Kafka centenary
As 2024 is nearing its end I have just discovered that an important milestone has almost passed by uncelebrated. This year marks the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka who died 3 June 1924 from tuberculosis at the age of 40. And while we sometimes see the adjective “Kafkaesque” thrown around in literary reviews do we know what it means?
I was introduced to Kafka at school when our English teacher got us to read books outside the curriculum when we were studying for the HSC. Among those he had us read was Kafka’s The Trial. I so clearly remember reading it and was struck by its otherworldliness. It was one of the most affecting books I had read by that age—not the dystopian future of Huxleys’ Brave New World or of Orwell’s 1984 but it was about the present world.
The Trial begins famously:
Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
The novel is a slow and evocative narrative of K.’s helpless progression through a completely incomprehensible bureaucracy. It is pessimistic and surreal.
After I left school I went on to read, perhaps, his most famous work: Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung). Kafka the master storyteller summarises the story in the first sentence (again):
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Do I need to tell you more?
Max Brod’s dilemma
Much of Kafka’s work was published after his death by his friend Max Brod, a writer and literary and musical agent. Kafka had asked Brod to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts but Brod had them published instead.
There has been much debate about the morality of Brod’s decision. Brod claims that he told Kafka very clearly that he wouldn’t do it and suggests that Kafka, by choosing him as executor, did want them published. This is quite conceivable as Brod had encouraged Kafka and promoted his work throughout their friendship. Had Brod burnt these works it would have been an enormous act of artistic vandalism as Kafka’s works are now revered as some of the most influential novels and short stories of the 20th century.
So what is Kafkaesque?
To call something “Kafkaesque” is to suggest a work evoking the anxiety of 20th century people and their sense of isolation and uncertainty. It may contain “an inscrutable, baffling mixture of the normal and the fantastic”.
In The Trial, Josef K is arrested for an unknown crime that is not explained, and experiences a sense of alienation and anxiety with the faceless bureaucracy. Similarly, Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect in The Metamorphosis is a dehumanising force that strips him of his identity and worth.
Critics and literary people argue about the exact meaning of the word “Kafkaesque” which is quite ironic given that Kafka’s work is about uncertainty, and unpredictability. It is also difficult to pin down the meaning of the adjective when there are also many different interpretations of the meaning of Kafka’s work.
Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin and Willa Muir viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Existentialists see the environment of guilt and despair as the point from which to build an authentic existence. Other interpretations emphasise the social criticism of the inhumanity of the powerful, and the barbarity behind normal life.
Who was the real Kafka?
Kafka’s dark writings have had him portrayed as a dark spirit. Even though he found his mundane job working for an insurance company torturous (he did his writing at night) his colleagues found him charming and humorous.
Kafka studied law at the University of Prague (where he had met Max Brod) and received his doctorate in 1906. As a youth he had become a socialist and an atheist. He attended Czech anarchists meetings (before World War I). When older he showed sympathy for socialised Zionism.
Kafka came from a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. He was German in both language and culture, but being Jewish isolated him from the German community in Prague. As a “modern intellectual” and an atheist he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage.
His health was poor and the office work by day, and writing by night, exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent periods in sanatoriums but his health finally gave way in 1924.
Kafka and the Holocaust
Kafka had three sisters—Ellie, Valli, and Ottilie. He was closest to Ottilie, known as Ottla. She supported his writing efforts and during bouts of his illness. Kafka’s sisters survived him into the Second World War. Ottla died at Auschwitz after volunteering to escort some Polish children being sent there from the ghetto at Terezin. Ellie and Valli were sent to the Łódź Ghetto before being murdered at Chelmno extermination camp.
Kafka’s early death spared him the fate of his sisters and many of his friends. His posthumous recognition began during the Nazi regime in Germany (at the time his sisters were killed in the concentration camps) and grew in post-war Europe. But however dark the imagination of Kafka it was nothing compared to the horror of the Holocaust.
Here is a quote from Morten Høi Jensen’s book review in the LA Review of Books (of Is That Kafka? by Reiner Stach. New Directions, 2016) that is impossible not to go past:
The final pages — the “Biographical Notes” — of Is That Kafka? are some of the most devastating I have ever read. They summarize, in brief, the fate of Kafka’s surviving family and closest friends.
“The short story writer Oskar Baum died in a hospital in Prague in 1941, but his wife was deported to Theresienstadt and died there; their son, Leo, died on July 22, 1946, “in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by a Jewish resistance group.” Max Brod’s brother Otto, “an outstanding pianist,” was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Kafka’s translator Milena Jesenská was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939; she died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. Elli and Valli, two of Kafka’s sisters, both died in the Chelmno extermination camp in 1942. Ottla, his youngest sister, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1940. In 1943, she volunteered to “accompany a transport of Polish Jewish children to Auschwitz as a helper,” and died there shortly after. The novelist Ernst Weiss committed suicide when the German troops occupied Paris. Finally, there is Kafka’s second fiancée, Julie Wohryzek, who was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1944. Elsewhere in the book we are told that as many as five of Kafka’s 22 classmates “appear to have been murdered in concentration camps.”
Kafka’s legacy
“Kafkaesque” reminds us of the failure of reason and the vulnerability of the individual against institutionalised and impersonal bureaucracies. This is my little tribute to a favourite author.