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The Jewish Tradition in Kafka's Writing
From: Columbia University
| By:
Willi Goetschel |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Because Franz Kafka's literary language was German, he is often thought of as a German writer. However, as a Jew born in Prague, German culture was not the only influence to play a role in Kafka's self-understanding. Increasingly, Kafka (right) became interested in his Jewish background and in the project of Zionism later in life. This fact has not gone unnoticed by literary scholars, who have labored to interpret the religious elements in Kafka's work. Willi Goetschel, a professor of Germanic languages, discusses how Judaism plays a central role in Kafka's writing and how, at the same time, Kafka's struggle with modernity has influenced the Jewish tradition itself. |
 ranz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and grew up in turn-of-the-century Europe. Some of his most fascinating parables and stories were written after his creative breakthrough in 1912: "The Judgment," "Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "Investigations of a Dog," "A Country Doctor," "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk." He also left behind three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial and The Castle. Kafka lived only four decades; he died of tuberculosis in 1924. |
Living as a Jew in Czech-speaking Prague, in what was a German-speaking Christian minority, Kafka learned early on what it meant to be part of a minority within a minority. But rather than isolation, all his writings show that to live means to travel along the frontier of existence: constantly traveling back and forth between opposite cultures, traditions and philosophies. |
It is no coincidence that when K., the protagonist of The Castle, enters the sphere of the castle in the first pages he announces himself as a land surveyor. We don't know what he has in mind really, but a land surveyor is someone who probes frontiers, among other things. There is also a double entendre because in Hebrew "land surveyor" and "messiahs" are just a vowel away from each other. |
Traveling along those frontiers, testing them, contesting them, and questioning them, Kafka was also traveling at the frontiers in his own life. By day a high-ranking and well-liked officer of the Workers' Accident Insurance, he was after work a passionate writer who decided to sacrifice all other pleasures to his one and only love--literature and writing. Only toward the end of his life, when Kafka already suffered from his lethal illness, tuberculosis, did he quit his job and find the courage to dedicate himself fully to his cause. |
One last irony, to which we owe the fact that his work is in print rather than fallen into ashes, is his testament to the effect that all his papers should be burned--a note that was never honored. The story is that one day he showed this note to Max Brod, his best friend, editor, and executor of his will, who laughingly said, "Of course, I would never realize such a request," at which point Kafka smiled and put it back into the drawer. |
Jewish tradition meets modernity
Prague was the most important Jewish city in Central Europe from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century. It was the city of the Maharal, Rabbi Yehudah Loew, who wrote on Jewish law, philosophy and morality in the sixteenth century. Prague was also the city that invited Martin Buber for his lectures on the Jewish Renaissance. |
Growing up, Kafka was very assimilated like most German-speaking Jews of his generation. Later in life he was increasingly drawn to Jewish tradition and even became relatively fluent in reading Hebrew. But he also uses Judaism in a playful way in his writing; Kafka becomes part of the Jewish tradition by reinventing it. |
One of Kafka's most interesting concerns was cultural Zionism. At the end of his life, he even contemplated immigrating to Israel, to die in Palestine. But Kafka is also extremely critical of Zionist ideology, and he's very critical of easy "consumer" types of Judaism. In his famous "Letter to His Father," he blames his father for having given him only a parody of Judaism, a sort of "three-day" Jew who doesn't even know what to do on those three days. Kafka himself found a very modern approach to his tradition. |
On a general level, Kafka chose a very interesting engagement in the question of how the universal and the particular should relate. How can a Jew in modernity also be fully modern; but also, how is modernity constructed? How is the universalism of modernity always only particular? He even becomes then a part of Jewish tradition, one could say. |
It has been a predicament of Kafka scholarship that the Germans have claimed him as a national German writer, albeit of the German-Jewish variety. Yet when he is taught in the United States, for instance, he's more often taught in the canon of modernity with James Joyce and Proust rather than with German writers. But he's also a Jewish writer; he's often taught in Jewish studies or as a world literature writer, which shows that he's traveling the frontier very well. |
Rather than glossing over these contradictions, Kafka poses them. He is a great writer for the question of multiculturalism, and also a forceful critique of it, in that there's not a common denominator at the end, but that you need to have different cultures struggle and bring out their contradictions. This struggle, this dialectic, is modernity. |
Symbolism of the Holocaust
Kafka has also been read in the context of the Holocaust. It is very difficult to uncouple him from such a connection, because in a way the descriptions in his writing assume sometimes stunning affinity to the images and narratives of the Holocaust. But if you view Kafka in such a connection, you have to be aware that you are doing something a little bit ahistorical. The descriptions are so similar because the common denominator is the human mind. |
For example, even in a happy life you encounter doorkeepers or guards. You can also apply Kafka's imagery to how the flow of information works, or the flow of culture, and in that way the comparison is accurate. We all know only little bits and pieces of tradition, and it's not easy to get access to it. But I would myself shy away from reading Kafka so literally. Kafka is metaphorically too sophisticated to be short-circuited with plain reality. |
For instance, when Kafka was publishing his story "Metamorphosis" he was frighteningly afraid that the illustrator was going to put a bug on the page. He said, "Anything but just not a bug; the most you can go for is a half-opened door and then some darkness in the back." Because if you read "Metamorphosis" carefully, the transformation of the protagonist into a bug may be all in the mind. It becomes surreal. |
"In the Penal Colony" is a horrible story on the surface, which tells how a person is tortured to death by his guilt being written on his body. But Kafka is reported to have just broken out into laughter when he was reading it to the public because it is a funny story, in a way. Literally, in life, you have to experience things, and whatever you do comes back to you. Experience is your own body, so whatever you do feeds back onto you. You become what you have done. |
In that way, it is a horrible story, but it's not meant to glorify or criticize violence. It just exists on a magical level, like a dream about a concentration camp which is not an actual experience or memory. Otherwise it's a different story. It may not even be a concentration camp; it may just mean you have got to get up early in the morning and work and struggle in life. |
Kafka plays on different levels, and also on regular misunderstandings. In "Give It Up!" the narrator asks a policeman the way and the policeman replies, "You asking me the way?" Of course, in Chinese, Jewish, and other traditions, "the way" has extremely rich possibilities of meaning: the way is life. |
Cabala and spirituality
Gershom Scholem, a historian of Jewish mysticism, once said that in order to understand the cabala, one had to read Franz Kafka's writings first, particularly The Trial. To his friend Walter Benjamin, Scholem wrote, "I think the key to Kafka would fall into the hands of that person who would be able to extract the comic aspect of Jewish theology"--a comic aspect, he means here, which is very serious, which is at the center of the counter-historical and the critical in Jewish theology. |
There is a mystical moment possible at any time, but it is a mystical moment that can never be expressed fully in language. The cabalists have an extremely sophisticated theory that language is only metaphorical. It's like deconstruction in a theological sense: you need to first construct something and then deconstruct it, and then you discover the feeling of what it could be. You can try to grasp it, conceptualize it, define it, but it disappears again. It's always hovering, like the cabalist concept of God. God is everywhere in every detail, and it's only your attention that is needed. |
What type of God is described here? The God of The Castle and The Trial is not the real God. It's not the God that we can never know; it's a man-made god. Kafka says at some point that there's an infinite amount of hope, just not for us. He means there is transcendence; there are things you can never nail down. In life you have to speak to realize it, but you can never fixate it because language is only a construct. |
This hopelessness is inscribed throughout Kafka's text. But it actually is a cheerful hopelessness--you have to read the irony. Kafka is a person most people never understand. At some of the weirdest moments in his stories, when Kafka would read them aloud to an audience, he would break out into laughter. What he's trying to criticize in his stories is our own bureaucratic, authoritarian mind that produces God. God himself or herself is not necessarily authoritarian, but we impose our constructs. |
In reading the disillusioning and disenchanting movements of "Before the Law," I have the feeling that there's some kind of a hope coming back. But this hope cannot be named; it's not a property. There are passages where Kafka says, "we need belief," "we need to believe in something." The problem is that people believe the wrong things. In a way, it's a crusade against cultural idolatry: people pray to the wrong doorkeepers and don't even get to the Law itself. If he doesn't give you hope, he gives you, I think, strength to live with the necessary hopelessness in life. |
With Kafka we are in an extremely strange world. In a way we are neurotic beings, as Sigmund Freud recognized of the human condition in modern civilization. You could say that the Kafkaesque is a short name for Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud said, "The moment you ask for the meaning of life it's already a sign of your illness, because there is none." |
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