Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  Although numerous German-speaking scholars, like Scholem, taught at Hebrew University from its founding in 1925, there was no German literature department there until 1973. The university offered no German-language classes between 1934 and 1954. (The Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University [later called the Minerva Institute], the first of its kind in Israel, was inaugurated in October 1971 with support of the Volkswagen Foundation.) The university’s first chair in German language and literature was founded in 1977, also with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. Only in 2001 did the University of Haifa establish the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society, financed by the Hamburg-based Zeit Foundation. Even today, were it not for German funding, Israel’s German departments, together with other humanities departments, would wither. The Martin Buber Fellowship in the Humanities, for example, founded in 2010 at the Hebrew University, is financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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  A second view holds that Kafka’s afterlife in Israel fell afoul not so much of a resistance to Germanness in particular as much as of an aversion to pre-state galut (Diaspora) culture in general. In her novel Forest Dark (2017), Nicole Krauss has her narrator put it this way: “Zionism is predicated on an end—of the Diaspora, of the past, of the Jewish problem—whereas literature resides in the sphere of the endless, and those who write have no hope of an end.”

  The Hebrew writer M. Z. Feierberg had a central character in his classic novella Whither cry out for just such an end: “Blow out the candle of the Galut—a new candle must be lit!” In 1938, the first anthology of the new prose of Palestine was published in Jerusalem. The introductory essay, by Joseph Klausner, professor of modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, captures something of the tone of the time: “Before us is a new Jew,” Klausner writes, “a man-Jew.”

  The typical Jewish cowardice has been terminated, the pallid color above the cheeks is gone, and the delicate palms of the hands are no longer. Excessive spirituality has passed from the world along with fear of dogs, of policemen, of the Gentile. The back has become straight and the bent-over body has grown erect.

  Austrian-born historian Judd Teller, reporting from Israel in 1953, wrote:

  To the sabra [native-born Israeli], the life of Jews a half century ago or more is alien. He has been told that it was a humiliating existence, and finds horrible confirmation of its “sordidness” in the older Hebrew writing. He refuses to identify his own literature with that created under such shocking conditions.

  Finally, perhaps Kafka exemplified to Israelis the political impotence and passivity—the pessimism that flows from a sense of one’s powerlessness—that Zionists so vehemently rejected. In his book Old Worlds, New Mirrors (2009), Israel Prize–winning scholar Moshe Idel writes: “In the years during which Kafka’s feeling of loneliness reached its peak in Prague and elsewhere, a new life was being shaped in the land of Israel.” Had Kafka written in Hebrew and lived on a kibbutz, Idel suggests, he would not have been among those bleak German-Jewish writers “for whom desolation was nothing but a mood.”

  In a diary entry of October 1921, Kafka said he inhabited “this borderland between loneliness and community,” a no-man’s-land marked by self-banishment and a refusal of roots. Many of Kafka’s fictions are tragedies of the defeated outcast, of characters condemned to be excluded or to exclude themselves.

  Kafka’s motifs—humiliation and powerlessness, anomie and alienation, debilitating guilt and self-condemnation—were the very preoccupations Israel’s founding generations sought to overcome. A new ethos found expression in the words of Hebrew poet David Shimoni (1891–1956): “Don’t mourn, don’t cry / at a time like this. / Don’t lower your head, / Work! Work!”

  “Kafka was on the side of the mice or the moles,” Israeli literary critic Dan Miron wrote in 2010, “and shared their instinctual flight to the hole or the burrow.” He who recoiled from power, who feared its reach, did not speak to those seeking power. A hypochondriac declared unfit for military service during the First World War “on account of weakness,” whose fictional characters (as in The Castle) “tremble at every knock at the door,” did not resonate with comrades in arms risking their lives to defend the Jewish state.

  In Kafka’s writing, inadequate, enfeebled sons submit to the judgment of their fathers. His story “The Judgment,” for instance, ends not with the killing of the father, à la Oedipus, but with the death of the son in meek submission to the verdict of the father. In the nascent state, self-reliant individualistic sons overthrew their ineffectual fathers, left behind exilic passivity and pessimism, and started afresh. As the Israeli writer Amos Oz puts it, they felt that the past belonged to them, but they did not belong to the past. Those busy making history could not be expected to be well disposed toward someone from the time and place in which other nations made history and the Jews were crushed under its wheels. Whether as a neurotic artist or an artist of the neurotic, the poet of non-arrival found scant audience among those who had at long last arrived and wished to make a clean start.

  The vanguard that had freed itself from the ghettos and inherited the Promised Land, in other words, did not look for inspiration to the disaffiliated pariahs desperate to blend into a society that excluded them—the “disinherited minds,” to use Erich Heller’s term, of the Diaspora. “Again and again,” writes the Prague-educated scholar Heller, “Kafka is tempted to side with the world against himself.” For this very reason, pioneers straining to cultivate a sense of at-homeness saw in Kafka the quintessential rootless, timorous Jew—haunted and homeless.

  Ironically enough, this attitude was prefigured in those talks Martin Buber had given in Prague in 1909–10, the very speeches which had so enthralled the young Max Brod. In his second talk, “The Meaning of Judaism” (“Der Sinn des Judentums”), Buber remarked that “this very intellectuality—out of touch with life, out of balance, inorganic, as it were—fed on the fact that, for millennia, we did not know a healthy, rooted life, determined by the rhythm of nature.” In his third talk, “Judaism and Mankind” (“Das Judentum und die Menschheit”), Buber called Jewish exile the “era of barren intellectuality.”

  The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, nine years younger than Kafka, once remarked that understanding Kafka begins with “the simple recognition that he was a failure.” Concerned with the practical demands of agriculture, urban planning, and social welfare, the first generation of Israelis had no ear for either the masochistic strains in Kafka’s imagination or his sensibility of failure. Kafka’s stories somehow didn’t befit the spirit of the Israeli Jew, to whom Joshua and King David seemed closer than Joseph K. or Gregor Samsa or the hunger artist.

  Israel wanted to rest on an act of discontinuity. (Brod’s novel, The Kingdom of Love, mentioned above, aptly captures this sentiment. Garta’s/Kafka’s brother insists that the Jews, “so sick with self-contempt, self-destruction, and self-corroding irony, must be given a new consciousness.”) “Like most kids who came to this country [Israel] as Holocaust survivors,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld said in an interview with Philip Roth, “I wanted to run away from my memories. What didn’t we do to change, to be tall, blond, and strong, to be goyim, with all the outer trappings.” The new country represented normalization; the Diaspora abnormality.

  Needless to say, there are different orders of prescience or clairvoyant conviction. Twelve years before Hitler came to power, Ilya Ehrenburg writes in his novel Julio Jurenito (1921):

  Solemn Performances of the Destruction of the Tribe of Judah will take place shortly . . . The program will include, apart from the traditional pogroms—a public favorite—a series of historical reconstructions in the spirit of the age, e.g. burning of Jews, burying some alive, sprinkling of fields with Jewish blood, as well as modern methods of “evacuation,” “removal of suspicious elements,” etc., etc.

  But Kafka’s premonitions were understood to be of a differe
nt and more essential kind. George Steiner, for instance, argues that The Trial “prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers.” Taking another example, Steiner asks us to consider “Kafka’s use of the word vermin in ‘The Metamorphosis’ of 1912 in precisely the sense and connotations that would be given to it by the Nazis a generation later. . . . From the literal nightmare of ‘The Metamorphosis’ came the knowledge that Ungeziefer (vermin) was to be the designation of millions of men.”

  For survivors like Appelfeld, Kafka’s vaunted prescience did not work in his favor. After the Shoah, the horrors of Kafka’s imagined penal colony and its torture machine sounded a quaintly obsolete tone in the ears of Israelis. Against the horrors, they pitted fact. Elie Wiesel asserted that “a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz.” For many first-generation Israelis, the true horrors could be registered in documentary, not fictional mode. It was as though art was inimical to atrocity; as though fiction, with its liberties and licenses, had been annihilated by fact, pushed back by a surge of traumatic memory. No imagination, not even Kafka’s, could hope to evoke what had been suffered. Many Israelis affirmed a new version of the Bible’s sublime injunction against graven images: the Shoah needed no representation outside of itself, it was incommensurate with the parables and symbols of literary imagination.

  True, Kafka’s language, with its characteristic oscillations between humor and horror, echoed faintly if unmistakably through some of the higher peaks of Israeli allegorical fiction. Its strains can be heard in the nightmarish stories in S. Y. Agnon’s Book of Deeds (Sefer Ha-Maasim, 1932), and in Aharon Appelfeld’s novels of displacement and disorientation. Above all, they can be caught in A. B. Yehoshua’s “Flood Tide” (1960), and in the early stories collected in Death of the Old Man (1963) and Facing the Forests (Mul Ha-Yearot, 1968), stories not anchored in a recognizable time or space. “I was shocked by my encounter with Kafka in the 1950s,” Yehoshua told me, “by the electricity of metaphysics in each line, especially in the aphorisms. Kafka was my first and most important influence. Of my literary generation here, I was perhaps the closest to him. He helped to liberate me from the social realism of the Israeli writers of the generation of 1948.” But neither as a reader of Kafka nor as a teacher of Kafka at the University of Haifa was Yehoshua tempted to reduce his work to a symbol of Jewish concerns. “I could absorb Kafka because I detached his writing from its Jewish and biographical context . . . I grouped him with Camus, Beckett, and Ionescu.” At the Sephardic synagogue in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, Yehoshua came to know Hugo Bergmann. Precisely because Yehoshua knew that Bergmann had known Kafka, Yehoshua hesitated to ask about “Kafka the man.” “It was as if I unconsciously wanted to distinguish Kafka’s writing from the Jewish man himself,” Yehoshua says.

  The exception that proves the rule is the most diasporic of Israel’s living writers. Aharon Appelfeld (b. 1932) began reading Kafka in the 1950s. “When I began to read Kafka,” Appelfeld told Michael Gluzman of Tel Aviv University, “I saw at once that his German was the German that I knew down to my fingertips.” “As a writer,” Appelfeld said to Philip Roth,

  he was close to me from my first contact. He spoke to me in my mother tongue, German, not the German of the Germans but the German of the Habsburg Empire, of Vienna, Prague and Chernovtsy, with its special tone, which, by the way, the Jews worked hard to create.

  To my surprise, he spoke to me not only in my mother tongue, but also in another language which I knew intimately, the language of the absurd. I knew what he was talking about. It wasn’t a secret language for me and I didn’t need any explications. I had come from the camps and the forests, from a world that embodied the absurd, and nothing in that world was foreign to me. . . .

  Behind the mask of placelessness and homelessness in his work, stood a Jewish man, like me, from a half-assimilated family, whose Jewish values had lost their content, and whose inner space was barren and haunted.

  The marvelous thing is that the barrenness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theatre, Hassidism, Zionism and even the idea of moving to Mandate Palestine. . . .

  The Fifties were years of search for me, and Kafka’s works illuminated the narrow path which I tried to blaze for myself.

  The task of digging a trench between the Diaspora and the Jewish state fell to the new country’s eminent writers, many of whom spurned Kafka’s influence and denied any affinities. S. Y. Agnon, for example—the greatest Hebrew novelist, and Israel’s only Nobel laureate in literature—was four years younger than Kafka. Agnon consistently refused to recognize Kafka’s paternity, despite obvious influences. (Gershom Scholem had suggested as early as 1928 that Agnon’s work represented a revision of The Trial . Gershon Shaked, a colleague of Scholem’s at Hebrew University and a founding father of Hebrew literary criticism, calls Kafka Agnon’s “Diaspora counterpart.”) Was this because Agnon saw Kafka as a diasporic writer? He didn’t say. “My wife, long may she live, has frequently offered to read me a tale by Kafka, but she did not succeed. After she had read but one or two pages, I turned my ear from it. Kafka is not from the root of my soul,” Agnon said in 1962, “and he who is not from the root of my soul I do not absorb, even if he is as great as the ten wise men who created the book of Psalms. . . . I know that Kafka is a great poet, but my soul is alien to him.”

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  To return to our question: Why, despite all this, did Israel’s National Library press so insistently for Kafka’s manuscripts?

  It cannot be explained as a by-product of a much-hyped generational shift in Israel. It is true that after decades of wariness, as the last of Israel’s Holocaust survivors began passing away, time-tempered post-Shoah taboos have loosened their grip and a newfound fascination with German culture has taken hold. It is true that drawn by the city’s affordable cosmopolitanism, Israeli expats in Berlin today run Hebrew-language kindergartens, a Hebrew literary magazine, Israeli restaurants in Prenzlauer Berg, and a Tel Aviv-style beach on the Spree. And it is true that German courses at the Goethe Institut in Tel Aviv continue to be oversubscribed. But none of this explains the National Library’s belated insistence on owning Kafka.

  In the end, perhaps no better answer can be found than Kafka’s remark in a letter to Milena Jesenská:

  The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever.

  Judith Butler of Berkeley suggests that another insecurity may be at play: Israel, a small and insecure country, wishes to recruit Kafka for its increasingly urgent fight against cultural delegitimation. “An asset,” she says, “is something that enhances Israel’s world reputation, which many would allow is in need of repair: the wager is that the world reputation of Kafka will become the world reputation of Israel.”

  In that case, the question is obvious: How can a literature of the helplessness of modern man, of his subjection to a world he neither governs nor understands, become an object of cultural prestige and national craving?

  Shimon Sandbank, one of Kafka’s leading translators into Hebrew, told me that he ascribes the National Library’s lawsuit to “patriotism that has nothing to do with literature as such.” And yet, Israel is hardly the only country anxious to secure the luster and prestige of writers.

  Do Israelis kindle to Kafka’s work largely because it is the work of a Jew? Do they thereby impoverish what is theirs by slighting its universal significance? Has the National Library blinkered itself to the possibility that greatest
victory would be to let the Germans have Kafka, a permanent reminder that the greatest German modernist was a Jew? Our possessions do not always serve us in the way we imagine. “Everything I possess is directed against me,” Kafka once confessed to Brod, “and what is directed against me is no longer in my possession.”

  Like many a Kafka story, this one remains unfinished and unfinishable (Kafka’s truth could be realized only in works given over to the fragmentary). But the trial makes clear that Jerusalem once more saw itself as the rightful heir and home to the cultural products of Diaspora; in the eyes of its courts and its National Library, at least, Israel saw itself as the ending of a story that began elsewhere.

  General sorting room of the Offenbach Archival Depot, Germany, 1946. (Yad Vashem)

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  Kafka’s Last Wish, Brod’s First Betrayal

  Kafka family apartment, Oppelt House, Old Town Square 12, Prague

  June 1924

  Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.