, daß »diese ganze Staatsgründung [...] ebensogut Neger als Juden betreffen« könne. 32 Kafka hat hier gleich die Probe aufs Exempel gemacht, indem er seinen Protagonisten als einzigen »sans papiers« ins Rennen schickt, der noch dazu unter dem für einen europäischen Mittelschüler höchst unwahrscheinlichen Namen »Negro« antritt. Gegen das Gewissen des Kanzleileiters und dank der hier faktisch entscheidenden Macht des Schreibers wird auch Roßmann ins Theater aufgenommen. Dennoch lastet über dem festlichen Eintritt ins Naturtheater ein seltsames Unbehagen, eine unterschwellige Bedrohlichkeit. So stehen die Verheißungen 28 29 30 31 32

Ebd., 72f. Kafka, Der Verschollene (Anm. 20), 322. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Anm. 12), 15. Kafka, Der Verschollene (Anm. 20), 313. Vgl. Adolf Böhm: Die zionistische Bewegung. Bd 1: Die zionistische Bewegung bis zum Ende des Weltkrieges. 2., erw. Aufl., Tel Aviv: Ivrith 1935, 208f.

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des Theaters zur bisherigen Lebenserfahrung des Protagonisten im gleichen Widerspruch wie Herzls Hinweis, daß »nur die Desperados zum Erobern« taugen, 33 zu seiner Vorschrift, daß die Neusiedler »ein Amtszeugnis ihrer bisherigen Behörden beibringen: >In guter Ordnung fortgezogen.Verhältnis zum Zionismus* wie für die zahllosen >Deutungen< der Strafkolonie, von denen hier ja keine einzige unterdrückt werden soll (im Gegenteil). Gedulden wir uns noch etwas. Die sechste Stunde der Kafka-Forschung ist noch nicht angebrochen. Aber sie rückt unaufhaltsam näher. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Anm. 12), 9. Vgl. ebd., 40. Vgl. ebd., 10.

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wir Dir von dem unsern geben«), sondern er antizipiert eine Frage, die erst fünfzig Jahre später durch die Ökologiebewegung zu mediopolitischen Ehren kommen wird: »Woher nimmt die Erde diese Nahrung?« 64 Bei Kafka gibt die Antwort kein Hirten-Gott - »Denn was gibt es außer den Hunden? Wen kann man sonst anrufen in der leeren weiten Welt?« 65 und kein Hirten-Staat - denn das für die Hunde typische Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit resultiert gerade aus ihrer zerstreuten Lebensweise - ; die Antwort kann allein auf dem Wege des individuellen und einsamen Experiments gefunden werden.

IV Bei aller Sympathie für den Menschen Kafka - so können wir schließen sollte man den Dichter nicht unterschätzen. Kafkas Literatur bürstet die zionistische Intervention gegen den Strich. Während Herzl und seine Mitstreiter ostentativ das Licht der Öffentlichkeit, die Weltdiskussion suchen, entwickelt Kafka eine komplexe Kryptologie, eine diskurstechnisch höchst kalkulierte »Geheimniskrämerei«, von der der laute Lehrer Brecht vielleicht hätte lernen können. Während die Zionisten die soziale Frage als Judenfrage und die Judenfrage als nationale Frage verhandeln und, wie Nordau in seiner Rede auf dem 1. Zionistentag, die »Judennot« als »besondere Not« von der »Durchschnittsnot« der Welt abzusondern suchen, 66 verfahrt Kafka gerade umgekehrt, ja er geht dabei sogar noch weiter, indem er die soziale Frage auf die ökologische hin erweitert. Seine »Hundefrage« nimmt alle wichtigen Merkmale der »Judenfrage« auf, aber nur, um sie auf den jeweiligen Grad ihrer Verallgemeinerbarkeit zu prüfen: »es gibt bestimmte Fragen denen man nur mit diesem Mittel gewissermaßen an den Nerv kommt«, begründet Kafkas chinesischer Wiedergänger, der Mauerbau-Experte, sein Freizeitinteresse für »vergleichende Völkergeschichte«. 67 Kafkas Hunde-Isotopie ruft nicht nur den stigmatisierten Juden auf, sondern auch den nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg stigmatisierten Deutschen, und schon der Vorgänger des Hundes, der Affe Rotpeter, weist bekanntlich neben der Wunde am Genital die im Gesicht auf, die >deutschnationale< Mensurvisage also, und sein sagenhafter Aufstieg zu europäischer Durchschnittsbildung ruft nicht nur den Prozeß der jüdischen Assimilation auf, sondern auch jenen Vorgang, den Helmut Plessner unter dem Titel der »verspäteten Nation« behandelte und den wir heute als den »deutschen Sonderweg« abheften. Außerdem ruft sie - wie sich im Detail zeigen ließe - so unterschiedliches Personal wie beispielsweise den Philosophen der Platon'schen 64

65 66 67

Vgl. Franz Kafka: Das Ehepaar und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß. In: ders., Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Banden (Anm. 8), Bd 8, 48-93, hier 58f. Ebd., 61. Vgl. Protokoll des 1. Zionistenkongresses (Anm. 50), 20. Vgl. Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (Anm. 8), 73.

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Politela, den Künstler des Goethe-Romans, den sexuell Inversen der Schriften Hans Blühers, die sekundäre Rasse der Menschheit im Gegensatz zur primären (wiederum nach Blüher), die nationalen Minderheiten der mitteleuropäischen »Schütterzone« sowie den Menschen im Zeitalter des Nationalstaats auf die Bühne der Konnotationen. Betreibt der Zionismus die Territorialisierung des jüdischen Volkes, so schreibt Kafka die Deterritorialisierung des verstaatlichten und nationalisierten Menschen. Er erfüllt in der Dichtung schließlich genau jene Aufgabe, die Herzl der Society of Jews in der Politik zugeteilt hatte: Die Society of Jews wird alle Kundgebungen der Staatsmänner, Parlamente, Judengemeinden, Vereine, die in Wort und Schrift, in Versammlungen, Zeitungen und Büchern hervorkommen, sammeln. 68

Kafkas Texte sind Konferenzen im Verborgenen, in denen die empfindlichen Fragen der Zeit - die Frage nach den Grenzen der sozialen Inklusion: ruft das Naturtheater wirklich jeden?; die Frage nach der Sicherheit des Menschen im Staat: kann eine lückenhafte Mauer hinreichend schützen?; und die Frage nach dem Hirten des Menschen: wovon nährt sich die Hundeschaft? - außerhalb jener mediopolitischen Skandalmaschinerie verhandelt werden können, mit denen selbsternannte Landvermesser heute ohne Rücksicht auf mögliche Folgen ihre Leserquoten pushen. Indem Kafkas Kryptokonferenzen den Lesern ohne pädagogische Anmaßung vorführen, daß die Menschen unseres Jahrhunderts hinsichtlich dieser empfindlichen Fragen »alle in einem Boot sitzen«, gelingt ihnen das, was Herzl und Nordau trotz der in Basel erklärten Absicht nicht gelungen ist: nach dem Antisemitismus der Gesetze auch den der Gefühle zu überwinden. Im Nachhinein wissen wir, daß dies auch Kafka schließlich nur in der Konferenz gelungen ist.

68

Vgl. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Anm. 12), 70.

Gershon Shaked

Kafka and Agnon: Their Relationship to Judaism and Zionism*

And yet I dozed off and slept. How do I know that I slept? Because of the dream I dreamt. What did I dream? I dreamt that a great war had come to the world, and that I was called to it. I vowed to God that if I returned safely from the war, whoever came out of my house to greet me on my return from the war would be sacrificed. I returned home, and there I was myself, coming out to greet me. 1

At the beginning of the 20 th century, the Habsburg Empire, which had coalesced through centuries, was a mix of nationalities, ethnic groups, and religions living in strange unity under the rule of the emperor. Though the empire was primarily Catholic, its eastern region was Greek Orthodox; the conquest of BosniaHerzegovina had added a Muslim faction, and a large Jewish population was dispersed throughout the imperial territory. Its ethnic groups included AustroGermans, Italians, Croatians and Bukovinians, Hungarians and Ukrainians, Jews, Czechs, and Slovaks. The Empire was the antithesis of the nation-state that had been developing in Europe since 1848. The Habsburg imperial bureaucracy was mostly German, and the empire as a whole owed some of its stability to the large population of Jews lacking a distinct national identity. Yet, sizzling beneath its surface placidity was a welter of anti-Semitic, anti-German, anti-Serb, and antiHungarian sentiments, with uprisings and riots occasionally breaking out in different regions. What held the realm together was the benevolent image of its aging emperor, Franz Joseph I (1830-1916). The Habsburg Jews, numbering some two million, for the most part worshipped him: they prayed for his health and even included lyrics in his honor in their prayer books. 2 * This essay, as printed here, is based on a revised version of Gershon Shaked's Kafka conference lecture, which was subsequently rewritten and expanded by him in Hebrew, and then translated from the Hebrew into English by Yael Shapira. A first publication of that expanded version appeared in the journal Partial Answers (2/1, January 2004, 81-111) under the title: »After the Fall. Nostalgia and the Treatment of Authority in the Works of Kafka and Agnon, Two Habsburgian Writers.« I would like to thank Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, for her permission to publish the following version of the paper. 1 S. Y. Agnon: A Guest for the Night. Trans, by Misha Louvish. New York: Herzl Press 1968, 76. 2 On the Jewish aspect of Austria's history, see Steven Beller: Wien und die Juden 1867-1938. Wien et al.: Böhlau 1993 (Böhlaus zeitgeschichtliche Bibliothek; 23) and Robert S. Wistrich: The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press 1989 (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization).

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The empire's spiritual disintegration began before World War I; the war and the treaty of St. Germain, which helped conclude it, delivered the fatal blow. The decline and fall of the Habsburg Empire left a mark on the writing of Franz Kafka and Samuel Joseph Agnon - as well as on the work of a third writer, Joseph Roth (1894-1939). All three were born on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The regions of their childhood, in Czechoslovakia and Galicia, had seethed with nationalist and anti-imperial sentiments, but it was the empire rather than the emperor that was regarded as exerting hegemony and therefore eliciting the hostility of the various nationalities. In Prague, the Czechs fought the Germans and the Jews. The latter were mostly thought of, by the Czechs, as a vulnerable part of the German enemy. The Ruthenians (or Ukrainians) of Galicia struggled against the Poles and the Germans, and all of them together fought the Jews. Nevertheless, an illusion of peace persisted, and though its vacuity eventually became painfully clear to all three writers, the empire that had maintained this illusion would remain an explicit object of nostalgia in Roth's work, and an implicit one in the writings of Kafka and Agnon, whose attitude towards the paternal dimension of the imperial power was more complex. Kafka and Agnon both yearned to explode the absolute authority of emperor, God, and father, and secretly repented this yearning when it was fulfilled. They longed for the order that was once guaranteed by that authority. The rise of nationalist movements and the establishment of nation-states - including the Zionist movement as a state-in-the-making - opposed the Habsburgian-Catholic world-view, which supposedly aspired to equality and patriarchal solidarity among the nations. Paradoxically, such a solidarity seemed to exist almost solely in the imagination of the emperor's Jewish subjects, who dreamed that his majesty would keep them safe from all harm. Two decades after the empire was finally dismantled, a photo-negative of this tendency reached its apex when the Nazis »reunified« the Habsburg Empire, conquering Czechoslovakia. The political disintegration of the Habsburg Empire was the inevitable consequence of its spiritual destabilization, or, paradoxically, of the cultural revival that undermined its conservatism along with its governmental institutions. This odd spiritual and cultural revolution actually led to an artistic flowering. Vienna, the empire's spiritual and administrative locus, was in this period one of Europe's main cultural centers, boasting such figures as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Arnold Schönberg and Gustav Mahler, Richard Beer-Hoffmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Peter Altenberg, and Arthur Schnitzler. Intellectuals, artists, and architects rebelled against the bourgeois liberalism that had become the empire's mainstay in the late 19 th century, having taken the place of the values of the waning aristocracy. But this was the same revolution that also found expression in the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic movements. A similar process was taking place in Prague, where anti-Semitism found an ally in the Czech national movement, just as it did among the Viennese nationalists who advocated Austria's inclusion in greater Germany. The crisis of the generation is

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evoked by Carl E. Schorske's description of three popular political movements, all of which broke away from their ancestral customs, denounced the liberal father who graciously conceded to be merciful to his multi-national monarchy, and chose instead to join nationalist/racist movements or, in one case, a Utopian national movement with a similar appeal to the masses. 3 The atmosphere in late 19th century Vienna was thus very intense. It is no wonder that, not without the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmansthal and the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger devised characters and theories that emphasized the power of irrational forces. Freud's theory, in particular, sees the murder of the father as a stage in the evolution of man, which, in social terms, can be read as the removal of an obstacle to society's development. Meanwhile, political leaders appealed to the irrational as a means of arousing national sentiments. * * *

The fallen empire was an implicit object of nostalgia in the writings of Kafka and Agnon, whose attitude towards the paternal dimension of imperial power was quite complex. The image of the emperor as a paternal, as well as a political and religious authority is central to their work. In Kafka, the emperor, the King of Kings, and the biological father merged into one intimidating figure, so that, as Avital Ronell has argued: »Kafka has pronounced the death sentence on God and the Kaiser.« 4 Nevertheless, both God and the father play an active and vital part in Kafka's writing. His negative father figure, whether incarnated as an actual biological father or appearing in symbolic or allegorical guises, wields destructive power. Agnon's work, by contrast, blends or merges the emperor with the creator of the universe. Both may have lost their authority, but the prodigal son yearns to return to them nevertheless. The disintegration of the monarchy, the decline of faith, and the breakdown of Jewish community life characteristic of the shtetl happened in the same place at the same time. Kafka and Agnon were both born to Jewish families in the land of »Kakanien« - a term derived from »k. u. k.«, one of the appellations of the Habsburg countries under Franz Joseph (.Kaiser of Austria, A"ing of Hungary). But, their cultural backgrounds were different. Kafka's parents were the typical assimilated bourgeois Jews of Central Europe. His father, Hermann Kafka, had moved from a small town to the big city, where he owned a large haberdashery store. Franz received a European education, culminating in a daunting matriculation exam in a German high school; he then studied law at 3

4

See Carl E. Schorske: Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture. New York: Knopf 1979. Avital Ronell: Doing Kafka in The Castle. A Poetics of Desire. In: Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance. Centenary Readings. Ed. by Alan Udoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1987, 214-235, here 218.

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the university, where he also took some courses in literature and philosophy. Later, he worked for an insurance company. His job would take up much of his time and energy throughout his life. He did not realize a conventional lifestyle. He never married, despite several engagements, most prominently to Felice Bauer and Dora Dymant, and quite a few relationships with women, the bestknown being with the Czech writer Milena Jesenská-Polak. Still, his was the life of a metropolitan European who could sample a variety of Prague's and Europe's cultural offerings. His travels took him to other parts of Europe, where he frequented both cultural institutions and brothels, the latter candidly described in his journals. By contrast, Agnon was born in a family of observant middle-class Jews in the town of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia. His father, Shalom Mordecai Czaczkes, was a religious scholar and ordained rabbi, who made his living as a fur trader. The son was given a traditional Jewish education in the heder, he also, however, learned German, and from his youth on, he read world literature. While Kafka seemed to accept the values of his father's world, rebelling against them inwardly and emotionally in his work, Agnon revolted openly by coming to live in the Land of Israel in 1908, along with »our other brothers and sons of our redemption,« as he would write in Tmol Shlishom (Only Yesterday).5 Afterwards, Agnon spent the years 1912-1924 in Germany, where he expanded his education and continued to write. His personal life was more orderly than Kafka's. He married the daughter of a bourgeois German Jewish family and the couple had two children. In his youth Agnon held a number of jobs, but from the 1920s on he received regular financial support from his publisher Salman Schocken, and unlike Kafka, he did not have to divide his life between writing and making a living. In 1924, Agnon returned to Israel. In 1966 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in February 1970. Much of his rich and varied literary estate was published posthumously. The bulk of Kafka's literary estate, which included his three novel fragments, his letters, and journals, was likewise published after the author's death in 1924. *

*

*

The trauma of World War I, which both Agnon and Kafka spent »at home« and not at the front, must be considered among their primary formative experiences. Whereas Agnon's novella »And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight« (»V'Haia heAkov l'Mishor«, 1912) deals with some of the factors that shaped the pre-war fin de siècle, the novella »Until Now« (»Ad Hena«), which appeared in the 1960s, alludes to his experience during World War I, epitomized by the narrator's dream that recycles the myth of Jephtah's daughter as a parody, suggesting that no one can escape wartime devastation unscathed. Actually, the formative experience of the great War is discernible throughout Agnon's œuvre and especially in his most important novel, A Guest for the Night. 5

S. Y. Agnon: Tmol Shlishom. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1947; [English:] Only Yesterday. Trans, by Barbara Harshav. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000.

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The fin de siècle experience and World War I also left their mark on Kafka's work. »The Old Commandant« in his »In the Penal Colony« stands for the emperor, a symbol of the old regime. The sense of guilt and persecution in The Trial, as well as the sense of rejection and the struggle for identity and belonging in The Castle, faithfully reflect refugee experience. Bereft of identity and persecuted for no fault of their own, Kafka's victims are like the homeless nomads who flock to the rear in times of war. These figures are perhaps more typical of World War II, which may explain K a f k a ' s enormous success with the post-World War II readership. But, they nevertheless grow independently out of earlier experience and are a product of what might be called la condition juive, which from the 1940s on became a representative sampling of the human condition in the modern world. 6 *

*

*

Touches of nostalgia and conflicted attitudes to the authority of the canon are discernible in the ways in which Kafka and Agnon sketched their self-images as artists, especially in stories that double as poetic manifestoes presenting the artist as a victim of his own art. In »The Tale of the Scribe«, for instance, Agnon portrays the writer as an ascetic who sacrifices his personal life on the altar of his work. By contrast, in »A Hunger Artist« Kafka transforms asceticism into art, a goal, and a mission. Kafka also mentions the ascetic side of writing in his diary: It is easy to recognize a concentration in me of all my forces on writing. When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joy of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively would they even halfway serve the purpose of my writing. 7

What we encounter here is a very explicit commitment to a self-imposed asceticism - a writer's pledge to channel his entire creative libido into his work. The emerging self-portrait is fairly similar to the figure of the writer in Agnon's »The Tale of the Scribe«. Here we find a character who willingly suffers in order to fulfill his obsessive duty. Thus, both writers portray the artist as a poeta doloroso, a poet whose torments become the source and substance of his work. But Agnon's most conscious poetic manifesto associates his creativity with a specifically nostalgic sorrow:

6

7

See Robert Alter: Jewish Dreams and Nightmares. In: What Is Jewish Literature? Ed. with an Introduction by Hana Wirth-Nesher. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1994, 53-69. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Trans, by Joseph Kresch and Martin Greenberg with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt. 2 vols, New York: Schocken 1948/49, vol. I, 211.

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If the Temple still stood, I should take my place on the dais with my fellow poets and daily repeat the song which the Levites used to chant in the Holy Temple. Now, when the Temple is still in ruins, and we have neither priests at their holy work nor Levites chanting and singing, I occupy myself with the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, the Mishnah, the Halakhah and the Haggadot, Toseftot, Dikdukei Torah and Dikdukei Sofrim. When I look into their words and see that from all our goodly treasures which we had in ancient days nothing is left us but a scanty record, I am filled with sorrow, and this same sorrow causes my heart to tremble. Out of this trembling I write my fables, like a man who has been exiled from his father's place, who makes himself a little booth and sits there recalling the glory of his forefather's house. 8

Agnon thus identifies a longing for the lost ancestral home as the wellspring of his work. Though he refers to this home as »the Temple«, his reference is actually to the beit midrash, or house of Jewish study. He also speaks longingly of the Jewish canon, for which his own writing is a mere substitute. The uneasy relationship to a lost canonical tradition is perhaps the distinguishing feature of Agnon's work. His texts are haunted by the sense of being an ersatz, not the thing itself. Something similar may be found in Kafka. In the journal entry for January 16, 1922, Kafka refers to the possible emergence of a new existential religious literature, and he tries to imagine a genius who would bring it into being: All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this. Though of course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth. 9

In envisioning this, Kafka does not seem to be aware that he is talking about his own contemporary, S. Y. Agnon. His words identify the potential inherent in Agnon; they also reveal, perhaps, that Kafka too yearned for the religious wholeness of ancient times and for writing of the canonical kind. What he wished to write, then, was not just stories but a new mystical treatise that might transcend any concrete tale. Kafka, however, was also influenced by the Central European fin de siècle literature and by Prague's »decadent« writers. (His close friends were Max Brod, Franz Werfel, and Hugo Bergmann.) His writing, in fact, sought to strip literature of its so-called sublimity. Despite a residual hankering after canonical writing, Kafka crafts a portrait of the artist as a wretched creature (an insect), not as a priest or prophet, not even as the pseudo-priest or pseudo-prophet that Agnon imagines. *

8 9

*

*

S. Y. Agnon: Elu ve Elu. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1953, 297f. Kafka, Diaries (note 7), vol. II, 202f.

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Agnon's and Kafka's attitudes towards Jews and Judaism were, accordingly, complicated by conflicting sentiments. Judaism stood for an ancestral tradition, while, at the same time, representing a set of nationalist values of the kind that could undermine the pax Habsburgiana. Agnon's presentation of Jews is ambivalent; he judges his characters on a case-by-case basis, each according to his or her qualities and function in the plot. His treatment of Judaism is equally complex and ambivalent; its only consistent feature is a profound intertextuality, nourished by a vast knowledge of the Jewish canon. This knowledge allows him, to use Kafka's words, to »strike root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew«. All of Agnon's work, and especially his novel The Bridal Canopy and the short-story collections Those and Others (Elu ve-Elu) and A City and the Fullness Thereof (Ir u 'Meloa), are infused with folkloric materials and fragments of canonical texts. Even when the sacral contents are obscured by ironic, parodistic, or grotesque comments, the power of this concealed mastertext, the main canonical target of his intertextual references, remains undiminished. Agnon's attitude towards the canon is, therefore, highly complex. Secularizing and profaning the sacred sources, he demands that the reader acknowledge the parodistic, at times grotesque, link between the tradition and its modern context. For example, one may consider the grotesque collocation of Jewish traditional cosmogony and that of the dog Balak in the novel Only Yesterday, which opens with the words »[i]n the beginning was the camel«. 10 Agnon's ideal implied reader is well-versed in the canonical tradition yet capable of accepting the subversive, parodistic, or grotesque materials that undermine it. The Jewish mastertext persists in Agnon's writing as a memento to the author's roots in tradition. Agnon's texts question God's treatment of his people and express an uncertainty whether the modern Jew can even survive the 20th century. Yet the traditional substratum of the work argues that a wouldbe heretic immersed in traditional culture is closer to tradition than to heresy. The oxymoron, »a revolutionary traditionalist«, is therefore an apt description of Agnon. Though swayed by powerful revolutionary forces, he nevertheless remains strongly attached to his Jewish heritage. Kafka's attitude towards Judaism and Zionism was no less complex. Jewish tradition was not a part of his childhood world, and he arrived at it relatively late in life, under the influence of his Zionist friends and of Loewy's Yiddish theater. He studied Jewish history and literature privately. Eventually, he tried to learn Hebrew, and he even attempted to read Yosef Chaim Brenner's novel Breakdown and Bereavement in the original. Jewish issues are only implicit in his fiction, which contains only one explicitly Jewish figure, the student Joseph Mendel in Amerika. This multinational novel sports European names of every possible origin and language, as though this fictional America were a gathering place for Europeans of every 10

Agnon, Tmol Shilshom (note 5), 473.

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stripe: alongside the Americans Mac and Green, the novel also features Isbary (Hungarian), Feodor (Russian), Robinson (Irish), Schubal (Slovak), Giacomo (Italian), and Delamarche and Rennell (French), as well as Clara, Therese Berchtold and Grete Mitzelbach (German). By contrast to his fiction, in his letters and journals, Kafka wrote directly, even bluntly, of his complex Jewish identity: In Hebrew my name is Amschel, like my mother's maternal grandfather, whom my mother, who was six years old when he died, can remember as a very pious and learned man with a long, white beard. She remembers how she had to take hold of the toes of the corpse and ask forgiveness for any offense she may have committed against her grandfather. She also remembers her grandfather's many books which lined the walls. He bathed in the river every day, even in winter, when he chopped a hole in the ice for his bath. 11 As a child I reproached myself, in accord with you, for not going to the synagogue often enough, for not fasting, and so on. I thought that in this way I was doing a wrong not to myself but to you, and I was penetrated by a sense of guilt, which was, of course, always ready to hand. Later, as a young man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort (for the sake of piety at least, as you put it) to cling to a similar, insignificant scrap. It was indeed so far as I could see, a mere nothing, a joke - not even a joke. 12 What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe. 13

These are different faces of an assimilated Jew. His deepest connection to the Jewish world is through his grandfather, whose figure, and the rituals surrounding him, symbolize the old Jewish world. The grandson nostalgically savors two main images: the Torah (the grandfather's many books) and the rituals of faith (bathing in the river). Both have faded into dim memories, leaving no palpable trace in the lives of the two subsequent generations. The parent generation could give its offspring nothing but a set of rituals and symbols (the synagogue, prayer) drained of all meaning, and the son despises this futile emptiness, a void that does not even amount to a joke. The sterilized, »Westernized« tradition arouses no respect or nostalgia, only contempt for its assimilated advocates. Caught somewhere between nostalgia and disgust, the son-grandson is left desolate, unconnected to any community of believers (Glaubensgemeinschaft), without any symbols of faith and all alone in front of the void. Agnon's treatment of Judaism is, in fact, even more ambiguous and conflicted than Kafka's, though the language and style obscure this complexity. Having rejected some aspects of the religion of his parents, Agnon both openly 11 12

13

Kafka, Diaries (note 7), vol. I, 197; entry for December 25, 1911. Franz Kafka: Letter to His Father. Trans, by Ernst Kaiser and Eithane Wilkins. New York: Schocken 1966 (Schocken Paperbacks), 75f. Kafka, Diaries (note 7), vol. II, 11, entry for January 8, 1912.

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and secretly yearned for the faith of his ancestors. He, therefore, did not deny his origins or ignore his roots, but rather reworked Jewish materials and conflicts into a shape representing the existential angst of all humans. His counterpart Kafka, feeling rejected by German literature, and seeing himself as a kind of expatriate dabbling in the assets of the locals, attempted to appropriate for himself the German culture from which and through which he had been excluded. Agnon and Kafka both dealt with the question whether Zionism could be a solution to the widespread anti-Semitism of the Habsburg Empire, whose different ethnic groups, each demanding its own territorial domain, were alike suffused with the hatred of the Jews. By making aliyah to Israel, Agnon chose the Zionist solution, and the ideology of Zionism permeates his works; but even here his stance is not unequivocal. The satire »Of Our Young People and Our Elders« reflects the distaste he felt towards the »professional Zionists« of the Diaspora, and Only Yesterday frequently expresses doubts as to the future of the Zionist endeavor. The character of Yitzhak Kumer in Only Yesterday is not only crafted for its psychology, but also functions as part of the novel's mythological infrastructure. Only Yesterday is rooted in the Biblical myth of Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham. Yitzhak Kumer, Isaac's namesake, is perceived as a ritual victim of the perennial rift between exile and redemption, Judaism and Zionism. Like Isaac the Patriarch, Yitzhak is bound on the Mountain of Moriah, but in his case God produces no sacrificial ram. The novel's basic outlook is tragic: the sin-ravaged earth cannot be redeemed of the plague (drought) until the sinnerhero dies. Only after Yitzhak is dead, having been bitten by a sick dog, is the land finally purified of sin and it can once again flourish: And when we came outside we saw that the earth was smiling with its plants and its flowers. And from one end of the Land to the other came shepherds and their flocks, and from the soaked earth rose the voice of the sheep, and they were answered by the birds of the skies. And a great rejoicing was in the world. Such rejoicing had never been seen. 14

Unlike the heroes of Greek tragedies, Yitzhak is the innocent victim of an ironic situation, a character who will never arrive at self-knowledge or recognize his own sin. The non-hero is destroyed, but society is revived. Yitzhak Kumer is the helpless victim of a transitional period, part of a doomed generation. On the symbolic level, his death opens up the possibility of new life and therefore has a tragic justification. But, in so far as he is an individual character whose relationship with the dog is a matter of chance, he is but a pathetic, random, and pitiful victim of blind contingency. Agnon revisited such themes even more intensely and bitterly in »Edo and Enam«, and especially in »The Covering of the Blood«. Kafka was ambivalent about Zionism and never derived any operative decisions from this ideology. Some passages in his writing may, with some strain, be read as Zionist. He describes the burrow, in his story of the same name, as 14

Agnon, Only Yesterday (note 5), 641.

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[...] my castle which can never belong to anyone else, and it is so essentially mine that I can calmly accept in it even my enemy's mortal stroke at the final hour, for my blood will ebb away here in my own soil and not be lost. 15

Is Kafka describing the final burrow of the Jewish people? This question must remain unanswered, but it is not impossible to give the passage a Zionist interpretation. 16 None of Kafka's works alludes directly to the Land of the Patriarchs, though some of his closest friends (Brod, Weltsch, Bergmann) were indeed confirmed Zionists. *

*

*

Kafka and Agnon differ from one another so prominently in their choice of genres that it is all too easy to overlook parallels between them. Indeed, Kafka wrote sketches (»Poseidon. A Little Fable«), short stories (»The Judgement«, »Josephine the Singer or the Mouse Folk«), monologues (»A Report to the Academy«, »The Burrow«, »Investigations of a Dog«), novellas (»In the Penal Colony«, »The Metamorphosis«, »A Hunger Artist«), and novels {Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle))1 His canonical heritage also includes documentary texts, letters, and diaries. Kafka's generic and thematic range is limited; he might be described as a genius coaxing music from a single chord. His patterns repeat themselves, and he limits his writing to a few essential topics. He does not provide variety through particularities of time and space but tends to leave his characters in a void. These limitations of structure and substance are compensated for by the vast variety of meanings evoked. Agnon's œuvre, by contrast, offers a great variety of genres, forms, and social materials. Unlike Kafka, Agnon placed his stories in distinct temporal settings (sometime between the early 19th century and the middle of the 20 th century) and in detailed, highly realized locales (from Galicia to Austria, Germany, the United States, to the various parts of the Land of Israel). He wrote in numerous genres: the psychological love stories favored by European realism (»Ovadia the Cripple«, »The Doctor's Divorce«, »In the Prime of Her Life«, »Metamorphosis«, »Fernheim«), as well as comic works of every stripe, from social satire (»Of Our Young People and Our Elders«) through comic sketches (»On Taxes«) to Rabelaisian grotesques (»Pisces«, »The Frogs«, »With the Death of a Saint«). His most interesting stories straddle the boundary between 15

16

17

Franz Kafka: The Burrow. In: id., The Complete Stories and Parables. Trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir. Ed. by N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken 1983,325-359, here 340. For a succinct account of Kafka's ambivalence towards the Zionist idea, see Ludwig Dietz: Franz Kafka. Stuttgart: Metzler 1975 (Sammlung Metzler; 138). Ritchie Robertson (Kafka. Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987) offers a number of labored readings that find Zionist implications in Kafka's works; Marthe Robert (As Lonely as Franz Kafka. Trans, by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986), however, argues - more convincingly - that Kafka shied away from any ideological agenda. S. Y. Agnon: Me-atzmi el atzmi. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1976, 245.

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realism and symbolism (»The Covering of the Blood«, »Betrothed«). Agnon tends to make subtle artistic use of primary folk forms (einfache Formen)·, folk tales, saints' legends (»The Tale of Rabbi Gadiel the Infant«, »The Pipe of My Grandfather«), and fables about historical figures (»Pleasant Stories of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Τον«) appear alongside ballad sagas (»Repentance«) and melancholy tales (»The Dead Girl«). He wrote family sagas (»The History of Our Houses«) and historical chronicles (»The Father of the Ox«). Novellas written in the form of archaic Hassidic tales (»The Tale of the Scribe«, »And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight«) display modernist traits, and some share surrealist themes and structures (»Edo and Enam«, »The Book of Deeds«, »The Overcoat«, »Forevermore«, »Footstool and Throne«). His ballad-type Gothic stories (e. g., »The Dance of Death«, »The Lover's Canopy«, and »The Lady and the Peddler«) contain a fairly complex modern component. Finally, Agnon's novels rework a variety of traditional genres - the picaresque novel (The Bridal Canopy), the psychological family novel (A Simple Story), the chronicle (Only Yesterday), the university novel (Shira), and even an innovative modernist novel (A Guest for the Night). Despite the differences in the generic range, Agnon and Kafka share a leaning towards imaginary literature of a symbolic or allegorical nature. Indeed, some commentators regard Agnon's The Book of Deeds as evidence of Kafka's influence. Agnon himself, however, denied any such link: »My friends, I have never lied about my teachers or concealed whom I learned from«, he said at a public lecture in 1962, [...] but The Book of Deeds I learned and heard only from my soul. And those who mention Kafka to me are in error. Prior to publishing The Book of Deeds, I knew nothing of Kafka's tales except for his story »Die Verwandlung« [»The Metamorphosis«] and now, except for The Trial, which I read while ill ten years ago, I have not yet picked up a book by Kafka. My wife, long may she live, has frequently offered to read me a tale by Kafka, but she did not succeed. After she had read but one or two pages, I turned my ear from it. Kafka is not of my soul's roots, and anything that is not of my soul's roots I do not absorb, even if he is as great as the ten old men who made the Book of Psalms. It is a joy to read Homer, Cervantes, Balzac, Gogol, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hamsun, or even their lessers. But not Kafka, even though my wife has all his books and is always willing to read them to me. I know that Kafka is a great poet, but my soul is alien to him. The same is true of Proust, Joyce, Hoffmann, and others of the world's great masters. 18

Thus, on record, Agnon rejects, and almost defends himself against, the attempt to link his work to Kafka's. He unequivocally denies any connection to modernist literature (Proust, Joyce) and pre-moderaist literature (Hoffmann), while expressing a strong affinity to mimetic literature (from Homer to Hamsun). Both the denial and the pledge of affinity are curious matters. As early as in his very first tales (»And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight«, »Abandoned Wives«) Agnon employed elements of modernist symbolism. Sefer 18

Ibid.

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HaMaasim (The Book of Deeds), published in the early 1930s, was not an entirely new beginning; rather, it exposed and foregrounded elements that had previously been concealed or marginalized. It does not matter whether Agnon read Kafka during his years in Germany (some believe that he did), discovered him later in life, or - as Agnon himself claimed - eschewed his writings and influence altogether. Both authors were born during the same period, and their work grew out of similar literary contexts, though each poured these common elements into different literary molds. The realist literature Agnon praised was the solid ground on which he constructed his symbolic systems, yet his work had »Kafkaesque« elements long before the early 1930s, when the highly allegorical tales of The Book of Deeds began to appear. The allegorical tradition on which both Kafka and Agnon drew was closer in nature to Spenser's The Faerie Queene than, say, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Both create a tension between schematic allegory and profound symbolism. Both also hesitate between, on the one hand, a symbolic system that might represent the internal laws of the personal and collective unconscious and, on the other, a semiotic system whose meaning is primarily ideological or political. In the Middle Ages, the artist as shaman and mystic was believed to possess the key to the secrets of existence; allegory (e. g., in the Midrashic and kabbalistic traditions) offered a way of unlocking them. Kafka and Agnon both turned to allegory out of the same religious need; but the general modernist recourse to symbol and allegory was likewise spurred by a desire to find objective correlatives for the incomprehensible, grotesque, and absurd world: symbols seek to decipher their own threatening, uncanny {unheimliche) secret. Both Agnon and Kafka go beyond both allegory and symbolism: their writing is not as unequivocal as allegory, nor is it always universal and endowed with multiple meanings. As symbolic works, their texts usually operate on several levels at once. Allegorical and symbolic systems both link the text to and separate it from the mastertext to which the allegory alludes and from which it derives its authority. The pre-text that authorizes Agnon's work is that of Jewish tradition; some argue that Kafka, too, relied on the same mastertext. One can occasionally identify an intertextual relationship between Kafka's writing and the Jewish canon, but it is not the same persistent, essential link that exists in Agnon's oeuvre. Robert Alter argues that Gershom Scholem saw a profound connection between Kafka's writing and kabbalist literature and that he found the two symbolic systems of the two cultures to be governed by parallel rules. Moreover, Alter claims, Scholem »was strongly inclined to see Kafka as a latter-day kabbalist exhibiting deep kinship with some of the esoteric figures he [Scholem] has studied as a historian«. 19 While a comparison might be made on a phenomenological or structural level, there is no convincing proof of a semantic 19

Robert Alter: Necessary Angels. Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991, 12.

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link between the text's literal stratum and a hidden kabbalistic mastertext. 20 Kafka's subtexts do contain occasional covert allusions to other canonical traditions (mostly the Pentateuch); but these are hard to bring to the surface, because Kafka's putative mastertext is itself far less clear than Agnon's. However, many of his works demand that the reader create an imaginary or mythic mastertext derived from the reader's own reservoir of mythological lore. The pre-text on which Kafka does draw consists of travel literature, legal literature, debates (Streitgespräche), and Aesopian fables. His writing literalizes animal metaphors and folkloristic proverbs (e. g., if Jews are referred to as dogs, then a dog must be Jewish). Kafka usually prefers puns and allusions to allegorical and emblematic images, such as the cross, whose meaning is fixed. Kafka explores the potentialities of hidden and ambiguous wordplay in an unprecedented way. For example, K.'s profession in The Castle is that of a land surveyor, or Landvermesser. The root of the German original (messen, vermessen) carries multiple meanings that get lost in the translation. Among the various meanings are vermessen as »to make a mistaken measurement«, and »to act boldly, audaciously«; ein vermessender Mensch is a man who relies solely on his own strength or good fortune or is without restraints or inhibitions. The word's various denotations identify K. as a man who sins both by audacity (hubris) and by missing the mark (hamartia). He tries to confront the problem of measures, or standards, without truly being able to oppose them, and therefore relies only on his own strength and luck instead of treading a more righteous path. The name of the counter-hero, Klamm, is also a form of wordplay. In German Klamm means both »a rocky abyss« and »congealed«; klammen means »to grasp firmly«; this cold, repulsive man (or half-God) shakes off K.'s attempts to cling to him. The profession of the hero, the name of the counterhero, and the name of the implied author, which begins with the same letter, all function as a code leading to some of the text's hidden meanings. Such games, claims Robertson, 21 are typical of allegory, as is the skeptical stance of the narrator, who doubts whether reality can be expressed through 20

See Karl Erich Grözinger: Kafka und die Kabbala. Das Jüdische in Werk und Denken von Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn 1992. Grözinger has explored this insight in his book on Kafka, seeking to uncover parallelisms between the latter's work and the kabbalistic tradition. Despite the varied evidence Grözinger provides, I cannot see a direct allusive or connotative relationship between Kafka's writing and the Kabbalah. Grözinger attempts to derive a method from Scholem's poetic observation about the similarities between Kafka's word patterns and kabbalist hierarchy. (Scholem did not argue for a direct causal link between them.) The problem with this meticulous exploration becomes evident when the critic compares the role of the righteous Jew (tzadik) in shaping the internal processes of divine action (theurgy) to the various lawyers in The Trial or to the mediators of The Castle. Grözinger's comparison between The Trial and Elijahu de Vidas' Reshit Hochma (ibid., 19) is interesting, but also unconvincing. Despite the two works' similar thematic structures, no direct influence or intertextual link can be established between them.

21

Robertson, Kafka (note 16), 271.

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language. Moreover, each element of the plot allows for conflicting interpretations, creating in the reader that odd sense of bewilderment typical of the effect of Kafka's texts. Agnon relied less on the polysemy of specific lexical items and more on collocations of seemingly contradictory elements, as in the names of Dr. Yekutiel Ne'eman, or Yitzhak Kumer (an allusion to the Biblical Isaac joined to »newcomer«, Kumer and also connoting Kummer, the German for »pain« or »grief«). Like Kafka, he also stages encounters between basic mythic situations and their parodistic incarnation in new contexts. Much of Agnon's writing can be understood only by those familiar with the secrets of the Jewish tradition. Alongside this hidden mastertext there appear different pre-texts of varying degrees of authority. Moreover, the two levels of meaning that comprise the allegorical text can connect to each other in different ways. For example, an allegorical work may contain many realistic materials whose allegorical meaning is hidden. Agnon's »And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight« appears at first to be overflowing with realistic materials. Kafka's The Castle also foregrounds realistic and psychological concerns in shaping K.'s relationship with Frieda, while the allegory is relegated to the margins of the text. Both writers create expansive, rather than reductive, allegories. Their works do not perform a simple semantic gesture of »this means that«, but instead open up a perspective of great depth. Both writers went through a period of symbolism before arriving at allegory. Agnon's early works »And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight« and »Abandoned Wives« are distinctly symbolic; The Book of Deeds contains a stronger allegorical plane, while later stories use a combination of both methods. Kafka's The Metamorphosis is symbolic. The image of the insect is meaningful mostly as a metonymy, while Gregor's character creates an entire conceptual system. The Castle relies on metaphorical connections to different traditions, as well as on a mastertext constructed from the implied reader's presumed storage of varied mythological lore. By contrast, Agnon, who emerged from a distinctly Jewish environment, created a form of language deeply rooted in specifically Jewish tradition, but even his handling of this heritage was subversive. *

*

*

Both Agnon's and Kafka's subversions of the authority of the canon take the shape of oneiric transpositions and metaphorizations. Through his minute realism of detail Kafka makes an unrealistic world real. Agnon, by contrast, de-actualizes the realistic time and space - whether of the European Jewish town or of Israeli life. He subverts his realistic signifieds, relocating them in a reality that is beyond, or below, the real. At the same time, Agnon's style involves ongoing and far-reaching intertextual connections: each of his works provides fertile grounds for the study of canonical sources and of the expansion of meaning.22 22

See Avraham Holtz: Mar'ot u'Mekorot. Tel Aviv: Schocken 1995; Baruch Kurzweil: Massot al Sipurei Agnon. Jerusalem: Schocken 1961; and Meshulam Tochner: Pesher Agnon. Ramat Gan: Massada 1968.

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An Agnonian text always works on at least two levels and is best understood by a certain, limited kind of implied reader - one familiar with Jewish sources and undeterred by their being parodied. An »utterly secular« reader, unfamiliar with the Jewish canon, may be more willing to accept the subversion but is likely to miss its significance. Readers of this kind may need editions that annotate the canonical allusions and the possible meanings of the fictional narrative's interrelations with the canon. Kafka's writing, by contrast, does not rely on a canonical tradition; the symbols he employs are natural ones, or ones that accumulate significance in the course of reading. Agnon's hedged-in world is seemingly classical in its conscious archaism, but the plot and characters tend to the absurd and the grotesque which are, in turn, reworked in the spirit of classicism; the impossible is stylized and hence admissible, and the effect of the text is enhanced by contradictory tendencies. Kafka, by contrast, domesticates the impossible by presenting it as self-evident. A man's metamorphosis into an insect is not viewed as a miraculous occurrence; nor does it violate the internal logic of the plot. Equally self-evident are the fast in »A Hunger Artist« and the strange tribulations of K., Josef K., and Rossmann. Kafka's world appears to shake off the film of the mundane, turning processes that take place within the depths of the psyche, or else in heaven or hell, into one's daily bread. Agnon's world, unlike Kafka's, is enclosed within a stylistic ghetto that is somehow empowering. Its style seals it off from the rest of the world but also maintains a self-sustaining universe within. *

*

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Kafka and Agnon both grapple with the transcendent world and its governing forces. In doing so, both draw on the biblical story of Job. Many of Agnon's characters - from Menashe Chaim in »And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight«, to Daniel Bach and his friends in A Guest for the Night, to Yitzhak Kumer in Only Yesterday and Hillel in »The Covering of the Blood« - are paltry avatars of Job, without his rhetorical powers and his auspicious beginning and end. As for Kafka, Gershom Scholem wrote to Walter Benjamin: I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which I regard as the sole subject of Kafka's production [worthy of] being treated in a work of literature. 23

The problem of judgement is central to Kafka's work - from his short story »The Judgement«, through »In the Penal Colony«, to The Castle and, above all, The Trial. Many of his works express a human complaint addressed to a sealed and oblivious heaven. Motifs from Ecclesiastes (1,2-7) support the notion of an endless, Sisyphean repetition of the circles of existence. A sense of the folly of human existence also pervades the work of both writers. 23

Gershom Scholem: Walter Benjamin. The Story of a Friendship. Trans, by Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1981, 170.

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The revision of the Job topos is associated with a rebellion against a figure of authority. Kafka's and Agnon's protagonists are plagued by a profound feeling of guilt towards their biological father, tribal leaders, or God, the »Father« of creation. Paternal figures loom large in the work of both these fin de siècle writers: they struggle with the Father and find it hard to justify his actions. The fall of the Habsburg Empire is to them the end of solidarity among the nations. This sense of crisis is also related to the destabilization of the ethnic group's religious unity. No longer a religious community with its own positive values, Jewry gradually becomes defined mostly by its unjustified persecution. In »And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight« the authority of the Kaiser is no longer what it used to be and therefore the restrictions on the transgressors against the commercial regulations of the Jewish community are no longer operative. Agnon also frequently raises doubts regarding the group's survival as a religious community. The parallels between the two writers are important for understanding the atmosphere of a declining civilization that left its mark on their work. Each, in his own way, tried to deal with the pressing problems created by the state of his society. Agnon sent his heroes to the land of Israel but crafted narratives that raised doubts as to Zionism's ability to provide a solution for Jewish existence. Kafka's rebellion against the father was expressed more bluntly and directly, in the famous letter and through his repeated portrayal of the sovereign as a capricious demiurge. The all-powerful, amoral father is repeatedly shown effortlessly bringing women to submission; served by a system of clerks and minions, he continues to rule the world from inside an inaccessible castle or a courthouse where injustice reigns. The old father can sentence the son to death or force him to commit involuntary suicide, and, in »The Judgement«, the guiltridden son submits to the verdict: An innocent child, yet, that you were, truly, but still more truly, have you been a devilish human being! - And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!« [...] He swung himself over, like the distinguished gymnast he had once been in his youth, to his parents' pride. With a weakening grip he was still holding on when he spied between the railings a motor-bus coming which would easily cover the noise of his fall, called in a low voice: »Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same,« and let himself drop. At this moment, an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge. 24

Kafka's novels evoke absolute existential uprootedness. His characters exist in a state of exile, which to Kafka is the essential human condition. They are nationless people living outside time and trying to confront problems without a clear temporal and spatial context. The a-temporal, non-spatial setting of his three main novels - The Castle, The Trial, and even, to an extent, Amerika - presents the exiled (Jewish) existence as a sentence imposed on a helpless individual. 24

Franz Kafka: The Judgement. In: id., The Complete Stories and Parables (note 15), 77-88, here 87f.

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The sovereign king or judge of the land becomes, in Kafka's work, an emblem of the King of all Kings, as well as a metaphorical embodiment of the biological father, entailing, for both him and Agnon, both theological issues and the Oedipal anxiety. One example of metaphysical heresy and anxiety in Agnon can be found in the following passage from A Guest for the Night, which calls into question both the symbols of faith and the possibility of passing faith down from father to son: I do not remember whether I was awake or dreaming. But I remember that at that moment I was standing in a forest clearing, wrapped in my prayer shawl and crowned with my tefillin, when the child Raphael, Daniel Bach's son, came up with a satchel under his arm. »Who brought you here, my son?« said I. »Today I have become bar-mitzvah,« said he, »and I am going to the Beth Midrash.« I was overcome with pity for this pitiful child, because he was docked of both his hands and could not put on tefillin. He gazed at me with his beautiful eyes and said, »Daddy promised to make me rubber hands.« »Your Daddy is an honest man,« said I, »and if he has made a promise he will keep it. Perhaps you know why your father saw fit to ask about Schützling?« said Raphael, »Daddy has gone to war and I can't ask him.« »Between ourselves, Raphael,« I said to him, »I suspect that your sister Erela is a communist. Doesn't she mock your father?« »Oh, no,« said Raphael, »she cries over him, because he can't find his arm.« I asked him, »What does it mean, he cannot find his arm?« »He lost his arm,« said Raphael. »If so,« said I, »where does he put his tefillin?« »Don't worry about that,« said Raphael, »those for the head he puts on his head, and those for the hand he puts on someone else's arm.« »Where does he find someone else's arm?« said I. »He found a soldier's arm in the trench,« replied Raphael. »Do you think he can meet his obligations with that one arm? Isn't it written the dead are free? When a man becomes dead, he is exempt from religious precepts, and anyone who is exempt from a precept cannot exempt anyone eise.« »I don't know,« he replied. »You don't know,« said I, »so why did you pretend you knew?« »Until you asked me I knew,« replied Raphael, »once you asked me I forgot.« »From now on,« said I, »I will not ask. Go, my son, go.« 25

Scraps of reality found elsewhere in the text converge in this dream segment. The forest clearing alludes to Daniel Bach's fear of the forest, and the handless child and Erela also appear at other points in the novel. The dream indicates that the two generations cannot realize their faith, because they lack some physical capacity (hands, arms). Not only did the father lose his faith in the trenches of World War I, but the son, born into a world devoid of faith, cannot claim his legacy. Disability has become a typical feature of life: both the speakers refer to it casually. The family system is shattered; the father has lost authority and receives nothing but pity from his daughter. Communication is impeded by the participants' inability to conduct a fruitful dialogue or address each other's questions. In Kafka, intricate metaphysical questions are likewise associated with the issue of authority. As Alter rightly claims: 25

Agnon, A Guest for the Night (note 1), 383.

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Commentators have sometimes reduced his work to autopsychobiography, or to sociopolitical or religious allegory, but he actually undertook a more daring and difficult task in his writing, which was to expose himself to, or to take by imaginative force, a realm of the transcendent in which he could not believe, or, if he believed in it, might prove inimical and perverse. 26

Kafka's work repeatedly ponders the possibility of believing in and trusting the »old commandant« (»In the Penal Colony«) or the powers seated in the remote castle (The Castle) or behind the gates of the law (The Trial). The metaphysical force his heroes confront is that of a demiurge rather than a benevolent God. The characters themselves are guilt-ridden, judging themselves and judged by forces they cannot control. The judgement itself is based on a hidden and incomprehensible code of law. Having provided a harsh account of the inaccessible legal world, the priest in The Trial concludes by saying: That means I belong to the Court. [...] So why should I want anything from you? The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go. 27

The death sentence in The Trial has nothing to do with the defendant's guilt or with the legal process. Both Agnon and Kafka portray the powers-that-be as brutal. In Agnon, man's relationship with the divine is reflected in various disasters. Among the many examples are the death of Ginat and Gemula in »Edo and Enam«, Adiel Amsel's flight to the leper asylum in »Forevermore«, the death of Yitzhak Kumer and the persecution of the dog Balak in Only Yesterday, the troubles of the townspeople in A Guest for the Night, and the suffering of Hillel, hero of »The Covering of the Blood«, who loses both a leg and a prosthesis after having survived a World War, drudgery in America, and exile in the Land of Israel. All these characters are hounded and destroyed by unassailable forces through no fault of their own. Josef K. in The Trial, K. in The Castle, and young Rossmann in Amerika are likewise persecuted by incontrollable powers that abuse them because they attract abuse. Even when they misbehave in response to persecution, their response is incommensurate with the punishment that is inflicted on them. The demiurge who rules the transcendent world torments human beings. This world is an exact reflection of the next one, and vice versa: Kafka's abusive clerks and Agnon's mutually violent gentiles and Jews are synecdochal descriptions, through the realities of the stories, of a reality beyond the real. The death of the protagonists can be read either as suicide or as a death sentence carried out by forces beyond the victims' control. The anonymous executioners who kill the victim of a legal injustice (The Trial), or the mad dog who 26 27

Alter, Necessary Angels (note 19), 112. Franz Kafka: The Trial. Trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir. London: Seeker and Warburg 1971,248.

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inflicts doom on the man who writes »mad dog« on his back, both express the predicament of authors who long for a benevolent God but despair of ever discovering one. Kafka cannot find any foothold in a world whose rules are faulty or incomprehensible. Agnon's metaphysical stance is not uniform. In his earlier works, his protagonists (Menashe Chaim, Ezechiel, Dinah) make futile attempts to be released from their bondage. Later works feature heroes like Reb Judel the Pious, a comically righteous man whose innocence transcends the comic-pathetic bind in which he is caught. But, from the 1930s on, in The Book of Deeds, A Guest for the Night, and Only Yesterday, Agnon's protagonists find themselves, like Kafka's heroes, facing an inaccessible transcendent reality which is bleak and confusing. Kafka's and Agnon's works provide no vindication of the ways of God, and God does not speak to these modern-day Jobs from within the storm. *

*

*

Both Kafka and Agnon were shaped by the trauma of their eras. Their works predict the greater cataclysm to follow, as well as the catastrophe awaiting Europe's Jews, 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«. But Kafka and Agnon are also spokesmen of the crisis of modern humanity, because existence in the world has become a meaningless exile; above all, they articulate the desperate state of Jews living in a void and, in Agnon's case, carrying the void with them to the land of their forefathers, hoping to find a way to fill it. The work they produced in the first two decades of the century struck its contemporary readers like a feverish nightmare; that nightmare was confirmed as living reality in the 1940s. Kafka and Agnon offer testimony to the crisis that gripped Central Europe between the late 19th century and the aftermath of World War I, a crisis that would come to a head in World War II and in the Holocaust.

Alfred Bodenheìmer

A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka's Hebrew Notebooks

If there are traces at all of the Hebrew language in Kafka's literary writings, they are very few. The most obvious, one might say, are the names of the murderer and the murdered in the short piece of prose »Ein Brudermord« (A Fratricide) that was published in 1917.1 The murder reminds us clearly of the story of Cain and Abel; it does not seem to be motivated by any material reason, but rather by what the murderer feels after his deed: »Happiness of murder! Relief, inspiration by the flowing of another person's blood!« 2 From a diary entry of June 19th, 1916 we know that at that time Kafka had been preoccupied with the beginnings of mankind in the book of Genesis, including the story of Cain and Abel. 3 The name of the murderer in his story is Schmar, the name of the victim Wese. Those who know the Hebrew text of Genesis are familiar with the wording of Cain's answer to God's question right after the murder about where his brother Abel is. Cain's famous answer, formulated again as a question: »Am I my brother's keeper?« sounds in Hebrew like this: 'DUN 'ΠΧ larari »HaShomer Achi Anochi?« Keeper, in Hebrew »shomer«, is built on the Hebrew root (SHMR). Kafka's choice of »Schmar« for the murderer's name, then, would be a hint to the answer to this question. It should be understood that the cynical element in Cain's question characterizes, in the final analysis, every ruthless murderer, or a belated recognition of his closeness and responsibility. The victim's name in Kafka's text, Wese, can also be explained by consideration of the Hebrew source of the story. The Hebrew form of Abel is Hewel. The most famous occurrence of this word in the Bible beyond its function as the name of the murdered brother is in the book of Ecclesiastes: ^an *7Dn (HAKOL HAVEL), all is vanity; or n^an ^nn (HAVEL HAVELIM), vanity of vanities. This is the most frequent translation of its meaning. But the root ^an (HVL) in its original sense means either »vapor« or »the breathe that comes out of a person's mouth« or »nought«, »nothingness«. The name in Kafka's text, »Wese«, on the other hand, is associated with the German word »Wesen« (being), that is, to the participle of the verb »sein« (to be), »gewesen« and also 1

2 3

Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa. Hg. von Roger Hermes. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag 1997 (Fischer-Taschenbuch; 13270), 261-263. Ibid., 262. Franz Kafka: Tagebücher. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müllerund Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1990, Vol. 1, 789.

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to the verb »verwesen« (decompose). As far as the person of Abel (^nn, HeVeL) represents a man at the moment of exhaling, on his way to nothingness and decomposition, »Wese« is a most congenial, almost Buberian, translation of the name. As hard as it seems to resist this interpretation, it is not clear whether Kafka, at the time he wrote »Ein Brudermord« really knew the Hebrew verb for »keeper«, or the Hebrew pronunciation of Abel's name, including all of its semantic implications. The story was published in the summer of 1917, and although no manuscript has survived, it is estimated that is was written already in the winter of 1916/1917. 4 The second edition of Moses Rath's Hebrew textbook m5? DSU? (SAFAT IMENU), which Kafka purchased right after it had appeared and used as the basis for his autodidactic studies, was published in the spring of 1917. 5 Theoretically, it might be possible to postpone the date when »Ein Brudermord« was written down to May or, at the latest, the beginning of June of 1917, or we might suppose that he put in the names of the protagonists only then. This would have allowed Kafka the time, at least theoretically, to learn not only the verb nati?1? (to keep), which appears in the fifteenth chapter of Rath and, perhaps by way of the general vocabulary list also the meaning of HVL (in Rath: »Nichtigkeit,« »Unbedeutendes«), which appears in chapter fifty-four. Perhaps he might have had time then to look over Rath's short version of the story of Cain and Abel in chapter one hundred and sixteen, where Cain's question to God is quoted. But, this chain of improbabilities presents distinct difficulties, and it seems more reasonable to suppose that Kafka already knew the Hebrew text in Genesis and the meaning of the words before he bought Rath's book. Otherwise, we probably should deny Kafka's possible intentions about the names' meanings, as they have been discussed here in relationship to Hebrew. Considering Kafka's Hebrew notebooks is, in some way, the reverse of the possible interpretation of the names in »Ein Brudermord«. In the literary work, there exists a certain meaning, and one may legitimately ask, whether or not Kafka possibly could have been aware of it, according to his knowledge or ignorance of Hebrew at that point in time. In his Hebrew notebooks we can read practically word by word what Kafka learnt. But we are confronted with the challenge of providing additional information, or, as I wish to call it, the mystery behind the material. The »material« itself is composed mainly of sober vocabulary lists, as well as a few brief notes, letter drafts, and grammatical exercises in Hebrew. Hartmut Binder writes in his 1967 article on Kafka's Hebrew studies that according to a remark of Max Brod, Kafka was learning Hebrew already in 1917. Also, Binder mentions the existence of four octavoes and one quarto vol4 5

Kafka, Erzählungen (note 1), 560. See Hartmut Binder: Kafkas Hebräischstudien. Ein biographisch-interpretatorischer Versuch. In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967), 527-556, here 527.

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ume, as well as about twenty loose sheets containing Hebrew vocabulary, exercises, and letter drafts. He was able to date them all in the year of 1923, and he named not only the Hebrew teachers Friedrich Thieberger (in 1919) and Georg Langer (in 1921), but also Puah Ben-Tovim (Binder writes falsely Bentorim), a student from Palestine, with whom Kafka developed a personal relationship. In addition, Binder writes about the lost notebook, of which one page had been reproduced in Gustav Janouch's book Franz Kafka und seine Welt a few years earlier. 6 In the meantime, though, more material has been found at another place: In Kafka's »octavo F,« the German entries of which have been dated as September/October 1917, there are sixty pages of additional Hebrew notes, beginning from the end of the notebook, meeting the German entries in the middle of page 60. The very first page of these Hebrew entries consists mainly of writing exercises for the first four letters of the Hebrew handwriting alphabet. It might be that Kafka noted them at the time when he wrote the German part of this notebook. There are, however, indications that in general the Hebrew entries were not made at the time when the German text was written, but six years later in 1923 - just as those in the previously known Hebrew notebooks. Near the middle of the Hebrew entries, Kafka started to note in which connection he learned the following words. We find there: »fairy-tale«, »newspaper«, »Hapoel«, etc., but we find also some other entries, like »Pua« and »bei Bergmann« (at Bergmann, oct. F, 36), followed by four Hebrew words. In a letter from July 1923, written at the seaside in Müritz, Kafka thanked Bergmann »for your greeting and wish. It has been the first Hebrew writing I have received from Palestine. The wish in it might be of great power.« 7 Among the words he noted in relationship to Bergmann, we find Ί3Ί3, PARPAR (butterfly), Mlim, ZIVONI (tulip), and rrnpn, BKAROV (soon). Since Kafka in his letter to Bergmann described his journey to Müritz as a test of his transportability regarding Palestine, we can suppose that Bergmann's letter had been a kind of idyllic picture of Palestine and an invitation for a visit. Regarding the notebook, one page of which is copied in Janouch's book and which Binder took for lost: it is to be found in the Schwadron Collection at the manuscript and archives division of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. 8 Chronologically, this notebook, containing 18 written pages, 6

7 8

Gustav Janouch: Franz Kafka und seine Welt. Wien, Stuttgart, Zürich: Deutsch 1965, 150. Franz Kafka: Briefe. Hg. von Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1966,436. The first publication concerning the existence of this notebook is: Raphael Weiser: Franz Kafka Studies Hebrew. In: Books & People. Bulletin of the Jewish National & University Library, Jerusalem, No. 8, 1994, 24. Weiser writes there that this notebook had »recently« been presented to the library by the Schocken family. When I delivered my paper at the conference in Jerusalem, I did not know about the existence of this notebook; luckily, Mr. Weiser, who is the Director of the Manuscript and Archival division at the JNUL, was present at the conference and directed my attention to it. Therefore, I was able to add this material to my paper after the conference.

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can most probably be placed close to the others, if one considers the routine in the writing of the Hebrew letters. There is also a hint about the terminus post quem from the fact that we find on page eighteen (the numeration has, according to Raphael Weiser, probably been added in later by someone else), the Hebrew word ro, ΚΑΤΗ, translated by Kafka as »Partei, Sekte« (party, sect), followed by the untranslated notion n w w s n nro, KITHAH HAFASHISTIM (Fascist movement). Kafka alternatively uses here the word nro, KITHAH, instead of ro, ΚΑΤΗ. This notation is followed by the word lima, NIZACHON, »Sieg« (victory). This combination of words makes it seem probable that - either during a conversation with his teacher or following the reading of an article in Hebrew - Kafka dealt with the victory of the Fascist party in Italy that had taken place in October 1922. Among other interesting notions in this notebook, on page five we find also the one of nsn©, SHACHEFETH »Schwindsucht« (tuberculosis), Kafka's illness, which had been diagnosed in 1917. Concerning the general matter of his Hebrew studies, there are basically two points that can be discussed: First: why did Kafka learn Hebrew? Binder stresses that Kafka concentrated on learning modern Hebrew; it was not so much the language of the Holy Scriptures that he wanted to learn. Rather, he attempted, by means of very intensive studies, to »become a part of the Jewish community by acquiring the language«. 9 But, one may ask, what is meant by that exactly, and if, in the case of Kafka, it is possible to differentiate between these two aims: reading the holy scriptures in the original Hebrew and the ability to speak and read modern Hebrew? The second question, upon which the answer to the first question is based is: what kind of Hebrew did Kafka really learn? This question is also closely connected to the different relationships to Hebrew among Eastern and Western Jews. Andreas Kilcher has shown in an article about the politics of Jewish languages in Kafka and Gershom Scholem, that Kafka was, on one hand, a typical Western Hebrew student, whose method and strategy of learning is related to the lack of basic knowledge by the Western Jew. 1 0 On the other hand, Kafka shares with Gershom Scholem the recognition that knowledge of Hebrew is a predominant element in Zionism. Two years after Kafka's death, on the fortieth birthday of Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem wrote an article about the puzzling role of the holy language as a secular everyday language. 11 Kafka never explicitly brought up this question. It apparently did not possess for him the urgency and the relevance that it did for Scholem. But within the documents related to his Hebrew studies we can find traces of an interesting clash between the »secular« and the »holy« language. 9 10

11

Binder, Kafkas Hebräischstudien (note 5), 546. Andreas B. Kilcher: Kafka, Scholem und die Politik der jüdischen Sprachen. In: Politik und Religion im Judentum. Hg. von Christoph Miething. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1999 (Romania Judaica; 4), 79-115, 106. See Stéphane Mosès: Der Engel der Geschichte. Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt a. M: Jüdischer Verlag 1992, 215-217.

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Anyone who knows Hebrew would be surprised to discover that Kafka wrote down certain rather elementary vocabulary items in those notebooks some five years after his first intensive Hebrew studies. For example, on page three of the first notebook there appear words like min, TOD AH (translated by Kafka with the noun »Dank«) and nu>p33, BVAQASHAH (also translated by the noun »Bitte«, which is not correct), as well as the word ΠΠ^Ο, SLICHA (translated again by a noun »Verzeihen«), but written wrongly with a D instead of a Π. On the same page, the adjective "IN, ANII (translated as »eigennützig« - selfish), derived from the pronoun ANI, I, is written with an V instead of an N, which might be based on a confusion with the orthography of the adjective TJ, poor. In principle, we may draw some conclusions about Kafka's early Hebrew studies, based on these few examples, all found on one single page of about some three hundred pages of notebooks. In addition to his autodidactic occupation with the book of Moses Rath, Kafka had taken private lessons with Friedrich Thieberger in 1919. He was the son of a rabbi, educated in an orthodox manner and familiar primarily with classical (i. e. biblical and rabbinical) Hebrew. Kafka had later taken lessons from Georg Langer, who was also familiar with the Eastern European religious use of the »lashon hakodesh«, the holy language. Rath's book itself was a useful textbook and grammar, and in the preface to the second edition the author hinted at its new assets, compared to the first edition. The new edition contained short excerpts from the Bible, stories and phrases of the rabbinical literature, a selection of prose and poetry, and a few dialogues as paradigms for everyday contacts in Hebrew. 12 But the book foregoes practically every modern perspective. Consequently, the word min, TODAH, probably one of the first five words that a Hebrew student is taught nowadays, first appears in chapter 82 in Rath, and not as a formula of gratitude, but, as in the Bible, translated as the noun »Danksagung«. In Rath, this elementary lexical item is used only in the more elaborate combination mw-TOX, ASSIR-TODAH, meaning a person obliged to express his gratitude. The same is the case with the verb Wpn1?, LVAQESH, which also does not occur except in its verbal form. Moses Rath's work, understood by its editor, as well as by the numerous people using it, as a modern Hebrew textbook, is nothing of the sort. It devotes a special chapter to the »Waw hahipuch«, a typical biblical grammatical form, which went out of use in antiquity. Rath's book occasionally uses other biblical forms like the direct combination of the subject and the object pronoun in the suffix (like TTTiö, MZATIV, »I found him,« instead of the modern WIN ΤΙΧΪΏ, MAZATI Ό Τ Ο . Correspondingly, it 12

Moses Rath: i:ay raitf (Lehrbuch der Hebräischen Sprache für Schul- und Selbstunterricht). 2 n d Edition, Wien 1917, IV. - Kafka possessed more textbooks, for example the 3 rd volume of S. L. Gordon's purely Hebrew series llli^n (Warsaw n. d.); Jaroslav Sedlácek's Czech based textbook, Leson Hassefarim. Základové hebrejského jazyka (Prague: B. Stybla n. d.); and Isidor Pollak's and Gustav Weiner's Biblisches Lesebuch, Part 1 (Prague: K. K. Schulbücher-Verlag 1918). Concerning a direct relationship to Kafka's notebooks, though, only the use of the book of Rath can be demonstrated.

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does not provide its readers with knowledge about everyday, modern situations, for example, activities in post offices, or with a broader vocabulary for technical, political, or scientific expressions of modern times. That seems to be why Kafka knows the basic meaning of a word like (although he errs in its orthography) and can use its derivation »selfish«, but he has to learn anew the actual meaning of min and nwpaa. The importance of Puah Ben-Tovim as a person who had experienced her whole youth in the Hebrew mother tongue in Palestine, can therefore hardly be overestimated in relation to Kafka's Hebrew studies. That alone is not a surprising insight. But it may be a portal to an even more profound understanding of Kafka's relationship to Hebrew. Benjamin Harshav, in his book Language in Time of Revolution, shows that the development of modern Hebrew was basically a result of the creation of a specific »Jewish secular polysystem« 13 by a generation of East European Jews revolting against the religious background of their youth. A Jewish polysystem, according to Harshav, means that the experience of the surrounding world stayed a Jewish one, but was not necessarily determined by religious or traditional elements alone. Such a polysystem did not have to be based on Hebrew, but the use of Hebrew provided - so to say - a guarantee of embedding any content in a Jewish context. Of course, the decisive secular elements of such a polysystem were education, literature, and culture, and Kafka himself had met representatives of such a polysystem (not Hebrew, but Yiddish), namely the actors of the Yiddish theater. The autobiographical sketch of Yitzchak Loewy that Kafka wrote down in 1917 shows a very typical revolt of an East European Jewish youngster against his orthodox background and his entry into an entirely different sphere, strictly rejected by his parents. 14 In the case of Kafka, the situation was entirely different. If Kafka was to construct any kind of a Jewish polysystem, he had to be aware not of its secular, but of its Jewish elements. Kafka's feeling that he lacked any Jewish education to speak of is clearly expressed in »The Letter to the Father«. 15 Hebrew, in his case, had to fulfill a far greater and more integrative task, because he was searching for a genuine Jewish identity, not merely attempting to determine a certain direction of its expression. In this regard, there is an informative little mistake in the first notebook. At some point, Kafka notes the Aramaic word Kim, GMARA, (N 1,55) with the annotation »aram« for aramaic in parenthesis. Kafka writes the word incorrectly with a Π, H, at the end, although he has explicitly noted the specialty of an N-ending in Aramaic above (N 1,25). The word is best known as an expression for the Talmud. This meaning was for Kafka either too well known to note it down, or he ignored it altogether. In any 13

14

15

Benjamin Harshav: Hebräisch. Sprache in Zeiten der Revolution. Aus dem Hebräischen von Christian Wiese. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag 1995, 72. Franz Kafka: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1993, 430-436. Franz Kafka: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Kritische Ausgabe. Hg. von Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1992, 191f.

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case he only writes down the - formally correct - meaning of the word: »Vollendung« (completion). Under this line, he writes the Hebrew form ΊΜ, GMAR, as well, but instead of adding in parenthesis »hebräisch«, he adds »jüd« for »jüdisch«. This fact is especially interesting, if we consider that it stresses the gap between Hebrew and Yiddish. The latter term had for years been identical with »Jewish« or »Jewish authenticity« and was close to »jüdisch« from a sheer morphological point of view. Yiddish, which Kafka called »Jargon«, according to the Western Jewish convention of the time, was »the youngest European language«, as he called it in his speech about Jargon in 1912. 16 According to Kafka, Jargon represented the Jew as a wanderer, always forced to install himself in changing cultural contexts. Hebrew, in contrast, was the antithesis of Yiddish; just as Hebrew had been the antithesis of Aramaic, which had been the first foreign language for Jews, and whose relationship as a »Jewish language« to Hebrew was in some ways similar to that of Yiddish. By 1923, Aramaic for Kafka seems to have become as inauthentic in terms of Jewishness, that is, as opposed to Hebrew, as German had been eleven years earlier, in contrast to Yiddish. If, according to Kafka's speech on Jargon, the German »tot« did not translate, but rather destroyed the meaning of the Yiddish »toit«, and if »Blüt« in Yiddish could in no way be translated by »Blut« in German, 17 how then could ¡ a m be identical to ~\m? Without a doubt, Hebrew presented for Kafka the most definite way out of the »transitory Judaism« he had once observed among the guests at his nephew's circumcision. 18 It may be significant that in his first Hebrew notebook he drew a circle around the German translation of the Hebrew word rnVrann, HITBOL'LUT, »Assimilation« (Ν 1,12). But the ideological battles among Hebrew writers during the first two decades of this century about how close the modern Hebrew language should be to the biblical and rabbinical sources were very far removed from the concerns of those who just had found their way to this new language. The textbook of Moses Rath, which was very popular among Kafka's contemporary Western Jews and provided secular Hebrew students with mainly classical (biblical) vocabulary and material, makes this point evident. In this way, any differentiation of style and linguistic commitment was not only avoided, it was also rendered impossible. In consequence, in Kafka's mind the fundamental presence of religious content in modern Hebrew seems to have aroused a certain irritation. Actually, he never uttered any explicit concern about it, but the Hebrew notebooks play in this case the role of a mute testimony by the simple fact that they contain a few - not many - remarkable entries, mistakes, or accentuations. To put Kafka's irritation about the closeness, or rather the interdependence of the holy and the profane in Hebrew into a symbol, we can quote his entries in the first notebook, where he brings together all kinds of words with the Hebrew root ttHp, 16 17 18

Ibid., 189. Ibid., 192. Kafka, Tagebücher (note 3), vol. 1, 31 If.

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KADOSH, like Εητρ, KIDUSH, »Heiligung« (sanctification), ntrnp, KDUSHA, »Heiligkeit« (holiness) or tt'ìpa, MIKDASH »Heiligtum« (sanctuary). At the end he notes, quite contracted in a corner of the page, the two notions cnp, KADESH and rranp, K D E S H A H , the male and female forms of prostitute (N 1,52). This notation is especially meaningful in view of the fact that Sigmund Freud cited exactly the same term, tt>np, KADOSH (transcribed by him in the German-Jewish accent as »kodausch«), to describe the ambivalent character of tabu, as something forbidden because of its impurity and of its holy remoteness alike. 19 The reference to Freud will have to be clarified later on. Modern Hebrew offered Kafka - or maybe rather forced him into - an encounter with biblical or talmudic notions of God or G o d ' s presence and other elements of classical Jewish belief. In the notebooks there are formulas like ΠΧΤ nwn DK, IM HASHEM YRZEH, (God willing, Ν 2,38) or DCn l j - w , YSHMRENU HASHEM (God save us), also in its Aramaic form, 1?s,17 w a r n , R C H M N ' LYZL (N 2,29). These testify to the certain presence of an ancient religious code within the modern language Kafka was eager to learn. It may be noteworthy that Kafka never wrote out the Tetragrammaton, nor the double Hebrew letter Yod that replaces the Tetragrammaton at numerous places, although this is done in the book of Moses Rath. We also find that whereas the biblical texts in Rath are virtually reflected in Kafka's notebooks, there is only a hint of his reading the last three chapters in Rath, which are composed of quotations from the Midrash and the Talmud under the title D^Dn '"Dì», MIDIVRE CHACHAMIM. 2 0 Kafka noted single words of these quotations, one after another, without leaving room for a translation. One of the expressions he noted was run 1 , YRAT SHAMAYM, excerpted from the quotation: »D"ött> nxTS f i n d w η ώ ^nn, HACOL BIDAY SHAMAYM CHUZ MIYRAT SHAMAYM«. An English translation is: All is in the hands of Heaven (God), except for fear of Heaven. What all this shows is merely that Kafka had steady contact with religious Hebrew expressions and writings, by virtue of his attempt to learn modern Hebrew. Still, Kafka was also capable of inventing, or copying, original Hebrew curses. Thus, in the Hebrew vocabulary of »octavo F«, under the word fSD, PAZAZ, translated by Kafka as »zerschmettern« (smash), we find the expression D'p^K "l^is 1 (May God smash you!). 19

20

Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe. Hg. von Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards und James Strachey. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1974, vol. IX, 311. It is significant, by the way, that Kafka's original Hebrew pronunciation apparently was also characterized by the Ashkenazi manner, familiar to Freud. In his letter from September 23rd to Robert Klopstock he translated the title of Eugen Hoeflich's periodical Das Zelt (The Tent) into Hebrew as »Ha-Auhel«, which is the Ashkenazi transcription of the Hebrew word (Kafka, Briefe [note 7], 446). For many, Ashkenazi pronunciation was no less a sign of diasporism than was Yiddish. We also find in the notebooks full pages of Hebrew words noted one after the other without translation and sometimes repetitiously, especially reflecting vocabulary lists of certain chapters in Rath.

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There are, though, two examples of Kafka's encounter with specifically religious expressions that give certain insight into the irritations of Hebrew for Kafka. Both examples refer to the same three verses in the Bible, namely Numbers 6:24-26. These are well-known as the priestly benedictions for the people of Israel, recited in the synagogue by the priests on every holiday (or, in Israel every day of the year). On page thirteen of the first notebook, the formula of the first verse, »May God bless you«, is written at right angles to all other words and without translation. But, instead of writing the classic quotation >n " p i T , YVARECH'CHA H'(ASHEM)Gnade< nennen, 36 37 38 39

Brod / Kafka, Eine Freundschaft (note 23), 319; cf. 294f. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 282f. Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985, 259. My understanding of Das Schloß is deeply indebted to Richard Sheppard's neglected study: On Kafka's Castle (London: Croom Helm 1973). Among recent contributions I would single out Elizabeth Boa: Kafka. Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), ch. 8; and Stephen D. Dowden: Kafka's Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia: Camden House 1995), ch. 6.

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die göttliche Lenkung menschlichen Schicksals [des Dorfes].« 40 (»precisely what the theologians call grace: the divine control of man's fate [the village].«) Brod's interpretation seems driven by his desire to claim for Judaism a conception of grace similar to that held by Christianity. Yet the counterinterpretation by Erich Heller, for whom the Castle is »the fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons«,41 is hardly superior. In a significant early passage, we are told what the Castle is not. K. contrasts it with the Christian church of his home town: Und er verglich in Gedanken den Kirchturm der Heimat mit dem Turm dort oben. Jener Turm, bestimmt, ohne Zögern, geradenwegs nach oben sich verjüngend, breitdachig abschließend mit roten Ziegeln, ein irdisches Gebäude - was können wir anderes bauen? - aber mit höherem Ziel als das niedrige Häusergemenge und mit klarerem Ausdruck als ihn der trübe Werktag hat. 4 2 (And he mentally compared the tower up there with the church spire in his home town. That tower, definite, unhesitating, becoming more slender as it rose, ending in a wide red-tiled roof, an earthly building - what else can we build? - but with a higher aim than the low cluster of houses and a clearer expression than the grey working day has.)

The Castle, by comparison, is indistinct; it cannot be precisely described, only: Es war weder eine alte Ritterburg, noch ein neuer Prunkbau, sondern eine ausgedehnte Anlage, die aus wenigen zweistöckigen, aber aus vielen eng aneinanderstehenden niedrigem Bauten bestand; hätte man nicht gewußt daß es ein Schloß ist, hätte man es für ein Städtchen halten können. 43 (It was neither an old knightly fortress nor a modern mansion, but an extensive complex consisting of a few two-storey buildings and many lower buildings huddled together; if you had not known that it was a castle, you might have taken it for a small town.)

The Christian imagery here is firmly assigned to the past (as is the abandoned chapel in Pollunder's country house in Der Verschollene [America, or The Man Who Disappeared]). The modern counterpart to the church is confused, obscure, shapeless. The Castle is sharply distinguished from the village by the fact that the road winds round the hill without getting any closer to it; yet we are also told several times that the village may be considered part of the Castle.

40

41

42

43

Max Brod: Nachwort. In: Franz Kafka: Das Schloss. München: Wolff 1926, 4 9 5 496. Erich Heller: The World of Franz Kafka. In: id., The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes 1952, 157181, here 175. Originally published in the Cambridge Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (October 1948), 11-32. Franz Kafka: Das Schloß. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1982, Textband, 18. Ibid., 17.

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This other reality is both alien and omnipresent. The Castle officials, especially Klamm, are treated with a reverential awe which their conduct hardly deserves. On the one hand they are farcically overworked and inefficient bureaucrats; on the other, they descend into the village or summon village women to them as suddenly and imperiously as the Greek gods. We hear of a fire-brigade festival, held during the short summer, attended by both officials and villagers, with copious phallic symbolism; it was on this occasion that the official Sortini caught sight of Amalia, summoned her in brutal terms, but received an unprecedented rebuff. I have argued before that Amalia's conduct is modelled on Brod's presentation of Christian denial of the senses, »Diesseitsverneinung«. It should be seen as deeply ambivalent, for Amalia does indeed assert her self-respect in rejecting Sortini; yet her action is also life-denying, leaving her trapped in isolation. Her sister Olga tries to make amends by spending every night with Castle servants in a promiscuous orgy that recalls Brod's account of paganism. We have here some kind of divinity, or at least beings who receive quasi-religious awe; but we also have suggestions of a vitalistic and brutal life-force which may be traced back to Kafka's reading of Schopenhauer and to the latter's concept of a mindless, appetitive Will. 44 Another pagan allusion lies in the name of Klamm's secretary Momus. Momus was the Greek god of merriment, and this Momus laughs repeatedly and describes himself as »fröhlich« (merry); but, by a private joke of Kafka's, as soon as he introduces himself as Momus, the atmosphere changes: »Nach diesen Worten wurde es im ganzen Zimmer ernst.« 45 (»After these words the whole room grew serious.«) And of course we have K.'s dream of fighting with a Castle secretary who is naked and similar to a statue of a Greek god. 46 Besides these references to paganism, we have some curiously Christian allusions. The Castle messenger Barnabas bears the name of a New Testament apostle, while another official, who does not appear, is called Galater - the German name of the Epistle to the Galatians. 47 Arnold Heidsieck has maintained that Kafka incorporates motifs from the Epistle to the Galatians into Das Schloß almost from the beginning. 48 He points out that Barnabas, with 44 45 46

47

48

See Sheppard, On Kafka's Castle (note 39), esp. 130-132. Kafka, Das Schloß (note 42), 174. On this passage and its homoerotic implications, see Mark M. Anderson: Kafka, Homosexuality, and the Aesthetics of »Male Culture«. In: Austrian Studies 7 (1996), 79-99, esp. 89f. The possible significance of the name is discussed, inconclusively, by Elisabeth M. Rajec: Namen und ihre Bedeutungen im Werke Franz Kafkas. Ein interpretatorischer Versuch. Bonn et al.: Lang 1977 (Europäische Hochschulschriften: Reihe 1; 186), 166. Arnold Heidsieck: The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction. Philosophy, Law, Religion. Columbia: Camden House 1994, 167. See also Hans Dieter Zimmermann: 'klam a mam? Zu Kafkas Roman Das Schloß. In: Franz Kafka und das Judentum.

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Paul, founded the Christian congregations in Galatia. In chapter 2 of the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul writes about the dispute whether Jewish and Gentile Christians should be separated or should eat together. Heidsieck connects this theme with Kafka's well documented concern about whether Jews could still live in the increasingly anti-Semitic society of contemporary Europe and to the anxiety recently caused him by his love-affair with a Gentile woman, Milena Jesenská. 49 The problem of Jewish assimilation is, he argues, expressed by K.'s marginal status in the village, and also by the ostracism of the Barnabas family. One can hardly deny the resemblance between K.'s marginal situation in the village and the Jews' position in modern Europe, as Kafka experienced it. 50 Indeed Kafka invites us to think of the Jewish destiny by another discreet joke, when K. is referred to as »der ewige Landvermesser«. 51 Although I know no more convincing attempt to explain the names »Galater« and »Barnabas,« I nevertheless find it difficult to incorporate Heidsieck's arguments into my reading of Das Schloß. The core of the novel seems to me to lie rather in the conflict that K. undergoes between his desire to sustain his relationship with Frieda and his desire to penetrate the Castle. The latter, K.'s Faustian striving to enter the Castle »auf eigene Faust«, 52 another of Kafka's jokes, turns out to be futile. For although by an extraordinary chance he breaches the system and manages to reach an official, Bürgel, who is competent to deal with his case, the effort is so great that K. falls asleep on Bürgel's bed and does not hear the crucial revelation. It is in his relationship with Frieda, despite its difficulties, that happiness is to be found. The description of their initial love-making, even though it takes place among the beer-puddles on the bar-room floor, is hauntingly poignant, as are Frieda's words when the relationship is over: »wie bin ich, seitdem ich Dich kenne, ohne Deine Nähe verlassen; Deine Nähe ist, glaube mir, der einzige Traum, den ich träume, keinen anderen.« 53 (»how abandoned I feel without your presence, since I first knew you; believe me, your presence is the only dream I dream, there is no other.«) We have here, transposed into a minor key, a celebration of erotic love, such as Brod attributes to the Song of Solomon. As for the other element in Brod's arguments, grace, it seems that it is necessary to make a human relationship complete. Frieda maintains that it is Klamm who has brought the two of them together: »Wohl aber glaube ich ist es sein Werk,

49 50

51 52 53

Hg. von Karl Erich Grözinger, Stéphane Mosès und Hans Dieter Zimmermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum 1987, 224-237. Zimmermann further allegorizes Olga and Amalia as Ecclesia and Synagoga (231). This interpretation goes back to Max Brod, Über Franz Kafka (note 25), 164. This association is explored in detail by Lovis M. Wambach: Ahasver und Kafka. Zur Bedeutung der Judenfeindschaft in dessen Leben und Werk. Heidelberg: Winter 1993 (Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte; 3/125). Kafka, Das Schloß (note 42), 37. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 399.

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daß wir uns dort unter dem Pult zusammengefunden haben, gesegnet, nicht verflucht, sei die Stunde.« 54 (»But I do believe it is his work that we found each other there under the counter; blessed, not accursed, be the moment.«) Similarly, K. argues that the landlady could have had a blessing in her marriage, which was likewise made possible by Klamm, but failed to realize it, because of the unhappy attachment to Klamm which she was unable to relinquish: »Der Segen war über Ihnen, aber man verstand nicht ihn herunterzuholen.« 55 (»The blessing was above you, but you did not know how to bring it down.«) Grace or the blessing, therefore, comes from the ambiguous but at least partly benign figure of Klamm, who presides over the relationships in the village; but to benefit from such grace, one must, perhaps paradoxically, not try to seek its source but focus one's attention on the everyday life which it illuminates. In this sense, Kafka's novel translates into fictional terms, Brod's notion of erotic love as a »Diesseitswunder«, and also the tension in Brod's book between the celebration of earthly life and the need for grace from a higher source.

54 55

Ibid., 83f. Ibid., 135.

Shimon Sandbank

The Look Back: Lot's Wife, Kafka, Blanchot

1 The location of our eyes in the front part of our head marks the space behind us as eluding consciousness and therefore fraught with potential danger and mockery. Moving forward rather than backward, we invest the space behind us with what is rejected and discarded, but also with that which has been unjustly neglected and is missed. Looking back, we try to catch that which escapes us, but also return to what was abandoned and retrieve what has been forgotten. The look back combines curiosity with nostalgia, anxiety of the unknown with regression to the past. Such regression may be fatal when not followed by a turning forward. On the other hand, if one moves forward without ever looking back, the very source of one's progress, the primal drive of one's existence, is lost. The move back arrests the move forward, but is nonetheless its driving force. That which makes progress impossible is, paradoxically, what made it possible in the first place.

2 The story of Lot's wife in Genesis 19 centers on a prohibition against looking back. »Escape for thy life«, the angel warns Lot, »look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain, escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed«. The angel's words seem reasonable enough and hardly call for further interpretation. He warns Lot against looking back because he wants him to hurry up; looking back would cause delay, when all he needs is to flee as fast as possible. The terrible fate of Lot's wife can similarly be understood as a result of this delay, rather than as a punishment. Instead of running away for dear life, she stops to look back, which exposes her to God's brimstone and fire and transforms her into a pillar of salt. The look back, however, is one of those motifs that resist a merely literal reading and insist on being symbolized. Its connotations, some of which I have pointed out, call for a non-literal reading of the story. If the look back combines curiosity with nostalgia, anxiety of the unknown with regression to the past, the injunction against it must be a rejection of all these. Essentially, two prohibitions seem implied: 1) against knowing that which was intended to be

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left unknown, and 2) against regressing to the past instead of moving on. The bitter lot of Lot's wife, when read non-literally, is a horrendous punishment for breaking one of these rules rather than a mere unfortunate accident. The Christian approach to the story consistently chooses the latter point. Time and again it interprets the prohibition directed at Lot as a prohibition against letting oneself be swept back by the dark forces of instinct, instead of climbing toward the light of the spirit. This interpretative tradition has its roots, as Charles Munier shows, in Philo and his allegorical method. Following Munier, let me quote the Alexandrian exegete. »For the sacred records«, he writes in De Somniis, say that Lot's wife having turned to what was behind her became a pillar of salt. And that is fit and natural, for if one has not a clear view of what is farther on, of what is worth seeing and hearing, of virtues, that is to say, and virtuous actions, but turns around to look at what is behind and at his back; if he pursues the deafness of glory, the blindness of wealth, the stupidity of bodily robustness, and the emptymindedness of external beauty, and all that is akin to these, he will be set up as a soulless pillar with its substance streaming down from it; for salt has no firmness. 1

And again, in De Fuga et Inventione: For a man who is led by innate and habitual laziness to pay no attention to his teacher neglects what lies in front of him, which would enable him to see and hear and use his other faculties for the observation of nature's facts. Instead he twists his neck and turns his face backwards, and his thoughts are all for the dark and hidden side - of life, that is, not of the body and its parts, and so he turns into a pillar and becomes like a deaf and lifeless stone. 2

To Philo, thus, the pillar of salt is both a result of moral apathy and a symbol of this apathy itself: the man who is indifferent to virtue is »a deaf and lifeless stone«. The exegetical approach to the story of Lot's wife, which Philo initiated is then shared, as Munier shows, by many Christian thinkers: Clement the Alexandrian, Tertullian, Origen (who compares Lot's wife to the Israelites who missed the Egyptian fleshpots and were doomed to die in the desert), Gregory Nazianzen, and Augustine, to mention a few of the names Munier quotes. Thus, the Christian version of the story equates looking back with the irrational drive to sensuality and evil, whereas Lot himself, never looking back, serves as an emblem of spiritual ascent. The look back, that is, is no arbitrary taboo, but a metaphor for a quite rational moral norm: the duty to resist bodily temptation and aspire to spiritual salvation. That is why there is no attempt here to explain the reasons that made Lot's wife break the rule. To be tempted by the senses needs no explanation. It is natural enough for humans to follow 1

2

See Charles Munier: La femme de Lot dans la littérature juive et chrétienne des premiers siècles. In: Cahiers de Biblia Patristica 2 (1989), 123-142. Cf. Philo: De Fuga et Inventione and De Somniis. Trans, by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. London: Heinemann 1934 (The Loeb Classical Library: Philo, vol. 5), De Somniis I, 247-248; The Loeb Philo, 427. Philo, De Fuga et Inventione (last note), 122; ibid., 77.

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their drives and neglect the demands of the spirit, or to fail to mobilize the inner strength needed for a spiritual exodus. 3 In addition, the punishment allotted to Lot's wife perfectly fits this moral scheme: her metamorphosis into a pillar of salt, rather than being a punishment for her deed, is another embodiment of the moral corruption that led to the deed in the first place. The pillar of salt, to return to Philo, stands for the human indifferent to spirit, »a deaf and lifeless stone«. The entire story - the prohibition, its violation, the ensuing punishment adds up in Philo and in its Christian allegorical version to an integrative moral fable. It is the story of Everyman, overcome by physical impulse, opting for sensual rather than spiritual pleasure, and ending up as what he has always been: a lifeless stone, a subhuman thing.

3 Interestingly, the Jewish exegesis of the same story is equally consistent in reading into it the other prohibition I mentioned. 4 The look back, rather than regression to the body, is understood as a forbidden glance into the unknown. The prohibition against it becomes accordingly a rejection of the desire to cross human boundaries and peep into Glory. Thus, in chapter 25 of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: >»Do not look backc he said to them, do not look back, for the Shekinah has come down to rain brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah.« Or the Midrash Aggadah: »For the Shekinah has come down to Sodom, and those whose heart craves harlotry cannot see the face of the Shekinah.« Or the Rashbam: »In order not to look unnecessarily at the angels and their acts, as is written: >We shall surely die, because we have seen God.«< And the Ramban: »I tend to say that when God overthrew these cities, the destructive angel was standing between heaven and earth in a flame, not unlike the angel of destruction whom David saw, and therefore they were not permitted to look« - etc. etc. That is not to say that the motive here attributed to Lot's wife is different from the sensual motivation of the Christian version. The Jewish sources, indeed, associate Lot's wife with a whole range of sensual temptations: homesickness, motherly sentiments, possessiveness, religious scepticism, even promiscuousness. 5 The prohibition itself, however, is directed , not at such mo3

4

5

The connection between the call to Abraham to leave his country (»Get thee out of thy country [...] unto a land that I will show thee«) and the prohibition to look back like Lot's wife is made by Leander of Seville. See: The Iberian Fathers. Martin of Braga, Paschasius of Dumium, Leander of Seville. Trans, by W. Barlow. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press 1969, 225-226. See Dov Noy: Lot's Wife Turning Back. A Contribution to the Study of the Motif of Punishment for Taboo Violation. In: Zer Ligvurot. Ed. by B. Lurie. Jerusalem: 1973, 20-37 (in Hebrew). I was also assisted on this matter by Dr. Ayala Amir. Ibid., 29-30.

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tives, but at the wish to know what is unknown, »to look at the angels and their acts«. It is, in other words, a pure taboo. It is so because it cannot be reduced to reason or ethics. It is not meant to stop man from turning back to base instinct and lead him forward to God, but is there for its own sake, beyond all rationale. Its only raison d'être is to preserve the absolute dichotomy between the human and the divine, to keep the creator strictly out of his creatures' comprehension. The unknown is meant to be unknown, and man is not allowed to encroach upon it. If he does, he must be punished. The advantage this reading has over the previous one lies in the fact that it is not only allegorical but literal as well. The story, beyond the look back and its metaphorical interpretation as an encroachment upon the unknown, explicitly involves a prohibition against looking at a divine act. If the former exposition of the look back as an attraction to evil and denial of the good is mere allegory, its second reading as a look at God (or at his acts mediated by the angels) is part of the literal meaning of the story. In terms of Romantic philosophy, this advantage can be described as the advantage of symbol over allegory. Thus, the story of Lot's wife not only signifies a prohibition against looking at God, but also participates in this meaning, enacts it in its materials, and is therefore a »symbol« of it. In the previous version, on the other hand, the denial of the good may be signified by the story, but is not included in its literal materials, and it remains cut off from it. Thus, it is mere »allegory«. The German Romantics - Goethe, Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel - invest allegory, on one hand, with a conceptual and finite meaning, and symbol, on the other, with infinite fullness and reverberation. Allegory, wrote their English disciple Coleridge, »is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturelanguage«, while the symbol »is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general - above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal«. (The Statesman's Manual) The »temporal« lot of the wife of Lot reflects infinity in that her individual case exists per se, but also touches on eternity, or rather on the unbridgeable gap between time and eternity. Lot's wife tries to bridge the gap by a single turn back, but the secret knowledge she gains is immediately deleted by her metamorphosis. The gap remains as valid as ever. This anagogical version of the story takes the narrative itself into account also in another sense. In the previous, moral version, the narrative signifies a situation rather than an event, and is therefore not really needed. Lot's wife, when turning into a pillar of salt, only turns into what she has always been: »a deaf and lifeless stone.« Her metamorphosis, rather than serving as punishment for her deed, is a mere further embodiment of the moral corruption which led to the deed. The narrative is a mere static image for the state of sinful humans. The other interpretation, on the other hand, centers on the dynamic transformation: prohibition, violation, and punishment are three acts in the drama of the unknown.

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Allow me a little digression which will make this clearer. Concerning another story of supernatural metamorphosis, Kafka's »Die Verwandlung«, some critics have likewise said that its protagonist Samsa is transformed only into what he has always been - a miserable insect, a human worm. Others, however, have claimed that it is precisely the surreal metamorphosis itself that is the center of the story, and the metaphorical reduction of the insect into a human worm would obviate the metamorphosis itself. For, why should it be necessary for Samsa to become what he has always been? This reduction, they say, destroys a story whose very essence is the surreal transformation by an unknown power. The case of the transformation of Lot's wife is similar. Its first interpretation reduces it to a moral allegory and may be said to obviate it, while the other insists on the narrative itself and puts the metamorphosis at its center: Lot's wife wants to transcend the human and is punished. An unknown and not-tobe-known power hovers over both literal interpretations - the surreal one of »Die Verwandlung« and the numinous one of the story of Lot's wife.

4 My digression to Kafka is not really a digression at all, for Kafka himself refers to the story of Lot's wife, though cursorily. This happens in a short aphorism from the fourth of his Eight Octavo Notebooks, miscellaneous fragments, aphorisms, and diary entries, posthumously published by Max Brod. The aphorism concerned is from February 1918: Can you know anything other than deception? If ever the deception is annihilated, you must not look in that direction or you will turn into a pillar of salt. 6

Three elements in this aphorism are borrowed from the story of Lot's wife: annihilation, the prohibition against looking at it, and the metamorphosis into a pillar of salt as a result of the violated prohibition. What is annihilated here is deception, analogical, it seems, to the »grave sin« of Sodom and Gomorrah. If man is warned not to look at the annihilation of deception, this is because deception is the only reality he can know. This calls for explanation. The aphorism implies that man can know only deception. What does this mean? To answer this question, a word must be said about Kafka's (somewhat vague) views on truth and untruth expressed in the Octavo Notebooks. 7 His basic assumption in this regard is that truth, which is 6

7

Franz Kafka: Dearest Father. Stories and Other Writings. Trans, by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Schocken 1954, 47. I owe some of my following thoughts to Kienlechner and to Robertson. See Sabina Kienlechner: Negativität der Erkenntnis im Werk Franz Kafkas. Eine Untersuchung zu seinem Denken anhand einiger später Texte. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1981 (Studien zur deutschen Literatur; 66); and Ritchie Robertson: Kafka. Judaism, Politics and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985.

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also the good, is self-sufficient and indivisible. As such, it cannot admit the split between knowing subject and known object which the act of cognition entails. It follows that truth can be conscious neither of itself nor of its opposite. Hence, the following formulations: Evil knows of the Good but Good does not know of Evil [...]. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has [...].Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.8

That is to say: while truth/the good lacks knowledge of itself and ipso facto of its negation, which is deception/evil, the latter has both self-knowledge and knowledge of its negation. Only deception can know truth. This applies, however, only to our own world. The truth, which here on earth can be known only from the perspective of deception, must be distinguished from another truth which, in some Utopian place, can exist without deception. In this world, humans (to return to the above aphorism) can know deception only. But, there is a place where they are given truth exempted from deception. If they are not allowed, according to the above aphorism, to witness the annihilation of deception, this is because this spells looking into a world of truth from which they are excluded. If the accessible truth, the truth known from the perspective of deception, is the truth gained by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the other truth, free from deception, will be gained only when humankind eats, at the end of days, the fruit of the Tree of Life. As stated in another aphorism: For us there exist two kinds of truth, as they are represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. The truth of the active principle and the truth of the static principle. In the first, Good separates itself off from Evil; the second is nothing but Good itself, knowing neither of Good nor of Evil. The first truth is given to us really, the second only intuitively. That is what it is so sad to see. The cheerful thing is that the first truth pertains to the fleeting moment, the second to eternity; and that, too, is why the first truth fades out in the light of the second. 9

The prohibition against witnessing the annihilation of deception is therefore a prohibition against witnessing the Utopian moment when the Tree of Life will replace the Tree of Knowledge, 1 0 or the second truth witnessing the first, or eternity time. The light of the flames devouring Sodom becomes the light of eternity devouring time, and Lot's wife looking back becomes humankind peeping into what is given to us »only intuitively« (Kafka says »ahnungsweise«, i. e. »as a hunch«), that is, peeping and paying for it. Wiser than Lot's 8 9 10

Kafka, Dearest Father (note 6), 75, 43. Ibid., 91. A similar connection between the prohibition to look back and eating from the Tree of Knowledge is made in the Hazzekuni by Hezekiah ben Manoah (13 th century): >»Do not look< - he warned him and all his, and therefore his wife suffered. And another example can be found in Genesis: >but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat< - that is, you and all yours, which is why Eve suffered.«

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wife (and more cowardly) is the »man from the country« in Kafka's »Before the Law«, who, reluctant to enter the radiance that streams from the gateway of the Law, stays behind. Thus, Kafka's reading of the story of Lot's wife can be said to conform to what we have claimed to be the Jewish reading. The concept of Lot's wife as embodying the failed ambition to cross the demarcation line between the human and the divine perfectly fits his dualistic world, the Kafkan loss of »Halakhah« (to use Benjamin's term), the unbridgeable gulf between Joseph K. and the Court, or K. and the Castle.

5 To what extent does the forbidden look back relate to aesthetic questions? If Kafka's version of Lot's wife has to do with the inaccessibility of ultimate truth, what are its implications for art, which, to Kafka, is »an expedition in search of the truth?« (»eine Expedition nach der Wahrheit« 1 1 ) Does the inaccessibility of truth spell the impossibility of art? The few aphorisms that deal, in the third Notebook, with art (and hence with poetry), place it vis-à-vis truth as vis-à-vis a source of blinding and burning light, like that which burned down the Sodomie deception: Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else [...] .Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before. 12

Unlike Lot's wife, and like the »Man from the Country«, art is reluctant to burn itself down. Because it knows that, belonging as it does to this world, it is necessarily divorced from the sphere of truth and can at most reflect it by way of the via negativa, with its back to it. Lot's wife, in such aesthetic terms, becomes the artist/poet who prefers Halakhah to Aggadah, or insists, against her own good, on painting truth itself: the divine act of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah or (in Kafka's phrase) the annihilation of deception. No wonder her painting stalls and she is transformed into a pillar of salt. A dialectical, more complex version of the relationship between art and truth is derived by the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, in his essay »Orpheus' Gaze«, from another mythical instance of the look back, the one found in the Orpheus and Eurydice story. 13 With all their differences, the two stories have in common the look back itself, as well as the triple pat11

12 13

Gustav Janouch: Gespräche mit Kafka. Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen. Erweiterte Ausgabe, Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer 1968, 99. Kafka, Dearest Father (note 6), 41, 87. Maurice Blanchot: Orpheus' Gaze. In: id., The Sirens' Song. Selected Essays. Ed. and with an Introduction by Gabriel Josipovici. Brighton: The Harvester Press 1982, 177-181.

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tern of prohibition, violation, and punishment. But, in the Orphic version, the look back occurs during an attempt to bring what is in the back, Eurydice, forward to this world, and it destroys that attempt. This allows for a complex treatment of Orpheus' act. Light and darkness, in Blanchot's essay, change the places they had in Kafka. The ultimate truth that Orpheus is after, when he goes down to the underworld, is not a blinding light, but »the heart of darkness«. 14 Orpheus's art, however, does not consist in breaking into the darkness only, but in »bringing it to the light and, in the light, giving it form and reality«. 15 Seeing the dark in the dark is not given to Orpheus; rather, he must avoid it. What the Greek myth tells us is that a work of art can only be achieved when the artist does not seek the experience of unrestrained intensity as an end in itself [...]. Intensity cannot be perceived face to face, but only concealed in the work of art. 16

When Orpheus breaks this rule, his work disintegrates and Eurydice returns among the shades. »His relation to Eurydice consists in nothing but his singing«, and he loses her »because he desires her beyond the limits prescribed by song«. 17 Paradoxically, however (such is the dialectic that informs art), [...] not to look back would be no less a betrayal. It would be a sign that he lacked faith in the unrestrained, reckless power of his purpose which is not to find Eurydice's daylight reality and superficial charm, but her nightmare darkness and elusiveness, her secret body and her inscrutable face. He does not wish to see her visibility but her invisibility [...] not to make her live but to perceive alive in her the fullness of her death. 18

This gaze, which forgets all laws and knows no restraint, is inspiration, the source of all authenticity. It is this gaze that destroys Orpheus and his art. »The moment of inspiration is, for art, the point of maximum insecurity.« 19 The forbidden look back is [...] precisely what Orpheus must do so that art may rise above what makes it certain - which can only be done by ignoring art and responding to an urge that emerges from darkness [...]. In this gaze art is lost. It is the one point where it is totally lost, where something more important than art, and more devoid of importance, emerges and exists. For Orpheus the work of art is everything - except the one look which destroys it. So that it is also only in this gaze that it can surpass itself, merge with its origin and assert itself in the impossible. 20

»Orpheus' gaze«, Blanchot declares at the culmination of his essay, 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Ibid., Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

177.

178. 177f. 179f. 180.

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[...] sets it [the sacred darkness] free, breaks its fetters and the rules containing and restraining its essence. Thus, Orpheus' gaze is a gesture of supreme freedom and frees him from himself and, what is more, frees his art, restores it to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which is freedom [...]. 21

Blanchot does not mention Kafka, a favorite writer of his, in »Orpheus' Gaze«. 22 But, it seems that Kafka's work was definitely in his mind. Orpheus' zigzag movement between darkness and light is Kafka's. This follows from another essay of his, »Kafka or the Demands of Literature«, which deals among other things with a conflict between two elements in Kafka: »spiritual monism« and »artistic idolatry«, which are not dissimilar to Benjamin's Halakhah and Aggadah. 23 The rich imagistic decor with which transcendence is clothed in The Castle, the detailed and realistic »bureaucratic phantasmagoria« of doubles, agents, assistants, and messengers, is, says Blanchot, merely the fruit of »impatience«, 24 of an impatient drive toward the goal, which »makes the goal inaccessible because it interposes accessible images and represents them as the goal«. Paradoxically, this impatience also spells restraint, for the drive toward the dangerous places of truth makes it necessary to cling to precise and restrained images. But »restraint is precisely what stops the work of art from ever achieving limitlessness«. 25 Thus, the work of art seeks its origin, »seeks the one place where it can become possible [...] and ceases to be possible as soon as the place has been located«. 26 Kafka, for Blanchot, has failed to achieve »limitlessness«, to restore his art (to go back to »Orpheus' Gaze«) to »its essence which is freedom«. 27 It seems he could not but fail, because art restored to freedom is also art that »ceases to be possible«. »Artistic idolatry« - image, fable, fiction - is inherently incapable of doing justice to »spiritual monism«.

21 22

23

24

25 26 27

Ibid., 181. Nor does he mention Rilke, another favorite. But Rilke's poem, »Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes«, is a perfect embodiment of (and inspiration for?) Blanchot's conception of this myth. Maurice Blanchot: Kafka or the Demands of Literature. In: id., The Sirens' Song (note 13), 121-143. See Franz Kafka, Octavo Notebooks: »There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness. Because of impatience they were driven out of Paradise, because of laziness they don't return. Perhaps, however, there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were driven out, because of impatience they don't return.« (Kafka, Dearest Father [note 6], 34) Blanchot, The Sirens' Song (note 13), 141. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 181.

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6 I started with Lot's wife, who turned back and became a pillar of salt, and concluded with the poet who turns to truth and stops being a poet. Underlying the various interpretations of the look back from Jewish sources to Kafka and Blanchot, there is a repeated pattern of intense aspiration towards the ultimate truth and no less intense pessimism about man's ability to reach it and go on living. Beyond this pattern, however, there is a complex dialectic between the aspiration and its failure. The aspiration itself is understood as its own failure, the yearning for the truth that underlies the spiritual journey is understood as the failure of that journey. In Blanchot's words, the move forward ceases to be possible as soon as it locates the place where it could become possible. When Lot's wife looks back at the annihilation of deception, she betrays the ascent to truth; when Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, he hinders his own progress. On the other hand, however, were it not for the annihilation of deception, the missed ascent would not have been possible, and the driving force of Orpheus' progress is his desire to reunite with Eurydice. This paradox becomes particularly manifest in the realm of art. Specifically in those arts which deal with truth and aim at representing it, the double function of truth as source of both inspiration and failure can be seen clearly. The tension between the reference to truth and aesthetic fiction, between what Blanchot calls »spiritual monism« and »artistic idolatry«, is familiar to every aspiring writer. The look back - either into oneself, as self-reflexiveness, or into metaphysical truths - nourishes writing, but also destroys it in exposing the fictive world as deceit and betrayal of its own origins. Lot's wife, like Orpheus, succumbs to this paradox. As artist, she has to look back, but once she does so, she can only perish.

Mark M. Anderson

Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions

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Zionism occupies a comparatively small place in Kafka's published writings. In his correspondence with Max Brod, an ardent Zionist since Martin Buber's Prague lectures on Judaism in 1909-1910, Kafka has surprisingly little to say about the topic. Nor is the vision of Zion, or any unnamed utopia, a conspicuous feature of his literary writings, which offer rather an appalling compendium of its opposite: exile, homelessness, and alienation. The one place Zionism plays an active role in his writing is in the correspondence with Felice Bauer. It appears at an early, indeed inaugural point in his letters to her and, though absent in name for long stretches, never really disappears. It is as if the idea of Zionism were inseparable from the idea of marriage and founding a family. Both prospects represented to him the decisive step into a community, a living Jewish community. Buber had spoken charismatically of Judaism as a life-giving spiritual essence. And the Talmud warned, as Kafka noted in his diary, that a man without a wife was not a human being. To an anxious, literarily ambitious but unproductive Jewish writer plagued by bodily ills and what he thought was the malady of urban life, both Zionism and marriage within Judaism represented the threshold to a new, healthier, if frightening existence, a break from the »Mütterchen mit Krallen« - the little mother with claws - that was Prague.1 »My name is Franz Kafka«, he wrote to Felice Bauer in September 1912, »and I am the person who greeted you for the first time at Director Brod's in Prague, the one who subsequently handed you across the table, one by one, photographs of a Thalia trip and who finally, with the very hand now striking the keys, held your hand, the one which confirmed a promise to accompany him next year to Palestine«. 2 This is the first sentence in a correspondence that will last more than five years, result in two engagements, and is broken off only with the outbreak of Kafka's tuberculosis and what he considered his physical incapacity for marriage. But what is the meaning of this promise to travel »next year to Palestine«? It means surely the Zionist voyage to »Eretz Israel« - the land of 1

2

Letter to Oskar Pollak, December, 20 1902. In: Franz Kafka: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans, by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken 1958, 5. Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice. Ed. by Erich Heller and Jürgen Bom. Trans, by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken 1973, 5

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Israel - and the promise of a new life there, far from the affluent but alienated conditions of Western Jewry in Prague and Berlin. But it means other things as well, as Kafka's insistence on the figure of hands suggests. By recalling the act of »handing« over the photographs, »one by one«, of »holding hands« and confirming a »promise«, Kafka conjures up both an erotic moment of intimacy and the solemn pledge of marriage (the request for her »hand«) that he will indeed make a short time later. But hands signify something else as well. At their first meeting in August Felice had told Kafka that she sometimes typed out the handwritten manuscripts of writer friends in Berlin - an admission that so startled him he beat his own hand against the table in astonishment. By identifying himself as the one whose »very hand now striking the keys held your hand«, Kafka joins their pledge to travel together »next year to Palestine«, perhaps as man and wife, to that strange commerce of writing that is soon to be established between them: a commerce of writing hands exchanging letters and gifts and stories, letters that are stories, and stories about letters that Kafka will give to Felice as a gift, as he does with »The Judgement«, the story he writes immediately after this first letter to her. Kafka's Zionist impulse in the letters to Felice Bauer is therefore more than a biographical motif. It has the density and complexity of a literary figure in which Zionism, marriage, his Jewish identity, and his work as a writer are inextricably entwined. Kafka himself, and many biographers and critics after him, tended to place marriage and writing as antagonistic opposites. But the figure of Zion suggests something very different, namely, that the yoking together of a new life in Palestine, marriage, and writing in a threshold state of virtual consummation the proximity of »next year« - responded to a single, powerful urge in Kafka at the deepest level. For this arrangement of his psychic and creative energies will mark the rest of his life as a Jew, a man, and a writer. He will never travel to Palestine or become an active, practicing Zionist like his friends Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann. He will never marry Felice, never have children or found a family, indeed never even buy his own apartment, preferring to live with his parents or in provisional, rented or borrowed quarters. And, although he will publish a few stories between 1912 and his death twelve years later, the bulk of his writing will remain unpublished and unread during his lifetime. He will remain, in sum, a virtual Zionist, a virtual husband, and a virtual author. This final point is apt to be controversial and deserves elaboration. Kafka's ambivalence toward publication is legendary and need not be recited here. But it is only half the story. As Gerhard Neumann first pointed out in an essay entitled »Werk oder Schrift?«, Kafka's relationship toward publication alternated between the intense desire, even lust (»Gier«), to see his texts printed, and an equally intense need to keep these writings in a private, or »semi-private« realm comprised of a few intimate friends. 3 These competing desires represent two

3

Gerhard Neumann: Werk oder Schrift? Vorüberlegungen zur Edition von Kafkas »Bericht für eine Akademie«. In: Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik - Reihe A: Kongressberichte 11 (1981), 154—173. Much of Neumann's work on Kafka

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quite distinct notions of the text. On the one hand is the »Werk«, the finished text that is signed by the author, submitted for publication and sent into the »traffic« of relations (»Verkehr«) with editors, printers, publishers, reviewers, critics, and readers - a traffic whose enabling condition is the fixed character of a text that can be infinitely reproduced for a potentially infinite number of readers. On the other hand is the »Schrift« - writing as an open-ended, exploratory, provisional act that need not respect conventional forms, genres, or even the demands of legibility, since strictly speaking, it is not an act of communication, even between the writer and himself. Also a form of »Verkehr«, this kind of writing corresponds to what Roland Barthes identified as the modernist écriture, or what Kafka himself described to Felice Bauer as a form of being, »Schriftstellersein«, of writing for the sake of writing. »Das Urteil« (The Judgement) is the classic example of the text as »Werk« in his literary production. He wrote it in a single night and almost immediately authorized its publication under his name, thus allowing it to circulate among readers as his literary property and identity. Das Schloß (The Castle) and Der Process (The Trial) by contrast are examples of the unfinished »Schrift«, epitomizing so many of the writings left in Kafka's Nachlaß - a first-draft, a hand-written manuscript that Kafka once described as originating more for the sake of being written than for being read. Though he read portions of it aloud to friends, it is a text he never published and that, according to written instructions to his literary executor Max Brod, should have been burned with his other writings after his death. It is in this sense that I describe Kafka as a virtual author: a writer, certainly, but one who consistently refrained from taking the decisive steps that would shift this »Lust am Schreiben«, the pleasure and jouissance of writing, into a form of ownership, copyrighted property, and fixed identity. »Schrift« is writing as a form of goal-less traveling or wandering, as an ongoing, open-ended »trial«, rather than the formally perfected, finished, legible »work«. This tendency toward the »Schrift« of virtual authorship is stronger than one commonly thinks, and poses fundamental obstacles to any edition of his writing. As executor of the »Nachlaß«, Brod attempted to minimize the »Schrift«-quality of Kafka's unpublished writings and establish them as »Werke«: first, by publishing them under Kafka's name, but also by providing them with titles, chapter headings, a table of contents (for the three novels), and standard German punctuation and orthography; in some cases he even added his own transitional sentences and endings. As he stated in the afterword to the second edition of Der Prozeß (The Trial): The overriding purpose [of the first edition] was to render accessible an autonomous poetical world, baffling in its nature and not a perfect whole. Everything which might have accentuated its fragmentary character and made it more difficult of approach was therefore avoided. 4

4

(though not the above essay) has been collected in: Franz Kafka. Schriftverkehr. Hg. von Wolf Kittler und Gerhard Neumann Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach 1990 (Rombach Wissenschaft: Reihe litterae). Franz Kafka: The Trial. Trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books 1974 ['1937], 272.

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As a result, much of what the general public thinks of as Kafka's »novels« and »stories« belongs to a much more ambiguous, fluid, generically unfixed form of writing. Even some of the stories that Kafka published during his lifetime cannot be classified unambiguously in the category of »Werke«. Kafka was rarely satisfied with his endings, and often continued writing and rewriting versions of a story that was already finished (such as »In the Penal Colony« and »A Report for an Academy«) in his diary, treating it like a living organism or ongoing project that required continued attention in the writer's private workshop.

2 The choice of Malcolm Pasley as chief editor of S. Fischer Verlag's Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe (KKA) - a surprising choice, insofar as Pasley was not a native German speaker and Kafka is arguably the most important modern German author - has had far reaching consequences for our current understanding of Kafka's texts. As a young German scholar in Oxford in the 1960s, Pasley was entrusted with the bulk of Kafka's manuscripts (including Das Schloß, though not Der Prozeß5), which had been deposited for safety reasons at the Bodleian Library. One of his first tasks was to prepare a scrupulous inventory and physical description of the »Nachlaß«. Later, he collaborated with the publisher and Kafka biographer, Klaus Wagenbach, in an attempt to fix the date of composition for all of the manuscripts and published writings, in part through analysis of material evidence such as watermarks, notebook format, and handwriting. 6 This close, sustained contact with the manuscripts led Pasley to early conclusions about the »semi-private« nature of Kafka's writing, its tendency toward self-reference, oblique autobiographical puns, and the coincidence between a text's signification and the material environment in which it was produced. 7 Before Derrida, and quite unconcerned with the structuralist emphasis on »le signifiant,« Pasley drew attention to the materiality of the signifier, which included the choice of writing instruments, quality and format of paper, the writer's immediate physical environment with its accidental »intrusions« into the writing process, and of course the writer's own body. In an article entitled »The Act of Writing and the Text: The Genesis of Kafka's Manuscripts«, Pasley

5

6

7

The manuscript of Der Prozeß remained in the hands of Max Brod's secretary until she had it auctioned off to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. This fact explains how the Stroemfeld Verlag was able to gain access to the novel for its edition; Pasley and the Bodleian Library gave S. Fischer unique access to the manuscripts, which are slowly coming into the public domain. Franz Kafka MSS: Description and Select Inedita. In: Modem Language Review 57 (1962), 53-59, and: Datierung sämtlicher Texte Franz Kafkas. In: Kafka-Symposion. Hg. von Jürgen Born et al. Berlin: Wagenbach 1965, 55-83. Malcolm Pasley: Kafka's Semi-private Games. In: Oxford German Studies 6 (1971/72), 112-131.

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noted Kafka's despair about »writing's lack of independence of the world«, his frustration at not being able to remove himself in his writing entirely from the external world: »Precisely because Kafka's works shut themselves off so emphatically from the empirical realities of life«, he wrote, »they often get caught up [...] in the manual conditions of their creation« and are thus all the more dependent on the »actual workshop« of writing and its material conditions. 8 When Pasley took charge of the Fischer critical edition, the stage was set therefore for an editing process that would be fully cognizant of the contingent, material aspects of Kafka's writing, its quality as manual and contingent »Schrift«, rather than the finished, perfected »Werk«. This orientation is reflected in the subtitle of the first volume of Pasley's 1982 edition of Das Schloß »in der Fassung der Handschrift« (»in the version of the manuscript«). This descriptive subtitle reflected Pasley's commitment to strip Max Brod's »corrections« from the original manuscript, which he regarded as the basis for the new edition. Kafka had not finished the novel, he noted, and many of Brod's interventions can now be recognized as unwarranted or unnecessary, even in those cases when Kafka's unusual or mistaken orthography and grammatical forms departed from conventional High German. If Kafka had readied The Castle for publication and copied it out for typesetting, he most probably would have [normalized his usage] - he placed great value on correct usage whenever he appeared before the public; but since it never came to a publication, these [departures from standard High German] must remain exactly as they appear in the manuscript. 9

This edition of Das Schloß wrought havoc with the prevailing understanding of Kafka's »anonymous« or »bureaucratic« use of the German language. Brod had praised his friend's stylistic perfectionism, his need to hone detail and rhythm that left him unsatisfied with the results and reluctant to publish. Wagenbach had spoken of Kafka's »paper German«, his formal, High German, which even evidenced bureaucratic qualities deriving from the position of the isolated German-speaking writers in the dominant Czech-speaking environment. Kafka's readers had tacitly accepted the notion of Kafka's linguistic anonymity, his deracinated, everyman-like, translated use of German. But in Pasley's edition of Das Schloß one encountered a text replete with regional expressions characteristic of Southern, Austrian German, or even of the local Pragerdeutsch. The edition localized Kafka. Few readers of Kafka had imagined what his voice sounded like. But here it was as if one could hear him speaking - not with a disembodied, impersonal, high German voice of indeterminate origin, but with an unmistakably Austrian, »Jewish« voice from Prague that betrayed the peculiar historical and sociological tensions of that period in Austrian history. This 8

9

Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle. Ed. by Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken 1989,214. Franz Kafka: Das Schloß. Roman in der Fassung der Handschrift. Hg. von Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1982, 501.

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spoken quality of the text is entirely in keeping with Pasley's view of the genesis of the writings. As he noted later with regard to Der Proceß in an essay significantly entitled »Die Handschrift redet« (»the manuscripts speaks«), the manuscript »even seems intended primarily for the ear, for an oral presentation, and it is well-known that Kafka read at least a few sections of the novel out loud to his friends. In this deeper sense the manuscript of >Der Proceß< speaks to us in an authentic voice.« 10 This impression of contingency and immediacy in the manuscripts was further strengthened by Pasley's strategic decision to reproduce Kafka's »mistakes« and idiosyncrasies: his quite personal spelling of »Teater« (without the »h« / »Theater«), for instance; or his frequent shortening of two-syllable infinitives like »gehen« into the monosyllabic »gehn«; or the tendency to omit or loosen standard punctuation in favor of a more freely flowing, »vocal« line. The prevailing notion of Kafka fostered by Brod as an obedient disciple of Duden thus gave way to an impression of spontaneous, unorthodox creativity. Regionalisms, personal idiosyncrasies, occasionally antiquated spellings, and »mistakes« brought us into what Pasley identified as Kafka's »workshop«, face to face (or rather ear to mouth) with the spontaneously declaiming master whose every utterance merited the editor's respectful attention. Though meant a bit ironically, my language here is faithful to Pasley's conception of Kafka as a kind of literary God, and of his own editorial labor as appropriate to the transmission of a sacred text. Indeed, modern editions all implicitly rely on this religious precedent. But this leads to a dilemma. If an editor is concerned only with the origin and interpretation of a »holy« text, every sign becomes significant. »God« cannot make mistakes, or rather, to speak with Freud, even his mistakes are »interesting«. The local, contingent, material qualities of language - its character as »Schrift« - come to the fore. On the other hand, insofar as the editor is concerned with the transmission of this text to other readers, and insofar as he is convinced (as Pasley was) that Kafka's deepest wish as a writer was to lift the world out of the realm of accident into the »Unveränderliche« (the »immutable«), as he claimed in a diary entry dated September 25, 1917, 11 then the text's quality as »Werk« must be privileged by effacing the manifestations of its errors and mere contingencies. For this reason Pasley and his team of co-editors made a series of strategic decisions, some of which have proved disastrous for the rigor and transparency of a critical edition. A few examples follow. Kafka's shortening of »gehen« into »gehn« was maintained because, according to Pasley, it was crucial for the rhythm and sound of the »spoken« text. His unorthodox punctuation was also maintained insofar as it affected the pace and movement of a sentence, in keeping with Pasley's view that one could gauge the degree of Kafka's inspira10 11

Franz Kafka: Der Proceß. Die Handschrift redet. Marbacher Magazin 52 (1990), 26. The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923. Ed. by Max Brod. Trans, by Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken 1948, 387.

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tion by the paucity of stops: when »possessed« by his writing, Kafka would start shedding punctuation - periods turned to commas, commas disappeared - and he literally started to fly along the page. But if the text displayed something Pasley could not justify, such as the opening of a parenthesis without its closing »partner«, or the lack of quotation marks around dialogue, the manuscript was »corrected«, sometimes without indicating that a change had been made. The impression of a certain editorial high-handedness was inescapable. Pasley uniformly changed Kafka's use of »ss« in place of the Germanic »ß« - thus rendering null and void Kafka's own decision to abandon the Gothic script of his childhood for the modern, European, non-Germanic script in which all his major literary works were written. This change was particularly unfortunate since it went against Kafka's explicit intentions and wiped away an entire stratum of German cultural history, when typefont was a locus of intense ideological conflict. 12 Pasley has been severely criticized for these interventions, with the rival press Stroemfeld/Roter Stern charging that S. Fischer's commercial interests fatally compromised the scholarly rigor of what was after all a critical edition financed in part with German taxpayer money. Shortly after publication of Das Schloß, I questioned Pasley about his normalization of the »ss«, and he answered that no German publisher would be willing to print an entire edition without it - thus clearly indicating the less than scholarly considerations shaping his work. 1 3 However, it is not correct to assume that the »lapses« in scholarly rigor derive solely from the publisher's need to produce a legible, marketable text. Two very different conceptions of Kafka the writer are at stake. Although keenly aware of the contingent, semi-private, »workshop« aspects of the unfinished writings, Pasley held finally to a deeply conservative notion of Kafka as exhibiting a will to transcend the mere personal, accidental realm of biography and history for the purity and truth of art. Even when Kafka had not succeeded or fallen short, Pasley felt, his deepest wish as a writer was to »lift the world into the pure, true, immutable«. 14 It is for this reason, it seems, that Pasley made the fateful decision at the outset of his work as editor of the KKA to reproduce Kafka's manuscripts as typographic texts rather than photographic facsimiles. Although labeled as being »in der Fassung der Handschrift«, the actual messiness of Kafka's handwritten texts, with its crossed-out words, inserts, corrections, and deletions, is magically transformed into the pure uniformity of type, with all deletions, corrections, and variants moved to the critical apparatus. The resulting textual impression 12

13 14

See my discussion of this issue in Mark M. Anderson: Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Clarendon 1992, 182. See also the catalogue to the interesting exhibition: Blackletter. Type and National Identity. Ed. by Peter Bain and Paul Shaw. With a Foreword by Lawrence Mirsky. New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1998. Verbal communication to me in Oxford, June 1984. Kafka, Diaries (note 11), 387; entry for September 25, 1917.

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abetted by the high-quality paper, generous margins and spacing, even the green silk ribbon as bookmark - is of biblical purity, order, and authority. As long as we stay in the text, as long as we do not wander into the rather forbidding and confusing realm of the »Apparatband«, we see or rather we hear the voice of a literary genius speaking directly to us. The hand of a virtual writer has been turned into the »authentic voice« of the author Franz Kafka. And the Fischer critical edition gives us access to this promised land, the »Zion« of writing.

3 In explicit, indeed polemical opposition to Pasley's edition for S. Fischer, the version of Kafka's Proceß published by Stroemfeld in 1997 under the editorship of Roland Reuss opted for a facsimile rendering of the manuscript with a »diplomatische Umschrift« or typescript on the facing page. 15 Whereas Pasley preferred the impression of the tablets of Moses, Reuss gives us a photographic image of Kafka's hand as it moves along the page, circling back to make a correction, attempting various narrative paths before finally finding its way. Everywhere we see the traces of Kafka's hand, the ease and speed and thickness of his pen strokes, or, alternatively, the cramped, halting, »frustrated« movements of his hand when he has trouble with the narrative flow. One has the impression of being with Kafka as he writes, peeking over his shoulder, spying into his most private thoughts. We have access to the novel, or so it seems, as pure »Schrift«, in its contingent presence, breaks, lapses, mistakes. In an article explaining his editorial principles, Reuss describes this notion of the text as »integral fragmentarisch«: his aim is to maintain the integrity of the text as unfinished fragment or, in Neumann's terms, as »Schrift«. Space will not allow for a full discussion of the radicality, at times bordering on fanaticism, with which Reuss has pursued this editorial goal. But two key features of the edition deserve mention. Pasley had held to the conventional notion that Kafka's Proceß manuscript was a novel, and that any novel has to have a strictly ordered sequence of chapters with a beginning, middle, and end. 16 While ordering the beginning and end posed little difficulty, the middle sections - many of them unfinished and displaying few causal narrative relations to the other chapters - were more problematic. Brod had solved the pro15

16

Der Process. Facsimile edition with CD-Rom. Ed by Roland Reuß with the assistance of Peter Staengle. Basel, Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld. This is the first volume of a projected complete edition, the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Handschriften, Drucke und Typoskripte / Franz Kafka. In this respect he followed Brod, who had recognized the uncertainty of the ordering of the middle chapters and resolved the difficulty by relying on his memory of discussions with Kafka, as well as on internal causal relations between the chapters. Brod has been criticized by several scholars, notably Uyttersprot, who argued for a reversal of Chapters 2 and 5.

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blem by referring to his memory of conversations with Kafka about the novel, although even he admitted the possibility of different orderings. Pasley took a much more circuitous route based on determining the probable order of composition of the various chapters, eventually settling on a sequence essentially unchanged from what Brod had put forth. (It is not clear however why the order of composition should say anything about the chronology of the different chapters, since, indeed, one of the first chapters Kafka wrote was »The End«.) Reuss took instead the radical step of suspending editorial judgment about the text's narrative sequence and reproducing the chapters as separately bound, unnumbered notebooks corresponding to the actual notebooks or »Hefte« that Kafka had used. The notebooks come in a box, and although inserted in some sort of sequence by the printer, normal usage quickly rearranges them into a different order that reproduces the uncertainty of ordering in the original notebooks at Kafka's death. This lets the reader decide, or not decide, the sequence of Josef K.'s wanderings throughout the strange spatial and temporal orders of the Court. The text is left in its fragmented, »open middle«, virtual state, without the reassuring table of contents and strictly ordered sequence that would allow readers to find their bearings. Readers are thus turned into perpetual wanderers looking for the proper path, their lack of orientation closely resembling that of Josef K. Reuss also disputes the genre category of novel, arguing that nothing in the manuscript explicitly indicates this classification and that Pasley had unwittingly adopted Brod's initial decision to make Kafka known as a great novelist, not just a »master of the short form«. Brod had invoked marketing considerations when first publishing Der Proceß, knowing full well the importance of genre in establishing a major author's visibility. Similar considerations seem to have guided Pasley's edition, which separates the novels (Der Proceß, Das Schloß, and Der Verschollene) from what it labels the »Nachgelassene Schriften« containing stories, diary entries, aphorisms, and shorter prose texts. Technically speaking, however, Kafka's »novels« also belong to the »nachgelassene Schriften« - editorial rigor would have demanded that they be included in this category. This is not mere quibbling. Since Kafka never explicitly wrote a title for the manuscript of what Pasley artfully referred to as the »Proceß-Roman« (rather than Der Proceß), Reuss goes so far as to reproduce this problem of a missing title on each notebook's cover, where the hand-written words »der Proceß« are reproduced with Kafka's own wavy line passing through them; the title is thus crossed out by the author, but still remains legible. Whether this editorial decision should be compared to a Hegelian »Aufhebung«, or to a postmodernist, Derridean representation »sous rature«, is open to debate, but it does for the title what the facsimile edition does for Kafka's text generally (the totality of which Kafka asked Brod to destroy), making his hesitation or indecision visible as such.17

17

Of course, Reuß's edition does not dispense completely with a title, which is reproduced as typescript on each notebook. Can a book be published and circulate in the modern world without a title?

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In short, Reuss has effectively produced the critical edition implicit in Pasley's description of the genesis of Kafka manuscripts in »The Act of Writing«, but undermined by his own editorial praxis for the Fischer KKA. There is a kind of reciprocity of interests between these rival editors. Just as Pasley's early critical work paved the way for Reuss's edition, so too does Reuss's facsimile edition allow us to place ourselves in Pasley's position as »keeper of the Graal« at the Bodleian library and recognize the validity of his description of K a f k a ' s writing process. To my knowledge Pasley never publicly responded to the editorial questions raised by this rival edition to his work. But, a certain pathos inherent in this situation cannot escape notice. For after more than two decades of uninterrupted labor on what was to be the definitive critical edition of Kafka, Pasley would have had to concede, I think, that Reuss has produced a more rigorous critical edition of Der Proceß than his own 1990 edition for S. Fischer. Not only does Reuss's version respect Pasley's stated criteria of preserving the »Handschrift« more faithfully than the KKA; it is also much easier to use, clarifies the editor's role, and democratizes access to the manuscript. Essentially, the Stroemfeld edition of Proceß turns all readers into editors, who are forever confronting the original manuscript as »Schrift.« Fidelity to the text is not the only reason Reuss has taken this direction. His notion of an edition that would be »integral fragmentarisch« is buttressed by an apocalyptic vision of history in which the text is always threatened with the possibility of extinction. This is true not only because of the fragile nature of some of the Kafka manuscripts, which are written in pencil strokes that are rapidly fading, and on crumbling sheets of paper. It is true because of the very historical events in Nazi Germany and modern Israel that have twice threatened the manuscripts with physical obliteration. »Given the violence of the last century with its destruction not only of people but also of texts«, Reuss intones, »anyone who has failed to understand that editing requires a catastrophic imagination, that is, the capacity to envision that the manuscript could disappear in the blink of an eye, could disintegrate or be burned, hasn't understood anything about our times«. 18 Hence Reuss's Kantian »editorial imperative«: »edit the text as if it would disappear with your glance at the manuscript. A reason for redemption.« 1 9 Of course, Reuss cannot completely preserve the contingency of the manuscripts as »Schriften«. The very fact of an edition transgresses Kafka's original »suspension« of the manuscripts by asking Brod to burn them rather than destroying them himself. Though more open, exploratory, and virtual than the S. Fischer critical edition, the Stroemfeld edition qua edition makes Kafka into

18

19

»genug Achtung vor der Schrift?« Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe. In: Text. Kritische Beiträge 1 (1995), 123-142, here 142. Ibid.

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a published author whose work can circulate in the traffic of readers, publishers, and critics. Literary property and copyright are very much an issue here, as the public spats between Stroemfeld, Fischer, the Bodleian Library, and Kafka's heirs have made clear. Indeed, Reuss's project is underwritten by a fundamental ambiguity that haunts all facsimile editions and is best explicated by Benjamin's notion of aura in the age of mechanical reproducibility. Even as the Stroemfeld edition insists on »uncompromising« rigor in reproducing Kafka's manuscripts in their material state and suspending editorial intervention, even as it reproduces more and more closely the condition of these manuscripts, its very status as a copy separates it from the original. One might speculate about improved techniques of reproduction that could reduce the gap between edition and original down to (almost) nothing: a facsimile in color, not just black and white; differentiated paper quality and format reproducing the texture of the originals; a higher grade of photographic realism allowing one to distinguish pen from pencil, watermarks, aging, texture, even odor. But does not the very search for such »adequation« betray a longing for the (lost) aura of Kafka's original, handwritten text? And would not perfect re-production of the manuscripts destroy them as originals? The »promised land« of the Stroemfeld critical edition remains just that: a promise of Zion that actual publishing practice must betray. This is not the only contradiction in the Stroemfeld edition, which is underwritten by a left-wing populist belief in the redemptive, revolutionary potential of Kafka's writing in a capitalist society. As with its earlier, equally scrupulous editions of Kleist and Hölderlin, absolute fidelity to the letter of Kafka's texts is understood as a subversive act, presumably because of some basic incompatibility between his writing's uncompromising iconoclasm and the conformism of »bourgeois« society. But here too the enterprise is riddled with paradox. For, on the one hand, Stroemfeld has democratized access to the Holy Grail of Kafka scholarship, putting ordinary readers in a position occupied until now by only a chosen few. This is a significant gain, appreciated best perhaps by scholars who have been denied access to the manuscripts by their various owners over the years. On the other hand, the cost of a sophisticated facsimile puts the edition out of the price range of most readers (the Stroemfeld Proceß costs 200 Euros - and this is only for one novel!), making the Fischer paperback edition a far more effective vehicle for bringing Kafka to a mass audience. One could of course put the entire edition on-line; a CD of Der Proceß already comes with the facsimile edition. But the quality of the screen image is, for now at least, vastly inferior to the paper version, and Reuss himself notes that the scrupulous reader of his edition will prefer the traditional medium of printed paper to a virtual copy on a computer screen. For all its high-tech sophistication and political rhetoric, the Stroemfeld edition is suffused with nostalgia for the aura of the original autographs, and in its own way makes a cult of the literary God Franz Kafka.

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4 The conventional view of Kafka as a solitary writer - »seul comme Franz Kafka« is the title of an early study by Marthe Robert - goes hand in hand with the notion of him as a »writer's writer,« who pursued his work with priest-like dedication, spurning the comfort and limitations of an ordinary life in society with a wife and family. His indisputable yearning for »community,« in this view, remained tragically unrealized; his efforts to marry, to found a family, or to commit himself to a particular social or political group (like Zionism) a noble failure. But Kafka did not simply reject »family« and »community« for a solitary writer's existence. He almost never lived alone, preferring to stay with his family in Prague (despite all its torments), which he left only when he moved to Berlin to live with Dora Dymant. All his life he maintained close, comradely ties with the circle of male friends that Brod portrays in the »Prague Circle«, especially Felix Weltsch and Oskar Baum, to which must be added his late friendships with younger men like Robert Klopstock and possibly Gustav Janouch. On vacation or in the many sanatoria he visited, as his letters, diaries, and the occasional group photographs indicate, he did not eschew contact with others. Consider for instance the photo of him at a sanatorium in Matliary in 1921: a bit reticent, off to the side, smiling shyly into the camera, but very much part of the group. Despite his often quoted identification with bachelor writers like Kleist, Grillparzer, and Flaubert, Kafka did not really exhibit the career-driven, misanthropic, exploitative dedication to his work that we recognize in those writers and that he sometimes criticized in himself. Without sentimentalizing his relations with others, we can note the humility, empathy, and openness with which he approached his fellow human beings - a direct correlate, it seems to me, of his indifference to, if not intolerance for, the powerful, wealthy, or famous. He exhibited none of the self-importance and social climbing we see in, say, Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann. In his own lifetime this openness toward the suffering of others made him something of an »eizes-Geber«, an advice-giver and trusted confidant for friends in need; he inspired unusual devotion, respect, and love. This basic goodness (there is no other word) is at the root of Max Brod's view of him as morally superior, as a kind of »saint«; and even Felice Bauer, the woman who might have justifiably complained of what he saw as his cold-blooded devotion to his work, always referred to her »Franz« in similar terms. Kafka's readers need not be concerned with such personalia, of course, but who would deny that a part of the fascination he exerts as a writer is linked to this fundamental ambivalence toward power, and the corresponding empathy for human pain, humiliation, and exclusion? What I have tried to suggest with the figure of »virtual Zion« is that we think of his relations with others in terms of this fundamental openness that allowed him to be both inside and outside a particular group, and further that this marginal position is key to an understanding of both the aesthetic and ethi-

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cal dynamics of his writing. Acutely aware of the mechanisms of exclusion, appropriation, and orthodoxy in any group formation, he remained on the margin, ostensibly uncommitted, unwilling to compromise his openness to other possible directions and social formations. At the same time the »Promise of Zion«, or of marriage and parenthood within Judaism animates his hopes and desires as virtual possibilities within his grasp - promises whose lure increases in proportion to the difficulty of keeping them. Kafka's early and sustained antipathy to the bourgeois domestic sphere he encountered at home - perhaps most arrestingly apparent in a story like »Die Verwandlung« (The Metamorphosis) - culminated in the stunning indictment of patriarchy in the »Letter to his Father« and his willingness to collaborate with the radical »anti-Oedipus« psychoanalyst Otto Gross in a journal dedicated to combating the »patriarchal will to power«. But this antipathy did not cause him simply to reject the family per se. Amidst the Zionist erotics of his five-year epistolary courtship with Felice, nothing is as strange or as characteristic as his desire to achieve sexual union, parenthood, and family à distance. He insists that Felice become involved with the Jewish Volksheim in Berlin, set up to care for the Jewish refugee children from Eastern Europe, and that she provide him with detailed written reports about the children and her activities with them. His attendance at the parent evenings organized by the Jewish community in Prague; his active interest in the founding of a Jewish elementary school, as well as in the education of his sisters' children; his relationship with Dora Dymant, which began in a colony for Jewish children from Eastern Europe - these and similar examples can be viewed as pieces of the same impulse toward »virtual parenthood«, as an alternative to the stultifying practices of his own father and mother. Georg Lukács famously dismissed Kafka as a decadent writer incompatible with the tenets of socialist realism - which did not stop the author of The Castle from becoming an underground, »cult« classic in the Soviet-dominated countries of Central Europe. Yet his popularity there did not result merely from his critique of totalitarianism and bureaucracy. His »decadent« work was also a protest against the very same capitalist, bourgeois alienation that had given rise to socialist sentiments in the first place, and hence eminently compatible with the humanitarian ethos and aspirations of a future socialist utopia. By the same token, Kafka's compatibility with Zionist ideals has been rejected because of his evident preoccupation with the themes of Western Diaspora Jewry: exile, isolation, guilt, and self-condemnation. Kafka's quite specific objections to certain forms of Zionist ideology should stand as a warning to those who would gloss over the differences separating him from committed Zionists like Hugo Bergmann and Gershom Scholem, for whom the existence of Arabs in Palestine rarely emerged as an impediment to the search for a Jewish homeland. At the same time one must ask why the poet of modern homelessness and exile does not have a deadening, hope-denying impact on his readers, inducing rather a life-sustaining, human responsiveness that is quite compatible with Zionist (as well as Utopian Socialist) beliefs. Figures like Gregor Samsa, cast

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out from the community of family and work; or K. in The Castle, whose efforts to integrate himself into village life are everywhere rebuffed; or Hunter Gracchus, whose boat wanders the seas of the Earth without ever being granted a permanent place of rest - these figures are driven on by the same longing for community, human love, and »home« that gave birth to historical Zionism in the context of European nationalism and organized anti-Semitism. In this sense »virtual Zion« undergirds almost everything he wrote; it is the Utopian negative of his unflinchingly precise renderings of the Galut. One might speak at greater length about the metaphysical, Messianic implications of Kafka's »commitment to non-commitment«, both in his writing and in his life. »Virtuality« has much to do with the Messianic openness toward the sacred, and to his quasi-Buddhist principle of believing in the divine without actively striving to reach it. Let us instead leave this question open and return to the last sentence of Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer. I suggest that we can now read his proposal not as the naive overture to an ultimately failed relationship, but as the uncannily prescient, remarkably exact account of what his life as a writer, and as a human being, would be: - »If doubts were raised«, he wrote about their project to travel to Palestine next year, »practical doubts I mean, about choosing me as a traveling companion, guide, encumbrance, tyrant, or whatever else I might turn into, there shouldn't be any prior objections to me as a correspondent [...] and as such, you might well give me a trial«. 20

20

Kafka, Letters to Felice (note 2), 5.

List of Contributors

Mark M. Anderson Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA Delphine Bechtel Faculté d'Études Germaniques, Centre Universitaire Malesherbes, 108, Bd Malesherbes 75017 Paris, France Alfred Bodenheimer Institut fur Jüdische Studien, Universität Basel, Leimenstrasse 48,4051 Basel, Switzerland Niels W. Bokhove Nachtegaalstraat 55B, NL-3581 AD, Utrecht, Netherlands David A. Brenner Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Satterfield Hall 109, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 44313, USA Iris Bruce Department of Modem Languages, Togo Salmon Hall 611, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L854M2, Canada Hans-Richard Eyl 58 Rehov Harlap, Jerusalem 92342, Israel MarkH. Gelber Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel Evelyn Goodman-Thau 1 HaRav Chen, Jerusalem 92514, Israel Andreas B. Kilcher Deutsches Seminar der Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 50, 72074 Tübingen, Germany

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List of Contributors

Vivian Liska Departement Letterkunde, Campus Drie Eiken, Universiteit Antwerpen, Universiteitsplein 1, BE-2610 Antwerpen (Wilrijk), Belgium Gabriel Moked Philosophy Department, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel Ritchie Robertson St. John's College, Oxford University, Oxford 0X1 3JP, United Kingdom Shimon Sandbank Derekh HaAkhayot 29, En Kerem, Jerusalem 95744, Israel Gershon Shaked Rehov Tirza 14, Jerusalem 96186, Israel Scott Spector Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 3110 MLB, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275, USA Benno Wagner Fachbereich 3 / AL, Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaften, Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Siegen, Adolf-Reichwein-Straße 2, 57076 Siegen, Germany

Index

Aaronsohn, Aaron 30 Abels, Norbert 73 Abraham, Karl 216 Agnon, S. J. 118, 150, 153-156, 2 3 9 257 Ahad Ha'am 13, 14, 24, 29, 112, 134, 228 Altenberg, Peter 240, 286 Alter, Robert 61,207, 243,250, 2 5 5 256 Althusser, Louis 223 Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton) 216-217 Amir, Ayala 299 Anderson, Mark M. 2, 138, 192, 2 0 9 210,216-217, 294,313 Anz, Thomas 230 Arnstein, Erwin 122, 124 Asch, Scholem 118-119 Augustine 290,298 Averbuch-Orpaz, Yitzhak 150 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 74 Baeck, Leo 143,290-291 Barsch, Claus-Ekkehard 3 1 , 2 8 3 , 2 8 5 Bäuml, Max 272 Bahr, Ehrhard 286 Baioni, Giuliano 2, 12, 26, 70, 91, 97 Balibar, Etienne 223 Balzac, Honoré 249 Banse, Ewald 222-223 Barzel, Hillel 4 Baudy, N. 56 Bauer, Feiice 3, 18-23, 29-30, 33-34, 37-39, 41, 45, 52, 55-56, 62, 65, 6 9 , 7 1 , 8 4 , 115-120, 128, 134, 169, 172-173, 242, 270, 307-308, 3 1 8 320 Baum, Oskar 59, 64, 73, 141, 318 Becker, Rafael 74 Beer-Hoffmann, Richard 240

Bein, Alex 53 Beller, Steven 239 Ben-David, Yoram 269 Ben-Gurion, David 35 Benjamin, Walter 64, 90, 220-221, 224-225, 253, 267-268, 283, 289, 303,305,317 Ben-David, Yoram 269 Ben-Tovim, Puah 5 4 , 2 6 1 , 2 6 4 Bergmann, Else 269 Bergmann, Hugo 3 ^ , 9-18,23-25, 3 0 31,47-48, 5 4 - 5 5 , 5 8 - 5 9 , 112-113, 125, 127-128, 134, 170, 244, 248, 261,269, 2 8 1 , 3 0 8 , 3 1 9 Biale, David 291 Bin-Gorion, Micha 112,208 Binder, Harmut 2, 25, 28, 30, 32-33, 3 8 - 3 9 , 4 3 , 4 5 , 4 8 , 53, 70,97-98,104, 113, 121-123,260-262, 270 Birnbaum, Nathan 25, 28, 143 Blanchot, Maurice 297-306 Bloch, Grete 36,51 Bloch, Hans 51,136 Bloom, Harold 66 Blüher, Hans 4 , 7 4 , 2 3 8 Blumenfeld, Kurt 28-29 Boa, Elizabeth 292 Bodenheimer, Alfred 125 Böhm, Adolf 29, 36, 134, 228 Bokhove, Niels 4 0 , 5 6 , 1 2 3 Boonstra, Baukje 48 Borges, Jorge Luis 150,155 Borman, Stuart 11 Born, Jürgen 25-26, 28-30, 36, 38, 43, 4 7 - 4 8 , 5 1 , 128,134, 142 Boyarín, Daniel 21, 207-209, 214, 291 Brahe, Tycho 287-289 Brecht, Bertolt 221,237 Breines, Paul 21

324 Brenner, Yossef Chaim 3,154-156, 245, 270 Brod, Elsa 131,292 Brod, Max 2-4, 8, 14, 16-18, 23-41, 4 3 ^ 6 , 48^19, 51, 53-54, 57, 59-61, 64-65, 71-72, 75-76, 79-85, 96-98, 100-101, 107-109, 111-112, 1 Μ Ι 16, 118, 120-123, 125, 128, 130, 134, 139,141, 168-170,207,210, 218, 244, 248, 260, 268, 271-281, 283-296, 301, 307-312, 314-316, 318 Brössler, Rosa 144 Brössler, Walter 144 Bruce, Iris 51,54,61,132,136 Buber, Martin 3, 9, 12-16, 25-26, 3031,37,47,81,86, 88, 112, 116, 125, 155, 170, 223, 232, 278-279, 286, 290, 307 Bunyan, John 250 Camus, Albert 149-150,154 Carmely, Klara Pomeranz 18,130 Cassirer, Ernst 161-165,177 Cavarocchi Arbib, Marina 290 Celan, Paul 204 Cervantes de Saavedra, Miguel de 249 Chickering, Roger 16 Columbus, Christoph 223 Clement the Alexandrian 298 Comte, Auguste 163-164 Czaczkes, Shalom Mordecai 242 Damaschke, Adolf 48^19,53 Dante Alighieri 291 Daviau, Donald G. 286 David, Aharon 52 Deleuze, Gilles 70, 89-90, 220 Derrida, Jacques 202-204, 310 Descartes, René 167 Deutscher, Isaac 35 Diamant, David 57 Diamant, Dora 3, 18, 55-57, 242,318319 Diamant, Herschel 57 Diamant, Kathi 56 Diamant, Zwi 57 Dickens, Charles 119 Dietz, Ludwig 248 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 151 Dov Ber (of Lubavich) 135,217

Index Dowden, Stephen D. 292 Dreyfus, Alfred 224 Dubrovic, Milan 72 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 207-211, 213-216,218 Einstein, Albert 152 Eisner, Minze 34, 48-50, 125 Engel, Alfred 114 Fabre-Vassas, Christine 190 Fanta, Bertha 15 Faulkner, William 151 Feder, Richard 142-143 Fingerhut, Karl-Heinz 220, 284 Flaubert, Gustave 174, 249, 286, 318 Fleischmann, Gustav 124 Fontane, Theodor 287 Foucault, Michel 220, 235 Franz Joseph I 241 Frauenstädt, Julius 43 Freud, Sigmund 69-70, 74, 152, 172, 175, 196, 202-204, 207-209, 214218, 241,266, 268 Fromer, Jakob 28 Fuchs, Rudolf 71 Ganot, Suzi 1 Geisel, Eike 37 Gelber, Mark H. 4,31, 80, 225-226, 283, 289 Geller, Jay 191 Genette, Gerard 82 Gennep, Arnold van 194 Gilman, Sander L. 2, 4, 74, 76, 128, 138, 191 Gnessin, Uri Nissan 153-155 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 156,238, 271,300 Gogol, Nikolai 150,249 Goldstücker, Eduard 2 Goodman-Thau, Eveline 166,168, 170, 182-183 Gordon, Aharon David 47, 50 Gordon, S. L. 263 Gottgetreu, Erich 48 Graetz, Heinrich 28,290 Green, Martin 75 Grillparzer, Franz 174, 318 Grözinger, Karl Erich 207, 211, 217, 251

325

Index Gross, Otto 7 0 - 7 5 , 7 8 , 8 2 , 3 1 9 Grünthal, Julius 55 Guattari, Félix 70, 89-90, 220 Günther, Christine 1 Günther, Hans F. Κ. 17 Guthke, Karl S. 285 Guttmann, Julius 55 Hacek, Jaroslav 285 Hadomi, Leah 284 Hamsun, Knut 249 Harshav, Benjamin 264 Hauptmann, Gerhart 286-287 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 167 Heidegger, Martin 149, 159, 167 Heidsieck, Arnold 290, 29Φ-295 Heller, Erich 293 Heraclite 161 Hermann, Felix 189 Hermann, Leo 97 Herrmann, Hugo 118 Hertzka, Theodor 235 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 194 Herzl, Theodor 1 3 , 2 4 , 3 1 , 3 5 - 3 6 , 5 1 , 76, 87, 128, 141, 143,207, 2 2 4 229, 231-232, 234-236, 238, 2 7 8 279 Hess, Moses 24 Hesse, Hermann 286-287 Heuer, Gottfried 72 Hillmann, Heinz 219-220 Hodin, Josef Paul 52 Hoeflich, Eugen 266 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 249 Hoffmann, Werner 47 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 240-241 Hölderlin, Friedrich 317 Holtz, Avraham 252 Homer 249 Horácek, Κ. 34 Hurwicz, Elias 81 Hurwitz, Emanuel 74, 78 Husserl, Edmund 167 Isenberg, Noah

130, 135

Janácek, Leos 285 Janouch, Gustav 50,261,303,318 Jaspers, Karl 167 Jeiteles, Jonas 143 Jens, Walter 61

Jesenská, Milena 3 9 , 4 1 - 4 2 , 5 2 , 6 0 , 64-65, 71-72, 86, 131, 242, 292, 295 Jirásková, Jana 48 Jofen, Jean 129-130 Joseph I 239 Josipovici, Gabriel 129 Joyce, James 151, 249 Jung, C . G . 70,216-217 Jungk, Peter Stephan 41,72 Kafka, Elli 55, 84, 123 Kafka, Ottla 33, 39, 43,45,48, 52, 55, 114, 125 Kafka, Valli 122, 142-143 Kant, Immanuel 167 Kauf, Robert 126, 129 Kaznelson, Siegmund 80 Kepler, Johannes 287-289 Kesten, Hermann 71 Kienlechner, Sabina 301 Kierkegaard, Seren 42, 147-150, 160, 291 Kieval, Hillel J. 11,14,108,111 Kilcher, Andreas B. 70, 82, 85-86, 262 Kleist, Heinrich von 73, 150-152, 317318 Klimt, Gustav 240 Klopstock, Robert 52, 54, 74, 112, 135, 266, 269,318 Klug, Flora 27 Koch, Hans-Gerd 125 Kohn, Hans 12,25 Kohn, Viktor 121 Kohn-Trattner, Amira 122,144 Kohner, Walter 232-233 Korda, Ben 124, 144 Kornfeld, Paul 4 , 7 2 Korselt, Karel 48 Korselt, Vojtëch 48 Kotyk-Marková, Marta 72 Kraft, Werner 4 , 2 2 5 , 2 7 7 Krantz, Fred 139 Kraus, J. S. 111 Kraus, Jiri 144 Kraus, Karl 17,64,76-77 Kremer, Detlef 82 Kugel, Chaim 125 Kuh, Anton 69-88 Kuh, Marianne 72-73 Kuh, Nina 73 Kurz, Gerhard 1

326 Kurzweil, Baruch 252 Lagarde, Paul de 226-227 Landauer, Gustav 37,116 Langer, Jírí 38, 195, 218, 261, 263 Le Breton, David 194 Lehmann, Siegfried 3, 37, 117, 278 Lehner, Ulrike 71 Lessing, Theodor 76 Lévinas, Emmanuel 63 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 223 Lichtheim, Richard 128 Lichtwitz, Hans 16 Liebermann, Mischket 35, 54 Low, Hugo 29 Loewy, Yitzhak 3, 19, 27-28, 93, 95, 189, 193, 245, 264 Lorencova, Anna 144 Lorm, Hieronymus 30 Lowenthal, E. G. 49 Lublinski, Samuel 38 Lukács, Georg 319 Luther, Martin 215,290,291 Mahler, Gustav 240 Mandelstamm, Max 30,128-129,131 Mann, Thomas 155,287,318 Marx, Karl 152 Masaryk, Tomas Garrigue 17 Maschek, Karel 48 Mauss, Marcel 193 Mautner, Friedrich 30 McLaughlin, Thomas 7 Meir, Shlomo 1 Mendele Moykher Sforim 130-131 Mendes-Flohr, Paul 1, 12, 170 Menczel-Ben-Tovim, Puah 55 Michaels, Jennifer E. 75 Milfull, Helen 23 Mocker, Svatopluk 34 Mosès, Stéphane 220-221, 262 Mosse, George L. 11-12, 21 Mossinsohn, B. 36 Munier, Charles 298 Nazianzen, Gregory 298 Neill, A. S. 123 Neumann, Gerhard 57, 62, 308-309, 314 Nietzsche, Friedrich 78,82,87,165, 167, 201, 222, 288

Index Nordau, Max 13,21,209,233,237-238 Northey, Anthony 67,223 Novák, Arne 8 Noy, Dov 299 Oppenheimer, Franz 222 Origen 298 Paige, Jeffery M. 202 Paige, Karen Ericksen 202 Parik, Arno 143-144 Pascal, Blaise 73 Pasley, Malcolm 199,310-316 Paulus 290-291,295 Pawel, Ernst 61 Pazi, Margarita 44, 283-285, 287 Pelikan-Strauss, Nina 216 Peretz, Isaac Leib 119,217 Pfister, Oscar 69 Philo 298-299 Pinès, Meyer Isser 28,127 Piaton 223,236-237,272 Plessner, Helmut 237 Polak, Ernst 72 Politzer, Heinz 212,216 Pollak, Isidor 263 Pollak, Oskar 20, 32-33, 60, 307 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef 31 Proust, Marcel 151,249 Rabbi Akiba 291 Rabbi Low 204 Rabbi Mendele of Kotsk 152 Rabbi Nachman of Breslav 152 Rabelais 248 Rabinowicz, Aharon Moshe 110, 120, 124 Rajec, Elisabeth M. 294 Raschi 69 Rath, Moses 260, 263, 265-266 Reed, Terence Jim 44 Reik, Theodor 70,196 Reiß, Fanny 115 Reuß, Roland 314-317 Rilke, Rainer Maria 305 Ripellino, Angelo Maria 8 Robert, Marthe 92-93, 95, 129, 132, 248,318 Robertson, Ritchie 18, 61-62, 91, 100, 130, 132, 201, 248, 251, 284, 292, 301

Index Roheim, Geza 196 Ronell, Avital 241 Rosenzweig, Franz 262 Roth, Joseph 240 Roth, Philip 60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 225 Rudolf II 288 Ruppin, Arthur 30, 36, 53, 223 Rybar, Citibor 141 Salda, F. X. 8 Salomon, M. G. 191 Sanzara, Rahel 48 Sartre, Jean-Paul 149-150 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 300 Schiele, Egon 240 Schillemeit, Jost 290 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 300 Schneider, J. 48 Schnitzer, Moriz 33, 58 Schnitzler, Arthur 33, 285, 287-288 Schnitzler, Peter 240-241 Schocken, Salman 4, 35, 242 Schönberg, Arnold 240 Scholem Aleichem 35, 54, 118, 143 Scholem, Gershom 3 7 , 1 1 6 - 1 1 8 , 164, 186-187, 207, 220-221, 250251,253,262,267-268,277,289, . 319 Schopenhauer, Arthur 43 Schorske, Carl E. 241 Schreber, Daniel 208-209, 215-216, 218 Schulz, Bruno 149,153 Sedlácek, Jaroslav 263 Seferens, Horst 229-230 Shapira, Anita 130 Shapira, Yael 239 Sheppard, Richard 292, 294 Sicher, Gustav 143 Sijde, Nico van der 63 Simon, Alexander Moritz 49 Simon, Hermann 116, 144 Sladky, Mathilde 32 Sokel, Walter 2 Sokolow, Nahum 36 Sole, Aryeh 120, 124-125 Spenser, Edmund 250 Spinoza, Baruch 35,44 Spitzer, Moshe 47

327 Stein, Hugo 113 Steiner, George 66 Steiner, Marianne 122-124,144 Steiner, Rudolf 43 Stern, Joseph Peter 8 Stölzl, Christoph 64, 111 Strassfeld, Michael 213 Tal, Josef 55 Tarde, Gabriel 222-223 Taufer, Barbara 1 Templer-Kuh, Sophie 72 Tertullian 298 Theilhaber, Felix 28 Thieberger, Friedrich 64, 261, 263 Thoma, Hans 33 Thon, Ossias 30 Thüring, Hubert 87 Tismar, Jens 126 Tochner, Meshulam 252 Tönnies, Ferdinand 42 Toker, Leona 239 Tolkowsky, S. 36 Tolstoy, Leo 47^18, 154, 249 Torczyner, Harry 55 Trebitsch, Arthur 77 Trietsch, Davis 29 Tschissik, Mania 27 Urzidil, Johannes 64, 73, 79 Uyttersprot, Herman 314 Vanëk, Zdenko 23 Vidas, Elijahu de 251 Viertel, Berthold 79 Vries, Theun de 35 Wagenbach, Klaus 310-311 Wagner, Benno 220, 223, 230 Wagner, Richard 138,225-227 Wagnerová, Alena 32, 72 Walser, Robert 286-287 Wambach, Lovis M. 295 Wassermann, Jakob 287 Weiner, Gustav 263 Weininger, Otto 64, 73-74, 76-77, 208209,218, 241 Weinstein, Leo 126 Weiser, Raphael 261-262 Weiß, Ernst 48 Weizmann, Chaim 35

328 Weltsch, Felix 3, 11, 15-17, 24, 30-31, 44, 56-57, 59, 79-84, 119-120, 122, 128, 130, 248, 284,318 Weltsch, Lise 35 Weltsch, Robert 15, 18, 30, 37, 47^18, 55,81 Welzig, Werner 2 Werfel, Franz 8, 41-42, 71-73, 116, 244, 285-287, 289 Wiesenfeld, Moses 285 Wilson, Woodrow 230 Wistrich, Robert S. 239 Wittel, Fritz 74

Index Wohryzek, Julie 279 Wolfenstein, Alfred 285-287 Wolff, Kurt 285 Wolffsohn, David 233 Woolf, Virginia 151 Yehoshua, A. B.

150

Zemach, Shlomo 51 Zimmermann, Hans Dieter 57, 61-62, 67, 294-295 Zischler, Hanns 222-223 Zweig, Stefan 286,318