HAIFA, Israel — After most intellectuals stopped reading and studying the Bible, it became fashionable to declare secular writers, philosophers, and scientists to be prophets, predictors of the future. The biblical meaning of prophets has been lost, so the ranks of prophets include authors who were alien to being counted as part of this institution. Karl Marx is a “prophet,” Sigmund Freud a “prophet.” “Franz Kafka was called a “prophet of totalitarianism.”
Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, where he attended a German university, studied German law, worked for a German insurance company, and printed in German publications. Ninety percent of Bohemian Jews were educated in German. In a German elementary school, 30 of Kafka’s 39 classmates were Jews.
Kafka lived among three nationalities—Czechs, Germans, Jews—in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All three nationalities were minorities in the Empire and had inferiority complexes and national neuroses. They had complex, strained relationships with each other. The Germans, a minority in Prague, were perceived by the Czechs as a hostile element. The Czechs saw the Jews as allies of the Germans because both peoples spoke German. The Germans, oppressed by the Czechs, vented their resentment or anger on the Jews. Antisemitism made its victims want to wall themselves off from it. Kafka tried to “seclude himself” in German, but it was impossible to forget himself in German, because the language did not belong to the writer in its entirety. His native language was foreign to him. He loved German, thought with images inspired by German literature, but his pen hurt him. What he wrote was neither German literature, nor Austrian or Czech literature, but the literature of a “lost world,” created by a man without identity.
The German critic Günter Anders (Günter Stern), a Breslau-born Austrian writer and philosopher of German-Jewish descent, characterized Kafka’s spiritual state as follows: “A Jew, he was not entirely himself in the Christian world. As an indifferent Jew—and such he was at first—he was not entirely his own among the Jews. As a German-speaking Jew, he wasn’t completely his own among the Czechs. As a German-speaking Jew, he was not entirely his own among the Bohemian Germans. As a Bohemian, he was not entirely Austrian. As a worker’s insurance clerk, he was not fully a member of the bourgeoisie. As a burgher’s son, he did not fully belong to the workers. But he was not wholly his own in the chancellery either, for he felt he was a writer.”
The terminology “Kafkaesque world,” “Kafkaesque situation” began to take shape after the publication of Kafka’s novel The Trial, written in 1914 (published in 1925). The epithet “Kafkaesque” has entered many languages of the world to describe the situations and feelings of a man trapped in a maze of dystopian, grotesque nightmares. The content of The Trial is the story of Josef K., a bank clerk, who suddenly learns that he is on trial and must wait for his sentence. Fruitless are his attempts to find out his guilt and defend himself-he is convicted and executed. “But after all, I am innocent. This is a mistake. And how can a man be considered guilty at all? And we’re all human here, me and the other!” said Josef K. It is generally believed that in The Trial, Kafka brilliantly foresaw the emergence of dictatorial regimes and their innocent victims. I think Kafka was not anticipating lawlessness, but describing his own feelings.
The year Kafka was born, a wave of pogroms broke out in Hungary and Bohemia over the blood libel at Tisaeslar—accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian babies for ritual purposes. A similar pogrom was repeated when Kafka was 15 years old. In 1899, when France was split by the Dreyfus affair, the Leopold Hilsner case arose in Austria-Hungary: A Jew, a shoemaker from a small provincial town, was accused of committing a ritual crime against a 19-year-old Christian girl. Hilsner was sentenced to death, but Emperor Franz Joseph commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. In 1920, Jewish pogroms broke out again in Prague. “I spent the whole day in the streets bathed in anti-Jewish hatred,” Kafka reported in a letter. “Vile blood,” as the Jews were called in my presence,” the writer recalled.
“Isn’t it natural to leave a place where you are so fiercely hated?” Kafka understood that it was possible to destroy a person by attributing to him the commission of a non-existent crime. Such a description did not require a genius fantasy, but only a rendering of the experiences of the Jews during the ritual pogroms in Austria-Hungary. Kafka was not predicting in The Trial what would happen in decades to come, but was describing what had already happened to the Jews.
Walter Benjamin wrote: “Kafka’s art is prophetic art.” Bertolt Brecht also considered Kafka a prophet: “Kafka described, with the wonderful power of imagination, the future concentration camps, the future instability of laws, the future absolutism of the state apparatus.” Kafka’s life under fear of antisemitism, moral pressure, humiliation, and pogroms in a world of Czech-German-Jewish conflict under the heel of the Austro-Hungarian imperial bureaucracy created a world of absurdity that shaped his creative handwriting. He did not predict the future, but described the world in which he lived. The fruits of the writer’s imagination were scarier than official documents devoid of imagination. In his major works, The Trial, The Castle, and The Transformation, there is a sense of comedy and satire in the description of the mores of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which reeks of hopelessness and fear of the horrors of totalitarianism.
In The Castle, the main character is a surveyor. He is a stranger in the village. The huge castle rejects the surveyor, who wants to live and work normally. The impersonal chancellery of the Castle humiliates and disadvantages the outsider. K. wants to become like all the villagers, but they reject him: “All this time K. has had the unrelenting feeling that he is lost or has even strayed into a foreign land, a land where no man has gone before him, a foreign land where not even a particle of his fatherland is left in the air and where he could suffocate with the foreignness, but still nothing can be done against its foolish temptations except go on and on, disappearing without a trace.” Together with the hero of The Castle, Kafka feels that “wandered into such a foreign land where even in the air is not a particle of homeland, where you can choke on foreignness.”
At the time when Kafka wrote the first pages of The Trial, the First World War broke out. He felt the madness of a society gripped by war: the Jews, who lived in anxiety, suddenly found “deliverance” in war… Kafka was indignant and despised them: “The Jewish négociants, who until now have deftly balanced between the Germans and the Czechs, participate in patriotic processions and are the first to chant, ‘Long live our beloved monarch!’ and to shout, ‘Hurrah! “These processions,” writes Kafka in his diary, “are one of the most disgusting attendant phenomena of the war.”
Kafka wrote The Trial and The Castle when insanity gained the status of normality. Every soldier on the fronts of the world war was condemned to die, and like Joseph K. in The Trial, had no idea what he was dying for. During World War I, Kafka told Gustav Janouch, a Czech musician: “The war has led us into a labyrinth of crooked mirrors. We waddle from one deceptive perspective to another, confused by false prophets and charlatans.” Kafka feared “false prophets”. He despised the mythology of “purification by war” concocted by his colleagues. In early 1915 Thomas Mann saw in war an opportunity to elevate oneself, to purify the soul and escape from “materiality” and “intellectual emptiness”. Mann saw this war as a German struggle “for the right of domination and participation in the governance of the planet”. The legend of an ennobling and legitimate war was composed before Kafka’s eyes. The legend of his prophecies was created after his death.
The story The Transfiguration (1915) describes Gregor’s transformation into a giant insect. The traditional interpretation of the metamorphosis is the total suppression of the human personality under a totalitarian regime, predicted by Kafka. But Gregor’s transformation into a “monstrous parasite” may reflect a sense of the Jew feeling himself a creature of inferiority, a parasite now rather than in the future.
British journalist Misha Glenny hosted the BBC program “In Kafka’s Shadow: A Prophet from Prague. Today’s Prague is equipped with signs of Kafka’s cult. But his biographer Claude David wrote: “Kafka was not at all receptive to the poetry of Prague, he borrowed nothing from its traditions and legends because he hated Prague. All his life he has wanted to escape from it. In December 1902, in one of his first surviving letters, he writes to his friend Oskar Pollak after a short stay in Munich, where he was about to enroll in university: “Prague does not let us go. Neither you nor I. This mother,” he says, transforming the Czech Maticka Praha, “has claws. We should submit or […] we should set her on fire at both ends, set Vyšehrad and Hradčany on fire – then maybe we could escape. Imagine this carnival!” Kafka would seek to escape from Prague for the rest of his life.”
Kafka did not fit the vestments of a soothsayer. He could not have foreseen the Jewish Shoah, could not have known about the murder of his three sisters in the Nazi death camps, did not predict the coming to power of the monsters of totalitarianism. He lived in the present. It was terrifying enough to inspire him to write works unlike anything else. Franz Kafka’s work, profound, tragic, grotesque, has become surrounded by legends and myths that endow him with traits not inherent in his writings, confusing and embellishing him with unwarranted characteristics of a mindset that is not his own.
*
Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.