Everyone wants a piece of Kafka, who refused to be claimed

Benjamin Balint

In his novella “The Prague Orgy,” Philip Roth has a Czech writer say: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K.” Just as Franz Kafka’s prose both demands and evades interpretation, something about his legacy has both solicited and resisted claims of ownership.

Despite his astonishing clairvoyance about the impersonal cruelty of the bureaucratic state and the profound alienation of contemporary life, Kafka could not have foreseen how many admirers would read and misread his enigmatic fictions after his death, nor how many would-be heirs would seek to appropriate him as their own in the century since.

Competing claims began to swirl almost as soon as Kafka died of tuberculosis, 100 years ago this June, a month short of his 41st birthday. Max Brod — close friend, betrayer of Kafka’s last instruction to burn his manuscripts, heavy-handed editor of his diaries and unfinished novels, and author of the first Kafka biography — depicted him as a modern-day “saint” whose stories and parables “are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.”

Among other religious readers of the novels Brod published (“The Trial” in 1925, “The Castle” in 1926 and “Amerika” in 1927), Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin and Willa Muir, presented him as an allegorist of Christian grace. (In German, “Die Verwandlung,” the title of Kafka’s tale of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into an insect, also connotes “transfiguration.”)

As early as 1947, Edmund Wilson warned that all this deification threatened to “oversaturate and stupefy” Kafka’s readers. Still, the Kafka craze continued to swell. In the 1960s, existentialists interpreted Kafka as an angst-ridden precursor who stared into the abyss of absurdity and asked — as Josef K. does in the penultimate paragraph of “The Trial” — “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen?” Simone de Beauvoir said that Kafka “revealed to us our own problems, confronted by a world without God and where nonetheless our salvation was at stake.”

Psychoanalysts claimed the author of stories like “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist” as a neurotic herald of the uncanny or a self-tortured “poet of shame and guilt” (as the subtitle of Saul Friedlander’s biography has it). Modernists adopted Kafka not as a patient to be diagnosed but as the writer who most acutely perceived the bewildering breakdown of received ideas in our society. “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs,” W.H. Auden said, “Kafka is the first one would think of.”

Others pulled Kafka into this or that political cause, most bizarrely when he was fashioned into a weapon of the Cold War. In a speech in Moscow in 1962, Jean-Paul Sartre cautioned against the “militarization” of culture, likening Kafka to a “grenade in the library” or a cartload of dynamite shunted between East and West. “A true cultural competition,” Sartre said, “raises the following pacifist challenge: To whom, us or you, does Kafka belong; that is to say, who understands him best?”

Soviet critics enlisted Kafka as an ally of the dignified individual bravely clashing with the capitalist system, while anti-communist dissidents turned him into an adversary of the bureaucratic terror practiced by authoritarian regimes. In 1954, long before the writer’s name became a ubiquitous adjectival cliche, Arthur Koestler disparaged the Moscow show trials as “Kafka-esque.” Two years later, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, the Marxist literary critic Gyorgy Lukacs was arrested in Budapest, held in a Romanian castle and deprived of the right to know the charges, much less to rebut them. “So Kafka was a realist after all!” he declared.

A more recent chapter in the story of Kafka’s contentious afterlife involves those who attempted to connect a national “we” to his name. Beginning in 2007, a nine-year custody battle was waged in Israeli courts over the manuscripts by Kafka that Brod had narrowly rescued from the Nazi occupation of Prague. The case could be read as a commentary on a single question: Does this writer — a member of a Jewish minority within a German-speaking minority within a Czech minority within a heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire — belong to German literature or to the state that regards itself as the representative of Jews everywhere?

On one side was the National Library of Israel, which recruited Kafka as a Jewish writer, despite his ambivalence toward Zionism. Israel saw itself as the rightful home to the cultural products of diaspora, the appropriate ending place for a story begun elsewhere. On the other side, lawyers for the German Literature Archive in Marbach argued that Kafka’s manuscripts belonged in Germany because his language was German — “the purest German prose of the century,” Hannah Arendt said.

When I attended the Israeli Supreme Court hearing on the case in the summer of 2016, one thing seemed beyond doubt: Germany’s claim on a writer whose family was decimated in the Shoah had become entangled with the country’s attempt to overcome its shame. Perhaps some Germans hoped that the act of claiming Kafka — as a Jewish guardian of German prose, and as a Jew fortunate enough to die before he could fall victim to the Nazis — would serve that overcoming. Here lay a potent irony: The writer who raised self-condemnation to an art would be used as an instrument of self-exculpation, of effacing, rather than facing up to, the past. (The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library.)

The Palestinian undergraduates with whom I read Kafka were not preoccupied with questions of cultural ownership. When we read “The Trial” in a course I taught at a Bard College program in East Jerusalem, the students were riveted from the opening line: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

One student compared the book to Mustafa Khalifa’s “The Shell,” a novel (published here in 2023) based on the author’s 13-year imprisonment without trial in Syria. Another found in Josef K.’s futile pursuit of justice a new vocabulary with which to express her family’s decades-long legal efforts to stave off eviction from the home they had lived in since the early 1950s, a two-bedroom apartment in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Since the property had belonged to a Jewish charitable trust before Israel’s creation in 1948, the state argued that ownership should revert to the charity’s trustees.

Like the trial over Kafka’s manuscripts, the family’s appeals would eventually be heard by the Supreme Court. “In ‘The Trial,’” my student said, “you can never obtain an acquittal. So also with us: We can only hope to postpone the eviction, to postpone, to postpone, to postpone.” For these young readers, Kafka conjured a world not surreal but superreal.

It struck me then that the readers who come closest to the essence of Kafka’s singular vision are those who recognize the irony of taking a proprietary attitude toward a writer so faithful to his own non-belonging, and so careful to set his characters — antagonists against authorities divine, political and paternal — in no particular time or place. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka writes of his “infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things.” Despite his deep feeling for Yiddish theater and for the Hebrew language, that yearning unmoored him from any kind of collective belonging and untethered his imagination to sail beyond any national canon, “obedient,” in his words, “to its own laws of motion.”

We can only wonder whether the spectacle of a century’s warring over his artistic legacy would have amused this least possessive of writers. “Everything I possess is directed against me,” Kafka confessed to Brod, “and what is directed against me is no longer in my possession.”