Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  * For the present purposes, three examples will suffice: (1) The German critic Günther Anders writes that in “The Giant Mole,” Kafka “analyzes the relation between the cultured Jew, the Bildungsjude whose affiliation to Judaism has become questionable, and the Orthodox Jew.” (2) Benjamin Harshav called “Investigations of a Dog” “a cleverly veiled allegory of the Jewish condition” in which Kafka’s canine character considers the diminishing power of language as it passes through generations; he laments the loss of the “true word.” (3) Kafka represents “history’s menace to the Jew,” Clement Greenberg argues, “in the unknown enemies of the animal hero of ‘The Burrow’; in the cats (presumably) that prey on Josephine’s mice nation.”

  * On the invitation to Kafka’s bar mitzvah, celebrated in 1896 at Prague’s Zigeunersynagoge, his parents had called it a “confirmation.” Fifteen years later, on the eve of Yom Kippur, 1911, Kafka went to synagogue with his father and noticed the family of the owner of the Salon Suha brothel in the pews nearby. Kafka had visited the brothel two days earlier.

  * In sensing the thinness of the inherited tradition, Kafka was typical of his generation. Kafka’s friend Robert Weltsch, writing in 1917, two years before Kafka wrote the letter to his father, claimed that “Jewish Prague lives on within us, although the Jewish community is no longer ‘alive,’ has dissolved, and fallen into lethargy.”

  * Löwy was also a great admirer of Max Brod, “the first to encourage me to appear in public with excerpts, songs, and scenes from Yiddish literature,” he said in 1934.

  † In describing Gregor Samsa as a vermin, several translators of “The Metamorphosis” into English (including David Wyllie, Joachim Neugroschel, and Stanley Corngold) retain the literal meaning of the German word Ungeziefer. Corngold notes that in Middle High German, Ungeziefer referred to an “unclean animal not suited for sacrifice.” According to Sigrid Weigel, “it is a word without clear imagery; it is collective and can denote any verminlike pests, not necessarily a roach or beetle as it is often translated.”

  * Consider the case of Bruno Schulz, a Jewish-Polish writer and artist with no inclination toward Zionism (and the translator, with Józefina Szelińska, of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish). In 1942, just before he was shot to death in the street by an SS officer, Schulz painted several fanciful frescoes in the children’s room of a house in his village of Drohobycz (then in Poland, today in western Ukraine). The town’s Jewish community of about fifteen thousand was reduced to four hundred by the end of the war. Schulz’s murals were left to decay and presumed lost for good. In February 2001, a German documentary filmmaker named Benjamin Geissler traveled to Drohobycz with his father, Christian, and rediscovered the frescoes. Shortly thereafter, a Polish-Ukrainian commission led by Wojciech Chmurzyński began to restore them. In a clandestine operation in June 2001, however, an Israeli team removed the paintings from the walls and hauled them to Yad Vashem, which asserted “a moral right” to the works. Polish authorities, offended by the implication that Poles are not worthy stewards of Polish-Jewish heritage, charged the Israelis with harming both reconciliation efforts and the artworks themselves. (Most of Schulz’s extant letters and drawings are kept in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature and the Museum of the Jewish Historical Institute, both in Warsaw.) In response, the Holocaust museum warned Poland of the wider consequences of demanding them back. “Yad Vashem is of the opinion that if Poland feels that they have an interest in assets that they see as their own, a discussion can be initiated regarding assets—cultural and other—which are part of the Jewish legacy in general and the Holocaust-era in particular, and are spread throughout Poland.” See the dueling open letters published in The New York Review of Books: “Bruno Schulz’s Frescoes” (November 29, 2001), and “Bruno Schulz’s Wall Paintings” (May 23, 2002).

  * These came from France (157,000 volumes), the Soviet Union (64,000 volumes), the Netherlands (90,000 volumes), Belgium (1,124 crates), and other occupied countries. In 1947, Simon Wiesenthal visited Tanzenberg together with three rabbis. “Suddenly I heard a thump behind me. One of the rabbis lay on the floor sobbing. He had a prayer book in his hand and said: ‘Look, that’s a prayer book from my house. Here is a message from my sister: Whoever comes across this prayer book, please turn it over to my beloved brother Rabbi Hoschut Seitmann. The murderers are in our community. They are in the house next door. In a few minutes they’ll be here. Please, don’t forget us and don’t forget our murderers.’ ” See Evelyn Adunka, Der Raub der Bücher: Plünderung in der NS-Zeit und Restitution nach  (Czernin Verlag, 2002).

  * In the far reaches of northeast Tel Aviv, there is a narrow Max Brod Street, lined by unprepossessing modern apartment buildings. Esther Hoffe was a guest of honor at the street’s dedication ceremony in 1999.

  * Harold Bloom calls the Muir translations, heavily influenced by Brod, “an almost perfect English equivalent.” By 1946, a volume of Kafka criticism appeared in English (edited by Angel Flores and published by New Directions), featuring forty essays by writers including W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, and, needless to say, Max Brod.

  † “The Metamorphosis” in 1928 and The Trial appeared in French in 1933 (both translated by Alexandre Vialette), for example, and “The Judgment” in 1930 (in the translation of Pierre Klossowski and Pierre Leyris). The Trial appeared in Italian in 1933 (in the translation of Alberto Spaini, and again, decades later, in the translation of Primo Levi), in Polish in 1936 (translated by Bruno Schulz), and in Japanese in 1940 (translated by Koichi Motono). The 1940s saw the first translations of Kafka’s stories into Romanian (by Paul Celan) and Persian (by Sadeq Hedeyat).

  ‡ Schocken commissioned Yitzhak Schenhar (Schönberg) to translate Amerika (Der Verschollene) in 1945. This was followed in 1951 by The Trial, translated by Yeshurun Keshet ( Jakob Kopelevitz). (Scholem thought the translation so shoddy that he urged Schocken not to publish it.) Not until 1967 did The Castle appear in the translation of Shimon Sandbank. Kafka’s diaries, translated by Haim Isak, did not appear until 1978–79. As the Hebrew language changed, it became necessary to update Hebrew versions of the earlier translations. This task was given to Abraham Carmel (Kreppel), whose translations of Kafka were published during the 1990s. Finally, in the later 1990s, Ilana Hammerman launched a series of new Kafka translations at the Am Oved publishing house. In 2014, her son Jonathan Nierad retranslated Kafka’s Letters to Milena (Briefe an Milena, published in German in 1952). (They were first translated into Hebrew by Edna Kornfeld in 1976.)

  * In Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 movie Kafka, the stonemason and sculptor Bizzlebek, a stand-in for Brod, directs Kafka into a tunnel that begins beneath a gravestone. Half in the grave, Kafka turns to Bizzlebek and asks for a favor. “If I don’t see you later, go to my house and find my notebooks and destroy them. All my manuscripts, just burn them. Please.” “What an extraordinary request,” Bizzlebek replies. “It’s my last and final one.” “Then its authority is in doubt,” Bizzlebek says. “A true friend would do it,” Kafka insists. “Not necessarily,” Bizzlebek says. “A wife would.”

  * The Czech-born writer Milan Kundera dismissed “this simpleminded novel, this garbage, this cartoon-novel concoction, which, aesthetically, stands at exactly the opposite pole from Kafka’s art.”

  * The French anarchist writer André Breton spoke about this text at a lecture in Paris in 1948.

  † According to Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last lover, “German is too modern a language, too much of the present day. Kafka’s whole world longs for an older language. It was an ancient consciousness in him, ancient things and ancient fear.” Quoted in J. P. Hodin, “Memories of Franz Kafka,” Horizon, January 1948.

  * Friedrich Torberg called the novel “one of the outstanding Jewish novels of our time.” The real-life David Ha-Reubeni, claiming to represent an Arabian principality whose citizens descended from the biblical tribes of Reuben and Gad, met with Pope Clement VII in the 1520s. A decade later he was charged with heresy by the Inq
uisition and burned at the stake in Spain. Although Reubeni’s origins are unknown, Brod imagines him as growing up in a Prague Jewish community facing expulsion. Brod has his “prince of the Jews” muse about power: “Perhaps those nations are so powerful and beloved of God . . . because they serve God—with their evil instincts also.” When the fictional Reubeni is condemned to the flames, Brod’s narrator echoes Kafka’s The Trial: “The accused were told neither the nature of their indictment nor the names of their denouncers.”

  * In a 2010 letter to the New York Times, Zvi Henri Szubin, professor emeritus at the City College of New York, reported an instance of such manipulation:

  In 1957, when I accompanied my mother on her visit to Brod’s basement office at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, Brod said that in the process of deciding which of Kafka’s papers to save, he, “like a surgeon on the battlefield, did not have the luxury of being sentimental.” My mother, who up to that day viewed Brod, her beloved teacher and mentor, as “the most ethical person in the world” was astounded and accused him of deliberately destroying Kafka’s continuing correspondence with her best friend, Regina. Accordingly, I am convinced that Brod calculatedly safeguarded Kafka’s reputation and legacy in the image of his own creation.

  * In 1935, Schocken Verlag could still publish (as part of its Bücherei series) a book by the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (in his biography of Kafka, Brod counts Stifter as among Kafka’s favorite writers). Because Stifter was not a Jew, however, the book had soon thereafter to be withdrawn.

  * Just after the end of the Second World War, and with his usual confident élan, Salman Schocken established Schocken Books in New York. Joining bibliophilia to business acumen, he intended to create a library of uniformly produced essential books on Judaism. After a rocky start—Hannah Arendt called him “Bismarck personified,” and Gershom Scholem wrote that Schocken was “a broken and miserable human being who has managed to antagonize everyone in America”—Schocken put Kafka at the center of his newly founded press. One of his first initiatives, in fact, was the English edition of Kafka’s Diaries, based on Max Brod’s typescript, which had not yet appeared in the original German. In 1946, Schocken Books reissued the existing Muir translations of Kafka’s novels, helping to inaugurate a postwar Kafka craze in the United States. In 1951, Salman Schocken would in turn sell the German rights to Kafka’s work to Gottfried Fischer, owner of the esteemed S. Fischer Verlag, which the Nazis had shut down during the war. “Kafka put our newly reestablished publishing house squarely into the public eye,” Fischer said. More recently, S. Fischer Verlag has published Reiner Stach’s definitive three-volume biography of Kafka: Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (2002); Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (2008); and Kafka: Die frühen Jahre (2014).

  * The private papers and diaries of R. J. Stopford, kept at the Imperial War Museum, London (catalogue number 12652), shed light on his heroic work on behalf of refugees from Czechoslovakia.

  * A dozen years later, Brod would write a book about his classmate Victor Mathias Freud, a Zionist, early member of the Bar Kochba group, and much-loved schoolteacher (Beinahe ein Vorzugsschüler, Almost an Exemplary Student, 1952). Denied a British immigration visa to Palestine, Freud was deported from Prague to Terezín in July 1943 and thence to Auschwitz in October 1944. He too believed he was protected by sacred texts. His last words before boarding the deportation train: “Nothing much can happen to me. I have the Bible and Goethe’s poems in my pocket.”

  * Czech president Tomáš Masaryk had visited Beit Alfa the previous April—the first visit of a head of state to British Mandatory Palestine.

  * In August 1969, Marianna Steiner also deposited with the Bodleian the manuscript of “The Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung) and the next year a box containing Kafka’s letters, which had been in the possession of her cousins in Prague. Another Kafka niece, Gerti Kaufman, the daughter of Kafka’s sister Elli, bequeathed her share to the Bodleian Library in 1972. In 1989, Miriam Schocken, a grand-daughter of Salman Schocken, gave the Bodleian a further batch of Kafka’s papers. The critical editions of Kafka’s works, published by S. Fischer Verlag, are based on the manuscripts in Oxford. Marianna Steiner bequeathed her share of the manuscripts to the Bodleian Library on her death in 2000. Under the editorship of Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle, Stroemfeld Verlag published facsimiles of the Bodleian Kafka manuscripts.

  * See, for example, Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks addressed to then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on October 5, 1995: “You said the Bible is not our land registry. I say: The Bible is our registry, our mandate, our proof of ownership. . . . This is the very foundation of Zionist existence.”

  * These joint projects, supported by the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), include the papers of leading Orientalist S. D. Goitein, a pioneering researcher of the “Cairo Geniza”; Josef Horovitz, founder and first head of the School of Oriental Studies; Curt Wormann, director of the Jewish National and University Library; Netti Boleslav, a German-language writer in British Mandate Palestine and Israel; and Jewish-German orientalist Martin Plessner, a professor in the Department of Islamic Culture at the Hebrew University. Each of these collections is housed at the National Library in Jerusalem.

  * At one point in “A Report to an Academy,” Kafka has his ape look out at a man looking in at him: “He could not understand me, he wanted to solve the enigma of my being.” Max Brod called this story (published in Der Jude, November 1917), “the most brilliant satire of assimilation which has ever been written.” The translator Peter Wortsman calls the story “an allusion to the attempts of assimilated Jews to imitate Aryan ways, so as to pass in a hostile and often perilous society.” We know that Kafka read a pamphlet by the Russian Zionist Max Mandelstamm, which remarked on the similarity between an assimilated Jew, with his “capacity for mimicry,” and an ape.

  * In his short history of German literature, Heinz Schlaffler of the University of Stuttgart remarks on the disproportionate numbers of twentieth-century German writers who were Jews. “If one grasps ‘German’ not as an ethnic species but as a cultural mindset, then the emancipated Jews can be considered the more serious Germans. With their expulsion and extermination, German literature logically forfeited its standing and lost its character.” See Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, Hanser, 2002.

  * As I was researching this book, I was occasionally asked why the Czechs chose not to apply to join the legal proceedings in Israel and made no claims on the manuscripts Brod had rescued from Prague. Czech, after all, was the first language into which Kafka’s works were translated: “The Stoker” (the first chapter of Amerika) in 1920; The Trial in 1923 (seven years before its French publication); and The Castle in 1935. The world’s first dissertation written on Kafka (“The Feeling of Loneliness and Communion in Franz Kafka,” by Mathilda Slodka) was written in Czech and submitted to Charles University in Prague in 1939.

  After the Second World War, Communist authorities in Prague banned Kafka’s books in his own city. “A regime that is built on deception,” the Prague writer Ivan Klíma later said, “that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his actions, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.”

  As a result, Kafka was little known in his native country until 1963, the year Marxist intellectuals from across the Eastern bloc convened a heated two-day conference in the Liblice Castle near Prague to mark what would have been the author’s eightieth birthday. (Max Brod had to decline an invitation to attend for reasons of ill health, but he did come from Israel the next year to open a Kafka exhibition in the Prague Museum of Czech Literature, and once more in 1966 to present his book, The Prague Circle.) The symposium aimed to rehabilitate Kafka’s reputation in the Soviet bloc and bring the author out of the shadows to which he
had been consigned. Austrian Communist Ernst Fischer told the participants: “Let us get Kafka’s works back from their involuntary exile! Let us grant him a permanent visa!”

  Some regarded the conference as a catalyst for the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968. Gustáv Husák, Czechoslovakia’s leader from 1969 to 1989, is reported to have said that the Prague Spring “began with Kafka, and it ended with counterrevolution.”

  “In 1968,” Milan Kundera writes, “the Russians occupied my country to crush the so-called counter-revolution. Their official statements declared that the first sign of the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia had been the rehabilitation of Kafka! Their argument may seem absurd, but it is less stupid than telling: Kafka’s work had long ago come to stand for the principal values that Czech intellectuals defended against totalitarian idiocy.” The West German writer Heinrich Böll witnessed a remarkable scene as Soviet tanks rolled in to suppress the Prague Spring in August 1968. “A tank stood in front of Kafka’s birthplace, its cannon aimed at the bust of the author,” he wrote.

  The months and years after gave ample examples of the fury the Liblice conference had aroused in the Communist regime. In September 1968, the official newspaper of the ruling party in the GDR indicted the conference as “an important milestone in the growth of the influence of revisionist and bourgeois ideology.” In 1970, a booklet called Beware Zionism was published in Czechoslovakia. It included a long essay by Yevgeni Yevseev (a pen name of Svatopluk Dolejs), editor of the anti-Semitic Prague weekly Arijsky Boj (The Aryan Fight) between 1941–44, and later a member of the secret police. Intertwining anti-Zionist and anti-modernist polemics, Yevseev called Kafka’s writing “decadent” and substandard,” and the conference “a carefully premeditated political operation of a subversive character.” Finally, in 1972, a Czech Communist literary critic named František J. Kolár wrote in a Czech magazine: