Franz Kafka: In Memoriam

“What do I have in common with Jews?  I have hardly anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.” (Diary, January 8^th, 1914)

One hundred years ago this week, Franz Kafka, just shy of his 41^st birthday, lay dying in a “small, friendly sanitorium” (his words) near Vienna. I say ‘his words’, but he could hardly speak – he wrote about the sanatorium in a letter to his parents in Prague. He was suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx, was finding it to difficult to eat, to drink, to swallow, to breathe. “Grateful to be able to breathe” was not, it turned out, just a turn of phrase.

Perhaps he already knew in 1914, proleptically, something in him already saw the future – about this, as about so much else. Kafka teaches us, amongst many other things, to pay close attention to our intuitions.  They contain a special kind of knowledge about ourselves - which is to say they can contain a special kind of knowledge about the human condition.

“Grateful to be able to breathe “ – not only an intuition about his future, maybe our common future, but teaching us not to take the everyday for granted. For that is where the miraculous lies. The everyday miracles in a world where the old pieties of religion no longer hold sway. “The ordinary is itself a miracle”, he once said, in conversation, “All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage. And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight. Therefore people close their eyes and see so little” (CWK 44/5)

As we listen in to Kafka’s words we hear a mind at work, a consciousness shifting moment by moment as new thoughts arise. The quotation offers a luminous insight into Kafka’s thinking as it unfolds. First the spark of an idea, simple but profound, maybe even verging on a cliche: “The ordinary is itself a miracle”. And then his relationship to it, slightly self-deprecating:  “All I do is record it”. As if that were completely straightforward - as if writing, finding the right words, is as natural as - well, as breathing.

And then an elaboration of the thought, hedged with characteristic caution, hesitancy, maybe self-deprecation again: “Possibly I also illuminate matters a little”. Followed by a simile that brings alive the idea in our mind’s eye: “like the lighting of a half dark stage”. 

That would have been sufficient – the point is made, illustrated, we feel we can grasp the simple grandeur of Kafka’s thought:  “The ordinary is itself a miracle. All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage”. Many writers, thinkers, would have been happy to leave it at that.

But then - and this illustrates Kafka’s fidelity both to emotional truth-telling, and to the complex zigzagging of his mind at work moment by moment, revising, editing, amplifying – he then doubles back on himself as a new, contradictory thought arises:  “And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight”. What he thought was the case – that his writing was recording the ‘ordinary miracle’ of living, to which he added some extra illumination, while leaving some things in the shadows as if on a half-lit stage – that thought is itself only one provisional version of what he does, just a momentary grasping after what feels like a truth. But there is another completely opposite truth, he now realises: that the stage is filled with light but people just don’t see what’s there in front of their eyes – i.e. he doesn’t see what’s there – indeed the problem is there’s just too much to see:   “Therefore people close their eyes and see so little”.

Such a familiar move, this, in so much of Kafka’s work, in his parables and longer fiction: the working through of an idea, and images that comes to mind about it – and then the ending on a down-beat note. (One exception is his magisterial parable ‘My Destination’ which ends with the hope-filled paradox that that in spite of their being no provisions available for the journey ‘Away From Here’, “…it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey”). But here it’s the resigned realisation that although there is so much to be seen, we nevertheless end up seeing so little - as if we are dazzled by the superfluity of what the world reveals to us, as if we can’t quite bear to see and know the full glory (but sometimes horror) of what is present at every moment.

Implicit in what I am doing here, spending this time unpacking a few words of his, is sharing with you, illustrating for you, why for me Kafka remains an indispensable companion.  He both illuminates the human condition and makes it strange -  or, rather, he reveals to us the strangeness hidden in plain sight.  He shows how the familiar, the everyday, is often more quirky, idiosyncratic, than we at first realise, or more packed with potential meaning, or more puzzling, or more disturbing.  

And, as we know, (and don’t want to know), the everyday can be very disturbing. The benign nestles so uncomfortably close to the sinister.  A sense of estrangement is always lurking, just around the corner:

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”  

The opening of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, written in 1914, pre-empts our daily news. It not only points towards Nazi and Stalinist times, but speaks to own benighted land where  asylum seekers are scooped up from their lodgings, just as it describes a reality for Covid scientists in China, for poets and journalists in Russia, for Palestinian shopkeepers and academics in the West Bank. Arbitrary unwarranted arrests on fine mornings. Impossible for Kafka to see into the future - and yet the words came, the stories emerged, a literature of scrupulous sensitivity, sometimes humorous, sometimes tortured, but always pregnant with meaning.  

So ‘The Trial’ is also a narrative of a psychological state, that strange condition in our inner world where we can be captured by feelings of being in the wrong, or feelings of being misunderstood, or feelings of guilt - even if we aren’t sure what we have done wrong, or even whether we have done anything wrong at all.  

The critical and persecutory forces within the human psyche are real – even if we have very little insight into them. It’s as if our psyches were a dimly lit stage (which they are): shadowy forces can emerge, can  haunt us, can arrest us ‘one fine morning’. Arrest us, derail us, lay siege to us. Kafka knew this only too well in his own life; and yet managed to transform, to give literary shape, to what he experienced in ways that compel our attention.  For example, he knew that sometimes these inner forces can distort the image we have of ourselves: they can make us grander than we are, more self-important, but they can also make us seem more monstrous than we are.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”.   

This is no longer ‘one fine morning’ but just an ordinary morning following ‘uneasy dreams’ – already a ominous note, foreshadowing the waking realisation that all is far from well.  Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’  (written in 1912, published in 1915) is not a novella about body dysmorphia, although it might give as a particular angle of vision into that state of mind, but it does speak about how alienated someone can feel from themselves and the world around them.

Generations of readers have recognised in the story – in Gregor’s feelings about no longer belonging to the respectable everyday world he is accustomed to, and being treated by his parents and others with prejudice, dismissiveness and emotional cruelty – they have recognised themselves in this disturbing portrait of feeling like an unwanted outsider. Yet although the drama allows for multiple interpretations, no single interpretation ever fits, for as so often with Kafka’s enigmatic creativity, the text hovers in front of us, just out of our grasp. His texts, his images, don’t ‘stand for’ something else, they are not symbols of something that need to be, or can be, deciphered, decoded  – they are just what they are (like God’s enigmatic self-description – ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am what I am, I will be what I will be”).

But for a Jewish reader it is hard to ignore the fact that Kafka – writing as he always did in German - describes Gregor in that first sentence (in spite of our translations) not as ‘an insect’ but as ‘Ungezeifer’, which means ‘vermin’ – a word that of course was to take on a darker, annihilatory dimension within a generation. That people could turn into ‘vermin’ overnight was not only a dystopian literary fantasy, or drama of personal alienation, but just another example of Kafka’s uncanny, unsettling gift for seeing further, seeing deeper, sensing the as yet unthought about emerging contours of contemporary life. He had intimations of the 'unthought known’: he saw what he saw, and recorded it, without knowing fully what he was seeing, and how it would speak into our lives.

So often I find that Kafka’s texts reverberate like a shofar blast summoning us into greater awareness of life’s double-sideness, how heaven and hell are always here and always now and always within us, and always just beyond our understanding.  “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”  was one of his more memorable paradoxes.  

This was recorded by his longstanding friend (and literary executor) Max Brod, from a conversation in 1920, and captures the way Kafka’s optimism and his ability to gain pleasure from the world – he was a natty dresser, enjoyed the theatre, the cinema, European literature, swimming, vegetarianism, Yiddish theatre, Hebrew scholarship (he attended lectures at the Berlin Hochshule and corresponded for many years with Martin Buber) – all of this enjoyment of life and its opportunities was real for him; and yet in the end, we hear that familiar note of loss, of incompleteness, of the elusive nature of what is wished for. It’s not despair that has the last word, but a rueful recognition that life’s pleasures are transient, and something darker (or maybe just sadder) must inevitably be reckoned with: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Kafka, I think I started reading him in my mid-teens and he has accompanied me ever since. But you can know his work - his novels, diaries, parables, aphorisms, letters - you can know all this, feel close to his soul, his spirit, his very special consciousness – and yet one still never knows him; you can come close to the biography of the man but his texts retain an elusiveness, however often you read them. They offer themselves up, but like the canonical scriptures of old they are endlessly suggestive, tantalising, seductive, enigmatic. They ask to be interpreted, but in the end they defy interpretation. They are what they are.  

My own sense is that if one wants to live with a developed Jewish sensibility in our own times one has to live alongside Kafka, in dialogue with Kafka, in the illuminating shadows of Kafka: his texts have become – for me – part of the very fabric of my understanding of what it is to be Jewish, they are  a sort of secular Torah, a holy literature that will be read for as long as humanity survives on this planet, offering us intimations of immortality although we know immortality is only another fable, another story to live by. Kafka made storytelling a sacred act, a spiritual discipline: “Writing as a form of prayer” he once said.

In the Austrian sanatorium where he lay one hundred years ago this week, this relatively unknown and mostly unpublished Czech-speaking, German-writing, Jewish accident insurance investigator was looked after by the medical staff along with Dora Diamant, his final girlfriend/lover – Kafka had never married. She was 25 and they had known each other for a year. In that last week or so, he could talk only in whispers, so he communicated mostly in written notes. He was a writer, after all. A completely secular writer with the Jewish spiritual sensitivity of the Hebrew poets of old. “Writing as a form of prayer”.

This is prayer as devotion and – as the Hebrew for prayer,  tefillah, literally means – prayer as self-judgement, self-reflection. Kafka’s devotion to writing – and to writing as a form of devotion – have been indispensable, foundational, for my own religious/spiritual sensibility. And I don’t imagine I am alone in this. I’ll finish with one short numinous text that I return to over and over again. It returns me to myself and to an awareness of living in a world where revelation happens at each moment, if we can allow ourselves to remain open to it.

“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

Franz Kafka died on June 3^rd 1924. Zichrono Livracha: may his memory continue to be a blessing.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 25th 2024]