Franz Kafka

Sander L. Gilman

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781861895974
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The conflation of reality and the fantastic, ambiguity, the relentless confrontation with horror, the fractured sense of identity: Franz Kafka created a wholly unique and enduring worldview through his literature and life, and he remains one of the central intellectual and cultural figures of our time. Sander L. Gilman brings together Kafka's literary works, personal writings, and biography to create a compelling and wholly accessible narrative of the literary master's life.Gilman focuses on the relationship between Kafka's life and work, reconstructing both Kafka's cultural environment and the writer's conceptual understanding of his own body. Kafka's letters, diaries, and writings emerge in Gilman's analysis as windows into his ongoing attempt to create an identity in a world where being a Central European Jew dictated an uneasy fate. The volume emphasizesin particular the image and role of the Jew in Kafka's modern world and how Kafka responded to prevailing attitudes, repressive actions, and stereotypes in society at large. Gilman also examines the influence of psychoanalytic ideas on Kafka and his works, exploring how Kafka wove such psychoanalytic experiences into his literature. Gilman concludes with consideration of the "Kafka-myth" and the wealth of material emerging from it over the past eighty years, including work by such illustrious minds as Walter Benjamin and Ted Hughes. Franz Kafka features illuminating archival photographs and illustrations as well as a comprehensive bibliography and filmography of work by and about Kafka. This succinct yet penetrating volume offers valuable and original insight into how Kafka's life and work shaped how we perceive our modern society and how, indeed, some aspect of the world is always "Kafkaesque."

1

My Family and my Body as a Curse

It is a frosty, damp early morning in 1917. Passers by look up at an odd sight for central Prague. A young man, stripped to the waist, stands at the open window of his apartment in what had been the Schönborn Palace, doing calisthenics for a full ten minutes. Exercise and repeat, exercise and repeat every evening at 7.30 p.m. The craze for body-building exemplified by the strongman Eugene Sandow (1867–1925) had an exponent in the civil servant Franz Kafka. Exercise, row, swim, ride horses, build your body, transform yourself. Light clothing even in the midst of winter was the litany of the body-builder Jens Peter Müller, who abjured the use of Sandow’s (Indian) clubs and spring dumbbells (all sold to eager young men through the post). Müller, on the other hand, sold special sandals and books on sexual hygiene. But both believed that bodily transformation was not only possible but also necessary in order to become a modern man.

Kafka, this young Jewish citizen of multicultural Prague in the first decade of the new twentieth century, shunned the devices but he did body-build compulsively. He fletcherized at every meal. ‘Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate’, said Horace Fletcher (1849–1919). Chew your food 32 times and you will have a healthier body and a happier soul. Franz’s father hid behind his newspaper, not wanting to watch his son chew. Franz Kafka exercising in a decaying castle in the middle of Prague, compulsively chewing his food, desiring to control his body. Kafka was not alone in his compulsive chewing. The philosopher and psychologist William James, by then a professor at Harvard, regularly fletcherized.

Slightly under six feet tall (1.82 m) and weighing 133 pounds (61 kg), Kafka was someone whose mother constantly encouraged him to ‘eat, eat, my son’. The average Czech man of the time was five foot five to six inches tall and the average Central European Jew was much shorter – five foot. Inordinately thin, compulsively hypochondriac, Kafka’s preoccupation with his body was, however, not solely a narcissistic quirk. Sandow, born Friedrich Müller in Prussia, was the ideal male body with whom all young men of the day identified: in 1902, aged 35, he was 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m) tall, weighed 202 lb (91.6 kg) and had a 48 in (121 cm) chest. When Franz Kafka went in 1907 for a physical for his first job at the Assicurazioni Generali Insurance Company, Dr Wilhelm Pollack, the company doctor, described his body in detail:

His body is thin but delicate [gracil]. He is relatively weak. His stride is secure, relaxed. The circumference of his neck is 37 cm. He shows no signs of goiter. His voice is pure and strong. He looks younger than his age. The form and structure of his chest – his breast is raised, his clavicle is drumstickshaped and indented at its ends. He has weak chest muscles. With a deep breath his chest circumference at level of his nipples is 82 cm and on expiration it is 78 cm. Both halves of his chest are equally developed but weak. He takes 16 breaths a minute when resting; and 19 per minute with exercise. The percussion of the right upper lobe of his lung is dull as a result of an earlier rachitic deviation. No anomalies by auscultation; no anomalous sounds.¹

As with much of his unremarkable life, the banal requirement of such physical examinations is transmuted into a literary trope in Kafka’s diaries for July 1914, where ‘Bauz, the director of the Progress Insurance Company’, informs the unnamed job applicant:

You’re tall enough … I can see that; but what can you do? Our attendants must be able to do more than lick stamps … Your head is shaped peculiarly. Your forehead recedes so. Remarkable … Naturally, we can employ only people in good health. Before you are taken on you will have to be examined by a doctor. You are quite well now? Really? Of course, that could be. Speak up a little! Your whispering makes me nervous … As long as you’re already here, have the doctor examine you now; the attendant will show you the way. But that doesn’t mean you will be hired, even if the doctor’s opinion is favorable … Go along and don’t take up any more of my time.²

External appearance signals the applicant’s mental health or illness and Kafka consciously sees himself always as the victim of such practices. Yet it is clear that the world of this little fable is not simply Kafka’s experience recorded but transformed in a way in which writing about it gives Kafka the power to control what seems to be uncontrollable.

Being intrinsically ‘sickly’ and in need of transformation meant, in Kafka’s world, being Jewish. In 1912 the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr (Self-defence), avidly read by Kafka, stated that the Jews must ‘shed our heavy stress on intellectual preeminence … and our excessive nervousness, a heritage of the ghetto … We spend all too much of our time debating, and not enough time in play and gymnastics … What makes a man a man is not his mouth, nor his mind, nor yet his morals, but discipline … What we need is manliness.’ Of course, manliness is healthiness. The Jewish male body was imagined in the time as diseased, deformed, at risk, unmanly. Indeed, Sandow’s tradition of body-building was carried into the 1920s by the Polish Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart (1893–1925), popularly known as the ‘Strongest Man in the World’. He bit through iron chains ‘as though they were soft pretzels and bent a 7.5-millimetre-thick iron rod like straw’, one Berlin reporter wrote at the time. Breitbart appeared before huge Jewish and non-Jewish audiences across Central Europe, frequently in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, and his advertising stressed his Jewish identity, including Jewish iconic images such as the Star of David. Among Jews he was referred to as ‘Shimshon hagibor’ (Samson strongman) when he appeared flanked by the Zionist flag. He even performed for his Jewish audiences as Bar Kochba, who led the Jewish revolt against Rome between 132 and 135 CE. His body was what Kafka over time wished his own to be: the transformed Jew as hero.

The young Franz Kafka turned his ‘physical’ deformation into his intellectual calling card. His ‘sickly’ body becomes the equivalent of his deformed psyche:

It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. Nothing can be accomplished with such a body … My body is too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole. How shall the weak heart that lately has troubled me so often be able to pound the blood through the length of these legs. It would be labor enough to the knees, and from there it can only spill with a senile strength into the cold lower parts of my legs. But now it is already needed up above again, it is being waited for, while it is wasting itself below. Everything is pulled apart throughout the length of my body. What could it accomplish then, when it perhaps wouldn’t have enough strength for what I want to achieve even if it were shorter and more compact.³

For Kafka his body, including his ‘weak heart’ and ‘mental instability’, is a legacy of the two families from which he sprang: the Kafkas and the Löwys. In his vituperative but unsent ‘Letter to the Father’, part fiction, part autobiography, all construction, written in 1919, he describes himself as:

a Löwy with a certain Kafka component which, however, is not set in motion by the Kafka will to life, business, and conquest, but by a Löwyish spur that impels more secretly, more diffidently, and in another direction, and which often fails to work entirely. You, on the other hand, [are] a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale.⁴

The Löwys, his maternal family, are the roots of his craziness. Kafka’s father, according to the letter of 1919 that Franz never sent him, agreed that his wife’s family was tainted by madness, demonstrated by their apparent hereditary predisposition to a whole range of illnesses for which madness was the master category. Kafka’s namesake (at least for his Hebrew name Amschel) was his mother’s maternal grandfather, Adam (Amschel) Porias (1794–1862), a successful draper who was also ‘a very pious and learned man’ who ‘bathed in the river every day, even in winter’. In evoking this devout if crazed ancestry, Kafka also evokes the problem of his own naming: his Hebrew name is Amschel the Son of his Father, something he can never forget. These begats, in the matrilineal Jewish tradition, return to his mother’s mother, who ‘died before her time of typhus’. Her death at the age of 29 so affected her own mother (Franz Kafka’s great-grandmother) ‘that she became melancholy’ and committed suicide in 1860. His mother’s great-grandfather was a miracle rabbi whose four sons ‘all died young’, except for his namesake Amschel, who was known as ‘Crazy Uncle Nathan’, and one daughter, his mother’s mother. One of the brothers converted and became a physician. What Kafka does not mention is that his mother, who had ‘weeping spells and melancholy’, was orphaned at three and was raised with her two brothers and three half-brothers, two of whom, Kafka’s uncle Alfred, a director of the Spanish railways, and Rudolf, a bookkeeper in a brewery, were also converts to Catholicism. Family ties and religious identity were closely linked in Kafka’s world.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 3 July 1883, in the family home at the ‘House of the Tower’, located at the corner of Maislgasse and Karpfengasse, on the periphery of the Jewish Ghetto. Eight days later he was circumcised and thus became part of the covenant that God had made with Abraham. But this was a different time and a different place and the very notion of a divine covenant took on a very different meaning for the Kafkas. The family moved frequently – at least seven times between Kafka’s birth and 1907. Each move was a sign of social and economic improvement but all of the moves were within the confines of Staré Mûsto, Prague’s Old Town. As late as 1920 Kafka, living in his parents’ apartment in the Oppelthaus Building, turned to his then Hebrew teacher Friedrich Thieberger, gestured toward the window and stated sadly that ‘within this little circle my whole life is bounded’. From the window they could see the Old Town Square, his high school, the university and his office. Prague was a complicated city, much like Kafka himself. It was a city, as Kafka noted, with sharp claws. Franz Kafka was a native son but also a stranger, since he was a member of that ancient covenant.

Kafka’s grandfathers had been village Jews in rural Bohemia. They primarily spoke Yiddish, the language of Central European Jewry; his father spoke Czech, but when he moved to Prague he opted to identify with the German-speaking community and raised his son to speak German. As the language philosopher and Prague Jew Fritz Mauthner wrote in his 1918 memoirs:

I had to consider not only German but also Czech and Hebrew, as the languages of my ‘forefathers’ … I had the corpses of three languages to drag around with me … As a Jew in a bilingual country, just as I possessed no proper native language, I also had no native religion, as the son of a religionless Jewish family…’⁵

What changed over time was not only their language but the very meaning that the covenant with God had for them, as Kafka wrote to Max Brod in June 1921:

And there is a relationship between all this and Jewishness, or more precisely between young Jews and their Jewishness, with the fearful inner predicament of these generations. Psychoanalysis lays stress on the father complex, and many find the concept intellectually fruitful. In this case I prefer another version, where the issue revolves not around the innocent father but around the father’s Jewishness. Mostly young Jews who started to write in German wanted to get away from their Jewishness, usually with their father’s consent (the vagueness of it was what made it outrageous). They want to get away, but their hind legs still stuck to the fathers’ Jewishness, while the forelegs found not firm ground. And the resulting despair served as their inspiration.

But of course there were in Prague two antithetical German-speaking worlds: that of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Christian and anti-Semitic to the core, and that of the Kafkas, seen as Jews no matter what their beliefs.

Czechs, too, Catholic, Protestant or Hussite, for the most part looked down on the Jews no matter what their language – and even if they bore a Czech name such as ‘Kafka’ (blackbird). One needs to note that as part of the civil emancipation of the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of the eighteenth century, Jews were forced to abandon their traditional naming practices, by which each child took the name of his father as his patronymic, to have fixed family names like every one else. This made taxation much easier even though a rumour circulated that it was possible to buy ‘beautiful’ or at least appropriate family names, such as Goldberg (gold mountain) or Seidensticker (silk embroiderer), and that the absence of a small bribe might mean that you could be given rather inappropriate or even offensive names. There is the legend that during the anti-Semitic riots of 1897 Kafka’s father’s shop was spared because of his ‘Czech’ name emblazoned on the store window. This was clearly a sum well invested generations before. Kafka’s legacy was as much a cultural one as a biological one – and equally conflicted.

Franz’s father, Hermann (1852–1931), was a ‘self-made man’, an importer who operated a store specializing in ‘fine goods’ for the rising middle-class. His own father, Jakob (1814–1889), had been a kosher butcher in the tiny Czech village of Wossek (now Osek) in rural Bohemia. At the age of ten Hermann had pushed a cart through the rural villages every morning, every season, delivering kosher meat to the local Jews. With his legs covered in frost sores in winter, his life was, at least in his own estimation according to Franz’s jaundiced account, that of the ‘rags to riches’ promise of the rising European middle class who had moved from the countryside to the city. He entered the army at twenty, which fixed his ‘German’ identity even though his Czech name enabled him to be self-consciously ‘on the margin’ between the two cultural groups. He came to Prague in the 1870s and opened a store selling haberdashery and ladies’ accessories. Franz describes the Kafkas as brutal, tyrannical and uncultured. Indeed, he credits to them his becoming a vegetarian in 1909 and his lack of musicality:

Unmusicality is not as clearly a misfortune as you say – in the first place it isn’t for me: I inherited it from my predecessors (my paternal grandfather was a butcher in a village near Strakonitz; I have to not eat as much meat as he butchered) and it gives me something to hold on to; being related means a lot to me.’⁶

Culture and vegetarianism is what the youngest generation of the Kafkas had to recuperate from their past. Indeed when Franz ate at home, he claimed that his father hid his face in the newspaper rather than watching him eat and chew his ‘healthy’ diet. Kafka’s mother, Julie Löwy (1856–1934), came from an orthodox Jewish family whom Kafka considered ‘better’ (but also crazier) than the Kafkas. Her father had been a cloth-maker in Humpolec in eastern Bohemia.

All of the qualities, however, that Kafka ascribes to the ‘mix’ between the Löwys and the Kafkas were absent in his much younger sisters: Gabriele ‘Elli’ (1889–?1942), Valerie ‘Valli’ (1890–?1942), and Ottilie ‘Ottla’ (1892–1943). Kafka’s brothers Georg (1885–1886) and Heinrich (1887–1888) had both died in infancy and as such made Franz’s presence much more valuable in a society that stressed the primacy of male children. This is doubly true among Jews for whom only a male child can say the prayer for the dead. Kafka was six years old when Elli was born. As the only male child he saw himself as a quasi-only child (‘I am the sad but perfect example’⁷) and felt that he bore the brunt of his father’s constant disfavour and his mother’s distance. His later siblings had a substantial advantage as ‘less attention is paid to them’. As he casts these descriptions in rather Freudian terms, terms that he knew well, we cannot know whether his father was totally demanding and his mother totally subservient to him. All we can know is that Kafka, when he sits down to write about them as an adult, finds in psychoanalysis an appropriate, cutting-edge language with which to cast the image of his parents. I am reminded that ‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’ (Ezekiel 18:2) was written well before Freud and Kafka.

For Kafka psychoanalysis is closely tied to his Jewish identity, for good or for ill. In the section of his unpublished papers labelled the ‘marriage-notebook’ he writes that it ‘is not a pleasure to deal with psychoanalysis and I stay far away from it, but it is certainly manifest in this generation. Judaism has always brought forth its sorrows and pleasures with the necessary “Rashi-commentary”, so too in this case.’ Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki; 1040–1105 CE) was the outstanding Jewish Biblical commentator of the Middle Ages and Freud seemed to be his contemporary parallel on things Jewish – at least from Kafka’s perspective.

Kafka’s home life was as the privileged child of a newly bourgeois family. He was educated in the state schools of Prague, beginning with the heavily Jewish Deutsche Volks- und Bürgerschule (State Grammar School) at the Fleischmarkt (1889–93). Hermann chose a German-language school rather than a Czech one as he wished his family to function within the language of political authority. Ninety per cent of Prague Jews made the same choice. The school was within easy walking distance of the family’s then apartment in the Minuta House on the Kleiner Ring. Yet each day he was walked to school by the family’s cook and general factotum, a Czech woman whom he felt tormented him. Kafka’s account of these trips to school and the complicated sense of the servant’s power over his life runs parallel to Sigmund Freud’s accounts of how his nursemaid took him to church in Vienna when he too was a small child. The ‘truth’ of such accounts of the treatment of small Jewish children by their powerless yet ‘superior’ Christian servants can only be speculated upon. Hermann Kafka referred to his Czech employees as the ‘paid enemies’. Yet the sense of the adults (both Kafka and Freud) was that they were in the thrall of their maids, much as they were in the power of their fathers. Despite the fear generated on the way to school, the pair made it each day just as the bell rang. Young Kafka was a ‘modest, quiet, good pupil’, even though each day during the break there were pitched battles between the ‘German’ (read: Jewish) children and the Czech children at the grammar school next door. Being quiet meant staying out of harm’s way. Kafka’s later friend, the novelist Oskar Baum, was blinded in such a playground confrontation.

At ten years old Franz Kafka entered the famed Altstädter Staatsgymnasium (State High School), and studied there from 1893 to 1901. It was an exacting German-language public high school for the academic élite. Here, as in his primary school, a l...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 My Family and my Body as a Curse
• 2 Writing
• 3 A Life ill
• 4 A Life after Life
• References
• Bibliography and Filmography
• Acknowledgements