When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature
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When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253353085 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/08/2009 |
| Series: | The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
When KafKa Says We
Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature
By Vivian Liska
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Vivian LiskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35308-5
CHAPTER 1
When Kafka says We
In his diary entry from 29 October 1921, Kafka writes of "this borderland between loneliness and community" (D, 396) in which he dwells. This territory was the only country Kafka ever truly inhabited. His stories, letters, and diary entries draw and redraw the contours of this land, revealing at its borders two extreme modes of being in the world: a condition of isolation and hermetic self-enclosure on the one hand and a state of total group cohesion on the other. Emblematic images of both are among the most poignant elements of Kafka's legacy: here is the one, "lonely like Franz Kafka," excluded, without protection, and at the remotest distance of human contact; there, in a vision more terrifying still, are the many locked into each other, identical and interchangeable, constituting opaque instances of impenetrable unity. The borderland between loneliness and communal life reveals Kafka's longings in both directions and his alternating flights from one to the other. In his life, he experiences this land as paralysis, emptiness, and living death. In his work, however, this region transforms into a language of force and movement that runs up against borders, confounding inside and outside, same and other, I and we. In Kafka's writing, the lifeless desert is not the area in between, but that which lies beyond both borders: the most radical forms of solitude and of community, autonomous separateness and homogeneous unison.
Undoubtedly, Kafka's yearning to belong and to gain the self-confidence that accompanies belonging drew him to the community of Jews, and his aversion to conformism kept him from adhering to it fully. Beyond this personal vacillation, one recognizes in Kafka's borderland a move away from the individualism of modernity, and more specifically of the assimilated Westjuden on the one hand, and from the seductions of communal ideologies on the other. Yet it is impossible to recuperate his work for any ideology, including Zionism, and also impossible to see his writing in terms of an omnipresent, politically conceived flight, what Deleuze and Guattari call a "deterritorialization" directed against fascism, Stalinism, and capitalism alike. Both views are simplifications that miss Kafka's specific insight into the attractions and dangers of closed and homogeneous collectivities. The lignes de fuite that Deleuze and Guattari detect everywhere in his work, these vanishing lines that prevent Kafka's writing from settling on firm ground, describe only one of its movements. The battles Kafka fought happened in confrontations at borders, where lines meet, touch, and hook into each other, where contrary forces wrestle with each other like the interlocked bodies of the adversary but interdependent neighbors he describes in one of his dreamlike diary entries (D, 272–73). If these battles ultimately do not deliver firm conclusions — one would hardly go to Kafka for that — they do sharpen the questions, and occasionally, through sheer pressure against the obstacles, they point, like Walter Benjamin's "Destructive Character," toward a way "where others encounter walls and mountains" (2002a, 542).
Just as there are many entrances to the burrow of Kafka's work — the opening remark of Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka book (1986, 3) — there are several ways of approaching the relationship between Kafka and the Jews. A first and unquestionably indispensable approach reconstructs Kafka's actual involvement with Jewish, particularly Zionist, movements of his time on the basis of historical and biographical evidence. The purpose of such a reconstruction, a more accurate understanding of Kafka as a person or as a paradigmatic example of a Western Jewish intellectual in central Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, is important and has inspired many outstanding accounts of Kafka's complex and oscillating interest in Judaism and Zionism. Ritchie Robertson's study (1985), especially his research into the historical discussion of the tension between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, society and community, in Kafka's time, is undoubtedly a prerequisite for a better understanding of the context of Kafka's writings about communal configurations. Similarly, Giuliano Baioni's (1994) tracing of the conflict between Kafka's self-castigating existence as the paradigmatic occidental Jew ("der westjüdischste aller Juden" [Kafka 1983, 294]), his attraction to a communal engagement, and his guilt-ridden indulgence in his solitary vocation as a writer illuminates the circumstances in which Kafka's reflections on collective identities came into being. More recently, Iris Bruce (2007) has reconstructed Kafka's involvement in the cultural Zionism of his day and has convincingly demonstrated the presence of corresponding themes and motifs in his literary works. However, efforts to go beyond these and other existing biographical studies about Kafka's actual relationship to Judaism and Zionism are forced into esoteric perspectives or limited to discoveries of marginalia.
The second approach consists of allegorical interpretations of his texts and their use as an inventory of analogies with structures in some way related to Judaism. Fragments of recognizable Judaica amid the gaping abstractions of Kafka's texts undoubtedly invite readings of the castle, the court, the imperial message, and the law as God, the Torah, or Jerusalem, of the stories' paraphernalia as kabalistic, Hassidic, or messianic icons, of their descriptions of various struggles as confrontations between God and his people, this people and its others, this people and itself, Ost- and Westjuden, assimilated Jews and Zionists, not to mention the different shades of Zionism. Impressive as many of these translations of Kafka's text into the different registers of Judaism are, the sheer number of possible alternatives leaves the search for the ultimate hermeneutic criteria open and questions of interpretative accuracy unanswered.
Replacing these approaches with an eye to the relevance of Kafka's relation to Jewish issues for an understanding of his attitude to collective identities in general is a third, maybe more compelling, though not necessarily less controversial perspective on the question. In reading his fiction, one has no verifiable way of identifying what the different groups and communities in Kafka's fictional texts might refer to, and any attempt to assign them specific correspondences in the real world reveals only the choices and concerns of the reader. Rather than trying to match the images of communities and collectivities in these texts to particular instances in reality, it may therefore be more promising to focus on the internal and external dynamics at work in Kafka's communal configurations as such. The situation is somewhat different with his non-fictional writing. His letters and diaries, unlike his literary work, do explicitly mention Jewish "realities," but any attempt to go beyond a reconstruction of the biographical development of his attraction to Jewish instances and movements will have to choose from the manifold, more or less explicit, and often contradictory statements Kafka made on the issue in the course of his life. Reducing these contradictions to changes of mind at different phases of Kafka's life may illuminate his individual development, but it barely addresses larger concerns. A different approach considers that it is precisely in those sometimes disturbing ambiguities and hesitations within his statements that the most valuable insights can be discovered. They are to be found in Kafka's personal writings as well as in his fiction wherever he reflects on the seductions and traps of collective ideals and communal forms of life. They may be most strikingly significant where Kafka, whose name became a byword for the ultimate experience of solitude, says "we."
A Diary Entry
The first of Kafka's diary entries mentioning Zionism, his critical review from 26 March 1911 of Max Brod's novel Jüdinnen, is written entirely from the perspective of a "we." In this review, Kafka voices three objections to the novel: in his view, the book lacks a solution to the Jewish question, a non-Jewish observer, and a young male leading figure. "In Western European stories," he writes in the first critique, "as soon as they even begin to include any groups of Jews, we are now almost used immediately to hunting for and finding under or over the plot the solution to the Jewish question too. In the Jüdinnen, however, no such solution is indicated [...]" (D, 45). "Offhand," he continues, "we recognize in this a fault in the story, and feel ourselves all the more entitled to such a criticism because today, since Zionism came into being, possibilities for a solution" are at hand (D, 46). This "we": is it a pluralis majestatis and nothing more? If we take this first criticism directed at Brod's novel as a straightforward expression of Kafka's conviction, he appears as an unequivocal defender of Zionist thought who expects literature to present answers serving the cause. Yet, the tone of the passage indicates that underneath these seemingly uncomplicated judgments, there is an internal dialogue taking place: the hesitant beginning, the awareness that the critical reading of the novel may be dictated by habit and established expectation, and mainly the word "offhand" ("kurz entschlossen") introducing Kafka's seeming criticism of the book's lack of a solution to the "Jewish problem" reveal a skepticism toward the rashness and self-righteousness with which Kafka imagines that a "we" with which he obviously does not wholly identify would find fault with Brod's novel.
The second criticism Kafka directs at Brod's novel reinforces this undercurrent of ambiguity. The "fault" of the insufficiently addressed solution to the Judenfrage, he writes, "has an other origin," namely the absence, in Jüdinnen, of "non-Jewish observers who, in other stories draw out the Jewishness so that it advances toward them in amazement, doubt, envy, fear, and finally is transformed into self-confidence" (D, 46). This passage seems to imply that it is only in the presence of a non-Jewish outsider's perspective that Jewishness can and may "draw itself up to its full height" (D, 46) ("sich in seiner ganzen Länge aufrichten"). "This is indeed what we demand," Kafka continues; "we don't accept any other way of dissolving the Jewish masses" (D, 46; translation slightly modified). Hartmut Binder understands this passage as an atypically ideological statement written under the influence of a review of Brod's book by the Zionist Hugo Herrmann, who insists that a hostile non-Jewish presence in the novel would be necessary to justify the Zionist cause (Binder 1979a, 376). Giuliano Baioni disagrees with Binder, explaining Kafka's statements as a pragmatic preemption of a critical reaction to the book, namely that non-Jewish readers will not understand the Jewish world of the novel because it does not include a non-Jewish point of view with which they could identify (1994, 41). Baioni's interpretation minimizes the significance of Kafka's statement in order to strengthen his argument that Kafka's attraction to Judaism resided in his perception of it as a self-enclosed world: "Kafka always looks at Judaism from within and experiences it as a completely autonomous world" (1994, 41). This view is contradicted by the almost offensive metaphor with which Kafka illustrates his critique of Brod's novel and which is left out by both Binder and Baioni: Jewishness, Kafka writes, should manifest itself in its full grandeur only under the eyes of an antagonistic observer ("ein gegensätzlicher Zuschauer"); just as the
convulsive starting up of a lizard under our feet on a footpath in Italy delights us greatly, again and again we are moved to bow down, but if we see them at a dealer's by hundreds crawling over one another in confusion in the large bottles in which otherwise pickles are usually packed, then we don't know what to do. (D, 46)
Kafka insists that this image has a more general validity: just like any other kind of identity, Jewishness ("das Jüdische") is a source of fascination and delight only as an unpredictable, mobile appearance drawn out by the presence of an outsider, not as a self-sufficient, enclosed entity. In the German original, the last words of this quotation are more explicit: "so wissen wir uns nicht einzurichten" (2002c, 161); then we cannot settle, cannot be at home there. But who is "we?" If one draws the parallel between Kafka's statement about the way Jewishness should show itself, and the simile by which he illustrates it, the "we" by which Kafka identifies here with the solitary wanderer on an Italian footpath would correspond to the non-Jewish observer, the "gegensätzlicher Zuschauer," and Jewishness to the lizard, whereas the rest of the text invites the assumption that Kafka uses "we" to reflect on the Jewish question from the inside. No wonder there is no place to settle on firm ground: there is hardly a homeland for such an elusive, contradictory "we." Although the text does not resolve this ambiguity of perspective, it highlights the precariousness of its position.
Kafka's choice of words in this passage must have seemed too controversial to the translator of the Diaries: "eine andere Auflösung der Judenmassen erkennen wir nicht an" (2002c, 160) — the literal "we don't accept any other way of dissolving the Jewish masses" is rendered as "no other principle for the organization of this Jewish material seems justified to us" (D, 46). The only "solution to the Jewish question" Kafka seems to have in mind here is the dissolution of "Judenmassen" — Jewish masses, which most probably refer to the closed and homogeneous communities of Ostjuden. This "autonomous" Jewish community should dissolve and be replaced by another kind of Jewishness, one that does — proudly, possibly even defiantly — face the eye of an external observer. It is only under his gaze that it may fully redress itself. Zionism, the passage implies, can perform this task, but it can fulfill it only if it is closer to the "convulsive starting up of a lizard" than to a bottle of vegetables: rather than a tightly closed mass-gathering of identical members, Kafka imagines it here as a movement toward self-confidence both dependent on and uninhibited by an encounter with a challenging, maybe even antagonistic other.
The phrasing of the last lines of the entry, where Kafka expresses his third, somewhat obscure critique of Brod's novel — that it oddly enough can do without the "prominent youth, who attracts the best to himself" (D, 46) — confirms this view. The charismatic youth whom Brod's novel can surprisingly omit, Kafka conjectures, is one who could lead the members of the community "in schöner radialer Richtung an die Grenzen des jüdischen Kreises" (2002c, 161), "along a beautiful radius to the margins of the Jewish circle" (D, 46). In this image, the direction is centrifugal, the face of the youthful leader turned outward. It invites a comparison with a very different image of unification that makes its repeated appearance in Kafka's writings: the "Reigen," a round dance or, less literally, a ring.
The Ring
In a famous passage from "Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer" ("Building the Great Wall of China" [2007, 113–24]), we read:
Wie groß und reich und schön und liebenswert ihr Land war, jeder Landsmann war ein Bruder, für den man eine Schutzmauer baute und der mit allem was er hatte und war sein Leben lang dafür dankte, Einheit! Einheit! Brust an Brust, ein Reigen des Volkes, Blut, nicht mehr eingesperrt im kärglichen Kreislauf des Körpers, sondern süß rollend und doch wiederkehrend durch das unendliche China. (2002a, 342; emphasis added)
every fellow countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and who was thankful all his life, thankful with everything that he had and was: unity! unity! breast on breast, a round dance of the people, blood no longer confined in the meager circulatory system of the body, but rolling on sweetly and yet returning to its source through the infinity of China. (KSS, 115)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When KafKa Says We by Vivian Liska. Copyright © 2009 Vivian Liska. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: Uncommon CommunitiesPart 1. Kafka's Communities1. When Kafka Says We2. Shooting at the Audience: Kafka's Speech on the Yiddish Language3. An Alliance of Foes: Kafka and the FemininePart 2. Revisiting the Common Ground4. A Vision out of Sight: Theodor Herzl's Late "Philosophical Tales"5. Diverting the Lineage: Biblical Women in Else Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew Ballads6. Saving Confusions: Else Lasker-Schüler's Poetics of RedemptionPart 3. Communities of Fate7. A Counter-Prayer: Paul Celan's "In Front of a Candle"8. Roots against Heaven: A Motif in Paul Celan9. The Voice of Israel: Nelly Sachs's "Choirs after Midnight"Part 4. Contentious Commemorations10. A Broken Ring: The Gruppe 47 and Ilse Aichinger's Poetics of Resistance11. After the Silence: Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Austrian-Jewish Literature12. Jewish Voices, Human Tone: Robert Menasse's The Expulsion from HellPart 5. Kafka's Companions13. Of Language and Destiny: Paul Celan and Kafka14. A Permanent Shadow: Ilse Aichinger and Kafka15. The Gap between Hannah Arendt and KafkaNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Liska's title is somewhat misleading: it suggests that the book is primarily about Franz Kafka or that certain aspects of his writing provide the volume's readings and analysis with a unifying thematic-heuristic thread. Rather, this is a collection of—for the most part—previously published work dealing with exemplary 20th-century Jewish authors, poets, and thinkers who wrote, or are still writing, in German—including (in addition to Kafka) Theodor Herzl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Ilse Aichinger, Robert Menasse, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Schindel, and Hannah Arendt. This does not mean that the volume is without merit. Quite the contrary. Looking at the sociocultural and political context of the 20th century, Liska (Univ. of Antwerp, Belgium) proffers nuanced, insightful, often provocative interpretations of selected works of interest to scholars of these particular writers. She explores how these German-Jewish writers' responses to anti-Semitism, along with their ambivalence about their marginal position, inspired 'unconventional literary approaches toward communities and selves and the relationship between them.' Keying on this level of ambivalence, Liska convincingly shows how these particular works—and literary language more generally—can unmask, subvert, but also reconfigure the 'oppressive cohesion of communal groupings' into new 'original and uncommon communities.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. — Choice *** Do not use until Nov. 1.
I know of no book quite like Liska's in range, sophisticated analysis, and importance for the appreciation of modern German-Jewish literature in the wake of Kafka.
Liska's title is somewhat misleading: it suggests that the book is primarily about Franz Kafka or that certain aspects of his writing provide the volume's readings and analysis with a unifying thematic-heuristic thread. Rather, this is a collection of—for the most part—previously published work dealing with exemplary 20th-century Jewish authors, poets, and thinkers who wrote, or are still writing, in German—including (in addition to Kafka) Theodor Herzl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Ilse Aichinger, Robert Menasse, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Schindel, and Hannah Arendt. This does not mean that the volume is without merit. Quite the contrary. Looking at the sociocultural and political context of the 20th century, Liska (Univ. of Antwerp, Belgium) proffers nuanced, insightful, often provocative interpretations of selected works of interest to scholars of these particular writers. She explores how these German-Jewish writers' responses to anti-Semitism, along with their ambivalence about their marginal position, inspired 'unconventional literary approaches toward communities and selves and the relationship between them.' Keying on this level of ambivalence, Liska convincingly shows how these particular works—and literary language more generally—can unmask, subvert, but also reconfigure the 'oppressive cohesion of communal groupings' into new 'original and uncommon communities.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. — Choice *** Do not use until Nov. 1.
Vivian Liska is remarkable for the precision of her readings. . . . She brings to her project a rich and varied sensibility—a mind at home in many languages and literatures and fields of thought.