Franz Kafka

In the works of three great writers, Western Europe and America have recognized events of international consequence in recent German literature: in the North German Thomas Mann and in the two natives of Prague, Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka. The reputations of Mann and Rilke have grown slowly and steadily to their present magnitude; after a posthumous delay of two decades, Franz Kafka's world renown has risen in a rapid and somewhat hectic fashion.

A mountain of essays has begun to tower upward-essays which set out to interpret Kafka's work and fathom the secrets of the man behind the work. Many of these essays are intelligent and penetrating. But they all remain piecework: unfortunately, exegesis and speculation seem to hang in the air. Almost all the literature on Kafka suffers from the interpreters' ignorance of certain decisive facts. Franz Kafka is explicable only in terms of his Prague, and thus only by means of an intimate knowledge of circumstances which are unique and will never recur again.

Yet even this realiter, this inescapable foundation, has been neglected in Kafka studies. The foreign critics of Kafka lack any acquaintance with certain local facts and customs; so that it is no wonder that they fail to penetrate the whole complex. But why the Prague interpreters of Kafka's work should likewise go into these matters so little, one cannot say.

The reflections which follow are intentionally from the point of view of a one-sided concentration, to compensate for that other one-sided perspective to which almost the whole body of Kafka criticism is committed. But let it be said that we are not concerned with proving why Franz Kafka necessarily had to come into existence, but rather with a pragmatically clear, factually incontrovertible account of the situation and circumstances which determined his existence.

Between the necessity and the possibility lies the unfathomable secret of genius and its genesis. First a word of introduction. Kafka's books are tragedies of loneliness, of hermetic isolation, of the curse of existence which converts the concrete individual into an enigmatic outcast.

For a long time the proceedings are suspended; but finally they end with a declaration of "Guilty!" and an infamous execution. That is The Trial of Kafka. Or a young man changes overnight into an offensive parasitic insect: The Metamorphosis. Kafka is inexhaustible in his ability to invent symbols for his exclusive concern: the guilt of the isolated individual who does not live according to truth and right, the mystic outlaw who excludes himself or is himself excluded from the society of other living beings. The explanation for Kafka's persistent theme of sorrow lies close at hand: the fate of the Jewish soul in the Dispersion. So obvious an explanation is, however, false if taken in such general terms.

Franz Kafka (who, by the way, according to the testimony of Max Brod, devoured every word of Thomas Mann) likewise constantly revolves around this ethical dilemma of the writer, though, in contrast with the author of Tonio Kroger, it is found only between the lines or explicitly and prominently only in certain passages from the diaries. The ethical dilemma of the writer was of necessity constantly sharpened by the particular problems of existence in Prague. Let Franz Werfel be a witness; for he was Kafka's countryman, about seven years younger. It is common to say that parallels between Kafka and Werfel are always of great profit to our understanding and would be worth systematic study.