Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  Felice Bauer was the woman Kafka would never marry. Over the next five years, and through hundreds of tumultuous letters (Kafka sometimes transcribed passages from his letters to Felice into letters to Brod, and quotes letters from Brod in his letters to her), he courts her affection, which he then finds overwhelming and retreats from. He loves her and flees from her. Separated by the six-hour train ride between Prague and Berlin, they would be twice engaged and twice separated.

  Kafka’s ambivalence toward Zionism can be read as a subtext of his ambivalence toward Felice—and other women he would love at a distance—as though Zionism and marriage were two aspects of one preoccupation, twin ways of saying “we” for a man who suffered a debilitating case of “we-weakness” (Wir-Schwäche). As though intuiting this subtext, when Kafka and Felice first became engaged, Brod gave them a present: Richard Lichtheim’s book The Zionist Agenda (Das Programm des Zionismus, 1911).* But Kafka’s ambivalence only deepened with time. Writing to Felice’s close friend, Grete Bloch, in 1914, Kafka confessed: “I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.”

  Kafka never set foot in Palestine, but in the first line of the first letter he wrote to Felice, five weeks after meeting her at Brod’s apartment, Kafka uses the fantasy of Palestine as the opening gambit of flirtation:

  In the likelihood that you no longer have even the remotest recollection of me, I am introducing myself once more: my name is Franz Kafka, and I am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at Director Brod’s in Prague, the one who subsequently handed you across the table, one by one, photographs of a Thalia trip, and who finally, with the very hand now striking the keys, held your hand, the one which confirmed a promise to accompany him next year to Palestine.

  This promise freed something in Kafka. On the eve of Yom Kippur, two nights after writing her this letter, he poured forth his breakthrough story “The Judgment” in a single ecstatic sitting from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. He dedicated the story to Felice.

  Judith Butler, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, remarks that for Kafka “Palestine is a figural elsewhere where lovers go, an open future, the name of an unknown destination.” Throughout their correspondence, Felice becomes identified in Kafka’s mind with that elsewhere. In February 1913, Kafka wrote to Felice about running into a young Zionist acquaintance who invited him to come to an important Zionist meeting. “My indifference regarding his person and any Zionism was boundless and unspeakable at that moment,” Kafka writes. He accompanied the young man to the gathering, but only “up to the door of the café.” He did not allow himself “to be escorted inside.” It was as though in his relationship both to Felice and to the Jewish national ambition—and to his own writing—Kafka vacillated on the threshold of consummation.

  The most vivid expression of this comes in Kafka’s late unfinished story, “The Burrow” (“Der Bau,” a title supplied by Brod), written in the winter of 1923. The story depicts a solitary badger-like creature which has devoted its life to building an elaborate underground fortress, with which it identifies itself: “the vulnerability of the burrow has made me vulnerable; any wound to it hurts me as if I myself were hit.” The creature does not inhabit this well-defended refuge, but remains vigilantly outside, on the threshold:

  At times, I was seized by the childish desire never to go back to the burrow at all but rather to settle in here near the entrance and find my happiness in realizing all the time how the burrow would keep me secure if I were inside it.*

  After breaking off his engagement with Felice for the second time, Kafka linked the image of being “near the entrance” to Zionism to subsequent lovers, too. In 1919, Kafka met and in short order became engaged to Julie Wohryzek, unassuming daughter of an impoverished cobbler and synagogue caretaker. She was a woman who “possesses an inexhaustible and unstoppable store of the brashest Yiddish expressions,” Kafka told Brod. (Neither her pedigree nor her Yiddish appealed to Kafka’s father, who considered her déclassé.) Julie, whose first fiancé, a young Zionist, had been killed in the trenches of the First World War, had attended Brod’s lectures on Zionism. Almost immediately upon meeting Julie, Kafka asked Brod to send her a copy of his 1917 essay “The Three Phases of Zionism.”

  _____

  Thanks to Brod, even before meeting Felice, Kafka had already touched, in a tangential way, on Zionist circles. In 1910, he began going with Brod to meetings and lectures of the Bar Kochba group. Unlike Theodor Herzl, members of Bar Kochba were more concerned with reviving Jewish culture than with the politics of realizing the Jewish state. They understood Zionism not as an end unto itself but as a means of spiritual renewal. In August 1916, Kafka alluded to this in a postcard to Felice: “Zionism, accessible to most Jews of today, at least in its outer fringes, is but an entrance to something far more important.”

  Kafka’s dialogue on the subject began years earlier with his friend Hugo Bergmann, who joined Bar Kochba at age sixteen in 1899 and was elected to chair the association at age eighteen. In 1902, the nineteen-year-old Kafka expressed bewilderment at his friend’s commitment to Zionism. Bergmann replied:

  Of course, your letter does not lack the obligatory derision of my Zionism. . . . Again and again I have to wonder why you, who . . . were my classmate for so long, do not understand my Zionism. If I saw a madman before me and he had an idée fixe, I would not laugh at him, because his idea is a piece of life for him. You think Zionism is also an idée fixe of mine. . . . I did not have the strength to stand alone, like you.

  Bergmann would leave Prague for Palestine in 1920, where he would serve as the first director of Israel’s National Library. Under his leadership, Max Brod said, it became “the largest, most content-rich, and most modern library in the Middle East.” Bergmann was later appointed rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kafka followed his career there with great interest. In 1923, Bergmann briefly returned to Prague to deliver a lecture at the Zionist club Keren Ha-Yesod. Kafka told him afterward, “You gave this talk only for me.”

  We can assume that Bergmann told Kafka something of the library’s origins. In 1872, a certain Rabbi Joshua Heshel Lewin of Volozhin issued a call in Hachavazelet, the first Hebrew weekly published in Jerusalem, “to establish a library which shall become a focal point in which the books of our people shall be collected—not one shall be lacking.” With the help of British financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, funds were raised and a board recruited, including Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew. In 1905, the library came under the auspices of the Zionist Congress in Basel. But the time was not yet ripe. A national library requires, by definition, a nation concentrated in one country, speaking one language.

  It was at Bar Kochba, in January 1912, that Kafka attended a talk on Yiddish folk songs by Nathan Birnbaum, the forty-seven-year-old Viennese writer who twenty years earlier had coined the term Zionism. “Kafka hung on every word of Birnbaum’s lecture,” Reiner Stach writes. Kafka also went to Bar Kochba to hear talks given by the Zionist (and future author of the children’s book Bambi) Felix Salten, and by Kurt Blumenfeld, secretary-general of the World Zionist Organization. He listened to leading cultural Zionist Davis Trietsch, a founder of the Jüdische Verlag and an editor of the journal Palästina, talk about the Jewish colonies in Palestine.

  In September 1913, along with some ten thousand other participants (including his future publisher Salman Schocken and future first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion), Kafka attended the eleventh World Zionist Congress in Vienna. (His main purpose for coming to Vienna was work-related: the second International Congress for Rescue Services and Accident Prevention.) There he heard speeches by Nahum Sokolow, Menachem Ussishkin, and Arthur Ruppin, among other leading Zionist voices. Delegates were granted a premiere screening of a 78-minute silent documentary film, produced by Noah Sokolovsky, that offered panoramic views of the new city Tel Aviv, the landmarks of Jerusalem, and Jewish agricultural settlements in Judea,
Carmel, and the Galilee.

  The boisterous gathering left Kafka cold. “I sat in the Zionist congress,” he remarked to Brod, “as if it were an event totally alien to me, felt myself cramped and distracted by much that went on.” “It is hard to imagine anything more useless than such a congress,” he told Brod. In his diaries, Kafka mocked Palästinafahrer, or those who journeyed to Palestine, who “constantly mouthed about emulating the Maccabees.”

  _____

  Caught in Prague’s cultural cross-currents, Kafka was no less wary than Brod and his Zionist friends of the ambient anti-Semitism. Like them, he was all too aware that Jews were seen by Czechs as Germans, and by Germans as Jews. “What had they done,” Theodor Herzl wrote in 1897, “the small Jews of Prague, the honest middle-class merchants, the most peace-loving of all peace-loving citizens? . . . Some of them tried to be Czech—they were assaulted by the Germans; others, who tried to be German, were attacked by the Czechs—and by the Germans as well.”

  Like Brod, Kafka read hateful anti-Jewish articles in the Czech paper Venkov, and was no stranger to casual Jew-baiting. One evening Kafka attended a salon hosted by his boss’s wife. Another guest remarked, “So you’ve invited a Jew as well.”

  The two Prague writers had opposite temperaments and fates but shared the charged experience of belonging to a Jewish minority within a German-speaking minority within a Czech minority within a heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire being pulled apart by the centrifugal force of rival nationalisms. Both experienced at first hand the rising völkisch anti-Semitism that accompanied the Empire’s disintegration.

  In December 1897, Kafka, age fourteen, witnessed a three-day riot in Prague. During the “December storm,” as it came to be called, marauders vandalized synagogues, plundered Jewish shops, and attacked Jewish homes, including Brod’s. “In my home the windows also shattered at night,” Brod recalled. “Trembling, we scurried out of the nursery, which faced the street, to our parents’ bedroom. I can still picture my father lifting my little sister out of bed—and in the morning there was actually a big paving stone in the bed.”

  Two years later, Kafka followed the case of Leopold Hilsner, a young Jew from a Bohemian town charged in 1899 with the ritual murder of a Czech Catholic girl. He read an eyewitness account of a 1906 pogrom by his friend Abraham Gruenberg. He read reports in Prague’s Zionist weekly Selbstwehr about the Beilis blood libel in Kiev, and according to Brod wrote a short story about the notorious affair (burned at Kafka’s request by his last lover, Dora Diamant). He was moved by Arnold Zweig’s 1914 play Ritual Murder in Hungary (Ritualmord in Ungarn), which dramatized a blood libel known as the Tisza affair. “At one point I had to stop reading, sit down on the sofa, and weep,” Kafka told Felice. “It’s years since I wept.”

  Closer to home, in 1922, Kafka watched students of the German University in Prague run riot rather than receive their diplomas from a Jewish rector. In the same year, Kafka was moved to answer an anti-Semitic screed, Hans Blüher’s Secessio Judaica, which denounced “Jewish mimicry” and recommended the secession of the Jews from the Germans. Kafka saw all this frenzied hatred without illusions. Thus, for example, when Germany’s Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau was assassinated in 1922, Kafka remarked that it was “incomprehensible that they should have let him live as long as that.”

  Acutely sensitive to simmering anti-Semitism, Kafka kept up an unceasing dialogue with Bergmann and Brod about the question of the precarious status of the Jews in Europe. In 1920, he read Brod’s study, Socialism in Zionism. Unlike his two friends, however, Kafka did not turn to Zionist ideology to answer that question. “I’ve been spending every afternoon outside on the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitism,” the thirty-seven-year-old Kafka wrote during a pogrom in Prague in April 1920. “The other day I heard the Jews called prašivé plemeno [mangy brood]. Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? (Zionism or ethnic feeling is not even needed here.) The heroism of staying on nevertheless is the heroism of cockroaches that cannot be exterminated even from the bathroom.”

  _____

  In a September 1916 postcard to his fiancée Felice, Kafka remarks on “the dark complexity of Judaism, which contains so many impenetrable mysteries.” To begin to fathom those mysteries, and to share in the grammar in which they were expressed, Kafka launched into a serious study of Hebrew, in 1917. In this he was following the counsel of Hugo Bergmann. “If you want to know the Jewish people,” Bergmann stressed, “if you want to participate in discussions of issues that determine its fate, then first learn to understand its language!”

  Kafka was aided in his Hebrew studies by a popular textbook by Moses Rath and conversational lessons with his friends Friedrich Thieberger and Georg (Jiří) Mordechai Langer.* Langer, a homosexual who had met Kafka through their mutual friend Max Brod in 1915, had at age nineteen left his middle-class family to become a follower of a Hassidic rebbe. He was the author of The Eroticism of Kabbalah (Die Erotik der Kabbala, 1923), which Brod edited (and enthusiastically reviewed). He also wrote an elegy in Hebrew for Kafka in 1929. In 1941, two years before his untimely death, Langer, by then living not far from Brod in Tel Aviv, would recall his student’s joy in speaking Hebrew:

  Yes. Kafka spoke Hebrew. In his later years, we always spoke Hebrew together. He, who always insisted that he was not a Zionist, learned our language at an advanced age and with great diligence. And unlike the Prague Zionists, he spoke Hebrew fluently, which gave him a special satisfaction, and I don’t think that I’m exaggerating when I say he was secretly proud of it. . . . Once when we were traveling together by streetcar and speaking about the airplanes that were circling the skies of Prague at that moment, some Czech people who were riding in the streetcar with us . . . asked us what language we were speaking. . . . When we told them, they were surprised that it was possible to converse in Hebrew, even about airplanes. . . . How Kafka’s face lit up then from happiness and pride!

  At the same time, Langer added that Kafka “wasn’t a Zionist, but he was deeply envious of those who fulfilled the great precept of Zionism themselves, which simply means those who immigrated to Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]. He wasn’t a Zionist, but everything that happened in our land greatly moved him.”

  In 1918, Kafka proposed to Max Brod that they begin to correspond in Hebrew. Brod too had been fitfully trying to master the language. “Being a good Zionist,” Brod writes in his memoir, “I started to study Hebrew over and over again. Year after year. Always from the beginning. But I always got stuck, only made it to the Hifil” (Hebrew’s causative verb form). In a 1917 collection of his poems, Das gelobte Land (Promised Land) Brod includes one called “Hebrew Lesson” [Hebräische Lektion]. It opens with these lines:

  I was thirty years old

  Before I began to learn the language of my people.

  It seemed to me as if for thirty years I had been deaf.

  Brod remarked that Kafka learned the language “with special zeal.” “By studying Hebrew deeply,” Brod recalled, “he left me far behind in this field too.”

  By the fall of 1922, despite his failing health, Kafka was studying Hebrew twice a week with a nineteen year-old student from Jerusalem. Puah Ben-Tovim—“the little Palestinian,” as he called her—was boarding in Prague with Hugo Bergmann’s mother. Puah’s parents had come to Palestine with the wave of immigrants from Russia in the 1880s. For ten years she helped her father, a distinguished Hebraist, read to the students at Jerusalem’s first school for the blind. After World War I, she was in the first graduating class of Jerusalem’s Hebrew Gymnasium. While still in high school, she had volunteered to help Hugo Bergmann catalogue the German books in the National Library.

  “Every so often he’d have a painful coughing spell that would make me want to break off the lesson,” Puah recalled. “And then he’d look at me, unable to speak, but imploring me with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another. It almost seemed as if he though
t of those lessons as a kind of miracle cure.”

  With Puah’s help, Kafka filled vocabulary notebooks with Hebrew words next to their German equivalents in looping, childlike handwriting: Fascist movement, tuberculosis, holiness, victory, genius. He also copied out Hebrew phrases, like “May God smash you!” (According to Raphael Weiser, former director of the National Library’s manuscript and archival department, the eighteen-page notebook I consulted at the National Library was presented to the library by the Schocken family.) “There is no question that he was attracted to me,” Puah recalled, “but it was more to an ideal than to the actual girl that I was, and to the image of a Jerusalem far away. He was constantly picking my brain about Jerusalem, and wanted to come with me when I went back.” “When I first met him,” Puah said of Kafka, “he already knew he was dying, and he desperately wanted to live. He still dreamed of Palestine; and, since that’s where I just came from, it gave me a sort of mystique in his eyes. . . . I soon came to realize that, emotionally, he was thrashing about like a drowning man, ready to cling to whoever came close enough for him to grab hold of.”*

  Yet Kafka, whose writing was born of the impossibility of belonging, pulled away from offers of collective belonging. “It was his yearning to belong, and to gain the self-confidence that accompanies belonging, that drew him to Zionism,” says Vivian Liska, professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp. “It was his fear of dissolution as a self in a group that kept him from adhering to it fully.” Hans Dieter Zimmermann, a leading German interpreter of Kafka, is more clear-cut: “Not by any means was he a Zionist. . . . He is an ‘unbridled’ individualist, as he himself once wrote.”