Literature: 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death: pedaling to America

The employee K., blameless, as demure as he is ambitious, is arrested one morning for no reason. He disappears forever in the spider’s web of an impenetrable judicial apparatus; it dissolves into a merciless motor logic, the consequence of which can only be execution. Franz Kafka’s “Trial” is one of the scariest texts about the madness of persecution that draws its cruel fantasies from the reality of paragraphs and dogmas, but above all from the fatal energy of human obedience genes.

More on the topic: A fixed point goes for a walk – column by Thomas Blum on the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death

Every perception in this novel becomes an exaggeration of an imagined reality that does not bode well. Anyone who writes something like that: How trapped is this person? This June marks the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death – Rüdiger Safranski has written a book about what drove and sustained this most enigmatic and clearest modern poet. What did Kafka have to do to feel like he existed? He only had to do one thing (as the book is titled): “Write for his life.”

A biographical search for traces is presented, which is rooted in the work and tells the contradiction: Kafka is obsessed with writing, it frees him more and more from the tormenting tolerability of everyday life, but at the same time, despite the beautiful rapture, he still lives this everyday life. He knows about the lure of the mundane and exotic world, from Palestine to South America, and last but not least, he fulfills the duties of an employee of the Prague insurance company excellently. Writing is a life against this world – without, of course, completely writing it off.

Safranski – as in his books about Nietzsche, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Heidegger and Hölderlin – knows his stuff, he is precise, he convinces once again with his knowledge. But fortunately he is not a possessive scientist or overview reviewer who distributes encyclopedically with his brain held high, i.e. who locks up time greats or entire epochs in the custody of interpretive diligence. This author spares us the well-known literary-critical liaison between accuracy and boredom, which knows nothing about the unleashing of moving souls because it always forces history and fate into the analytical yoke of structures and circumstances.

Safranski acts very cautiously, almost politely; he does not expose himself or descend into mystical, dark enthusiasms; He discovers a happy smile in Kafka’s shyness of the world, and he sees the aesthetic grandeur in Kafka’s self-accusations of not fitting into ordinary life. And there, in friendship or desire, are the companions: Grete, Julie, Dora, Milena. Women are Kafka’s suffering where only the desire to write creates a true rush; but they do spark a desire where even the beloved writing is only suffering and inhibition. Every pleasure is also torture, every happiness a harbinger of death. Felice Bauer – to her in particular he becomes a reader asking for judgment (“The Judgment”, “The Metamorphosis”), and the emotions rage in the stark change in temperature. Drive and loyalty and separation, and also this burdensome urge from the parents that Franz should finally start a family: Always ask the most unhappy person what love is.

Kafka’s life tells the novel of a double burden: how to do equal justice to the freedoms of fantasy and the demands of reality? And why this constant striving for equilibrium? Beautiful experience still in despair: Where the aesthetic, the antithetical to the world, is naively asserted and defended, there arises grace that gives the broken pieces on our paths a glitter.

Highest praise for literature: You don’t write (and you don’t read!) for pleasure, no, you dig for yourself. The hopeless Kafka universe suddenly becomes an encouragement. Because feelings of guilt, whether towards the beloved work or the beloved beings, “have something unleashing, not something paralyzing” in this delicate human being. Because anyone who feels guilt has reached the core of life. Don’t let anyone talk about the possible better world, carelessly or in a spirit of class struggle – the new thing of the time is this: the always old, fixed person. Guilt makes us aware of who we are, and only those who lose have experiences. Winners make the race, but no experience. To prove it, just look at the smoothness all around.

In the novel fragment “America,” for example, Kafka tells the odyssey of the sixteen-year-old German Karl Rossmann – rejected by his parents, put on a ship, landing in New York the way you land in real life: to kick, climb, slide. To struggle for a little money, to climb for a little recognition – in the end it’s all just to slip and slide. America is the ongoing parable: great crossing to sink on the all-too-solid land. You can dance to the music of your superfluity. But you don’t dance. You’re struggling.

Safranski describes this as sadly as it is strict: We are struggling. This doesn’t let up. Only the strength diminishes. Man’s main legacy is lack of strength. Every idea, no matter how new, for what we call society flourishes on the rubble of existence. Alienation is inevitable. You can do whatever you want in your life, but you will never do what you really wanted. Throw yourself comfortably into the community spirit, but you won’t eliminate loneliness that way. Kafka’s writing truth says: The judgment about the world cannot be grasped in mere images of reality; there must be something absurd, something inappropriate. Martin Walser spoke of Kafka’s “comical goodness” and of a conscience “tender to the point of madness” in his work.

Kafka’s confession: He has “no literary interest,” no, he consists “of literature.” That means: improving the real misery by increasing thoughts and feelings. An old soul household remedy. That we as readers also need very much, considering our unfounded existence. We are not saved by consolation, but perhaps by the ability to seek consolation. Especially with Kafka. Where the world is most desolate.

Rüdiger Safranski: »Kafka. Write about your life.” Hanser, 256 p., hardcover, €26.