Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  On the heels of his encounter with Yiddish theater, as the reverberations of his father’s voice grew fainter, Kafka began to give himself the nourishment denied him by his father. He subscribed to the Zionist periodicals Die Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review) and Selbstwehr (Self-Defense). He read the Bible in Martin Luther’s translation, acquainted himself with Talmudic literature through Jakob Fromer’s Organism of Judaism (Der Organismus des Judentums, 1909), and “eagerly and happily” devoured Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews (1888–89). “I had to stop here and there in order by resting to allow my Jewishness to collect itself,” he says. He also read about Yiddish in French. He absorbed Meyer Isser Pinès’s history of Yiddish literature (Histoire de la littérature judéo-allemande, 1911); after finishing it in January 1912, Kafka records in his diary that he read “five-hundred pages with such thoroughness, haste, and joy as I have never yet shown in the case of similar books.” He copied into his diary several passages from the book, including this phrase in Yiddish: “Wos mir seinen, seinen mir / Ober jueden seinen mir”—What we are, we are/ But Jews we are.

  Kafka knew from his father how condescending a view the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie took of Yiddish; they shunned it as a half-German half-Hebrew “hermaphrodite” jargon. In his History of the Jews, Graetz, for example, had called it a “mumbling gibberish” (lallendes Kauderwelsch).

  The unsettling encounter with Yiddish altered Kafka’s relationship with German, his inherited mother tongue (Muttersprache), and challenged him to reassess whether he belonged to German—or German to him. “Yesterday,” he writes in his diary on October 24, 1911, “it occurred to me that I did not always love mother [die Mutter] as she deserved it and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no Mutter.” He had loved his mother in a mother tongue that, for all the precision with which he brandished it, rang false. In one letter to Brod, Kafka refers to “the German that we still have in our ears from our un-German mothers.” In another, he refers to the Jewish use of the German language as “an overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property [ fremde Besitz], which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out.” It was an inheritance he could not fully claim.

  And so another, humbler linguistic inheritance offered itself. On behalf of his new “indispensable friend” Yitzhak Löwy, whom he had been trying to persuade to emigrate to Palestine, Kafka persuaded the Bar Kochba group to sponsor a benefit evening of Yiddish readings. It would take place in the banquet hall at Prague’s Jewish Town Hall (Jüdisches Rathaus) opposite the Altneu Synagogue on Maisel Street. Kafka himself organized and would introduce the evening. He anticipated in his diary that his introduction “will come straight out of me as though out of a gun barrel.”

  On the night of Sunday, February 18, 1912, Kafka took the stage, mediating between the audience before him and Löwy waiting in the wings behind him. It was not to be a Yiddish performance as much as a performance in German about Yiddish. In his talk (which Max Brod would publish in 1953 under the title “Speech on the Yiddish Language”), Kafka counseled his German-speaking audience not to fear the Jewish past submerged beneath their emancipated facades:

  I would like [the effect of the verses of the Eastern Jewish poets] to be released, if it deserves it. Yet this cannot occur so long as many of you are so afraid of Yiddish that one can almost see it in your faces. . . . You understand far more Yiddish than you think. And once Yiddish has taken hold of you—and Yiddish is everything: word, Hassidic melody, and the very essence of this Eastern Jewish actor [Löwy] himself—you will no longer recognize your former complacency. At that point, you will so powerfully feel the unity of Yiddish as to make you afraid—not of Yiddish any longer but of yourselves.

  Afterwards, Kafka noted the “proud, unearthly feeling” that accompanied him as he spoke about the “Mameloshn” (mother tongue). For once, he surveyed what he had done and saw that it was good. Nowhere else, notes French essayist and translator Marthe Robert, was Kafka, usually so uneasy about his position as a Jew writing in German, “so confident of his talent, so proud of his ease of movement of action.” It was to be the only public lecture Kafka would ever give. His father, Hermann, did not deign to come.

  In the end, however, the verdict in the Israeli courts would turn not only on Kafka’s relation to Jewishness, but also on the Jewish state’s relation—equally ambivalent—to him.

  7

  The Last Ingathering: Kafka in Israel

  Offenbach Depot, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  July–August 1946

  I am a memory come alive.

  —Kafka’s diary, October 15, 1921

  Beyond its legal conundrums, the trial in Israel threw into stark relief the country’s ambivalence toward Diaspora culture. Throughout the trial, Israel acted as though it can lay claim to any pre-state Jewish cultural artifact,* as though everything Jewish finds its culmination in the Jewish state, as though Jewish culture has been driven by a teleological thrust toward Jerusalem. During the trial, the National Library portrayed Kafka as a touchstone of modern Jewish cultural achievement, and portrayed Israel itself as the heir of the Diaspora’s achievements. As David Blumberg, chairman of the board of the National Library, put it: “The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people.”

  Outside the main reading room at the National Library, an engraved inscription, dated 1899, reads: “In Jerusalem our holy city shall be built a great house, high and exalted, where all of the fruits of the spirit of Israel from the day it became a people shall be kept, and to this house will stream our rabbis, sages, and all the enlightened of our nation.” If Israel is a country of return, the Zionist “ingathering of exiles” involved not just the physical return of Jews to the land, but the aspiration to serve as a haven for Jewish books—an aspiration that accompanied the National Library from its inception.

  Five years after the founding of the Hebrew University in 1925, the Jewish National and University Library (JNUL), as it was then called, moved into its new building on Mount Scopus, a hilltop in east Jerusalem. Since 1933, two copies of every publication printed in the country must by law be deposited with the library. In 1948, the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence severed Mount Scopus from the rest of Jerusalem, and the library was forced to move its main holdings to the Terra Sancta building, a Franciscan property in West Jerusalem. Twelve years later, the library was transferred to the impressive building in which it is currently housed, on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University. In 2007, the Knesset passed the National Library Law, which redefined the JNUL as the National Library of Israel.

  Visitors there are today greeted by the stunning interplay of saturated blues and radiant reds of Mordecai Ardon’s stained-glass windows, among the largest ever made. Ardon’s masterpiece is dedicated to Isaiah’s vision of peace: “For out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. . . . And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war again.” The central window transfigures Jerusalem’s Old City wall into the Dead Sea Scroll of the Book of Isaiah, as though in Jerusalem words are more real than stone.

  Until Isaiah’s vision is realized, the library must serve as a safe haven for a culture that only narrowly survived extermination. Among the Jewish properties looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Nazi Germany’s state agency for looting, formed in July 1940) were vast libraries and archives. Some were intended for anti-Jewish museums dedicated to curating a culture destroyed. By war’s end, millions of plundered Jewish books had been scattered across Europe. Some 400,000 books that had been plundered from French Jews were discovered in Tanzenberg Castle in Carinthia, Austria.* In Vienna, 330,000 confiscated books (including part of
the renowned YIVO library in Vilna) were kept in a former bank building, and tens of thousands of volumes stolen from Austrian Jews ended up in a basement of the Hofburg Palace. The former central synagogue of Trieste, Italy, was turned into a warehouse for books looted from Jewish emigrants. In Berlin, hundreds of thousands more volumes were kept in the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt).

  In 1946, Robert Walsh, a journalist dispatched to Germany by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that a five-story reinforced-concrete building belonging to I. G. Farben in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, had become the world’s largest repository of Jewish books. Workers there sorted some thirty thousand books a day. Their restitution created a host of political, administrative, and diplomatic difficulties, but it also drew on a long Jewish tradition of “redeeming” books, almost as though they were human captives.

  In 1945, a group of German émigrés in Jerusalem (including Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Judah Magnes) established a “Committee for the Salvage of Diaspora Treasures” at the National Library. The committee (called in Hebrew Otzrot Ha-Golah, or Treasures of the Diaspora), expressed the view that it was “a requirement of historic justice that the Hebrew University and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem be made the repository of these remains of Jewish culture which have fortunately been saved for the world,” and that the Hebrew University should be “regarded as the spokesman of the Jewish people in this regard.” Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, added: “We are to be the chief country for the absorption of the living human beings who have escaped from Nazi persecution. . . . By the same token we should be the trustee of these spiritual goods which destroyed German Jewry left behind.”

  The next year, the library dispatched Scholem, the eminent Kabbalah scholar and director of the National Library’s Hebrew Division (a position obtained with the help of Kafka’s friend Hugo Bergmann), to Europe to rescue heirless books and manuscripts. Scholem did everything in his power to repatriate these fragments of memory. He was concerned that if the task were left to Allied authorities, the books would end up not in Jerusalem, but in New York, where prominent scholars Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, Horace Kallen, and Max Weinreich had set up the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.

  In Prague, Scholem pored through a catalogue of some thirty thousand volumes that had been brought there from Theresienstadt. Visiting the Offenbach depot in July and August 1946, he placed what he had managed to rescue into unlabeled crates, provided a fake name on the invoice, and colluded with an American Jewish serviceman to smuggle the crates on a kind of Noah’s ark from Offenbach to Paris, and thence to Jerusalem. Although the Allies lodged a formal diplomatic complaint, the Offenbach books remain to this day in Israel’s National Library. Their rescue and survival made all the more tangible that which had been destroyed.

  _____

  Even as Zionism involves ingathering of exiles and their culture, and claims Jewish cultural products from the Diaspora as its own, the Jewish state also rests on a contrary impulse: a self-purgation of the atavisms of the Diaspora, on the notion that only in Israel—and only in Hebrew—can one reenter history as a Jew. Zionists saw exile as fallen and in need of redemption, as something to be overcome.

  What then explains the National Library’s insistence during eight years of legal battles on “ingathering” a quintessential Diaspora writer who died a quarter century before Israel came into being? The question deepens in light of the fact—which Marbach’s lawyers did not hesitate to point out—that Kafka never became part of the Israeli canon, or of the project of national revival. There has never been a Kafka cult in Israel, as there was in Germany, France, the United States, and elsewhere.

  During the trial, the Marbach archive subtly portrayed Israel as a latecomer to the Kafka industry. Israel can boast of neither a center of Kafka studies nor a significant school of Kafka interpretation. Nor does it grant a Kafka Prize (as in Prague, bestowed on Elias Canetti, Philip Roth, Ivan Klíma, Elfriede Jelinek, Haruki Murakami, and Amos Oz, among others). To this day, no Israeli city has named a street after Kafka—in contrast to Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Hannover, Nuremberg, Dortmund, Köln, Karlsruhe, Bielefeld, Bottrop, Müritz, and Vienna, among many others. (As of this writing, Otto Dov Kulka of the Hebrew University was petitioning the Jerusalem municipality to name the square in front of the new National Library, due to be completed in 2020, Kafka Square.)*

  Comparatively few Israeli literary critics have written about Kafka, and when they did, they tended to stress the Jewishness of his work. (Under the dominant influence of Gershom Scholem, he was read there not as a writer of fiction, but as a theologian.) In April 1969, several months after Brod’s death, the National Library in Jerusalem held a Kafka exhibition at the suggestion of the German embassy in Tel Aviv. Under the direction of German scholar Klaus Wagenbach, the exhibition had appeared in Berlin and Munich. The National Library’s director, Issachar Joel, said at the time: “We thought it proper to enrich the exhibition by adding a number of items which would make the Jewish side of Kafka more pronounced than it was in the original.” The first conference in Israel on Kafka, held on the centennial of his birth in 1983, was similarly initiated and funded not by Israelis but by the Austrian embassy in Tel Aviv. The first Kafka conference in Israel organized by Israelis (the Hebrew University, the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University) did not take place until 1991.

  The Scottish translators Willa and Edwin Muir introduced Kafka to English-speaking readers in the late 1920s.* In Europe, translations of Kafka’s work appeared similarly early.† In Israel, Kafka’s novels were translated into Hebrew piecemeal and relatively late, mostly at the behest of Salman Schocken.‡ Brod’s biography of Kafka, published in German in 1937, did not see light in Hebrew until 1955 (translated by Edna Kornfeld).

  In Germany, Kafka’s complete works were published before World War II. Between 1982 and 2004, an international team put together a German critical edition of Kafka’s writings (published by S. Fischer Verlag with funding from the German government). The first French edition of Kafka’s works (edited by Marthe Robert) came out in eight volumes between 1963 and 1965. The first Spanish edition of the complete works appeared in 1960 (translated by David Vogelmann and others). A seven-volume edition of Kafka’s collected works in Serbo-Croatian came out in 1978. In Israel, by contrast, there is to this day no Hebrew edition of Kafka’s complete works. (Nor, as of this writing, does the National Library in Jerusalem hold a copy of the German critical edition of Kafka’s works.)

  _____

  In one view, Kafka’s cool reception in the Jewish state was determined by a resistance toward German language and literature, which had become associated with Nazi barbarity.

  In 1942, Arnold Zweig (another celebrated writer all but ignored in Israel), invited to give a speech in German at Cinema Esther in Tel Aviv, was violently prevented by right-wing activists. Together with Wolfgang Yourgrau, Zweig was editing a short-lived local German-language weekly called Orient. Among the contributors to this small corner of the Exilpresse, or the German press in exile, was Max Brod. In February 1943, an arson attack destroyed the Orient’s printing-house, the Lichtheim Press, in Haifa.

  On September 10, 1952, after highly charged negotiations, Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett signed an agreement with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on reparations between Israel and West Germany. The reparations enabled the newly born state to finance major infrastructure projects, such as the National Water Carrier. Although the Israeli economy was in dire straits and its citizens subject to strict austerity measures and rationing, many Israelis, led by future prime minister Menachem Begin, fiercely opposed accepting German “blood money.”

  Even those who accepted reparations refused to countenance normalization of cultural ties, and the Israeli government imposed severe restrictions on cultural, literary, and educational ties with Germany. German-language film
s were banned by the Israeli “board for film and theater review” (a committee of censors abolished only in 1989, when Germany and Israel concluded a protocol on cultural relations). Israel’s Minister of the Interior announced in a speech at the Knesset on July 16, 1958:

  It is the Board’s opinion that any performance in the German language is offensive to the feelings of the Israeli public who cannot forget the fact that this is the language of the nation that, only recently, barbarically annihilated a third of the Jewish people.

  In 1965, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol established diplomatic relations and arranged for the exchange of ambassadors. Even then, pockets of resistance persisted. Some kibbutzim banned the use of the German language. When German author Günter Grass visited Israel in March 1967 and in November 1971, for example, his public appearances were disrupted by protests. According to Avi Primor, Israel’s former ambassador to Berlin, “the Israeli protesters were not targeting Grass personally and their anger had nothing at all to do with his literature. It was the German effort to establish cultural relations with Israel to which they objected.”

  For some Israelis, it was still too soon. “My mother tongue, as stated, was German,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld wrote in 1997, “the language of my mother’s murderers. How do people once again speak the language drenched in Jews’ blood?”

  In 1964, Gershom Scholem of the Hebrew University was invited to contribute a piece on “German-Jewish dialogue” for a Festschrift in honor of the poet and essayist Margarete Susman’s ninetieth birthday. His acerbic answer was telling:

  There is no question that Jews tried to enter into a dialogue with Germans, and from all possible perspectives and standpoints: now demanding, now pleading and imploring; now crawling on their hands and knees, now defiant; now with all possible compelling tones of dignity, now with a godforsaken lack of self-respect. . . . No one responded to this cry. . . . The boundless ecstasy of Jewish enthusiasm never earned a reply in any tone that could count as a productive response to Jews as Jews—that is, a tone that would have addressed what the Jews had to give and not only what they had to give up. To whom, then, did the Jews speak in this famous German-Jewish dialogue? They spoke only to themselves.