The composition of the library supports the Marbach archive’s position throughout the trial in Israel over the Brod estate: German literature—not the Jewish tradition—indisputably constituted Kafka’s cultural canon. If Judaism was for Kafka a foreign but acquired frame of reference, his natural home was in German literature. He revered the Lutheran writer of Alemannic folktales Johann Peter Hebel (Kafka called his “Unexpected Reunion” “the most wonderful story in the world”), Heinrich von Kleist (especially Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O), and the Viennese dramatist Franz Grillparzer (especially his diaries and The Poor Minstrel [Der arme Spielmann]). Among his contemporaries in the world of German letters, Kafka admired Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Walser, and Thomas Mann.
But above all he had esteemed the greatest classicist, Goethe. According to Marthe Robert, a member of the editorial board of the German critical edition of Kafka’s complete works, the young Kafka “sought the Promised Land in Weimar, and Goethe was his Bible.” In the summer of 1912, Kafka and Brod traveled to Weimar for six days to pay homage to the writer who had made his home there for more than half a century. “To hear Kafka talk about Goethe with awe was something quite out of the ordinary,” Brod remembers. “It was like hearing a little child talk about an ancestor who lived in happier, purer days and was in direct contact with the Divine.”
At the same time, Kafka was not above mocking the German national sanctification of Goethe. His friend Oskar Pollak’s pilgrimage in 1902 to the Goethe National Museum elicited a letter from Kafka in which the word “national” is described as “the most delicate, miraculously delicate irony.” To Pollak’s mention of visiting Goethe’s study, the writer’s holy of holies, Kafka replies: “We cannot ever have the all-holiest of someone else, only our own.” There is nothing to possess of the great Goethe, Kafka says, except “the footsteps of his lonesome walks through the countryside.”
Kafka attended a German university, studied German jurisprudence, and steeped himself in German literature. More to the point, the austere music of Kafka’s art was inseparable from—and made possible by—the German language. In the movement and momentum of his perfectly weighted sentences, Kafka forged that necessity into a stainless and unstilted prose of spare precision, economy, and translucency, a merciless German that pares away superfluity and slack. (Even the barmaids and peasants in his fiction speak a flawless German, uninflected with dialect.) His beautifully calibrated language, Hannah Arendt remarked, was “the purest German prose of the century.” That language “is fire,” Brod said, “but it leaves no soot behind.”
Is Kafka possible only in German? Time and again, the Marbach archive’s lawyers intimated that Kafka is German because his language is German and his art could not be expressed in anything but the German language. They were neither the first nor the most eloquent advocates of this view. “His language was German,” Cynthia Ozick writes, “and that, possibly, is the point. That Kafka breathed and thought and aspired and suffered in German—in Prague, a German-hating city—may be the ultimate exegesis of everything he wrote.” “When he crucially, even triumphantly, announced, ‘I am made of literature and nothing else,’ ” Ozick adds, “it could only mean that it was German idiom and essence, German root and rootedness, that had formed and possessed him.”
Whether he possessed it is altogether another matter. In a letter to Brod, Kafka depicts the prose of Jews writing in German as “a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope.” Kafka’s mastery of German is inseparable from his fear of falling from that impossible tightrope.
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Why did the German Literature Archive persevere through eight years of legal wrangling for the chance to acquire Kafka’s literary remains? Did it involve the ways Kafka figured into Germany’s overcoming of its repressed past?
Kafka recognized “the pride which a nation gains from a literature of its own.” A national literary archive, whether in Marbach or Jerusalem or anywhere else, is neither a neutral repository nor an arbitrary accumulation; it is a shrine to national memory and to the continuity of that memory. Like a church consecrated by its relics, or a temple by its Holy Ark, the archive as reliquary participates in the effort of a nation to distinguish itself from other nations. The archive is a tabernacle that derives its legitimacy by what it preserves. If we whisper in libraries and archives as we whisper in churches, this is why.
If the archive is where the writer is translated into a saint, it is also where the private coalesces into the public, where inanimate literary remains are invested with collective symbolic significance. (And like any other material thing, a literary relic may be possessed by one person or group to the exclusion of another.) No matter how self-effacing, its curators serve not merely as guardians and conservators, but as privileged interpreters who include and exclude, give the stamp of authenticity, and authorize veneration. They decide what material to archive, how to order it, and who may access it. The word “archive” itself points in this direction: it derives from the Greek arkhe, literally “beginning, origin, first place.” Control of the archive is a form of power.
This is especially true of Germany, where until 1871, when Bismarck’s Prussia consolidated the various smaller states, there was no people that could claim the title “Deutsche.” There were only Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, Prussians, East-Franks, and so forth. According to a well-known quip, there is no German identity other than the search for an identity. Despite political divisions, the German people, it is often said, found itself in its literature. In this nation of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers)—a nation preoccupied with the unanswerable question of what it means to be German—affirming national identity vitally involved turning toward German literature. (To be sure, as Heinrich Mann remarked in 1910, Germans are perfectly capable of revering their writers as keepers of the national conscience without necessarily absorbing their ideas.)
Language and literature acted not just as a vehicle of communication but as a crucible of national cohesion in which a “German” identity was forged and membership in the imagined community called Germany was determined. German literature long preceded the unified German state (just as Jewish literature long predated the Jewish state). In Germany (as later in Israel), the founding documents are not those that announce the birth of the state (e.g., the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the United States), but texts that long precede the birth of the state.* The masters of German prose and poetry—Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Heine—predate the establishment of modern Germany in 1870.
In January 1889, German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey issued a far-reaching call for the state to establish and support German literary archives in order “to foster our national awareness.” The time was ripe. Later that year, Schiller’s estate was incorporated into the Goethe Archive that had been founded four years earlier. Ever since, to a degree unthinkable elsewhere, literature has played—and continues to play—a consolidating role in helping Germans come to terms with their Volksgeist.
Precisely for this reason, the Third Reich both commandeered German-language literature and called it into question. The fall of the Third Reich, in turn, ushered in more than just a political crisis; it demanded a reassessment of the interactions of Geist and Macht, of literature and power-politics. After the war, in the shadows of the ruins, some German writers sensed that German literature had lost its way and had to be reset. (The German language, the poet Paul Celan said after surviving the war, “had to pass through its own answerlessness.”) After what became known in West Germany as the Stunde Null, or “zero hour,” they felt the need to begin anew. In a conversation at their home in Berlin, the literary scholars Sigrid Weigel and her husband Klaus Briegleb told me that the loose-knit circle of German writers known as Gruppe 47, prominent leftist apostles of the so-called Nachkriegsliteratur (pos
twar literature), called for a radical new beginning, a Traditionsbruch (rupture with tradition). They refused to continue to write as if nothing had happened, as if the horrors had been exaggerated by anti-German propagandists; instead, they looked to literature to help them face the traumas their country inflicted.
Between 1947 and 1967, the most prominent writers of the Federal Republic—Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Martin Walser—fixated on a past that would not pass away. Grass declared that the struggle to overcome the repressed past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) was the ultimate aim not only of his own writing but of German literature as such.
It was into this milieu that the Marbach literature archive came into being in 1955 on the outskirts of Marbach (population fifteen thousand), the birthplace of the German poet Friedrich Schiller. (On June 21, 1934, for the poet’s 175th birthday, some fifteen thousand Hitler Youth, looking to Schiller as a standard-bearer of National Socialism and the “eternal German spirit,” marched through Marbach.) The archive is nestled in a grove of plane trees on a hillock overlooking the Neckar River. Behind the archive, a block of thirty apartments, called the Collegium House, offers accommodation to researchers. The archive itself stands adjacent to the domed Schiller Museum—opened in 1903 and expanded into its present dimensions in 1934—which houses the poet’s relics: his death mask, vest, gloves, and socks. Across the lawn, the Museum of Modern Literature (Literaturmuseum der Moderne, known as LiMo), beckons visitors into environmentally controlled exhibition galleries, illuminated by subdued artificial light, where material from the archives’ collections is displayed. The permanent exhibition—organized by year rather than by writer or theme—includes Kafka’s high school matriculation certificate (1901); the original manuscripts of The Trial (1914–15) and his unfinished story, “The Village Schoolmaster” (1915); a letter to Max Brod (1917); three letters (1920) and a postcard (1923) to Milena Jesenská; and even one of his spoons. Here the old veneration of writers like Schiller and Goethe was translated into the present, grafted onto modernist writers like Kafka.
And it is here that Kafka’s past came to impinge on Germany’s present.
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In June 2017, I sat down with the director of the Marbach archive, Ulrich Raulff. Before his appointment, Raulff served as editor of the culture pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and as managing editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He also coedited a volume on “Heidegger and Literature,” and published an award-winning book on Stefan George, the German poet to whom some National Socialists looked as an important influence. When Raulff came to Marbach in November 2004, he brought with him ambitions to raise the archive’s public profile. (He is set to be replaced as director in January 2019 by Sandra Richter, currently head of the department of modern German literature at the University of Stuttgart.)
Raulff began our conversation with a smile that was also a glower, “So,” he said, “is there anything I can do against you?”
From the outset of the legal proceedings in Israel, he said, he had wished to maintain “clear neutrality,” and instructed his attorney, Sa’ar Plinner, to act as an observer merely. Raulff presented himself as a man thrust against his will into the spotlight; as though despite his best intentions, he had been unwittingly drawn into controversy.
By 2010, the policy of neutrality had run aground; Raulff became worried about the bad press the archive was getting, first in Israel and then internationally. He claimed the controversy took him by surprise. “Perhaps Israeli sensibilities had changed,” he said, “and there was a new heightened awareness in Israel of the country’s cultural heritage.”
That year, Raulff came to Israel to meet with both Eva Hoffe and representatives of the National Library. To placate the Israelis, he proposed co-ownership of the Brod estate along the lines of the partnership the archive in Marbach would set up with the Bodleian Library in Oxford with regard to the hundred letters and postcards Kafka sent to his favorite sister Ottla between September 1909 and January 1924. (The two institutions had jointly bought the letters for an undisclosed fee in April 2011.) There were already several joint cataloguing projects between the Marbach archive and the National Library in Jerusalem, too.* But Raulff’s malleability was not reciprocated, and the attempted compromise failed.
Not long after, Raulff told me, the trial had brought him another unpleasant surprise. He had been on the verge of getting a generous grant for the archive from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in Germany. Between 2001 and 2008, a 169,000-euro grant from the Krupp Foundation had made it possible for the Marbach archive to photograph and digitize its entire collection of Kafka manuscripts. Against the backdrop of the Kafka trial, however, the new funding had run aground because of the foundation’s complicated past. During the Second World War, its founder, the industrialist and arms manufacturer Alfried Krupp, had used concentration-camp prisoners supplied by the SS to work under brutal conditions in his factories. In 1948, he had been convicted of crimes against humanity by a U.S. military court in Nuremberg. Without warning, Raulff said, the Krupp Foundation had suddenly pulled the new grant, citing the need to shield its name and reputation from even indirect suggestions that it supported seizing cultural heritage from Israel.
By 2012, Raulff said, he regretted getting involved in the first place, and instructed Plinner to drop the case. He valued long-term partnership and good working relations with the National Library of Israel over short-term gain, and preferred “the logic of research” over “the logic of acquisition.” His interests, if any, rose above national boundaries. Why then did Plinner address the Supreme Court in 2016 in the name of the Marbach archive?, I asked. Had Plinner consulted him, Raulff said, “I would have told him not to appear in the Supreme Court.”
I sensed a deep ambivalence: on the one hand, as one of the central bankers of the literary republic, adept in assessing the value of literary capital and prestige and in understanding how the “culture industry” congeals literature into commodity, Raulff wanted to seize a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the archive. (Goethe once spoke of a “world market of intellectual goods.”) Both the German and Israeli will to appropriate, whether lofty or low, attempted to convert Kafka’s works into usable goods.
On the other, he could not risk the appearance of “seizing” cultural heritage from the Jewish state. “Had Eva won and turned to us,” Raulff said, “it would have been a catastrophe for us.” I asked what he would have done had Eva offered to sell Brod’s estate to Marbach. “I would have had sleepless nights,” Raulff replied.
Throughout the conversation, he seemed persuaded that only the Israelis had interests, that the Marbach archive acted in this case as an unobjectionably disinterested, neutral, even passive observer; he spoke as if Germany represented the true home of the human spirit. This reflects a position of strength, of a majority culture: only those who have fulfilled their interests can speak in a “disinterested” way, and only those who have accumulated literary capital can allow themselves the luxury of persuading themselves of the pure timeless universality of literature. (A German only has an explicit interest, a colleague quipped, when an Israeli compels him to put it on paper.) It is possible to want something and at the same time not to admit to oneself that one wants it. But the fact is that it would have been highly unusual, to say the least, for Plinner to appear, file briefs, and argue in the Supreme Court without Raulff’s knowledge and authorization.
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Did the German state itself wish to appear to be free of interests? If politics, especially cultural politics, is a form of aesthetics, to appear disinterested is a matter of good taste. The postwar German uneasiness with avowed interests may correspond to an ambivalence toward the uses and abuses of sovereign power and the state’s latent violence. Postwar Germany is famously reluctant to admit to being a state, like other states, that pursues its national interests, as if an unsheathed expression of national interest today might portend the st
accato of marching jack-boots tomorrow.
The German party to the legal dispute in Israel wished to appear as honest brokers acting not in the name of Germany but of literature per se, as though it represented European universalism against Israeli particularism, or the eternal light in which other cultures are refracted. In a 2011 documentary film about the trial called “Kafka’s Last Story” (directed by Sagi Bornstein), Ulrich Raulff addressed the question of Kafka’s belonging: “He is nowhere at home—thus everywhere.”
Needless to say, Marbach is not “everywhere.” It is in a Germany that in its postwar reckoning, in its “coming to terms with the past” (or Vergangenheitsbewältigung), was anxious to overcome the old canard that Jews could not authentically master German, even if they wrote it flawlessly; that they were poachers, or at most tolerated guests, on the fertile lands of German prose; that the German idiom used by Jews was an appropriation of someone else’s property. In this view, the Jewish writer, essentially uncreative, could only ape the language of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe. (Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” published in Martin Buber’s monthly Der Jude, features a speaking ape.*) In his notorious essay “Judaism in Music” (“Das Judentum in der Musik,” 1850), the German composer Richard Wagner writes: “The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien. . . . In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only imitate and mimic.” The German historian Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), in his 1896 book The Emergence of Judaism (Die Entstehung des Judentums) contrasts Aryan creativity to the Semites’ derivative nature. Jews were said to be set apart because they spoke another language (Hebrew, Yiddish) or spoke German with a “Jewish” accent. However much they mastered mimicry, the purities of German speech and spirit receded beyond their grasp.
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