I. Writer as Adjective

It is a rare writer, observes one critic about Franz Kafka, who produces a body of work so coherently integrated and so thoroughly imbued with his own unique perspective that his name becomes an adjective. One thinks of Nicollo Machievelli, the 16th Century Italian politician who wrote The Prince. He gave us the term “Machievellian,” which defines a world of cut-throat politics marked by cunning and duplicity. But artistically speaking, his writing is more of a realpolitik survival guide than a poetically rendered literary vision. So here, a better example, perhaps, might be Charles Dickens, 19th Century English novelist. His accounts of institutional abuses and the inhumanity of commercialism and industrialism gave us a “Dickensian” world populated by an abundance of vividly humorous, grotesque or sinister characters.

Moving into Kafka’s own era of the early 20th Century, we find Ernest Hemingway’s once-vaunted heroic code – which has fallen into general disfavor and is now a favorite target of attack by feminist literary scholars. The “Hemingwayesque” protagonist – straight-forward, manly, stoic, loved by beautiful women and respected by fighting men, lives out a mindset incurably involved in scenes of romanticized violence in exotically picturesque locales. In this context, a discussion of the “politically incorrect” readily brings to mind George Orwell’s name, which has become synonymous with a dystopian nightmare view of the future. The “Orwellian” worldview is one of totalitarian superstates where powerless citizens live under constant surveillance by Speech and Thought Police.

And to the millions who have read the brooding, unsettling, but at times absurdly hilarious novels, stories and prose poems of Franz Kafka, and to millions more who have never read a word of his, the term “Kafkaesque” immediately brings to mind the image of the small, anonymous individual trapped in an existential nightmare from which there is no escape and no awakening.

Kafka was in many ways a solitary figure, isolated in his own mind from any true community of friendship and alienated from his own Jewish heritage. This inner turmoil, as expressed in his continuously popular writings, promoted Kafka into a symbol of the anxiety and alienation that has pervaded much of 20th-century society. Like Shakespeare – as well as Dickens, Hemingway and Orwell – who, each in his own fashion, explored the malevolence of human institutions and the violences which they wreak upon the lone individual, his name, too, has become an adjective. This shy, tubercular Jew depicted the absurdity of modern life and its power structures in a series of parable-like short stories and novels featuring grotesque imagery and an almost religious depth.

II. German vs. Czech

The son of a would-be assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community, Kafka was German both in language and culture. At the time of his birth in 1883, Prague, with 160,000 people, was the third-largest city, after Vienna and Budapest, of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph, for whom Kafka was named. By 1910, the population of Prague was 230,000; the greater metropolitan area was about 600,000. Ninety-one percent of the population spoke Czech and the rest spoke German.

The social elite of business managers and entrepreneurs were largely German-speaking: there was essentially no German-speaking proletariat. According to a German tour book of the time, “In the best pubs and restaurants, and also in the biggest shops German is understood. Coachmen, people in the service industries and railway porters usually understand as much German as they need to deal with foreigners.”

The German upper-class, which constituted only five percent of the city’s inhabitants, dominated the city and its much larger indigenous Czech population. Although the local population spoke largely Czech, German was used for official business and by the upper classes. The small Jewish component, highly represented in the city’s universities and business world, was the target of hostility from both groups. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but as a modern intellectual he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.

One critic has written of Kafka that “The uncertainty he felt whenever he contemplated reality was matched by the uncertainty of the Jew in an enemy setting, among Germans, whose language he spoke, and among Czechs, whose nationalism had no role for the Jew to play. But as a Westernized Jew, Kafka had to deal with more than anti-Semitic Germans and anti-German, anti-Semitic Czech nationalists. … The question of assimilation – or rather, the question of whether assimilation was even possible, given the prohibitions of the host countries in which Jews resided – created in itself an ambiguous kind of reality, often more hallucinatory than realistic.”

Kafka’s father, a self-made middle class Jewish merchant, raised his children in the hopes of assimilating them into the mainstream society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, Franz attended German grammar school, and later the German Gymnasium. He finished his Doctorate of Law in Prague, studying at the German language University there. Although he spoke and wrote Czech fluently throughout his life, his literary work was all completed in German.

And in Prague . . . sometimes, as the French like to say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 2006, physically, the centre of Prague looks much the same as in Kafka’s day. The main difference is that large areas of the centre have been pedestrianized. Because of strict planning restrictions, there are relatively few new buildings in the centre. Over the past century the city has expanded centrifugally, and much of the population now lives in modern (and very poor quality) apartment blocks in the suburbs.

Today, English has taken the place of German as the main second language for international business in Prague, capital of the fledgling Czech Republic, in which Czech is the official language. The population is about 1.3 million. The German minority has virtually disappeared: large numbers of German-speakers were forcibly removed from the country after the Second World War, and most of the rest have assimilated.

However, interestingly enough – it strikes the Czech-American observer that, just as German was the language of the ruling class in Kafka’s day, English is increasingly playing that role in the 21st Century. Much of the media is foreign-owned, most new office buildings are built, funded and rented by foreign companies for other foreign companies; and a large part of the business service industry, such as accountancy firms and real-estate agencies are foreign owned. Many foreign business men are able to work effectively without being able to speak Czech; however, few people can work effectively in top positions unless they know English.

III.) Biography

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, into a middle-class Jewish family. He was the first surviving child, after the deaths of two infant sons, of Hermann Kafka, a tradesman whose father was a butcher in a Jewish village in South Bohemia, and Julie (Löwy) Kafka, the daughter of a Prague brewer. He had three surviving younger sisters: Valli, Elli, and Ottla. After his two brothers died in infancy, he became the oldest child, remaining forever conscious of his role as older brother; Ottla, the youngest sister, was the family member closest to him. All three of Kafka’s younger sisters, as well as Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and one of his lovers, would, long after his own death, die in Nazi concentration camps.

As described by his son, Hermann Kafka was a large, domineering man whose attitude toward the strange young man he had fathered came near to contempt. As his haberdashery prospered, the family moved several times into more luxurious quarters, where they were served by maids, a cook, and a governess.

Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, eccentricity, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother, a simple woman devoted to her children. Subservient to her overwhelming, ill-tempered husband and his exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of their son’s unprofitable and possibly unhealthy dedication to the literary “recording of [his] … dreamlike inner life.”

A shy and sensitive child, Kafka received a basic primary and secondary education–no art, music, or modern languages. Timid, guilt-ridden and obedient, he was academically successful, although he always did quite poorly in mathematics. He was educated at an academically demanding school for the city’s elite students, where he was respected and liked by his teachers. Although he went along with the traditional and very orthodox teaching, inwardly he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. This rebellion was articulated with excruciating precision in a remark he made later in his life, when he said, “I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.”

His rebellion took its first tangible form when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists; he attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I); and, in his later years, showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. However, even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. The reason for this lack of engagement lay in a profund disillusionment with political processes and institutions – including revolution – and their ability to foster genuine human growth and happiness. He once asserted that “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” One hopes for the sake of the Czech Republic and Slovakia that the “Velvet Revolution” of 1993 will prove to be an exception to this native son’s cynical, not to say bleak, generalization.

After his graduation in 1901, he entered the university and briefly studied chemistry and philosophy, intending at first to study German literature but then transferring to law, on the assumption that it offered better career prospects. He completed his law studies in eight terms, the shortest time in which it could be done, and earned his doctorate in jurisprudence in 1906. While at the university, Kafka joined a German student reading and debating group, in which he met Max Brod, another student with literary interests and ambitions, who became his lifelong friend and was responsible for introducing his friend’s genius to the world. Brod would become his de facto literary executor. This minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s acquaintances, and eventually he emerged as the promoter, savior, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential biographer. Brod famously failed to execute Kafka’s dying wish that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned, and in so doing earned the gratitude of generations of readers.

After his graduation, Kafka underwent the obligatory year of law internship, and then became an insurance clerk, first in 1907 in the Prague office of an Italian company. In 1908 – the year he first published some short prose sketches in a magazine called Hyperion-he took a position with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia. This was a highly desirable, semi-governmental position, which he would hold until his worsening health forced him to take permanent leave in 1921. This job provided him with a steady income and “regular” office hours, so that he could dedicate his evenings to writing.

Upon entering the confusing and nightmarish world of an insurance institute, where he calculated the costs and probabilities of all sorts of human misery and calamity, his principal duties came to involve travel to sites of industrial accidents, assessment of workers’ injuries, and determination of what, if any, compensation they should receive. As a claims adjustor, he tended to favor the workers over their companies. At work, Kafka was considered hard-working and ambitious. Soon becoming the right hand of his boss, he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him. In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him – working during the day and writing during the night – to be an “excruciating torture.” His diaries contain continuing accounts of his restlessness and sleeplessness as he would work all night writing, only to return to the office for the next day of work, thoroughly exhausted.

Despite the strains of his job, he took advantage of the short hours and lenient vacation schedule to travel and devote more time to his writing. When not working, Kafka visited cafes where he was introduced to the Prague literati and Yiddish theater. He had begun writing in school and published a book of short impressionistic sketches with help of Brod, who was convinced that Kafka was a genius. In the evenings he would often take a long walk with Brod or another friend, attend the theater or a political lecture, and then go home – he continued to live with his family for most of his life – and write until two or three in the morning. A health-conscious vegetarian, he also enjoyed sports and physical exercise despite being plagued by maladies that included headaches, stomach problems, and various psychosomatic ailments (especially insomnia).

His deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed and Kafka found no more happiness in his personal relationships than he had in his work or family life. The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. In 1912, at the age of 29, he met Felice Bauer, a German secretary in Berlin, and began a long-distance relationship which was painfully affected by his inhibition. This love affair lasted five years and produced two broken engagements before a final rupture in 1917. That year, after several extended leaves of absence from his job, Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent much of the rest of his life living in various sanitariums, where he continued to write, took up gardening and, later, devoted himself to the study of his Jewish heritage In addition to his literary projects, the last several years of Kafka’s life were marked by declining health and a series of relationships with young women. In 1919, he was once again briefly engaged, this time against the wishes of his family, to Julie Wohryzek.

The following year, he had a love affair with Milena Jesenská, a married Czech woman of no small interest here, as she translated some of his works into Czech. Jesenská was the daughter of a Czech nationalist professor, and her father had had her interned in a mental clinic for eight months for stealing money from him to give to her lovers. Soon after her release, she married Erns Polak, a German-speaking Jew, and they settled in Vienna. Neglected by her unfaithful husband, Jesenská at one point allegedly resorted to taking cocaine. In order to provide herself with independent means, she took up journalism, and in 1919 she wrote to Kafka asking permission to translate his works. This triggered an intense correspondence that filled a mutual need for intimacy. They had hour days together in Vienna, but Kafka could not sustain the relationship, and Milená did not want to leave her husband. She died in Ravensbruk concentration camp in 1944, a victim of the Holocaust.

There is some debate over whether or not Kafka was fluent in Czech, and Jesenská is usually presented as ‘Exhibit A’ by those arguing the negative. However, in either case, it is quite likely that he was insecure about his formal written – as opposed to spoken vernacular – given his educational background. It is also likely, given how unusual it was for him to let anyone read or publish, much less translate his work – that his agreement to her request had as much to do with Kafka’s libido as his linguistics. “I began to run as fast as I could,” wrote Kafka of her, “and always the thought: ‘If only I could take her with me!’” Jesenská, some feel, may have in many ways been his ideal match: intelligent, well-read and independent (albeit, one might add, equally neurotic), and Kafka suffered greatly because of her refusal to leave her unfaithful spouse. Willi Haas, editor of a compilation of Kafka’s “Letters to Milena,” feels that she was perhaps “too healthy, too strong-willed, too independent to follow her lover into the abyss which he inhabited.”

In 1922 Kafka was forced to retire from this job after having suffered for five years with tuberculosis. He received a pension, and in 1923 moved to Berlin to get away from his father and devote himself to writing. In Berlin, Kafka met the last love of his life, a lively Hasidic Jew from Poland named Dora Diamant, who was not yet twenty years old. He found some measure of happiness with her and hoped to live with her once he recovered – although he never did. Although Kafka had never been traditionally religious, he was, especially in his last years, fascinated by Hasidic rituals and beliefs. He experienced some sense of spiritual salvation (not religious) before succumbing to his disease.

In March 1924, Brod brought the seriously deteriorating Kafka back to his parents’ home in Prague. In the following month, weighing less than one hundred pounds, he was taken to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Kierling, Austria, near Vienna, where he died on June 3, exactly one month short of his forty-first birthday. Eight days later, he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

IV.) Big Daddy

Kafka’s relationship to his father – between the thin, intellectual, and awkward Franz, and the robust, loud, and corporal Hermann – dominates all discussions of both his life and his work. The ideas of “father” and “family” permeate the fabric of many of Kafka’s texts. Kafka’s father was the very opposite of Kafka himself: a down-to-earth shopkeeper who was obsessed with money and social success. Hermann Kafka was also a bully, both to his wife and to Kafka himself, and the influence of Kafka’s tyrannical father stayed with him throughout his life. His domineering father placed great pressure on his shy and sensitive only son to grow up into a robust businessman like himself. Kafka, however, was more interested in creative and literary pursuits and, consequently, struggled his entire life under the shadow of his father’s disappointment.

The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed Kafka’s work as well as his existence; the figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive literary creations. For, in his imagination, this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch, who worshiped nothing but material success and social advancement, belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant – at the same time he hated and admired him. The conflict with the father is powerfully reflected in the story “The Judgment” (1916). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in The Castle). In Kafka’s most important attempt at autobiography, “Letter to Father”(1919), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to live – to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood – as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. Yet despite the obvious need to get away from this person, Kafka spent a major part of his life living with this man, who was, by all accounts, quite an awful person.

However, the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship to his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings – the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in – and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.

V.) Bibliography

Despite his great impact on the literary world, Franz Kafka was a relatively “unknown” author during his life-time. He published relatively few of his works, and those were published in very limited runs, or in small literary journals. He is known to have started writing at an early age, but all of his earliest attempts were later destroyed. His first published work came in 1907, and he continued to publish throughout the next seventeen years, but most of his works were published posthumously by Brod, who is given credit for making Franz Kafka internationally famous as a writer of visionary and imaginative fiction. In Kafka’s will, Brod was asked to burn all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing those already in print. Brod instead edited the manuscripts and had them published.

Only a fraction of Kafka’s total work was published in his lifetime. This includes sections from “Description of a Struggle,” a chapter from his novel Amerika, and two stories, “Metamorphosis” and “In the Penal Colony.” His two major novels, The Trial and The Castle, were published after his death. 1912 was an important year in Kafka’s life and a turning point in his brief literary career. That year, Kafka experienced a breakthrough and within the next three years wrote the majority of his major works, most of which appeared in a short-lived literary journal published by Brod, despite Kafka’s reticence about publication. Also in 1912, he wrote a good deal of Amerika, a novel he had begun the previous year about the adventures of a naive young stoker in an America concocted out of Kafka’s reading and imagination.

Amerika is Kafka’s only comic novel, and represented his escape – as for so many Czechs, to a mythic country of skyscrapers and opportunity. Another blend of fantasy and realism, according to its American publisher, it features the misadventures – some comic, some pathetic, all mysterious – of Karl Rossman, a young immigrant who comes to New York. Of great interest to any reader of this book is an “Afterword,” both intimate and illuminating, by Brod:

“Franz Kafka’s manuscript bears no title. In conversation he used to refer to this book as his ‘American novel,’ but later he called it simply The Stoker, after the title of the first chapter, which had appeared separately (1913). He worked at it with unending delight, mostly in the evenings and late into the night; the pages show amazingly few corrections and deletions. Kafka knew quite well, and discussed the fact, that this novel was more optimistic and ‘lighter’ in mood than any of his other writings.

“In this connection perhaps I may say that Franz Kafka was fond of reading travel books and memoirs, that [Benjamin] Franklin’s biography was one of his favorite books, from which he liked reading specific passages aloud, and that he had always a longing for free space and distant lands. He never actually traveled farther than France and Upper Italy, so that the innocence of his fantasy gives this book of adventure its particular colour.

“Kafka broke off his work on this novel with unexpected suddenness. It remained unfinished. From what he told me I know that the incomplete chapter about the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (a chapter the beginning of which particularly delighted Kafka, so that he used to read it aloud with great effect) was intended to be the concluding chapter of the work and should end on a note of reconciliation. In enigmatic language Kafka used to hint smilingly that within this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and parents, as if by some celestial witchery. …”

At the urging of Brod, Kafka gathered together a number of his tiny fables and prose poems for a little book called “Meditation,” which would be published the following year, the first of several small volumes of his work that would appear in his lifetime. On the night of September 22, 1912, he wrote “The Judgment,” his first major short story, which describes a tense confrontation between a strong father and his neurotic son. And in the fall of that same remarkable year, he wrote “The Metamorphosis,” viewed by many as perhaps his masterpiece and along with the novel The Trial, one of the two works most closely associated with his name.

In “The Metamorphosis,” a traveling salesman living with his family wakes to find himself a giant insect. His family is none too pleased and they keep him locked in a room and increasingly ignore him until he finally succumbs to this alienation. As with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which is believed to have inspired this work, we have not a hero, but an anti-hero, one who sees himself as no more than an animal. And like Underground, “Metamorphosis” is also famous in modern literature for its opening sentence – arrestingly, disturbingly personal: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

“Metamorphosis” begins with this outlandish event reported in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, and this tale – literally and figuratively “fantastic” – operates simultaneously on a number of different levels: the amazing power of Kafka’s imagination as he convincingly describes the sheer physical reality of being a giant insect, the nightmarish expressionism through which Gregor Samsa’s inner fears and fantasies are projected into his external reality, the psychological shrewdness of Kafka’s portrayal of Gregor’s (and his own) classic passive-aggressive relationship with his family, and the profound pathos of the description of Gregor’s last days.

In 1914, he began writing The Trial, in which the protagonist, Joseph K., a quiet and dutiful bank clerk, is arrested and charged with an unnamed crime. His efforts to defend himself are continually frustrated by bureaucratic mazes and implacable authority. After a fruitless search through the absurd machinations of the legal system, he comes gradually to an acceptance of his own guilt–his guilt for being himself, for being alive, for participating in the human condition. He never discovers the nature of the charges against him and is killed “like a dog.”

Kafka had another burst of creativity in 1914, when he wrote the final chapter of Amerika. He did not, however, actually finish this novel, or either of his other two: their very incompleteness seems part of the essence of Kafka’s art. And in 1914, he wrote the great short story “In the Penal Colony,” which explores the eternally problematic themes of freedom, human worth, and power relations between the individual and society. In this story, Kafka does not give us an adjective; rather, he takes one – the term “harrowing” – and gives it a concrete physical incarnation as a very disturbing noun.

Briefly summarized, an explorer/narrator visits a penal colony, where an officer demonstrates to him the Harrow, an instrument used to inflict capital punishment. The Harrow is an extraordinarily elegant instrument: a condemned man lies face-down on a bed, while a complex system of needles inscribes the commandment he has broken (e.g. “Honor Thy Superiors”) on his back. The needles pierce deeper and deeper until the prisoner dies. In the process of dying, however, the condemned man finally understands the nature of justice and his punishment. His face is transfigured, a sight edifying to all those who watch. The Officer begins to demonstrate the Harrow on a soldier condemned to die because he was sleeping on duty.

The machine was conceived and developed by the former Commandant, and the Officer quotes his predecessor’s philosophy: “Guilt is always beyond doubt.” Thus, this man can be executed without a chance to defend himself. However, it soon becomes clear that the Explorer does not approve of the death-machine and that he feels morally bound to express this disapproval to the new Commandant, who is already known to have serious questions about using the Harrow as a method of punishment. Suddenly, the officer removes the condemned man from the Bed and takes his place. Before doing so, he adjusts the machine to inscribe “Be Just.” The Harrow begins its grisly work on the Officer’s back, but malfunctions and goes to pieces – but not before the self-condemned man has died.

This very difficult story examines humankind’s cruelty and inhumanity, and the meaning and possibility of justice. What is the appropriate Penalty for failing to “Honor Thy Superiors”? Ho does one “Be Just”? How is justice related to compassion? In this century of systematic state barbarism and cruel, self-righteous terrorism, this story serves as a surreal entry point to discussion about the real world. It also demonstrates the multiple levels of interpretation Kafka’s work can support, or at least suggest. Who is the former commandant? The angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament? The Emperor? His father? And the new officer – is he the martyred Jesus of the New Testament, dying to redeem our collective guilt? Is he the enlightened despot at the head of some emerging new socialist world order? Or is it Kafka himself, a compelling image of the sensitive author in barbaric society, taking the world on his shoulders and killing himself slowly, but somehow blissfully, with a pen tipped with his own blood, coughed up from his tuberculor lungs as he consigns himself to a self-destructive, yet somehow uplifting seat at his writing desk?

In 1916 and 1917, Kafka wrote “The Great Wall of China” and the stories that he would publish in 1919 in the collection “A Country Doctor.” Weakened by his tuberculosis, he became ill with influenza in the pandemic that occurred toward the end of the First World War. In 1919, he wrote the long, painful “Letter to His Father,” which he did not send. In 1920, having done no creative work for three years, he experienced another period of inspiration that saw the writing of quite a few short pieces. In 1922, the same year in which he published “A Hunger Artist,” one of the strangest and most powerful of his short stories, he worked on The Castle, a denser and more abstract novel than its predecessors, in which the protagonist, a land surveyor known only as “K,” struggles to live in a village without a clear position in its society. “K” unsuccessfully attempts to gain entrance to the castle of the title while trying to wring an answer from its inscrutable authorities as to why he was summoned there. It is his most extended parable on his most characteristic theme, the peculiar perseverance of human aspiration in the face of failure and negation.

Max Brod’s devotion to his friend was shown as vividly after Kafka’s death as it had been while he was alive. He edited and published Kafka’s manuscripts and wrote the story of his life, and through his efforts Kafka’s literary reputation grew in a few short years from near total obscurity to international prominence.

VI). Franz Goes to Hollywood

There have been three major movies of or about Kafka: Orson Welles’ 1963 film of The Trial, a 1991 remake of the novel, and a 1992 film entitled Kafka. Welles, known to many (thanks to a long-running television commercial) as a fat guy with a deep voice who drank a lot of sherry, was also an unreliable film-maker who always went over time and over budget, and one of the most innovative storytellers of the century. Welles shocked Broadway with his all-black voodoo version of “Macbeth,” challenged the U.S. government with his production of “The Cradle Will Rock,” terrified America with his spoof radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” and then at the tender age of 26, directed what many people consider the greatest American film ever made, Citizen Kane.

Whatever one may think of Welles or his version of The Trial, his own considered view was “Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made” The first Welles film since Citizen Kane to be released in the form he intended, The Trial was a visionary work, a boldly stylized, visually baroque version of Kafka’s classic. This work was both uniquely personal for Welles, who said it was “closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve ever made,” and uniquely divided. “Kafka’s novel presents a rather realistically described world,” he observed, “but it is inhabited by dream people.”

The film starred Anthony Perkins – who has made a career of playing disturbed individuals, most notably Norman Bates in Psycho – as protagonist Joseph K. Welles dubbed 11 of the voices, played the Advocate and the Priest, and even dubbed 10 lines of Perkins’ dialogue. Albinoni’s “Adagio for Organ and Strings” plays both forwards and backwards on the soundtrack, and the film featured Jeanne Moreau as a sullen nightclub entertainer, Romy Schneider as a web-fingered, eager-to-please “nurse,” a band of feral nymphettes, and Alexander Alexeïeff’s hypnotic “pinscreen animation” prologue. Welles’ interpretation was daring, to say the least. He changed the ending somewhat, as he did not think that, after World War II, he could show a Jew lie down and accept his death, as Kafka wrote it. So, in the film, Joseph K is defiant to the end. “I couldn’t put my name to a work that implies man’s ultimate surrender,” he explained. “Being on the side of man, I had to show him in his final hour undefeated.”

He also rearranged the plot (the book’s 10 chapters were filmed in the following order: 1, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 9, 10. However, he remained faithful to the incidents within those parameters; while stylistically attaining some of the most baroque effects of Welles’ career. To emphasize the web-like qualities of K’s predicament, there are copious spidery shadows draping the scenery. Also, the network of windows and squares on the ceilings and walls of the modern buildings give a similar feeling of entrapment. The film has a famous tracking shot of K’s workplace, across 850 clacking typewriters in a giant white room, all of which stop simultaneously. Eventually cut was a sequence with an all-knowing computer that K asks to tell him his future. It tells him his fate … on a strip of punched tape which he cannot read.

The important people that all the victims are trying to meet (the clerk of the court, the examining magistrate, etc.) are never seen in close-up and, if they are seen at all, it is always from a great distance For most of the film, the voices are low, soft, then a crash of voices – in the courtroom, you can hear a pin drop, K makes his speech, and the whole room erupts with laughter, yet are stone silent whilst the guard and his wife make love. There is a stretching of the big and the small echoing throughout the picture, distorted like a bad dream – enormous doors, tiny spaces, extreme close-ups, tiny figures in a bleak landscape. The editing is very severe and quick. The filmaker Francois Truffaut once said, “The films of Orson Welles are shot by an exhibitionist and cut by a censor.”

Welles always found this film hilarious. In his view, Joseph K is guilty of everything. K, according to Welles, is an up-and-coming-executive, an ambitious man who deserves everything he gets. K comes on to all the women in the movie. He exerts his power over others, as others exert it over him. However, K is so up-and-coming, so fast, that he neatly bypasses all the thousands of other numbered men waiting in fields and in corridors, on his way to his death sentence. Welles said: “Kafka hates the law. What I hate are the abuses.” What Welles dearly loved was a good spoof, and he told Perkins – probably out of mischief – that they only had enough film in the camera for two takes of the long opening scene, which made it somewhat nerve-wracking for Perkins. Perhaps one of the reasons for Welles’ good humour was because he met Olga Palinkas, the daughter of the film designer. A sculptor, actress, TV anchor and writer, later rechristened Oja Kodar, she became Welles’ companion and collaborator.

The night before the production company was to have filmed the interior shots in Prague, its somewhat mysterious Yugoslav backers withdrew their money. With no money, the whole company skipped town and got on the next train to Paris, where Welles wandered nighttime Paris trying to figure out how and where to film the interiors. He looked up, saw the two clock faces of the Gare d’Orsay and walked around the deserted train station until dawn. There, he found all the sets he needed. The Gare d’Orsay, owned by an elderly woman who permitted the filming, is now the Musée d’Orsay, one of the most prestigious art galleries in the world.

During filming, Welles moved the production company into the building; it was their home as well as their set. After further short sequences were filmed in Dubrovnik, Rome and Milan, the shoot ended in Paris. The French language version had a Paris premiere on December 21 1962; it was first shown in NewYork on February 20 1963. It failed both critically and financially. Welles said that people expected Joseph K to be some sort of Woody Allen-type, and Anthony Perkins was far more aggressive and obnoxious. The object of Welles’ particular scorn was the corporations and the blithe corruption that is carried out in their name – something which, in his view, managed to elude most of the critics.

In 1992, Harold Pinter penned his own adaptation of The Trial, and the incongruity of Joseph K’s situation and the impenetrability of its elusive legal system make this likely material for Pinter. Kyle MacLachlan stars as Joseph K., and the Big Names in the film are Anthony Hopkins as the Priest and Jason Robards as the Advocate. One critic noted that the film, directed by David Jones, looks and sounds uncannily like a product of the ’60s, mentioning Patrick McGoohan, the British star of an Orwellian television series of that era, The Prisoner. This rendition of The Trial has the contradictory qualities of being simultaneously experimental and old-fashioned. Anthony Hopkins’ massive monologue in the parable “Before the Law” is, as one writer put it, the deadpan equivalent of an existential knock-knock joke. The filmmakers achieved, through costumery and tint, a look that faithfully reproduced the retro look of ’60s movies, and the grim, melodramatic orchestral score adds an aural dimension to this factor.

In highly condensed form, the plot of the 1992 Steven Soderbergh film Kafka presents a protagonist of that name, an insurance worker who gets embroiled in an underground group after a co-worker is murdered. This underground group is responsible for bombings all over town, attempting to thwart a secret organization controlling the society. The Kafka-figure eventually penetrates the secret organization and must confront its members. Pop-star/movie critic Roger Ebert held that, whereas Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape took place in a world of neatly furnished apartments and unremarkable cityscapes, Kafka seems located within a set designer’s nightmare. The movie, he notes, takes place in a Prague more or less like the imaginary cities of Franz Kafka’s fiction. It then moves, he goes on, to an interior set that seems inspired by Bride of Frankenstein crossed with Re-Animator.

The film stars Jeremy Irons, who, to Ebert’s practiced eye, looks “cadaverous and wan as a fictionalized version of the writer.” Irons inhabits a world, wrote Ebert, that owes something to Kafka’s fiction and a great deal to other movies. The vast insurance office he works in, for example, reminds us of a similar set in Orson Welles’ version (not to mention Jack Lemmon’s office in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment). At home, Kafka/Irons writes short stories, including one about a man’s transformation into a cockroach and grows concerned about the disappearance of an acquaintance, Eduard. It is hard to say what Eduard meant to him, observes Ebert, but when he meets Eduard’s lover, Gabriela (Theresa Russell), there is an opportunity for a retread of The Third Man if only he will develop a great passion for her. Passion is, of course, an unknown language for Kafka (holds Ebert), and so the search for Eduard proceeds “less like a quest than like a research project.”

Whether or not one is American – or even Czech, one might readily agree with Ebert that “it is more than a little bizarre to see him transported into the Mad Scientist genre, climbing ladders over domes upon which are projected the interiors of brains.” Ebert speculates that Soderbergh probably made this movie he admires the work of Kafka, and possibly because inside every filmmaker there throbs the desire to make a gothic black-and-white melodrama set in a mysterious and beautiful city. These, Ebert asserts, are legitimate cinematic aspirations, but perhaps should not have been brought to the same project.

VII). Amerikan Perspectives

Two more recent examples demonstrate Kafka’s continuing influence in America. In 2001, the Off-Broadway premiere of a 90-minute pocket opera adapted from Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” discussed earlier, opened in New York City. The libretto was written by American screen playwright Rudolph Wurlitzer, and the music by renowned avant-garde composer Philip Glass. It premiered earlier in 2000 in Seattle, and a performance at Chicago’s Court Theater in December 2001 was reviewed by Stephen Kinser for The New York Times, in a piece entitled “A Pocket-Size Opera From a Harrowing Kafka Story,” Kinser wrote that “Philip Glass wrote the music to what he calls this ‘pocket opera,’ and the production is directed by his longtime collaborator and former wife, JoAnne Akalaitis.

“I came across this story probably 40 years ago when I was at the University of Chicago,” Mr. Glass said. “It took that long for me to write the piece. The theme of enlightenment or transfiguration is what motivated me. There’s a crucial moment when we find out that the old commander used to want children to have priority during the executions, to be right down in front. He says that at this moment, knowledge and understanding floods their faces. If you listen to the music, it’s hard to miss that. Although the former commander is no longer living and thus does not appear in the story or in this production, his figure hovers over the whole proceeding. He represents the extremes to which some people are willing to go in order to achieve what they consider pure justice. … “

In Kafka’s story only these two men speak, but in this opera there is a third speaking character, Kafka himself as commentator, speaking words Ms. Akalaitis culled from Kakfa’ diaries. Kinser notes that while “In the Penal Colony” one of the few stories Kafka published in his lifetime), is less than 25 pages long, it is so disturbing that some readers cannot finish it in a single sitting. “Mr. Glass’s opera,” he concludes dryly, “is not so devastating. …”

The New York Review of Books is arguably one of America’s leading intellectual journals in the realm of arts and letters, and one could scarcely to hope to find a modern author more American than J. D. Salinger, subject of an article in its June 21, 2001 issue by Janet Malcolm. Literary scholarship has its waves and patterns, and often authors first slighted receive a reevaluation decades later (Melville is a prime example). In her piece, Malcolm carries a brief for Salinger, whom she considers misread and undervalued. Malcolm’s article is prime example of how Kafka has into a reference point, a benchmark in relation to whom other modern writers – especially the Absurdists – can be situated and understood.

In the course of her discussion, she uses Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and draws an extended parallel between Salinger’s parabolic structures and those of Kafka. “Salinger presents his abnormal heroes [Frannie, Zooey, Holden Caulfield] in the context of the normal world’s dislike and fear of them,” she writes. “These works are fables of otherness – versions of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis.’ However, Salinger’s design is not as easy to make out as Kafka’s. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, preternaturally good-looking. Nor [unlike Kafka] is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it oscillates between the tragic and the comic.” With one exception, notes Malcom, neither child “is able to live comfortably in the word. They are out of place. They might as well be giant insects.” Further on, Malcom compares and contrasts the use by both authors of food-based plot devices and imagery: “As in ‘Metamorphosis’ (and in its pendant ‘The Hunger Artist,’), the person who is the other, the misfit, is unable to eat the food normal people eat. He finds it repellant. Kafka’s heroes die of their revulsion, as does Salinger’s hero Seymour. (Though, Seymour shoots himself, there is a suggestion that he, too, must be some sort of hunger artist. …”).

Given earlier statements regarding Kafka’s Jewishness, a final remark by Malcolm is provocative, as it closes one analogy and opens others: “The connection between [Salinger's] biography and Salinger’s refusal to be an American Jewish writer writing about Jews in America is impossible to fully sort out. Of course, given Salinger’s reticence, we can only assume that it exists. But the refusal itself is what is significant.”

VIII.) Summary

Thomas Mann said of Kafka’s prose that it is “conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear, and correct style with its precise, almost official conservatism.” In that respect, it betrays his legal training. Much like a lawyer writing a legal brief, he had a penchant for very realistic descriptions of fantastic events, somehow managing to make the reader accept the event and pass over its fantastic quality. One critic has observed that “His stories had many muddy puddles in their streets that could easily make one stumble, but he always used his prose to as cloak over the puddles to keep his readers clean, dry and on their feet.” The stories, both short and long, have a parable-like quality, a very simple kernel of a story that challenges the reader to use his/her own life’s experience to reconcile the unclear connections between events, and come to some understanding of his own life in light of these events.

The musings and inventions of this lonely, isolated, neurasthenic figure spoke meaningfully and powerfully to those who were living through the nightmarish years of the 1930s, and as the decades of the 20th century accumulated and reality seemed to grow ever more absurd and out of control, his writings, and the unique sensibility that had created them, came to seem more and more central to our perception of ourselves and of our inescapable human condition. Out of his extreme sensitivity and the ambiguities and contradictions of his own life, out of his sense that the nature of reality was such that merely to describe its surfaces would no longer suffice as a way of coming to terms with its essence, Kafka fashioned fables in whose reflection the modern world recognized its own image, works that became indispensable to the 20th Century’s – and now the 21st Century’s – definition of itself.

About the author: Victor Verney grew up in Buffalo, NY, where he developed an early and abiding love for music, literature and baseball. After spending a four-year hitch in the U.S. Navy indulging his inner Herman Melville, he went on to a stint as a semi-pro jazz pianist indulging his inner Chick Corea. Eventually, he earned graduate degree in American literature at the State University of NY-Buffalo; his doctoral dissertation was directed by the late Leslie Fiedler, renowned literary critic and author of the widely acclaimed “Love and Death in the American Novel.” Formerly a college literature professor, Victor has also been a journalist, serving as an editor for weekly and daily newspapers in Iowa. Now a full-time freelance writer living in the Des Moines area, his primary hobbies continue to be jazz and baseball (along with mowing the lawn). More background and writing samples from a variety of contexts may be found at his Web site: http://verney.us/