Kafka, a fanatic of language, was not alone. America had its own language fanatics, of which he was unaware. In the novel we know as Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared, also called The Stoker), anomalous characters populating his American scenes are rife; but Kafka’s imagination, capaciously strange though it was, could not have conceived of the American Hebraists, as prodigiously single-minded as himself, who were thriving in the very years he was at work on Amerika.
That Kafka contended with his native German even as he powerfully embraced it is one of the salient keys to his character: the key is in hand, but there is no lock for it to fit into. German was his, ineradicably, yet insecurely. His famously self-lacerating lament—that Jews who wrote in German had “their hind legs stuck in parental Judaism while their forelegs found no purchase on new ground”—suggests some small helpless underground animal futilely attempting to escape its burrow. But when he crucially, even triumphantly, announced, “I am made of literature and nothing else,” it could only mean that it was German idiom and essence, German root and rootedness, that had formed and possessed him.
Why, then—early in life until late, and with strenuous diligence—did he pursue the study of Hebrew? The notebooks that survive (archived in the National Library of Israel) are redolent of an ironic pathos: an earnest schoolboy’s laboriously inked vocabulary lists, Hebrew into German, in the very hour that the world’s most enduring masterworks were spilling from this selfsame pen. When at twenty-nine Kafka was first introduced to Felice Bauer, the young woman to whom he would be twice engaged but would never marry, he thought her unprepossessing, but was nevertheless instantly drawn to her talk: she was, she told him, studying Hebrew.
The American Hebraists, poets who in their youth had emigrated from Eastern Europe, were Kafka’s contemporaries. They were also his peers in language fanaticism: they too were made of language and nothing else—but the language that formed and possessed them was Hebrew. Unlike Kafka’s feverish wrestling with the fraught and unseemly question of hind legs and forelegs, they were consumed, body and soul, with no ambivalence of belonging, by Hebrew. Not only were they fanatics in their claim of intimately ingrained ownership of Hebrew, its godlike guardians and creators, they were fanatics in their relation to their new environment. English was all around them, awaiting their mastery; and they did become masters of English, and still it was Hebrew that inflamed them. Nor were they—unlike Kafka—torn by incessant doubt and self-repudiation. Scattered in cities all over America, they sat in tranquil rooms, on new ground, immersed in the renewing sublimity of the ancient alphabet.
And then they disappeared.
Kafka did not disappear.
No Hebraist poets inhabit his Amerika, but we can try to imagine, had he journeyed, like his protagonist Karl, to the real America, and encountered, say, Preil or Halkin or Regelson, would they recognize one another as equally eaten by that glorious but perilous worm, literary fanaticism?
Transcending the Kafkaesque
How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume? Franz Kafka, named for the fallen crown of a defunct empire, has himself metamorphosed into an empire of boundless discourse, an empire stretched out across a firmament of interpretation: myth, parable, allegory, clairvoyance, divination; theory upon thesis upon theophany; every conceivable incarnation of the sexual, the political, the psychological, the metaphysical. Another study of the life? Another particle in the deep void of a proliferating cosmos. How, then, does one dare to add so much as a single syllable, even in the secondary exhalation of a biography?
One dares because of the culprits. The culprits are two. One is “Kafkaesque,” which buries the work. The other is “transcend,” which buries the life. A scrupulous and capacious biography may own the power to drive away these belittlements, and Reiner Stach’s mammoth three volumes (only the second and third have appeared in English so far) are superbly tempered for exorcism. With its echo of “grotesque,” the ubiquitous term “Kafkaesque” has long been frozen into permanence, both in the dictionary and in the most commonplace vernacular. Comparative and allusive, it has by now escaped the body of work it is meant to evoke. To say that such and such a circumstance is Kafkaesque is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism—even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is “like” “The Hunger Artist.” Nothing is “like” “The Metamorphosis.” Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. The Kafkaesque is what Kafka presumably “stands for”—an unearned and usurping explication. And from the very start, serious criticism has been overrun by the Kafkaesque, the lock that portends the key: homoeroticism for one maven, the father-son entanglement for another, the theological uncanny for yet another. Or else it is the slippery commotion of time; or of messianism; or of Thanatos as deliverance. The Kafkaesque, finally, is reductiveness posing as revelation.
The persistence of “transcend” is still more troublesome. What is it that Kafka is said to transcend? Every actual and factual aspect of the life he lived, everything that formed and informed him, that drew or repelled him, the time and the place, the family and the apartment and the office—and Prague itself, with its two languages and three populations fixed at the margins of a ruling sovereignty sprawled across disparate and conflicting nationalities. Kafka’s fictions, free grains of being, seem to float, untethered and self-contained, above the heavy explicitness of a recognizable society and culture. And so a new and risen Kafka is born, cleansed of origins, unchained from the tensions, many of them nasty, of Prague’s roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew, its ambient anti-Semitism and its utopian Zionism, its Jewish clubs and its literary stewpot of Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Weiss. In this understanding, Kafka is detached not from the claims of specificity—what is more strikingly particularized than a Kafka tale?—but from a certain designated specificity.
In an otherwise seamless introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories, John Updike takes up the theme of transcendence with particular bluntness: “Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.” As evidence, he notes that the Samsas in “The Metamorphosis” make the sign of the cross. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche. (Danilo Kiš, Isaac Babel, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Stefan Zweig, Josef Roth: from these wounded ghosts, a chorus of knowing laughter.) The idea of the parochial compels its opposite: what is not parochial must be universal. And if the parochial is deemed a low distraction from the preponderant social force—“that is to say, predominantly Christian”—then what is at work is no more than supercilious triumphalism. To belittle as parochial the cultural surround (“the ethnic source”) that bred Kafka is to diminish and disfigure the man—to do to him what so many of Kafka’s stories do to their hapless protagonists.
As biographer, Reiner Stach will have none of this. Nowhere in The Decisive Years nor in The Years of Insight does he impose on Kafka an all-encompassing formula. He offers no key, no code, no single-minded interpretive precept: the Kafkaesque is mercifully missing. Instead, he allows Kafka’s searing introspections, as they emerge from the letters and diaries, to serve as self-defining clues. Kafka saw his stories not as a reader or critic will, but from the inside, as the visceral sensations of writing. “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else,” he announced to Felice Bauer, the woman he would never marry. It was a statement meant not so much metaphorically as bodily. At twenty-nine, on September 23, 1912, he exulted in his diary as an exhausted but
victorious long-distance swimmer, on completing a marathon, might:
The story, “The Judgment,” I wrote during the night of the 22nd, from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M., in one sitting. I could hardly pull my legs out from under the desk; they had become stiff from sitting. The frightful exertion and pleasure of experiencing how the story developed right in front of me, as though I were moving forward through a stretch of water. Several times during the night I lugged my own weight on my back. How everything can be hazarded, how for everything, even for the strangest idea, a great fire is ready in which it expires and rises up again. . . . At 2 A.M. I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid came through the front room in the morning, I was writing the last sentence. Turning off the lamp, the light of day. The slight pains in my chest. The exhaustion that faded away in the middle of the night. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only in a context like this, with a complete opening of body and soul.
Stach will go no further than Kafka’s own reflections and admissions. In this restraint he follows Kafka himself: on no account, he instructed the publisher of “The Metamorphosis,” should the insect be pictured. He saw explication as intrusion, and willful interpretation as a false carapace. A premonitory authorial warning: he was already warding off the Kafkaesque.
In refusing the critic’s temptation, Stach is freed as biographer. Open to him is the limitless web of the societal, the political, the historical, the customary, the trivial; everything material, explicit, contemporaneous—sometimes day by day, on occasion even hour by hour; the trains and the telephones; the offices and the office machines; the bureaucrats and their litigations; the apartment and the family’s noises. In brief: the parochial, in all its dense particularity. The biographer excavates, he does not transcend, and through this robustly determined unearthing he rescues Kafka from the unearthliness of his repute.
Foremost is the question of language. In Prague, Czechs spoke Czech, Germans spoke German, Jews spoke German. Kafka’s ruminations on his relation to the language he was born into are by now as familiar (or as overfamiliar) as his face in the photographs, and equally revealing of shrouded pain. Jews who wrote in German, he lamented, resembled trapped beasts, neither at home in their native idiom nor alien to it. They lived, moreover, with three impossibilities: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently.” To which he added a fourth, “the impossibility of writing.”
Kafka’s prose has been universally lauded as spare, somber, comic, lucent, almost platonically pure; but many of those who acclaim it are compelled to read through the art of the translator. Shelley Frisch, Stach’s heroic American translator, movingly reproduces his intended breadth and pace and tone, though now and again she is tempted to transmute the biographer’s turns of phrase into popular local catchwords (“tickled pink,” “thrown for a loop,” “let off steam,” “went to temple,” “right off the bat,” and many more). This is not altogether a failing, since it is Stach, not Kafka, whom these displaced Americanisms represent; but at the same time they serve to remind us that the biographer, whose Muttersprache is German, comes to Kafka’s idiom with the deep linguistic affinities that only a native German, one who is also a literary writer, can assert. It is with such felt authority that Stach looks back at Kafka’s writing—not to say how and what it is, but rather how and what it is not: “There were no empty phrases, no semantic impurities, no weak metaphors—even when he lay in the sand and wrote postcards.” Yet there is another side to Stach’s closeness to Kafka’s rhetoric. When Kafka declared the impossibility of writing German, it was plainly not the overriding mastery of his language that was in doubt, but its ownership—not that German did not belong to him, but that he did not belong to it. German was unassailably at the root of his tongue; might he claim it societally, nationally, as a natural inheritance, as an innate entitlement? The culture that touched him at all points had a prevailing Jewish coloration. Family traditions, however casually observed, were in the air he breathed, no matter how removed he was from their expression. His most intimate literary friendships consisted entirely of writers of similar background; at least two, Max Brod and Hugo Bergmann, were seriously committed to Zionism. He studied Hebrew, earnestly if fitfully, at various periods of his life, and he attended Martin Buber’s lectures on Zionism at the meetings of Bar Kochba, the Association of Jewish University Students. Unlike the disdainful Jewish burghers of Prague, who had long ago shed what they dismissed as an inferior zhargón, he was drawn to a troupe of Yiddish-speaking players from Poland and their lively but somewhat makeshift theater. He was a warm proponent of the work of Berlin’s Jewish Home, which looked after the welfare and education of impoverished young immigrants from Eastern Europe. He read Heinrich Graetz’s massive History of the Jews; he read Der Jude, the monthly founded by Buber; he read Die Jüdische Rundschau, a Zionist weekly; he read Selbstwahr, yet another Zionist periodical, whose editor and all of its contributors he knew. He also read Die Fackel, Karl Kraus’s scourging satiric journal.
If Kafka’s profoundest conviction (“I am made of literature”) kept its distance from these preoccupations and influences, he nevertheless felt their pressure in the way of an enveloping skin. His commanding conundrums, including the two opposing impossibilities—writing and not-writing—are almost suffocatingly knotted into Jewish insecurities. Zionism was one symptom of this powerful unease; and so was Kraus’s repudiation of Zionism, and his furious advocacy of radically self-obscuring assimilation.
It is difficult to refrain from pondering how a biographer (and a biographer is inevitably also a historian) will confront these extremes of cultural tension. Every biography is, after all, a kind of autobiography: it reveals predispositions, parallels, hidden needs; or possibly an unacknowledged wish to take on the subject’s persona, to become his secret sharer. The biographer’s choice of subject is a confession of more than interest or attunement. The desire to live alongside another life, year by year, thought for thought, is what we mean by possession. And for Stach to be close, both as a given and as a fortuity, to Kafka’s language can hardly reflect the full scope of his willed immersion. He must also come close to Jewish foreboding—a foreboding marinated in the political and tribal and linguistic complexities of Austria-Hungary at the turbulent crux of its demise. Much of Kafka’s fiction—The Trial, The Castle, “In the Penal Colony”—has too often made of him a prognosticator, as if he could intuit, through some uncanny telescope, the depredations that were soon to blacken Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. But the times required no clairvoyance; Jewish disquiet was an immediacy. At fourteen, Kafka witnessed anti-Semitic rioting that had begun as an anti-German protest against the Habsburg government’s denial of Czech language rights. At thirty-seven, three years before his death, and with The Castle still unwritten, he saw Prague’s historic Altneu synagogue attacked and its Torah scrolls torched. “I’ve been spending every afternoon outside on the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitism,” he recounted. “The other day I heard the Jews called Prasivé plenemo [mangy brood]. Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? . . . The heroism of staying on nevertheless is the heroism of cockroaches that cannot be exterminated even from the bathroom.”
Post-Holocaust, all this must sting a susceptible German ear; note that Zyklon B, the genocidal gas of the extermination camps, was originally used as an insecticide. Yet there are reminders still more unsettling. Because a biography of Kafka will perforce include minor characters—his sisters Elli, Valli, and Ottla, for instance—it must finally arrive at Kafka’s afterlife, the destiny he did not live long enough to suffer: that zone of ultimate impossibility wherein all other impossibilities became one with the impossibility of staying alive. Between 1941 and 1943, all three sisters perished, Elli and Valli in Chelmno, Ottla in Auschwitz. They hover over Kafka’s biographies—this one, and all the rest—like torn and damaged Fates. Stach is never unaware of these points of connection; at
first, uninvited, sotto voce, behind the scenes, in quiet recognition, they pierce the weave of his narrative. But by the time he attains his coda, Stach’s watchful voicing of the fraught history of the Jews of central Europe during the passage of Kafka’s life will have risen to a thunder.
And while a biographer may be willy-nilly a historian, and subliminally an autobiographer, he is, even more so, a species of novelist—of the nineteenth-century, loose-baggy-monster variety. He is in pursuit of the whole trajectory of a life, beginning, middle, end: chronology is king, postmodern fragmentation unwelcome, landscapes lavish, rooms and furnishings the same, nothing goes unnoticed. The biographer is a simulacrum, say, of George Eliot, who places her characters against the background of a society rendered both minutely and expansively, attending to ancestry, religion, economic standing, farming, banking, business, reading, travel, and more. Stach, in this vein, is doubtless the first to give so plentiful an account of the activities of the Prague Workers’ Accident Insurance Company, the government agency where Kafka was employed as a lawyer from 1908 until 1918, when advancing tuberculosis forced his retirement. That he divided his day into office and work—by declaring them antithetical—is itself a type of credo; but Kafka’s exalted literary image has too readily obscured the press of the quotidian. What did Kafka do, what were his everyday responsibilities? Stach lifts the dry-as-dust veil:
If an industrialist submitted an appeal, the office had to establish proof that the safety precautions of the firm in question were not up to the latest standards. But what were the latest standards? They could not be definitively stipulated with ordinances; they had to be continually reestablished, if possible by personal observation. Kafka, who already had legal expertise, quickly acquired the technical know-how; he attended courses and traveled through northern Bohemian industrial cities. Next to the swaying stacks of appeals on his huge office desk there was an array of journals on accident prevention . . . in the areas in which he specialized—particularly the woodworking industry and quarries.
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