Yesterday the poet Franz Kafka died after a long and difficult illness in the Kierling Sanatorium in Klosterneuburg. He was born July 3rd, 1883. He was born in Prague and studied, received his doctorate, and worked for a long time as a civil servant here as well. Two years ago Max Brod wrote about the place that Franz Kafka holds in literature in “Jews in German Literature” (Welt Verlag, Berlin) and asked the following:
Where to begin? It’s all the same, for what’s special about this phenomenon is that one will come to the same conclusion from any side. It then follows that it is truth, unshakeable authenticity and purity, while lies offer a different view from every perspective and dazzle us with impurity. In Franz Kafka however, and I would say in him alone amongst the entire sphere of literary modernism, there are no illusions, no wavering prophets, no shifting backdrops. Here is the truth and nothing but the truth.
Take for example his language! He disdains cheap methods (coining new words, compounding words, shuffling clauses etc.), but “disdain” is perhaps not the right word. These methods are inaccessible to him, just as impurity is inaccessible, forbidden and taboo to the pure. His language is crystal clear, and on the surface one will note how he strives towards the precise depiction of his subject, and yet dreams and visions of immeasurable depth flow beneath the bright mirror of this pure stream of language.
Strength and weakness, ascension and submission, are entangled in Kafka’s work in a remarkably unique manner. At first only the weakness is visible and it reminds one of decadence, Satanism, the love of that which is rotting, dying, and morbid that erupts in Poe, Villiers de l’Isle, Adam and some newer works (Meyrink). But this first impression is misleading. A novella like Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” has absolutely nothing to do with Poe outside of the appearance of some horrific scenes. The deep gravity of religion fills Kafka’s work and he shows no curiosity towards the abyss. Rather, he sees it against his will. He does not lust after decay.
I recall one of the conversations I had with Kafka about Europe today and the fall of mankind. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that arise in God’s head”, he said. I was immediately reminded of the Gnostic worldview: God as an evil demiurge, and the world, his crime.
“Oh no,” Kafka said, “we’re only one of God’s bad moods, a bad day.”
“So is there hope outside the known world?”
He laughed. “Oh, there’s hope, endless hope - but not for us.”
At the time it seemed to me that his work and his whole way of living could have been captured by this sentence. “Endless hope, but not for us.” One could call it optimism or pessimism, but it is a despair without limits for a circumscribed area, a despair that names itself as an exception amidst endless and righteous successes. This is precisely why his books (for example, “The Metamorphosis” or “The Judgment”) have such a disturbing effect; the whole world reveals itself inside them. They are not disturbing on principle, rather, they are idyllic, heroic, upstanding, healthy, and positive. They are full of affection for life and all that is mild and good, for the body of the girl that blooms above the hero’s corpse at the end of “The Metamorphosis”, for the Montessori schools, vegetarianism, working the land, all that is natural, simple, and the newness of childhood, an impulse towards joy, respectability, bodily and spiritual power with the intent of a benevolent god during creation of the world - “But not for us”. This “not for us” beckons from behind this benevolent divine will, doubly frightening because it is a confession of sin, of the ultimate violence..
Kafka does not reject life, but he rejects his peers. He does not quarrel with God, only with himself, which explains the fearsome severity with which he makes judgements. Judge’s benches and executions appear everywhere in his work. “The Metamorphosis” - the human that isn’t quite human. Kafka condemns him to be an animal, an insect. In an even more hideous manner, he lets the animal ascend to humanity (Report to an Academy), but only in a masquerade that the humans eventually expose. But that is not enough! Humanity must sink even deeper -it’s all or nothing- and when one cannot raise themselves towards God, when the father condemns them to “death by drowning”, when total unity with the immoral is barred from entering the law by a powerful doorkeeper, when one cannot muster the courage to push this doorkeeper aside, when the message from the dying emperor never reaches you, you transform into something that is neither animate nor inanimate like the spool of thread in “Concerns of a Family Man” that restlessly wanders up and down the stairs. “What’s your name then?” “Odradek” (and this resembles a slew of Slavic words that mean “apostate”, an apostate from reproduction, rod, from the council of divine creation, rada). This resembles the hero of Kafka’s greatest work, “The Trial” (which in my opinion is complete, but in the opinion of the author completely unfinishable and unpublishable). Kafka has already released tiny fragments of this extensive book (“A Dream”, “Before the Law”) in the same volume as “A Country Doctor”.
Despite all of the beauty of these published pieces, one cannot make sense of the impact and originality of the entire body of work. The hopeless struggle of a man against an unseen court, that lures him with mysterious summons and arrests, judges, and kills him through an omnipresent apparatus of officials, customs, and systems. This is a court that strangely enough only manifests itself as if by magic in the most downtrodden, marginalized places like junkyards and the attics of houses on the edges of town. Despite the hero’s best efforts, he only ever meets the low-ranking organs of this court, nothing particularly honored, and yet he comes to know the majesty and irresistable sovereignty of the law.
Kafka’s books are the most mysterious ones I know. It goes without saying that they are too tough to crack, and yet they envelop you like the softest songs, separated from life and yet embedded within, for all their fantasy and specters still filled with a sense of reality, observations, shrewd observations. They are attuned to a single individual even as they unfold into broader scenes with an abundance of secondary characters, some that participate and some that observe the progress of the plot from the fringes and the windows with minimal intervention.These spectators are a unique part of his technique, and, as always, in every word he says, in every letter and note, one has here the entirety of Franz Kafka. Without understanding him fully one feels that he stands alone against the movement of the stars and the human race, set apart not by polemics or contempt or hate, but the severity of his love for the noble.
Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, a city that to this day he has only left for brief periods. His six books (which were published at the urging of his friends and not through his own initiative) are only a small fragment of his literary work. Take for example “The Stoker”, which is only the first chapter of an all-encompassing and nearly complete novel, that tenderly and lovingly takes place in a dreamlike America.
Max Brod, obituary for Franz Kafka
Published in the Prager Tagblatt, June 4th, 1924 (trans. me)
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