Kafka, transparence et opacité



Le présent ouvrage rassemble les actes du colloque «Sillage de Kafka» organisé à l’Université de Paris-X-Nanterre de mars 2004.

Dans sa préface, Philippe Zard écrit que Kafka est devenu un « lieu commun », ne serait-ce que par l’usage de l’adjectif « kafkaïen » à propos de telle ou telle complication administrative, ou bien même de l’horreur nazie, comme si celle-ci avait été proprement annoncée par des œuvres de Kafka, plusieurs d’entre elles « rappelant » évidemment l’univers concentrationnaire. D’où l’idée d’une confrontation entre l’œuvre de Kafka et le monde qui lui ressemblerait, et l’hypothèse que la littérature moderne ne cesserait de revenir à cette confrontation. Ce « sillage », ce serait la trace ou les traces que l’œuvre de Kafka ne cesserait d’imprimer dans la littérature postérieure, et qu’il s’agit de reconnaître.

Il n’est pas ici simplement question de l’« influence » de l’auteur pragois, mais d’une présence quasi obsédante et de la figure qu’il représente, et de certains motifs de son œuvre, emblématiques de ce que fut et est l’histoire moderne, surtout après Kafka.

Dès sa mort, un mythe est apparu, qui a pris forme dans des récits de contemporains, voire même, plus récemment, dans des films, comme le montre Jean Cléder dans son article intitulé «Kafka au « service» du film de genre: emprise et reprise du mythe «kafkaïen» dans Kafka de Steven Soderbergh». Cette figure cinématographique est au fond la transposition du mythe littéraire qu’est devenu très vite l’auteur de La métamorphose. Dans son étude, «Kafka, personnage de fiction», Gérard-Georges Lemaire revient à la genèse de ce mythe. Il montre notamment que, de son vivant, la figure de Kafka était connue dans les cercles littéraires pragois, alors que l’écrivain n’avait publié que six courts textes et un article. La présence d’une centaine de personnes à son enterrement en juin 1924 en témoigne : incarnant pour beaucoup la culture des Juifs de Prague en déclin après la fondation de la République tchécoslovaque, «Kafka avait d’ores et déjà frappé les imaginations avant même d’avoir pu le faire avec sa littérature», écrit Lemaire. L’écrivain était déjà devenu un personnage de fiction de son vivant, personnage que d’autres écrivains après lui déclinèrent de différentes manières. Le premier fut Max Brod, l’ami fidèle et éditeur posthume, qui, quatre ans après la mort de Kafka, a publié un roman intitulé Le Royaume enchanté de l’amour, dans lequel un personnage, Eric Garta, se révèle être un double de l’écrivain pragois, double qui s’oriente vers le sionisme et serait en cela «l’accomplissement du désir de Kafka». Première fiction à partir du personnage Kafka qui enrôle celui-ci dans une cause ou une idéologie et génère une série d’interprétations de son œuvre qui en effacent la complexité.

Sans en faire une figure présente dans son œuvre, Henri Michaux a lu Kafka, d’abord la traduction espagnole de La métamorphose alors qu’il se trouve en Equateur en 1928, ensuite, à son retour en France, dans la traduction française d’Alexandre Vialatte parue dans la N.R.F. Il a découvert plus tard la Lettre à son père, et déclare à Robert Bréchon dans un entretien : «Dans ce texte, d’ailleurs capital, le manque d’insoumission m’éberlue et m’indigne». Dans son article, Chantal Colomb-Guillaume fait le point sur cette réception critique, montrant les accents kafkaïens de certains textes de Michaux, notamment dans Plume ou dans Apparitions, mais en mettant en exergue la remarque du poète concernant l’absence d’esprit de révolte chez Kafka.

Cette critique est également présente chez Günther Anders qui, dans un essai intitulé Kafka, Pour ou contre, intente un procès à l’écrivain, comme le montre Béatrice Jougy dans son étude «Kafka, cet oiseau de malheur: Günther Anders contre Franz Kafka». Pour Anders, l’auteur tchèque est un défaitiste et serait un apôtre de la soumission et du sacrifice, le refus des ordres donnés par une autorité toute-puissante n’ayant pour lui aucun sens.

La réception de Kafka a pu produire également des contresens d’ordre théorique, comme le montre Marie-Odile Thirouin à propos de la lecture de Deleuze et Guattari dans leur essai Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. D’une part les deux philosophes reprennent la traduction de l’expression de Kafka, «kleine Literatur», en «littérature mineure», alors qu’il faudrait parler de «petite littérature»; d’autre part, cette expression sous la plume de l’auteur de langue allemande renvoyait à la littérature tchèque, et non aux auteurs juifs de langue allemande. Ici l’ignorance du contexte par Deleuze et Guattari conduit à un contresens, certes productif sur le plan conceptuel, mais peu respectueux de la pensée réelle de Kafka.

Cette propension de certains éminents lecteurs à faire de Kafka soit un auteur égocentrique et négatif, prônant la passivité face à l’injustice, soit un théoricien de la «littérature mineure», amène à s’interroger sur la nature même de l’écriture kafkaïenne, laquelle, à travers une série de paraboles, ou suite à des erreurs de traduction, peut conduire à plusieurs interprétations opposées. C’est au fond la complexité de la situation de Kafka, aussi bien intellectuellement que culturellement, qui est exposée ici à plusieurs reprises.

On notera la présence dans ce volume de plusieurs études se questionnant sur la proximité de tel auteur avec Kafka (notamment en ce qui concerne les «machines à supplice» chez Kafka et Beckett, analysées par Erik Leborgne), des écrivains de la modernité comme Borges, Sartre ou Perec étant bien sûr attachés à cette œuvre. Mais c’est bien la question de la compréhension de l’œuvre dans le contexte qui est le nôtre qui semble essentielle ici, comme le montre Hélène Kuntz dans son article, «Kafka contre Brecht. Le modèle kafkaïen à l’épreuve des «éboulements de l’histoire la plus récente» chez Heiner Müller. C’est en effet l’opacité qui intéresse Müller chez Kafka, écrivain dégagé de tout «système référentiel» qui attribuerait à chaque histoire ou œuvre une signification unique. Les récits de Kafka sont opaques parce qu’ils sont débarrassés de toute morale, contrairement aux pièces de Brecht, transparentes dans le contexte historique dont elles se réclament. «L’œuvre de Kafka, écrit Hélène Kuntz, devient dès lors le modèle d’un réalisme qui emprunte d’autres voies que celles ouvertes à la fin du XIXe siècle, un réalisme qui joue d’opacité et non de transparence, qui revendique l’aveuglement au lieu de la lucidité».

Laurent Margantin

— Fabula



Kafka and judaism



Franz Kafka was born a Jew and remained a Jew all his life, Nevertheless, his friends were almost all Jewish, as were all but a couple of his girlfriends. Judaism plays a Key though usually hidden role in many of his stories, such as in "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," the "mouse folk" presumably being the Jews, who are depicted as widely scattered, hard-working, facing great dangers they always manage to overcome, and, interestingly.

The situation for Jews in Bohemia at the turn of the century seems to have been one of somewhat suspicious tolerance most of the time, with exceptions such as the 1899 anti-Semitic riots in Prague, which wiped out many stores owned by Jewish shopkeepers. Kafka's father, who himself owned a shop, had registered his family as Czech nationals, and so escaped destruction. Jews were resented by the Czech-speaking majority as being part of the German-speaking elite, who made up a bit less than 10% of the population in Prague, yet had most of the power, wealth and prestige. In point of fact, better than half of the German-speaking population in Prague was in fact Jewish, although they mostly belonged to the middle, not the upper classes. The German elites in power in the Austro-Hungarian Empire also distrusted the Jews, one reason being that their political views tended to be more liberal than the German nationalism favored by the elites. And of course the insidious stereotypes of the Jews as shifty, conniving, physically weak, money-grubbing, etc., etc. were still widely held by most—so insidious that even some of the Jews themselves began to believe they were true.

For centuries Jews had been living in the old ghetto in Prague, the Josefstadt, which had been one of the most important in Europe. By the 19th century most German Jews had decided to assimilate themselves to the prevailing culture around them, hoping that in this way they would no longer be seen as "outsiders" and hence would gain rights traditionally denied to them. They dropped the old clothes, the "exotic" behaviors, and the use of Yiddish. This proved successful in gaining them emancipation, which was completed in 1860, but along the way much of the centuries-old heritage and traditions were lost. Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden, living in countries like Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European nations did not try to assimilate, holding on to their old ways, and the leaders of their more "civilized" Jewish neighbors in Germany and Austria-Hungary considered them almost an embarrassment. They wanted to steer clear of any reminder of their "barbaric" past, such as Hasidism. On the other hand, there was also an interest in the old ways shown by much of the population, and novels of ghetto life were very popular, as was the Yiddish theater.

Kafka was drawn to the Yiddish theater after a traveling troupe arrived in Prague in late 1911. He would sit transfixed by the admittedly sometimes schmaltzy plays and write about them extensively in his diary. He became very close friends with one of the actors, Isaac Löwy, "whom I would admire in the dust," who spent hours telling him about his childhood and young adulthood in Poland (then under the control of Russia). Franz became so enamored of the theater that on February 18, 1912 he gave a lecture called "Speech on the Yiddish tongue," described as an "elegant and charming lecture delivered by Dr.Kafka" in the Prague Jewish newspaper. Franz's father was less than impressed with his son's newfound interest in the old ways. Hermann Kafka had escaped a poor Jewish upbringing in the town of Wossek, about fifty miles southwest of Prague, and had made a name for himself with his successful store. He had been thoroughly assimilated, registering as a Czech national and giving his children German, not Jewish names, and looked askance at his son's fascination with what he considered "backward" and something to be discarded without a second thought. Franz brings this up for a lengthy discussion in the "Letter to His Father," complaining that what was left over of Judaism after the assimilation was an "insufficient scrap...a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke," and that "precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoutest action."

This "insufficient scrap" had consisted of attending temple services four times a year with his father as a child ("I don't think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons") , the first Seder meal, which degenerated into "a farce," and of course his bar mitzvah, held on June 13, 1896. The almost 13-year old boy experienced much nerve-wracking anticipation, but it turned out to be simply a matter of memorizing a couple of speeches and then a party afterward. However, on his mother's side there was a tradition of strength, learning, and discipline. "In Hebrew my name is Amschel, like my mother's maternal grandfather," who was "a very pious and learned man." There was also his mother's great-grandfather, even more learned and "held in equal honor by Jews and Christians."

The tradition of Talmudic discussion and debate has been for centuries an integral part of Jewish intellectual life, and this had some influence as well on Franz. The ninth chapter of The Trial, "In the Cathedral," is a virtuoso demonstration of such discussion, even though it takes place between a priest and Joseph K., the man arrested for no discernable reason trying to get to the bottom of the situation. It starts with the priest telling the "Before the Law" parable, and continues over several pages, with the priest and K. discussing the finer points of the story. Mention is frequently made of "scholars" who have been studying the parable, just as rabbis would study the Torah, the old Law, and appeal to it in their debates, so too do the scholars try to tease out every drop of meaning in the new Scriptures, the new Law, in this case the Law of the Court. But in both cases there is so much to be made of the writings that the potential for new and different interpretations is infinite.

Although there is much of a Jewish sensibility in Kafka's works, there is also a sense of universalism as well. When religion is directly mentioned it's almost never Judaism being discussed but Christianity. For instance, the Samsa family from The Metamorphosis is quite definitely Christian, praying to the saints, and crossing themselves, and the maid at the end of "The Judgment" buries her face in her apron and cries out, "Jesus!" Also, the tradition of the "wandering Jew" is utilized in the wanderings of K. in The Castle, although in a secularized, more universal way. It could be that Kafka simply wished that his work be more inclusive as opposed to being exclusively Jewish in nature. The feelings of alienation, being an outsider, and knowing that your life is subject to forces beyond your control, as well as a sense of dogged survival, frequently associated with the Jewish sensibility and which all frequently crop up in Kafka's work would prove to be among the most widespread and common feelings among people of all religions and races in the uncertain 20th century. In a very real sense, Jewish sentiments have been made universal, and Kafka speaks to these feelings from the perspective of both a Jew and as a member of humanity in general.

Later in life, Kafka became intensely interested in Zionism and other things relating to Judaism. For a time he was interested in the Kaabalah and mysticism, and tried his hand at learning Hebrew. For a while he had the daydream of going to Palestine and open a restaurant with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi and quite learned herself in Hebrew and Judaism. Nothing would come of this, of course, but he saw Palestine as a refuge, even if only a mental one for him.

Kafka's own beliefs are a matter of conjecture. When he was a boy one of his friends argued for the existence of God from design, that having a world without a God to create it was like a watch without a watchmaker. Kafka refuted this argument forcefully, and he seemed to be quite proud of this accomplishment. As a student, he went so far as to declare himself an atheist, and as an adult, he rarely went to temple and was definitely not a practicing Jew, even though elements of the culture interested him so strongly. On the other hand, as shown in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, he was quite interested by metaphysical questions of sin, Truth, and ultimate reality, writing intriguingly, "There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution." Elaborating further, he went on, "The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty." Many commentators, most notably his best friend and biographer Max Brod, who was himself quite devout, see Kafka as a religious writer, holding, for example, that the object of K.'s quest, the Castle, is in fact God or divine love or eternal life. Whether this interpretation is justified or not has been fiercely debated, but it says a lot about Kafka's sensibility that his works can be read in this way, even though they frequently seem completely bereft of hope of any kind, much less hope in a transcendent, religious sense.

The Jewish presence in Prague was suddenly almost totally wiped out after the takeover in March 1939 of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, who hated Czechs and all Slavs as well as Jews. In the space of about six years the Jewish population in Prague was literally decimated, dwindling from a bustling community of 100,000 to the less than 10,000 living there today. Hitler planned to make the Prague ghetto a monument to a disappeared culture, and most of this culture was indeed destroyed. Kafka's three sisters all perished in the nameless horror of the Holocaust. Ironically, although the Western Jews had tried hard to assimilate and be accepted, in the end they were wiped out with the traditional Jews who followed the old ways. Nevertheless, the Polish and Russian Jews, the Eastern, traditional Jews got the worst of it, however—virtually all of them were wiped out. For instance, the Polish Jews had been about 3 to 4 million strong, making up about a tenth of Poland's population, and were utterly destroyed, almost all of the extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. (as opposed to the concentration camps) being located there. Today there are about 5,000 Jews in all of Poland. The senseless, random cruelty still boggles the mind and seems in retrospect to be quite Kafkaesque, bringing to frightening life the arbitrary Court from The Trial, which is an exercise in futility to resist.

Today, as the malaise of the modern world deepens, the Judaism reflected in Kafka's works seems to be more universal than ever. The uncertainty, alienation, and sense of being an outsider in the world are felt, however vaguely, by almost everyone, and the reflection of these feelings in Kafka make him not just a Jewish writer, although he most definitely is that, but also a universal one, able to transmute the feelings of all mankind into an impressive work of art.

— Daniel Hornek webside



El Marxismo y la obra de Kafka



El 9 de julio se ha conmemorado el centenario del gran escritor checo Franz Kafka (1883-1924). En un año en que también celebramos el centenario de otros destacados escritores (Marx, Stendhal, Washington Irving, Turquniev, Lutero, Alarcón), ¿por qué dedicar particular atención a Kafka? Consideramos que para ello existen sólidas razones. Desde el final de la segunda guerra mundial, la figura de Kafka ha adquirido particular relieve. Además de la edición de sus obras completas, se han sucedido innumerables ediciones de sus novelas, cuentos, cartas, diario, etc. No menos numerosos han sido los estudios críticos sobre su obra. A ello contribuye la gran calidad intrínseca de los textos de Kafka, a quien -muy acertadamente- Lukács califica de "la figura más grande de la literatura vanguardista actual". Pero existe otra razón no menos poderosa: cualquiera que sea la interpretación ideológica que se haga de la obra de Kafka, casi todos sus críticos coinciden en que refleja, con una lucidez casi profética, el drama humano que se desarrolló en las décadas que sucedieron a su prematura desaparición. La angustia y el absurdo de los grandes procesos políticos totalitarios, el horror del universo concentracionario, el genocidio nazi y todas las formas de opresión y alienación contemporáneas se prefiguran en la obra de Kafka. Aunque, por sus formas vanguardistas, no sea un escritor popular -pero sí muy apreciado en amplios medios literarios- su apellido ha logrado adjetivarse en el lenguaje cotidiano de los sectores cultos. Cuando se califica a algo de "kafkiano", o se habla de una "atmósfera kafkiana", inmediatamente nos remitimos a un ambiente absurdo, angustioso, fantasmagórico, opresivo y alienante.

Para comprender mejor a Kafka, antes de detenernos en algunas de las interpretaciones ideológicas y estéticas que se han hecho de su obra, conviene precisar algunos datos biográficos. Nacido en Praga, cuando todavía la actual Checoslovaquia no se había independizado del Imperio austro-húngaro, se encontró inmediatamente sumido en las contradicciones y conflictos que originaba la confrontación de diversas etnias, lenguas y culturas. Hijo de un hombre de negocios judío, vinculado a la burguesía media, tuvo la oportunidad de doctorarse en Derecho a los veintitrés años. Tras un año de práctica jurídica se colocó en una compañía de seguros y en 1908 obtuvo una colocación mejor en una institución destinada al pago de pensiones a los trabajadores. En tal cargo permaneció hasta el año 1918, año en que lo abandonó para tratarse de una tuberculosis contraída como consecuencia de las penurias que el bloqueo aliado había impuesto a la población de los Imperios centrales. Como empleado, Kafka fue siempre muy estricto en el desempeño de sus funciones, si bien su vocación se centraba en la literatura. En su formación inicial influyó la lectura de Nietzsche, Darwin y Haeckel, aunque posteriormente -como escritor- fue influido por Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Pascal, Kierkegaard y Freud, así como por sus amigos Franz Werfel y Max Brod. En 1913 publicó su libro inicial, "Contemplación"; en 1915 el famoso relato "La metamorfosis", en el que describe, con todas las consecuencias, la súbita transformación de un hombre en repugnante insecto. La maestría literaria que en tal relato alcanza Kafka es subrayada por Jorge Luis Borges: "La más indiscutible virtud de Kafka es la invención de situaciones intolerables. Para el grabado perdurable le bastan unos pocos renglones... El argumento y el ambiente son lo esencial; no las evoluciones de la fábula ni la penetración psicológica. De ahí la primacía de sus cuentos sobre las novelas".

En 1916 Kafka publica "La condena" y en 1919 los catorce cuentos fantásticos o catorce lacónicas pesadillas que componen "Un médico rural". Su situación de judío de lengua alemana, que vivía en tierra checa bajo la dominación austro-húngara, exasperó en él el sentimiento de soledad y de desarraigo. Sentimiento natural si se tiene en cuenta las contradicciones que en él convergían y que han sido así descritas: "Estaba separado de la población checa por la lengua alemana. Y, sin embargo, se sentía en la lengua alemana como un invitado. Se sentía extranjero en Praga, su ciudad natal. Como judío estaba aislado de la población de habla alemana. Hijo de un acaudalado comerciante, se encontraba fuera del pueblo. El 'ghetto' judío de Praga ha sido destruido, pero el 'ghetto' moral subsiste. (...) No asimilado socialmente, moralmente solitario, Kafka se siente exterior a toda comunidad histórica". En tal situación no puede sorprender que Kafka tratase de huir de la realidad refugiándose en él cultivo de su vocación literaria. Esa interiorización evasiva y su actitud hacia la comunidad judía provocan fuertes tensiones familiares que han quedado bien reflejadas en su célebre "Carta al padre". Tres veces se enamora y otras tantas retrocede ante el matrimonio por temor de que éste le impida satisfacer las exigencias de su vocación literaria.

De todo ello nos ha quedado elocuente testimonio en su Diario y en las "Cartas a Milena".

La enfermedad, que no obstante su tratamiento en diversos sanatorios avanzaba sin cesar; el trabajo monótono, los amores desgraciados, la tirantez de relaciones con su padre se conjuntaron para exasperar y debilitar a Kafka hasta acabar con su vida el 3 de junio de 1924. Sus obras conocieron también un destino inseguro y extraño. Durante su vida se publicaron pocas y no precisamente las más significativas. Además, en su testamento dejó instrucciones para su destrucción. Empero, incumpliendo esa voluntad, su amigo y albacea Max Brod las fue publicando gradualmente: En 1925, "El proceso", que había sido iniciado en 1914. En 1926, "El castillo", iniciado y abandonado en 1922. En 1927, "América", y en 1931, "La construcción de la muralla china". La edición de sus obras completas se realizó por primera vez en Berlín (1935) y Praga (1937). Con la eclosión kafkiana de posguerra han sido reeditadas en Nueva York (1946) y Francfort del Main (1950-58).


Interpretaciones del universo kafklano

Reconocida casi universalmente la alta calidad de la obra literaria de Kafka, la labor de los críticos se ha centrado casi exclusivamente en la interpretación de su contenido. De hecho es difícil encontrar otro autor contemporáneo cuya obra haya sufrido tantas y tan variadas interpretaciones. Sin embargo, merece la pena detenerse en ellas ya que, según se opte por una u otras, la obra de Kafka adquiere muy distinto alcance y dimensión. Cronológicamente, es la primera la interpretación religiosa. Es la de Max Brod, en la que también ha insistido recientemente Leopoldo Azancot. Según ella, Kafka tiene fe en un mundo absoluto; lo absoluto existe, pero existe también un eterno malentendido entre el hombre y Dios. Esta interpretación religiosa adquiere en Azancot sentido judaizante, ya que, a su juicio, Kafka y su obra sólo pueden ser entendidos partiendo del fuerte influjo que desde 1911 ejercieron sobre él la cábala teosófica y el jassidismo. Es decir, la teosofía judía y la interpretación oriental del judaísmo. Sin embargo, estas interpretaciones religiosas son combatidas por diversos autores. Así, según Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, "Max Brod cita pocos pasajes en apoyo de su tesis y los pocos que ofrecen exigen ser retorcidos para que podamos desprender de ellos una actitud religiosa kafkiana". Por su parte Lukács, inspirándose en una cita de Walter Beniamin, va todavía más lejos: "Así, pues, lo reconozca o no, Kafka es ateo. Pero ateo según el cuño moderno burgués que no concibe el alejamiento de Dios del mundo de los hombres como una liberación, como lo concebían Epicuro o los ateos de la burguesía revolucionaria, sino como abandono del mundo por Dios, como soberanía del desconsuelo de la vida, de la falta de significado de toda finalidad humana en un mundo semejante. A su vez, Garaudy rechaza la interpretación judaizante: "Kafka es profundamente judío, pero al mismo tiempo es un judío que ha roto con la comunidad judía. Su crítica de la religión judía es feroz. El cuento titulado "En nuestra sinagoga" describe la comunidad judía como observador sin comprender las creencias y ritos cuya significación se le escapa. El animal misterioso y angustiante que frecuenta la sinagoga de Trasmühl simboliza la meta incomprensible, indescifrable, hacia la cual se elevan ciegamente las plegarias de los creyentes".

La interpretación existencialista de Kafka tiene una base sólida. Además de su semejanza en ciertos aspectos con Kierkegaard, que Kafka reconoce en su Diario, en la obra de Kafka se prefiguran los temas de la filosofía de la existencia: el tema del ente que se siente "arrojado" en un mundo al que llega por la vía de la contingencia; el tema de la individualidad radical, así como el de la soledad, insuficiencia e impotencia de la condición humana que tiene el inevitable correlato de la desesperación y la angustia. Empero es en la perspectiva de la carencia de sentido o de lo absurdo de la existencia donde Kafka y el existencialismo se identifican más. No es tampoco desdeñable la interpretación psicoanalítica, que basándose en la "Carta al padre" analiza la obra de Kafka desde la perspectiva del complejo de Edipo. A su vez, la Medicina general trató de fundamentar la explicación de "La metamorfosis" y "El proceso" en la tuberculosis que Kafka padeció. Sin embargo, las fechas no concuerdan: tales obras datan de 1913 y 1914 mientras que la tuberculosis de 1917. Por otra parte, si del complejo de Edipo se pretende hacer una clave interpretativa privilegiada, la visión final de la obra de Kafka corre el riesgo de hacerse todavía más opaca. Como bien ha precisado Ricard Torrens en su epílogo a la "Carta al padre", el complejo de Edipo no resuelve todo el caso Kafka. No es, en efecto, la obra lo que hay que explicar, "psicoanalizar", por medio del complejo, sino a la inversa, es el complejo lo que hay que interpretar por medio de la obra y elevarlo al plano de las significaciones suprapersonales en las que la obra se produjo y se sostiene como fenómeno literario. En todo caso, compartimos el criterio de Garaudy al precisar que no se excluye que cada una de estas interpretaciones recoge una de las parcelas de la verdad. Lo que ya constituye un error es hacer de lo que sería una útil hipótesis de trabajo un sistema unilateral de interpretación global.


La interpretación marxista

La interpretación marxista ha sido compleja y contradictoria. Y sin embargo, su necesidad era obvia. No se puede comprender a un escritor como Kafka sólo en función de sus convicciones religiosas, complejos psicológicos, vivencias existenciales, enfermedades, relaciones amorosas y amistosas, etc. Es necesario completar la obra proporcionándole el marco adecuado. Es decir, el contexto histórico-social en que se sitúa la obra y la actuación de Kafka. Tarea nada fácil, pues a los reduccionismos religiosos y psicoanalítico podría unirse el reduccionismo sociológico. Y, de hecho, ese reduccionismo se dio en las interpretaciones marxistas dogmáticas que se contentaron con clasificar a Kafka como "literato decadente que refleja la angustia y la frustración de una burguesía decadente". Tal simplificación -derivada de las tesis dogmáticas que Zhdánov desarrolló en 1948- fue combatida en el Congreso de escritores celebrado en Praga en 1964 con la participación de Sartre, Ernest Fischer, J. Hayek, etc. Se coincidió en condenar el empleo dogmático y mecánico del concepto de decadencia. Así Fisher precisó: "Si los escritores describen la decadencia sin consideración alguna y la denuncian moralmente, eso no es decadencia. No debiéramos abandonar Proust, ni Joyce, ni Beckett y menos aún, Kafka al mundo burgués". Por su parte, E. Goldstucker matizó: "Hay que distinguir los elementos de decadencia en la 'filosofía de la vida', examinarlos críticamente y apreciar, en alto grado, las nuevas técnicas de creación artística que esta visión decadente y pesimista de la vida y del mundo han aportado". A su vez, M. Kundera concretó: "Hemos llegado a una posición verdaderamente dialéctica con respecto a lo que se llama la literatura decadente, y hemos comprendido que la lucha ideológica no reside en el rechazo de los obstáculos, sino en su superación".

No obstante, Lukács, en su obra "Significación actual del realismo crítico" -que constituye una crítica tanto de los excesos dogmáticos de una variedad del "realismo socialista" como de los excesos subjetivistas de la vanguardia artística occidental-, dedica un capítulo a la contraposición entre Kafka y Thomas Mann. El balance es netamente favorable para Mann, como paradigma de un realismo crítico burgués progresista, frente a un Kafka cuya extraordinaria calidad literaria no le libra de una condena más sutil y matizada que la de los zhdanovistas.

Por el contrario, Roger Garaudy, en su "Hacia un realismo sin fronteras" -dedicado a la valoración de Picasso, Saint-John Perse y Kafka-, recupera plenamente a Kafka. Para Garaudy, "la realidad social de la que Kafka es testimonio, víctima y juez, es también fantasmal como en las sociedades mágicas de los primitivos. La alienación en lugar de ser engendrada por la impotencia del hombre ante las fuerzas de la Naturaleza, lo es hoy por el sentimiento de impotencia ante las fuerzas de la sociedad que toman la forma de fuerzas extrañas y hostiles. "Según Garaudy, la grandeza de Kafka consiste en haber sabido crear un mundo mítico que está estrechamente unido con el real. Lo real en arte es una creación que transfigura mediante la presencia humana la realidad cotidiana. Así como en la misma época los pintores cubistas revelaban la poesía inmanente de las cosas más cotidianas por una transposición consciente, Kafka crea un mundo de lo fantástico con los materiales de este mundo recompuesto en base a otras leyes. Por ello, Garaudy finaliza su trabajo sobre Kafka afirmando que la mejor definición de tal autor se obtiene aplicando a su obra el juicio que él realizó sobre la pintura de Picasso. Frente a la afirmación de Janouch, "Picasso es un deformador voluntario", respondió Kafka: "Yo no lo creo. No hace más que afirmar las deformaciones que aún no han entrado en el campo de nuestra conciencia. El arte es un espejo que 'adelanta' como un reloj". Esta concepción de un espejo dinámico, por parte de quien prefiguró muchos de los fenómenos más trágicos de nuestra época, sería sugerente contrastarla con la de Stendhal, para quien el arte era un espejo colocado al borde del camino.

A su vez, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, en su trabajo "Un héroe kafkiano: José K.", sitúa definitivamente a Kafka en su adecuada perspectiva: "Kafka ha visto lo negativo sin poder rebasarlo. Pero basta, a la vez, negar esa negación para que se ponga de manifiesto todo lo que hay de positivo y fecundo en la creación kafkiana. Para ello hay que poner la obra de Kafka en relación con lo real. Veremos, entonces, que ese mundo irracional, absurdo e injusto que pinta existe realmente, pero en el marco de unas relaciones humanas determinadas históricamente. Y aunque Kafka no haya señalado las raíces profundas de ese mundo inhumano ni las vías para cancelarlo, es evidente que su obra, al describir ese mundo absurdo e inhumano, entraña una crítica profunda de él. Ver la obra de Kafka en un plano intemporal como una apología de lo absurdo o lo irracional en sí, cortando todos los lazos que la vinculan en su suelo real, es prolongar la abstracción contra la que se rebeló el propio Kafka y es, finalmente, contribuir a cerrar el paso a la solución del problema kafkiano fundamental, que es también el problema cardinal de nuestro tiempo: la integración del individuo en la sociedad, es decir, la unión de la verdadera comunidad y la verdadera individualidad". Así, la interpretación marxista de la obra de Kafka, queda enriquecida, superando las simplificaciones dogmáticas y apresuradas que nunca habrían compartido los clásicos del marxismo.

José María Laso Prieto

— Nuestra Bandera



Misreading Kafka



"Germany declares war on Russia—in the afternoon, swimming lessons," Franz Kafka wrote in his diary on August 2, 1914. The line has often been cited as an expression of Kafka's estrangement from life, of his Weltfremdheit. And why not? After all, the incongruity conveyed in the line jars us like the one we encounter at the beginning of The Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa wakes up as a "monstrous vermin" and wonders: How will I ever get to work on time?

But if the famous journal entry feels Kafkaesque, it hardly leaves us with an accurate sense of what Kafka thought about the war. Indeed, a former classmate of Kafka's recalled seeing him at an early demonstration in support of the war, "looking oddly flushed" and "gesticulating wildly." Max Brod, his closest friend and most fervent admirer, allowed that within their circle of Jewish literati, Kafka alone had believed the German and Austrian forces would necessarily prevail. So when Kafka put a chunk of his savings into war bonds, he aimed to perform his civic duty and turn a profit.

The timing of the war, on the other hand, couldn't have been crueler, as Kafka saw it. For months, he had been trying to resolve to quit his job. His plan was to escape its bureaucratic tedium and the scrutiny of his parents, and relocate to Berlin, where he would, or more likely wouldn't, manage to marry Felice Bauer. In July, Kafka finally made the decision to leave. He even drafted a letter to his parents notifying them that he would finally be moving out (at the age of 31). Now Kafka was stuck in Prague for the foreseeable future.

It could have been worse, of course. Deemed fit to serve, Kafka was spared active duty through the intervention of his supervisors at Prague's Accident Insurance Institute, who got him categorized as an indispensable worker. With the Institute now understaffed and overwhelmed with new, war-related tasks, Kafka really was indispensable and lost his prized perk: afternoons off. Finding time and psychic energy to write, which had always been a challenge, now became almost impossible. By 1916, Kafka's literary production had dwindled badly, and he was beside himself. He demanded either a leave or a release into the army. Kafka was demanding, in effect, vacation or death. He got a vacation.

Thus it seems fair to claim that Kafka's response to the war does, indeed, bespeak a Weltfremdheit, just not quite in the way it is supposed to. We can say much the same thing about many Kafka myths —such as the idea that Kafka's talent was generally unknown during his lifetime or that his father was a psychological bully. They are sort of true, and this leaves would-be myth-busters in an awkward position. Announcing that you will be overturning an established notion is more exciting than telling readers that you are going to subtly revise one. But in the case of Kafka, more often than not, revising is the activity that makes sense. Unfortunately, in order to present themselves as being properly myth-busting, a number of recent works on Kafka engage in quite a bit of myth-building.

James Hawes, who has a doctorate in German literature but left academia to become a novelist, tells us that his slim volume, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, "isn't going to argue that the K.-myth has wildly skewed our view of Kafka and his writings. It's going to show it—where necessary by using some long-lost dynamite that no one, not even the best modern German scholars, has ever used before." What is this "spectacularly fake" K.-myth? Among the ten "building blocks" that Hawes lists, in lazy bullet point form, are these:

— Kafka was imprisoned, as a German-speaking Jew in Prague, in a double ghetto: a minority-within-a-minority amid an absurd and collapsing operetta-like empire.
— Kafka's works are based on his experiences as a Jew.
— Kafka's works uncannily predict Auschwitz.
— Kafka's works were burned by the Nazis.

The general idea here is that we've made Kafka into a martyred prophet, whose art owes everything to Jewish persecution and marginality. This is laying it on pretty thick. You don't need to have studied up on late-Habsburg Prague to know that its German-speakers, whose language was that of the Habsburg government, didn't constitute a beleaguered minority. That Kafka's writing has his "experiences as a Jew" as its sole cause isn't really a dominant critical impression. After all, the word "Jew" never appears in his fiction, which is often understood as revealing precisely the plight of the representative everyman. As it happens, Representative Man is the title of one of the first major Kafka biographies. I have, by the way, just provided more evidence to support my point than Hawes gives to underpin the argument of his book.

Hawes tries to illustrate the claim that for many influential readers, Kafka augured Auschwitz, but all he produces is this:

So when a recent biographer (Nicholas Murray) writes with a straight face of ‘the long-standing debate about whether Kafka foresaw the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe,' I throw his book across the room.

Hawes' apoplectics would be hard to take seriously even if Murray were guilty of actual myth-mongering. But because Murray was merely referring to a critical exchange, the histrionics are silly. At the very least, Hawes ought to have brought up the most influential advocates of the Kafka-as-oracle-of-doom position, Ernst Pawel and George Steiner, but of course that would require sustained argument with formidable critics. As to the myth of Kafka's works falling victim to Nazi book burnings-which I can't recall having encountered-it sounds like a reasonable historical assumption, rather than "rubbish."

What, finally, about that dynamite Hawes promises to set off? There is nothing new about the idea that Kafka's life had its normal features. For many years, critics have been pointing out that Kafka was interested in fashion, the movies, and, as a young man, prostitutes. Nor has the fact that he kept a stash of erotic magazines—or "porn," as Hawes calls it—gone unnoticed. Yet Hawes acts as though broadcasting this will blow things wide-open. His claim that the source of Kafka's famous bug figure can be found in the work of Heinrich von Kleist is, in any case, several megatons short of explosive. Kleist has been overlooked, Hawes implies, because critics want to view Kafka as part of Jewish literature, not Western literature. Yet much has been said about Kafka's debt to non-Jewish authors. Kafka himself improbably remarked that the model for his work Amerika was Dickens: "It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I would take from the times, and the duller ones I would get from myself."

In trying to deracinate Kafka's work, Hawes asserts that "very little in the actual writings should make us think—as so many critics have claimed—that, to understand these stories properly, we need to reach for our Torah or our Hasidic tales. What makes us think this is not anything in his writings but our knowledge of his life." Well, Kafka did give an eloquent lecture on Yiddish theater ("I want to tell you, ladies and gentleman, how very much more Yiddish you understand than you think you do"), tried to study Hebrew, read Martin Buber, and even visited the Belzer Rebbe and so on, but does any serious critic really claim this? Theodor Adorno famously said that Kafka's fiction was like "a parable whose key has been stolen," and it would be nice to know whom the Judeocentric critics are who disagree. When Walter Benjamin (reflecting on his conversations with Gershom Scholem) discussed one of Kafka's brief parables with Bertolt Brecht, it was Brecht whose reading seemed forced in its determination to avoid the subject of revelation. The exchange was brilliantly discussed by Robert Alter in his 1991 book Necessary Angels, which showed that one could discuss Jewish motifs in Kafka's work without reducing it to them.

If anyone might be thought to be guilty of over-Judaizing Kafka, it might be Rodger Kamenetz, whose Burnt Books (the newest volume in Schocken's Nextbook series) compares Kafka with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rabbi Nachman was the great grandson of the Ba'al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and a writer of odd, powerful, and parabolic folk-inspired tales himself. Kamenetz is a poet best known for his book The Jew in the Lotus, which chronicles the discussion between the Dalai Lama and leading rabbis on the challenges of exile. Kamenetz has also long been interested in the connection between Kafka and Kabbalah, and teaches a course on the topic at Kafka's alma mater, Charles University in Prague. But Kamenetz doesn't try to convince us that Kafka was a kabbalist or a proto-Neo-Hasid. He just wants to put Kafka into conversation with Jewish traditions and theologians. The goal isn't so much arriving at a "proper" understanding of Kafka as it is mutual illumination.

Following Scholem, Kamenetz wants to read Kafka's works as employing Jewish forms and motifs (commentary, allegory, the ineffability of revelation) in such a way that, among other things, they offer inspired commentary on the fate of Jewish tradition in modernity. This was Alter's project, too; and it is hard to see how Kamenetz advances the argument. On the other hand, Alter's Necessary Angels reads like what it is: a collection of academic lectures. In addition to providing more in the way of biographical storytelling (especially welcome for the non-specialist) and imaginative associations, the prose in Burnt Books is snappier. Here is Kamenetz giving the kind of qualification that, according to Hawes, we never find in "Jewish readings" of Kafka: "What can any reader do, except scare up another ghostly face to haunt Kafka's literary remains, guided by personal obsessions and projections?" Kamenetz doesn't go very far beyond such intelligent haunting.

Zadie Smith's essay "F. Kafka, Everyman" first appeared in The New York Review of Books, and is included in her collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Like Hawes, Smith tries to make the case for a more "quotidian Kafka." In doing so, she leans on another young novelist and critic, Adam Thirlwell:

It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Kafka and the Kafkaesque . . . Kafka's work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors . . . These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs . . . It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka's emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of human behavior. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.

Thirlwell holds Brod responsible for establishing these mistakes, and ridicules the hagiographic excess of Brod's 1947 biography, its talk of "ultimate things," "angels" laughing, and Kafka's "metaphysical smile." Smith is fully on board with this. She writes, "These days we tire of Brod's rough formulations: for too long they set the tone. We don't want to read Kafka Brodly, as the postwar Americans did so keenly."

But have we ever really read so Brodly? It was more than a decade ago that new English translations of Kafka's major works supplanted the Muirs' renderings, based on Brod's German editions. Furthermore, the authority of Brod's word on Kafka was never self-evident. Despite his commercial success as an author, Brod always had a talent for calling forth critical derision. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was probably the first to mock Brod's literary sensibility via his surname. In 1911, he wrote, "Geist smeared on Brod is Schmalz." Nor is it true that postwar Americans read Kafka as a Jewish saint. Heinz Politizer's Franz Kafka: Paradox and Parable, which Time glowingly reviewed in 1952, doesn't reinforce a single one of Thirlwell's "Brodish" truths.

On the other hand, if people want to see Kafka as a singular genius and his writings as expressing the alienation of modern man, well, so what? Are such interpretations really so outlandish? What business do we have pronouncing them not simply flawed or superficial, but outright "wrong"? To her credit, Smith gives a candid answer. She allows that behind the desire to debunk Brod's banal pieties there is a Kafka "purism"—that is, more Kafka reverence.

For Smith, what makes Kafka universal is that he captured quotidian experience. His ability to speak to us all has to do with how well he conveyed the very local alienation of being an assimilated German-speaking Jew in Prague, who didn't fully "belong" anywhere, rather than with his evocation of some vague modern existential malaise. Making much of Kafka's famous image of German-Jewish writers sticking "with their back legs" to Judaism and reaching "no new ground" with their front ones, and sounding more than a little pious herself (even as she freely mixes Kafka's bug metaphors), Smith concludes:

For there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question (‘What have I in common with the Jews?') has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation is the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is Femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer now.

Never mind that Kafka didn't include himself among those German-Jewish authors whom he saw as flailing about with their anterior legs. Hasn't Smith once again made Kafka into a prophet—a prophet, that is, of the post-everything age? How is this better than reading him Brodly?

Smith's essay is primarily an appreciative review of Louis Begley's biographical volume The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. While far less sensationalistic than Hawes' book, and not as catty as Thirlwell's writing, Begley's work also relies on some dubious generalizations to make a case for its own importance. One notable instance comes in the middle of its chapter on Kafka's Jewish identity. Begley writes that Kafka's "intermittent self-lacerating and provocative pronouncements," as well as his oft-mentioned "qualms" about the ability of Jews to write effectively in German, "have been used by scholars to buttress the argument that Kafka was himself a Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew."

Begley, by contrast, wants us to see Kafka's response to the Jewish questions of his day as normal, but his efforts are less than concerted. For example, in commenting on Kafka's fantasy of stuffing all Jews (himself included) "into the drawer of the laundry chest" and "suffocating" them, Begley writes that the "outburst" was probably just a function of the "fatigue" that stems from living with anti-Semitism. Such exhaustion might account for a desire to achieve individual release, but Kafka is dreaming of genocide, which, obviously, is something else. Maybe he was expressing some kind of self-hatred. Or maybe Kafka's line, which occurs in a letter to Milena Jesenská, is a provocation meant to elicit a revealing response from his non-Jewish married lover—the attraction Jews held for her fascinated Kafka endlessly.

One thing that Hawes is right about is the importance of Reiner Stach's masterful German language biography-in-progress, the first two volumes of which devote more than fourteen hundred pages to tracking the last fourteen years of Kafka's life. When the first installment of Stach's biography appeared, back in 2002, no full-scale life-of-Kafka had been written in German. In that volume, Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidung (available in an English translation by Shelley Frisch entitled Kafka: The Decisive Years), Stach reflects at length on this odd fact and his biographical goals. Stach's account of his aims gives the reader an early taste of both his modesty and his interpretive good sense: He speaks of having to "anticipate failure," of the real but limited value of biographical inquiry for understanding Kafka's prose, and of having as his main end "to explain how a consciousness that is set thinking by everything could evolve into a consciousness that set everyone thinking." Less satisfying, however, is Stach's answer to the question of why he has no predecessors writing auf Deutsch. His theory centers on the relative lack of movement in Kafka's life. Kafka, as Stach writes:

. . . wrestled his whole life with the same problems, and seldom took on a new one. Father conflict, Judaism, illness, the struggles with sexuality and marriage, work, the writing process, literary aesthetics: One doesn't need to carry out an extended analysis to identify the key themes of this life, which appears so static that one could ask, and one has asked, whether it makes sense to talk of any sort of development here at all.

But if Kafka's stasis was really so intimidating in this case, then why didn't it scare off biographers writing in languages other than German? It is true, on the other hand, that the seemingly given character of Kafka's driving concerns makes it nearly impossible for Stach to achieve his goal of tracing the emergence of Kafka's "consciousness." Stach has good reason to brace for failure. But he also shows how much Kafka's positions on his "burning issues" did, in fact, develop, how much they shifted and evolved over the years—hence the titles "the decisive years" (1910-1915) and "the years of knowledge" (1915-1924), the latter of which is scheduled to appear in English in 2012. Or rather, Stach does this brilliantly, producing as engaging a literary biography as I have read, one that is every bit as good as Leon Edel's magnificent, multi-volume account of Henry James' life.

Stach does everything well. His prose is lucid and his learning is vast. Without compromising the flow of his biographical narrative, he manages to work in a wealth of information about both Kafka's cultural context and the people who mattered in his life. He sketches important life scenes in vivid detail, right through to the drama of Kafka's last hours, during which he suffered terribly and demanded a lethal dose of morphine.

Moreover, Stach is an astute reader of Kafka's fiction, and his interpretations generally both point to the connections between life and text, and demonstrate why those links don't hold out the key to revealing the text's meaning. Finally, through thick biographical description, Stach shows how Kafka was able to create works that were seen by his circle as being about distinctively Jewish problems, and by other readers as being about "the human condition." He also effectively addresses the issue of why Kafka was so committed to doing things that way:

Kafka always maintained that literary writing and propagandizing were utterly incompatible. The task of the writer isn't to discuss what he has experienced, but rather to represent it in the purest form possible—to achieve a kind of "self-forgetting," as Kafka remarked to Brod . . . Kafka's aesthetic ideal mandated keeping all the experiential connections in his writings indeterminate: personal, Jewish, or simply "human," and for this reason he confronted everything explicitly Jewish with a taboo. The concept doesn't occur in his literary works.

It may be that at the end of Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (The Years of Knowledge) we get a deeper, if less direct, explanation as to why this magisterial work is the first major German Kafka biography. Stach concludes the book with an epilogue that is about the effect of the Holocaust on what had been Kafka's life world. We are told that if Kafka had managed to survive tuberculosis and, unlike his three sisters, the camps, "he would have recognized nothing at the end of the catastrophe. His world no longer existed. Only his language lives."

Writing the life of Kafka is, among other things, a special kind of memorialization, one that may be especially difficult to carry out in his language. After all, Kafka is not the only great, much-discussed German-Jewish author of his era whose German biography was either written just recently or remains to be written. This group includes Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kracauer, and a host of others. Maybe, then, the Holocaust has mattered in Kafka studies as much as the myth-busters say, just not in the way that it is supposed to.

Paul Reitter

— Jewish Review of Books



Kafka y la literatura



Vinimos aplicando los términos mosaico, filónico, spinoziano, marxista. En todos los casos se refieren respectivamente al pensamiento o la obra de esos intelectuales. Con el adjetivo “kafkiano” ocurre algo diferente: no apunta a la obra de un autor, sino una sensación única que dicho autor creó en su narrativa.

Cuando estamos atrapados en un laberinto de acontecimientos grotescos, vivimos una experiencia kafkiana, una angustia considerada específica del hombre del siglo XX, y que Franz Kafka reflejó acabadamente.

En 1899, cuando contaba con quince años de edad, tumultos judeofóbicos en Praga arrasaron con muchas tiendas de judíos. Una de ellas no fue dañada: el negocio de artículos para hombres de Hermann Kafka, quien había inscripto a su familia como nacionales checos y no como judíos. Hermann había llegado a Praga huyendo de su indigente infancia aldeana. Asimilado al medio, le dio a sus hijos nombres alemanes, y siempre resistió los intereses judaicos y literarios de su hijo Franz, quien lo ayudaba a comerciar por las estrechas callejuelas del gueto. Franz Kafka estudió en la universidad alemana de Praga, trabajó en una oficina de asuntos legales y en una compañía de seguros.

Hermann, quien fue eventualmente un próspero comerciante, era extremadamente rígido e insensible para con su hijo, lo que afectó el desarrollo emocional de Franz. Siempre sufrió de migrañas e insomnio, y su miedo al padre fue una de sus motivaciones más exploradas. A la edad de 36 años, en la cúspide de su carrera, escribió la Carta al Padre (nótese el artículo no posesivo) en la que desprecia que el judaísmo de su padre fuera mínimo, que durante su niñez lo hubieran llevado muy pocas veces a la sinagoga, y que se hubiera tratado con liviandad la ocasión de su Bar Mitzvá. En síntesis, Kafka alega que su padre le “inculcaba odio al judaísmo”.

Los desmanes de 1899 aludidos al comienzo, fueron la excepción, no la regla. En general, la situación de la judería de Bohemia a fines de siglo XIX, fue de tensa tolerancia. Los judíos eran la mitad de la minoría germanoparlante de Praga (menos del diez por ciento de la ciudad) y, en ese aspecto, se recelaba de ellos. Se trataba de una élite lingüística con poder, prestigio y riqueza, aun cuando los hebreos pertenecían dentro de esa minoría a la clase media y no a la aristocracia.

Debido al creciente nacionalismo alemán, la élite germánica del imperio austro-húngaro también desconfiaba de los israelitas, a quienes percibía como la vanguardia liberal. Por ello, los judíos se veían entre la espada y la pared: ambos grupos (los checos y los alemanes) padecían de prejuicios sobre el judío, imaginado evasivo, complotador, materialista, y débil.

De su heredad cultural, Kafka supo sólo vagamente, a excepción del sionismo, sobre el que aprendió mucho, aunque no de parte de su familia, sino de dos de sus tres mejores amigos, Max Brod y Hugo Bergman.

Como se sabe, Kafka nunca se casó, pero varias mujeres tuvieron un rol importante en su vida. Una fue la periodista Milena Jesenská, cuyo espistolario con él fue publicado. Otra fue Dora Dymant, una judía polaca que lo atendió hasta su muerte, y a quien conoció en un campamento vacacional del Asilo Judío de Berlín. En 1917, se le diagnosticó la tuberculosis que lo llevó a la muerte siete años después.


Una literatura única

La narrativa de Kafka es renovadora como ninguna. Sus relatos comienzan en general con un evento exterior perteneciente, en apariencia, a la experiencia normal. Vale explicarlo comparando su novela breve La Metamorfosis con la de Dostoievski Crimen y Castigo. Ésta, al principio del tercer capítulo de la primera parte, cuenta el estado de abandono y soledad en que se encontraba Raskolnikov, al que describe como un animal enconchado: "A la mañana siguiente se despertó tarde, tras un sueño agitado que no lo había descansado. Se levantó bilioso, irritado, de mal humor, y consideró su habitación con odio. Era una jaula minúscula, de no más de seis pies de largo, y tenía un aspecto miserable [...] Raskolnikov se había retirado deliberadamente lejos de la compañía de los hombres, como una tortuga bajo su caparazón...". Se ha convertido en un "gusano", "alimaña", "cucaracha", "piojo estético".

En La Metamorfosis Kafka utiliza las mismas imágenes, pero utiliza una de sus herramientas más poderosas: la literalidad. El insecto es real. Se desmonta la metáfora que sostiene al "insecto moral" y se la lleva a límites no explorados hasta entonces en la literatura. Queda sólo el "bicho", sin ningún calificativo, y el párrafo pasó a ser uno de los comienzos inolvidables de la literatura: "Cuando Gregorio Samsa despertó aquella mañana, luego de un sueño agitado, se encontró en su cama convertido en un insecto monstruoso. Estaba echado sobre el quitinoso caparazón de su espalda, y al levantar un poco la cabeza, vio la figura convexa de su vientre oscuro, surcado por curvadas durezas, cuya prominencia apenas si podía aguantar la colcha, visiblemente a punto de escurrirse hasta el suelo. Innumerables patas, lamentablemente escuálidas en comparación con el grosor ordinario de sus piernas, ofrecían a sus ojos el espectáculo de una agitación sin consistencia".

Mientras La Metamorfosis se inicia con el despertar de Gregorio convertido en insecto, algo similar ocurre en la novela El Proceso: Joseph K., se despierta la mañana de su cumpleaños número treinta a la espera de su desayuno. Dos jóvenes vienen a anunciarle que está bajo arresto. Protesta, quiere ver al jefe. Se encuentra con un inspector que confirma el arresto, pero no revela las causas. Joseph K. recorre infructuosamente juzgados y oficinas. Nadie le puede proveer la información de por qué está detenido, aunque de hecho no lo está. El Proceso tiene un final trágico, ya que su protagonista termina ejecutado por un crimen que ignora. Pero en el resto de las novelas de Kafka no hay final. Su novela El Castillo es paradigmática. El protagonista es el agrimensor K, que llega a una aldea un invernal anochecer, para realizar unas mediciones del castillo, el cual supuestamente está sobre una colina, pero ni esto queda claro. Todos sus intentos por alcanzar el castillo son vanos, y el capítulo 24 nos deja con la imposibilidad. No hay final: el castillo nunca puede ser accedido.

Por su estilo difuso, los críticos nunca coinciden en qué significa. Hay interpretación psicoanalítica; hay religiosa (un símbolo de la búsqueda espiritual del hombre moderno); hay judaica (la alienación del judío en el mundo).

En vida, Kafka publicó mayormente relatos. Sus tres novelas son póstumas: El Proceso (1925), El Castillo (1926), y América (1927). Fueron traducidas muchas veces, y adaptadas para obras de teatro, óperas, y filmes.

Kafka fue aclamado como el intérprete de la angustia de vivir; el Teatro del Absurdo es impensable sin él. Inició una renovación general de la literatura occidental, y es víctima de su éxito: su prosa es frecuentemente leída en búsqueda de arquetipos preconcebidos.

Nos asomamos a ella, sabedores de que Rusia representa la existencia distante y solitaria, escribir una carta es el modo de catarsis y de inserción social, o mirar a través de la ventana es el recurso habitual para denotar aislamiento. Quien conoce los símbolos más recurrentes, tiende a aplicarlos a modo de decodificación del texto, y a veces se ve compelido a buscar, desde la primera línea, "el mensaje” característico y privativo del autor, más que con otros creadores. Como agravante, al buscar mensajes en Kafka, el biografismo se impone por sí solo, y no podemos evitar reconocer, en las dudas de sus personajes, las tormentas por las que atravesaba el autor, nítidamente registradas en sus diarios y epistolario.

Es un germanoparlante en una ciudad checa; un hombre lleno de dudas y de una ardiente sed de fe, entre ibrepensadores; un escritor nato y obsesivo, entre gente de intereses comerciales; un joven enfermo, entre los sanos; un amante tímido y neurasténico, entre relaciones que exigen lo erótico.


El judío Kafka

Lo judaico fue central en su obra, sobre todo a partir de que su íntimo amigo Max Brod publicara sus novelas.No hay duda de que Brod, su editor, socio espiritual y albacea, fue el pionero, gracias a la fascinante biografía de 1937, y a los muchos artículos posteriores. Por mérito de Brod, difícilmente pueda hallarse hoy un crítico que subestime la presencia de simbología y referencias judías en la obra de Kafka. Paradojalmente, la palabra judío no figura en su rica narrativa. Kafka nos enfrenta a un dilema: pese a la falta de personajes judíos explorables, somos conscientes de la importancia que su propia judeidad tuvo en su vida, y sabemos que su biografía se entrelaza con su obra.

Además de Brod, dos intelectuales rubricaron la conciencia colectiva acerca del judeocentrismo kafkiano. Gracias a esa terna, el lector contemporáneo sabe abordar las obras de Kafka como las de un judío.

Dos fueron israelíes, y se inclinaron por el judaísmo simbolizado o expresado en su obra. El tercero fue checo, y puso el énfasis en el interés de Kafka por su pertenencia al grupo judío.

El segundo, Gershom Scholem, el padre del estudio científico de la cábala, ratificó la presencia del judaísmo en Kafka desde la perspectiva de hurgar influencias cabalísticas. Scholem sostuvo que "aunque inconsciente de sí mismo, en sus escritos Kafka da una representación secular de la concepción cabalística del mundo”. O más aun: “Para entender la cábala hoy, uno debería entender las obras de Franz Kafka, especialmente El Proceso”.

Dos principios básicos de la cábala son: la creencia en la unidad de todo lo que es, y que el conocimiento del mundo y de Dios tienen aplicación práctica. Esta sabiduría le permite a los humanos conducirse: la pequeña conducta de los pequeños humanos, debe contemplarse desde la eternidad. Las acciones de los hombres tendrían consecuencias en los mundos del más allá, y tarde o temprano provocarían reacciones desde ese reino.

Se agrega a Brod y a Scholem, el historiador literario Edward Goldstuker, primer embajador checo en Israel, fallecido en el 2000 en Praga. También él rescató al Kafka judío.

En 1951, Goldstuker fue condenado por el régimen stalinista a cadena perpetua. Ocho años después fue liberado, y poco después aprovechó exitosamente un exabrupto de Jean Paul Sartre, para producir una grieta cultural en el totalitarismo. Sartre, durante el “Congreso por la paz” de Moscú en 1962, formuló la sorpresiva exigencia de que se diera fin a la persecución contra la creación kafkiana en el mundo comunista. Golstuker se lanzó de inmediato a organizar la conferencia de Liblice, que en mayo de 1963 puso fin al tabú en el país natal de Kafka.

Su siguiente audacia fue preparar una exposición sobre Kafka, primera en su género en el mundo entero. La exhibición llegó a Berlín, París, Amsterdam, Nueva York y Jerusalén, y reveló al gran público los aspectos desconocidos acerca de la identificación judía del escritor. El tabú antikafkiano había sido quebrado, y se levantaba el veto sobre la literatura kafkiana y su judeidad. A ésta remiten los estudios kafkianos a partir de Brod, Scholem y Goldstuker.

Kafka concurrió a las clases de Talmud del profesor Harry Torczyner (Tur-Sinai) en el Hochschule de Berlín para Estudios Judaicos. Estudió hebreo, se identificaba con la literatura sionista que leía en el Selbswehr, y planeó trasladarse a Eretz Israel.

Sus principales amistades fueron judíos, incluidas sus novias. Por dos motivos la mención femenil es importante, ya que Kafka se expresa en términos sionistas justamente en sus cartas a las novias. Invita a Felicia Bauer a realizar juntos un viaje a Jerusalén, y le escribe a Milena en la primera carta: "Al menos tiene usted una patria, posesión de la que no todos pueden preciarse". Con Dora Dymant, pensó en radicarse en Israel y abrir allí un restaurante.

La familia cercana de Kafka acentúa su judeidad. En principio, la tragedia del sino judío sobrevino a sus tres hermanas (Elli, Valli, Ottla), muertas en el Holocausto. En el momento de escribir en su diario su nombre judío, Kafka se muestra orgulloso de la familia de su madre: "En hebreo mi nombre es Amschel, como el del abuelo materno de mamá, que era un señor muy erudito y devoto”.

El primer entusiasmo judío de Kafka fue el teatro ídish. Entre 1910 y 1912, asistía a las representaciones de una compañía teatral del Este en el Café Savoy, y en sus diarios abundó acerca del valor de esas obras. Del actor Isaac Loewy escuchaba relatos acerca de la infancia judía en Polonia.

La obra de Kafka constituye un inagotable manantial de símbolos para las distintas corrientes literarias y político-filosóficas de nuestro tiempo. Ernst Pawel, al final de su biografía de Kafka (La pesadilla de la razón, 1984) observó que la literatura que trata sobre su obra ya llegaba a quince mil títulos en los principales idiomas. Se lo reconoció como el precursor del surrealismo, del existencialismo, y de la “filosofía de la angustia” de Kierkegaard.

Aunque Kafka insistía en que “No soy más que literatura y no puedo ni quiero ser otra cosa”, pudo bien haber previsto el tropel de exégesis que generó. Lo que podríamos llamar la filosofía kafkiana está implícita en la forma peculiar de su arte, y no en las ideas que formula. También el judaísmo puede encontrarse en el estilo de Kafka, y no en sus citas.

Meno Spann sostuvo que a veces los críticos de Kafka “no leen el texto cuidadosamente, en su ansia de filosofar acerca de él”. Leyendo cuidadosamente, salta a la vista un contraste de Kafka con la literatura tradicional: en ésta, las aparentes incongruencias de conducta y las contingencies confusas se aclaran ulteriormente, en un final que trae entendimiento y orden (a veces, en un sentido moral, pero casi siempre en un sentido lógico). La singularidad de Kafka es que la parábola queda abierta aun después del final, y por ello apabulla.

En los contenidos, el centro de su obra es el hombre angustiado, miembro de un mundo paradójico e impenetrable, accionado automáticamente, que semeja un túnel oscuro sin salida.

En su forma, es una afluencia de escenas y situaciones percibidas con una intensidad sin precedentes, en la que el detallismo descriptivo cobra una expresión visionaria. La clave de la obsesión hermenéutica kafkiana, reside no solamente en el tipo de relatos, crípticos, sino en el lenguaje utilizado, ambiguo por antonomasia.

Tan grande es la tentación de filosofar que Kafka inspira, que aun la simple oposición generacional, tan justificada en su obra desde lo biográfico, es ascendida a implicancias cósmicas, entendido el conflicto padre-hijo como la lucha entre Dios y la humanidad. Desde una perspectiva más existencial,Thorlby ve en la figura paterna la relación personal de Kafka para con el hecho temible e inescrutable de estar vivo.

Hubo otras alegorías. La nacional señala que el destino del hijo representa en Kafka el de la república de Weimar, y el padre, el del Reich. Por su parte, el enfoque marxista (que como vimos llegó tardíamente a aceptar el valor de Kafka) enfatizó la interrelación casa-oficina y atribuyó la omnipresente alienación al sistema económico imperante.

Los protagonistas de Kafka viven acechados por códigos no verbalizados de los que, a excepción de ellos mismos, toda la gente está al tanto, aunque desinteresada. Los protagonistas son un reflejo del escritor. Jóvenes vacilantes, solitarios, ansiosos, en apariencia inocentes de todo pecado. Tratan de ser muy morales pero se ven enredados en la incertidumbre y la falta de esperanza, por culpa de reglas sociales que no comprenden.

Podríamos contentarnos con asumirlos como una expresión de tedio, de desazón, de angustia del escritor.

O podemos dar un paso más y entender a esos protagonistas como al individuo en lucha contra poderes ubicuos, inaprehensibles, anónimos, que a pesar de determinar sus pasos, al mismo tiempo se oponen a esa marcha. Una persona que va siendo envuelta en una atmósfera misteriosa de temible inseguridad, debido a una ilógica secuencia de eventos, que sin embargo son muy simples. Sin dificultad, hallamos en Kafka mensajes filosóficos, judaicos o cabalísticos. Es notable que esa búsqueda seduzca tanto a los lectores.

Veámoslo en un diálogo de El Castillo. Un agrimensor, invitado a realizar trabajos profesionales en un pueblo adscrito a un castillo, abandona su patria, su familia y su puesto de trabajo para acudir a la llamada, pero al llegar le dicen que en el pueblo no hace ninguna falta, por lo cual se halla, desde un principio, al margen de la comunidad. Emprende una lucha a ciegas para entrevistarse con la administración, autora de la llamada, y que reside en el castillo. Pero el agrimensor K fracasa también en este empeño. El mundo que lo rodea le está vedado, lo aliena, es inextricable.

Brod nos explica que Kafka ha sabido plasmar la lucha espiritual del hombre moderno, que busca a tientas algo que está por encima de él. En El castillo, el alcalde le explica a K que no hace falta ningún agrimensor y que la convocatoria a K ha sido un error. Reproduzco la explicación del alcalde ante la protesta del agrimensor:

“Hay autoridades de control. Por supuesto, su función no es buscar errores... porque no ocurren los errores, e incluso si de vez en cuando ocurre un error, como en su caso, ¿quién puede decir finalmente que se trata de un error?”

La lógica del alcalde es representativa de la escritura de Kafka, en un movimiento doble o triple de interpretación que se autocancela: 1) los errores no ocurren; 2) la convocatoria a K es un error; 3) ¿quién puede decir finalmente que se trata de un error?

Dos problemas surgen de ese párrafo, que encierran buena parte de la singularidad del estilo kafkiano, de su misterio: la contradicción difusa y el metadiscurso.

El primer problema es la yutaposición de argumentos que son válidos en sí mismos, pero que en conjunto se exluyen unos a otros. Podemos recordar el conocido chiste: cuando José le devuelve a Simón, rota, la filmadora que le había pedido prestada, argumenta en su defensa: “Primero, nunca me prestaste ninguna filmadora; segundo, la que me prestaste estaba rota desde el comienzo; tercero, te la devolví en perfectas condiciones”.

Las conexiones entre las partes son retóricas, pero no son lógicas. En los escritos kafkianos abundan las interferencias mutuas entre lógica y retórica. Una de las tareas de la exégesis de Kafka es leer las conexiones. No se trata sólo de que el texto se presta a múltiples interpretaciones, sino que los intersticios que deja no permiten en ningún caso una única interpretación. Siempre insinúan mensajes ocultos. Siempre son elásticos, versátiles, multifacéticos.

Herman Uyttersprot muestra que, estadísticamente, de los autores en alemán, Kafka usa más que ninguno la conjunción adversativa pero. La utiliza de dos a tres veces más que el resto de los escritores.

La causa es la notable complejidad de un alma que no puede simplemente ver y sentir en línea recta, sino que duda y vacila, aunque no por cobardía ni por cautela, sino por la claridad de su visión. Cada pensamiento, cada percepción, cada aserción, viene en Kafka acompañada por un desafío que le murmura: pero...

El alcalde confunde. Pasa de lo factual (“Por supuesto, errores no ocurren”) a la hipótesis (“y si incluso ocurriera”) y de allí a la pregunta (“¿quién puede decir que es un error?”). Pero aquí no termina todo: eventualmente, la autoridad del alcalde (que es quien define la llamada a K como un error o no error) es deslegitimada por la señora en la aldea quien opina que “el alcalde es una persona sin importancia”.

Éste es el segundo problema. Hay un metadiscurso final que cuestiona todo el discurso del alcalde, toda interpretación. Así leemos en El Proceso:

-Yo no soy culpable. ¿Cómo puede ser culpable el hombre? -Es justo, -respondió el abate- pero así es como hablan los culpables.

Y para colmo, después de enunciar la parábola e interpretarla largamente, el abate concluye “No atribuya demasiada importancia a las interpretaciones”.

Lo que hace de Kafka un escritor judío, junto con su biografía y sus preocupaciones, es su estilo inimitable, que también lo acerca a ser un filósofo.

— www.masuah.org



Franz Kafka the absurdity of everything



Many professors of literature would prefer that I not group Kafka among the existentialists. After all, here was a man who was not a trained philosopher or disciplined writer. Kafka never indicated that he was expressing a deep philosophical theory in his aphorisms. But, when you consider the time, place, and nature of Kafka — then you see an existentialist.

This exploration of Kafka is included among my Web of pages because Jean-Paul Sartre recognized him as an existentialist and Albert Camus considered him an absurdist. If Sartre and Camus considered Kafka a like-minded writer, that’s good enough for me.

Franz Kafka was the writer I most wanted to emulate as a student. While I cannot read his works in their original forms, the English translations are striking. The writing is simple and ironic, yet it demonstrates a complex wit. You find yourself smiling — but never laughing — at the humor he injects within tales of isolation, injustice, and cruelty. As I attempted to evolve my own style, I found Kafka, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and the other writers I admired all possessed the same dark wit.

Reading a Kafka short story is like running a race. You find yourself fighting to read, like a passerby trying not to look at a crime scene or accident victim. Because we know what “Kafkaesque” means, we know what to expect from the author. Yet, we read the tales, knowing the end might be neither just nor reasonable. This absurdity separates Kafka’s tales from those of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone — Serling tended to teach lessons and dispense justice while Kafka merely taunted his characters, then they suffered.

Kafka never wrote a long novel; he never seemed to have the time. I often wonder if that is for the best — I sense a longer work would not have the same affect upon readers as does a short piece in Kafka’s style. Emotionally, readers reach a limit, and I think Kafka knew intuitively where that limit was.

My favorite works by Kafka are Josephine the Singer, A Hunger Artist, and The Burrow. While other works are more popular (or assigned to more students) these are the works to which I most closely relate. The more I have read about Franz Kafka, the more I see my own nature in these stories. I write at night, alone in a room, closed off from the world. I write because that is what I do. Like Josephine, I am not sure if it is the process or the audience I enjoy. Like the Hunger Artist, I would not pursue my art if I could find another form of emotional sustenance.

Over the years, I have had to purchase several paperbacks of Kafka’s works. The books wear out from constant use. That speaks louder than any other comment I can record on this page. [...]


Jewish Heritage

Hermann Kafka had located his store just beyond the Jewish ghetto of Prague, and even had his family legally declared Czech nationals. Still, the Kafkas were Jewish; Franz was bar-mitzvahed and attended temple at the local synagogue with his father. The paradox is clear — Jews and Germans were hated by the nationalistic Czechs, yet Hermann raised Franz to speak German and took his son to Friday-night services.

The seriousness of anti-Semitism revealed itself to Franz in April of 1899. Near the week of Passover, a young Christian girl was murdered, her throat slit with a knife. Throughout Europe there had been tales of Jews using Christian blood to prepare Matzos for Passover — and as far as many were concerned, this murder proved the tales. Anti-Semitic riots spread through Prague and other parts of Bohemia, with boycotts against Jewish-owned stores and even the destruction of shops. Hermann Kafka’s shop was spared only because he was “officially” a Czech.

Franz was 16 years old at the time of the riots. He responded like many secular Jews, developing a strong anti-Jewish bias. Many critics claim Kafka’s works are in fact tributes to the religious and mystic heritage of European Jews, but his own anti-Semitic streak is evident in his diaries.

Sometimes I’d like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket… then open it to see if they’ve suffocated.

What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself!


During 1899 and 1900, Kafka’s diaries indicate he read a great number of philosophy and science texts. He was fond of Spinoza, Darwin, and Nietzsche. His extensive reading was paralleled by a period of creativity. Kafka wrote a extensively between 1899 and 1903, but these early writings were destroyed by the author. These writings probably reflected the author’s predisposition toward the macabre, but we might never know. During this period of productivity, Kafka met Max Brod, a writer, critic, and editor of Prager Tagblatt. Brod was to be a close friend and editor throughout Kafka’s life.

Hermann Kafka’s opinion of his son was improved slightly in 1906, when Kafka received his law degree from German University, Prague. After receiving his law degree, Kafka worked briefly for an Italian insurance company. In 1908, Kafka took a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, a form of Czech “workers’ compensation” insurance company subsidized by the government. The year he was hired, Kafka wrote “On Mandatory Insurance in the Construction Industry,” a report demonstrating the need for insurance to protect construction workers’ earnings and families in the event of injury. His fascination with death and injuries had found a purpose in advocating for workers.

During the winter months of 1911 and 1912, Kafka befriended a Yiddish actor, Isak Löwy, while the actor was performing with a traveling troupe in Prague. With Löwy’s help, Kafka began to study Jewish folklore. Possibly influenced by his mother, Kafka became obsessed with Jewish mythology, history, and the Yiddish language. Kafka even lectured on the Yiddish language at a university.

On the night of 22 September 1912, Kafka began work on The Judgment. He began writing at 10 p.m. and did not stop until 6 a.m. the next morning. In the opinion of editor Erich Heller, this feat alone proved Kafka to be a genius. The story, in standard book format, is a mere 12 pages; but its affect upon a reader is incredible. Kafka had created a form of literary surrealism — a vivid nightmare.

While attending a small party at the home of Max Brod’s father on 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a secretarial assistant in a Berlin office. On 20 September 1912, Kafka began writing letters to Felice. Many biographers believe Kafka “created” Felice during this period; not being near her he created a mental image Felice could never equal. It was not until the spring of 1913 that Kafka met with Felice in Berlin. A number of sources indicate Kafka did not love Felice, and any attraction was limited. It is possible Kafka was looking to prove to his father he was “normal” and planned to settle and start a family. About the same time, Kafka met an Swiss woman, according to his diary, and there is also evidence of a close friendship with Grete Bloch, a friend of Felice Bauer. If nothing else, Kafka’s relationships were complex.

Kafka seems to have thought wedding someone would help him maintain a sense of normalcy, so he proposed marriage to Felice on 12 April, 1914. He broke the engagement on 12 July of the same year. In early 1915, he revived the relationship with Felice, trying to maintain their friendship. Curiously, on 20 August, 1916, Kafka composed a list of reasons for and arguments against marriage to Felice. Nearly a year later, in July of 1917, Kafka again proposed to Felice.

Kafka’s diary entries for September 1917 reflect a man suffering a great emotional stress. He apparently considered destroying his notebooks, calling his writings the result of a “reward” from the devil for “services rendered.” It is unclear what those services might have been. A few days later, he noted the power literature has to lift “the world into the pure, the true, the immutable” truth. During such manic cycles, Kafka would write pages for hours, depriving himself of sleep. This sleep deprivation might have exacerbated his condition.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death…. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night.

A life-long hypochondriac, Kafka’s fears were realized when the writer was diagnosed with tuberculosis, not an uncommon disease during the early twentieth century, on 4 September, 1917. Not long after the diagnosis, Kafka temporarily ceased maintaining his diary. He slipped into a mild depression and broke his second engagement to Felice in December 1917.

Felice Bauer finally married another man in early 1919. She had loved Kafka, but could not endure his depressions and manic episodes any longer. His emotions for her were never clear, even to Kafka.

The Republic of Czechoslovakia was formed in 1919, yet Kafka continued to write in German. As a result of Kafka’s use of the German language, his works did not appear in a translated form in Czechoslovakia for more than a decade after his death. Kafka was not fond of the Czechs and they did not appear fond of him.

Kafka met Milena Jesenská-Pollak (also “Jesenska-Polack”), a Czech writer, in 1920. She was 13 years younger than Kafka. Their relationship seems to have been close, with Milena’s own diaries indicating they made love several times when Kafka visited her. A potential problem with their deep attraction was the fact Milena was married to Ernst Pollak (also “Polack”), a well-known intellectual of the time. Thankfully, Ernst and Milena appear to have had an open relationship. (Ernst had several well-known affairs.)

Kafka made a note in his diaries on 15 October, 1921, that his diaries were to be given to Milena upon his death. The pair last met in May of 1922. Kafka’s ability to travel had been limited by tuberculosis and other ailments, real and imagined, while Milena remained young and energetic.

As mentioned previously, tuberculosis was a common disease in the early twentieth century, and Kafka was among its many victims. By the age of 39, Kafka was unable to work — he was bleeding to death internally. In 1922 he resigned from his position at the workers’ insurance. For some time he lived with his sister, Ottla, long his favorite Kafka family member. In personal notes, Franz described his relationship with his sister as a “marriage” without the normal problems.

In 1923 Kafka found a new companion, Dora Dymant, a Polish Orthodox Jew. Dora was only 19 when the pair moved to Berlin. Kafka enjoyed Dora’s company, forming a relationship much better than those of his past. It is possible Dora and Franz were in love, not merely companions. They traveled together during the last year of Kafka’s life. Kafka was so pleased with his life, he decided to burn his previous writings. He informed Dora, asking her to destroy the manuscripts if he was unable. Curiously, after making the request Kafka produced The Burrow. On 10 April 1924, Kafka was taken to Wiener Wald Sanatorium, accompanied by Dora. While in the sanatorium, Kafka struggled with severe pain. During the final months of his life, Kafka was reduced to communicating via written notes. He berated his doctors and demanded morphine for his pain, a reasonable request due to the suffering he was enduring.

Kafka died 3 June 1924. Three days later Milena presented an obituary, referring to Kafka as “a man condemned to regard the world with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable and went to his death.”


Kafka’s Self-Image

Franz Kafka spent much of his life trying to improve his metal and physical health. However, his friends considered Franz physically fit. He was an accomplished swimmer, enjoyed hiking in the mountains, and was a talented horseman. Still, Kafka saw himself as thin, awkward, and even cowardly. He pursued various “treatments” to improve his health, when none seemed necessary.

Milena Jesenká-Pollak wrote that Kafka seemed repulsed by his own body, and to a lesser extent, hers. Milena seems to have been reasonably attractive and enjoyed hiking, yet Kafka still had difficulty looking directly at her. Milena wrote:

I knew his fear before I knew him…. In the four days Frank was near me, he lost it. We even laughed about it. But he will never be healthy as long as he has this fear…. It isn’t just about me, but about everything which is shamelessly alive, for example, the flesh. Flesh is too open, too naked: he can’t bear the sight of it…. When he felt the fear coming on, he would stare into my eyes, we would wait for awhile and it would soon pass… everything was simple and clear.
- Introducing Kafka; Mairowitz, p. 107

The irony would not be lost on Kafka.
After Franz Kafka’s Death

While Kafka had written of cruel and unjust treatments of individuals, even he could not have foreseen the horrors of the Holocaust. Max Brod saved many of Kafka’s manuscript pages, despite the author’s request that all his notes and manuscripts be burned upon his death. Unfortunately, many pages were lost when the German army raided the apartment of Dora Dymant. While Dora survived the Holocaust, Kafka’s letters and works he had left with her are presumed to have been burned by the Gestapo.

Grete Bloch and Milena Jesenská-Pollak died in 1944, in Nazi concentration camps. Kafka’s three sisters also died in Nazi concentration camps. Kafka’s sister Ottla died a tragic death, having divorced her non-Jewish husband to remain with the Kafka family. [...]

Kafka as Existentialist

Philosophy professor Robert Solomon states, “The existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world he cannot accept” (ix). However, the individual eventually accepts and even embraces the absurdity of life. Albert Camus’ Sisyphus is the often-cited example of such an existential hero. Sisyphus not only accepts his fate, he sees his acceptance as a form of revolt against the absurdity. Kafka’s characters, too, accept their fates and embrace the absurdity of the universe. As William Hubben writes of K. in The Castle:

As with Camus’ Sisyphus, every failure is succeeded by a new and futile effort.
- Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Kafka; Hubben, p. 141

Existentialism and the absurdism of Camus are often considered together in philosophy and literature. Kafka’s absurd world belongs in this same grouping, as he explores the absurd relationships between individuals, society, technology, and words. Kafka’s works meet the basic criteria of existentialism, while adding the additional depth of postmodern absurdity.

Continental philosophy historian Walter Kaufmann observes that individualism is one of the few common traits among those writers associated with existentialism. This focus on the individual in an absurd world is one reason Kaufmann decides to include works by Kafka in collections of existential works. As Kaufmann explains:

Certainly, existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets. The three writers who appear invariably on every list of existentialists — Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre — are not in agreement on essentials. By the time we consider adding Rilke, Kafka, and Camus, it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism.
- Existentialism; Kaufmann, p. 11

While Marx and various Marxist movements see a social evolution in humanity towards a utopian society that moves beyond a need for government, postmodernism often rejects this tradition. For this reason, many Marxist critics consider postmodernism to be a symptom of capitalism and the alienation caused by materialism. The postmodern can be a bleak society lorded over by systems and mindless organizational psychology. This bureaucratic nightmare is the world of Kafka, which Hubben suggests existed throughout Europe before World War II:

He expresses an existentialist Weltgefühl with stronger visionary force than his French colleagues, and speaks undoubtedly to the condition of untold men and women in Europe.
- Hubben, p. 139

Kafka does not theorize a utopian future for humanity. At best, Kafka has no philosophical or political motives and merely wants to reflect what he has seen of human nature. At worst, Kafka believes humanity is descending into an abyss of alienation in which individuals can rely on no external truths or communal obligations. The end result is an extreme version of alienation that is a forced, not chosen, individualism.

If anything, Kafka is more pessimistic than Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger, or even Camus. The individual’s conflict against the absurd is not even heroic; it is hopeless. Solomon suggests Kafka’s pessimism moves beyond existential despair:

It is now standard to link Kafka with Camus as a prophet of the absurd, but this view ignores the ultimate despair of Kafka that Camus rejects. […] One might say that the basic difference between Camus and Kafka is that Camus attempts to provide an answer for the problem Kafka sees as inescapable.
- Existentialism; Solomon, p. 166

Readers should compare The Judgment, The Trial, and In The Penal Colony. In Kafka’s stories the greatest sin, as in existentialism, is a failure to be authentic in the sense Jean-Paul Sartre used the term. Something does not seem authentic about Kafka’s punished characters — they do not seem true to themselves. It is one thing to accept a situation, it is another to fail to assert an identity. Without an identity, alienation is certain. [...]

C.S. Wyatt

— The Existiential Primer



Selected works:



BETRACHTUNG, 1913 - Meditation (tr. Malcolm Pasley, in The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992; Joachim Neugroschel, in The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, 1995; Siegfried Mortkowitz, 1998) - film 1970, La Colonia penal, dir. by Raoul Ruiz

DAS URTEIL, 1913 (in Arkadia) - The Judgement (tr. Malcolm Pasley, in The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992; Joachim Neugroschel, in The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, 1995)

DIE WERWANDLUNG, 1915 - The Transformation and Other Stories (tr. Malcolm Pasley, 1992) / The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories (tr. Joachim Neugroschel, 1995) / The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (tr. by Donna Freed, 1996) / Metamorphosis and Other Stories (translated by Stanley Appelbaum, 1996) / Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Other Writings (edited by Helmuth Kiesel, 2002) / Metamorphosis and Other Stories (tr. Michael Hofmann, 2007) -films: 1976, Förvandlingen, dir. by Ivo Dvorák, starring Peter Schildt; 1977, The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, dir. by Caroline Leaf (10 min); 2002, Prevrashcheniye, dir. by Valeri Fokin; 2008, dir. by Limor Diamant

IN DER STRAFKOLONIE, 1919 - The Penal Colony, Stories and Short Pieces (tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1948) / In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works (tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 1973) / In the Penal Colony (tr. Malcolm Pasley, in The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992) / The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories (tr. Joachim Neugroschel, 1995)

EIN LANDARTZ, 1919 - A Country Doctor (tr. Kevin Blahut; Malcolm Pasley, in The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992; Joachim Neugroschel, in The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, 1995)

BRIEF AN DER VATER, 1919 - Letter to His Father (tr. E. Kaiser and W. Wilkins, 1966)

EIN HUNGERKÜNSTLER, 1924 - A Hunger Artist (tr. Kevin Blahut; Joachim Neugroschel, in The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, 1995) / A Fasting-Artist (tr. Malcolm Pasley, in The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992)

DER PROZESS, 1925 - The Trial (trs. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1937; Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, 1977; Breon Mitchell, 1998; David Wyllie, 2009) - films: 1962, Le procés, dir. and adapted by Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins. "I do not share Kafka's point of view in The Trial. I believe that he is a good writer, but Kafka is not the exreaordinary genius that people today see him as. That is why I was not concerned about the excessive fidelity and could make a film by Welles." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999); 1993, dir. by David Jones, adapted by Harold Pinter, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Anthony Hopkins; 1999, Am Ende des Gange, dir. by Michael Muschner (10 min)

DAS SCHLOSS, 1926 - The Castle (trs. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1930; Mark Harman, 1998) - films: 1968, dir. by Rudolf Noelte, starring Maximilian Schell, Cordula Trantow; 1986, dir. by Jaakko Pakkasvirta, starring Carl-Kristian Rundman as Josef K; 1990, Tsikhe-Simagre, dir. by Dato Janelidze; 1994, Zamok, dir. by Aleksei Balabanov, starring Nikolai Stotsky; 1997, Das Schloß, dir. by Michael Haneke, starring Ulrich Mühe

AMERIKA, 1927 (original version, as Der Verschollene, ed. by Jost Schillemeit, 1983) - Amerika (tr. Edwin Muir, afterword by Max Brod, 1945) / Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (trans. Michael Hofmann, 2004) / Amerika: The Missing Person (tr. Mark Harman, 2008) - films: 1969, dir. by Zbynek Brynych; 1983, Klassenverhältnisse, dir. by Jean-Marie Straub & Daniéle Huillet; 1994, dir. by Vladimír Michálekt, starring Martin Dejdar

BEIM BAU DER CHINESISCHEN MAUER, 1931 - The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections (tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1946)

ERZÄHLUNGEN UND KLEINE PROSA, 1935 (edited by Max Brod and Heinz Politzer) - The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 1946/1995)

BESCHREIBUNG EINES KAMPFES, 1936 - Description of a Struggle (tr. T. and J. Stern, 1958)

TAGEBÜCHER 1910-23, 1951 (edited by Max Brod) - The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913 (tr. J. Kresh, 1948); The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923 (tr. M. Greenberg and H. Arendt, 1948-49/1999)

BRIEFE AN MILENA, 1951 (edited by Willy Haas) - Letters to Milena (tr. by T. and J. Stern, 1953) / Letters to Milena (translated and with an introduction by Philip Boehm, 1990)

HOCHZEITSVORBEREITUNGEN AUF DEM LANDE, 1953 - Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings (by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 1973)

BRIEFE 1902-24, 1958 (ed. by M. Brod) - Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (translated by Richard and Clara Winston)

BRIEFE AN FELICE, 1967 (ed. by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born) - Letters to Felice (tr. J. Stern and E. Duckworth, 1973)

SÄMTLICHE ERZÄHLUNGEN, 1970 (ed. by Paul Raabe)

The Basic Kafka, 1971 (ed. by E. Heller)

Complete Stories, 1971 (ed. by Nahum N. Glatzer)

Shorter Works, 1973 (ed. by Malcolm Pasley)

I Am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographival Writings, 1974 (ed. by N.N. Glatzer)

BRIEFE AN OTTILA UND DIE FAMILIE, 1975 (ed. by Klaus Wagenbach and Hartmut Binder) - Letters to Ottla and the Family (tr. by R. and C. Winston, 1982)

SCHRIFTEN, TAGEBÜCHER, BRIEFE, 1982

Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 1988 (tr. Richard and Clara Winston)

BRIEFE AN DIE ELTERN AUS DEN JAHREN 1922-1924, 1990 (ed. by Josef Cermák und Martin Svatoš)

TAGEBÜCHER, 1990 (ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, Malcolm Pasley)

The Transformation and Other Stories, 1992 (ed. and tr. Malcolm Pasley)

The Zürau Aphorisms, 2004 (translated by Geoffrey Brock and Michael Hofmann; originally published in Italy as Aforismi di Zürau, 2004)



— www.franzkafka.de

— The Modern Word

— Franz Kafka-Ausgabe

— www.kulturagent.eu

— Hans-Joerg Grosse

– www.kafkaesk.de

— Franz Kafka konkret

— Kafkas Werke im www

— Oxford Kafka Research Centre

— www.kafka.org

— Franz Kafka online

— Los abrevaderos cabalistas de la literatura kafkiana (pdf)

— the Existential Primer

— Biografía
— El Castillo
— El Proceso
— La Metamorfosis
— América
— Diarios/Cartas
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Kafka Informe para una academia