February 24, 2011
who owns kafka?
An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika between 1925 and 1927. In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafka’s wish not to have it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod’s compromise with himself turned out to be consequential, and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the non-resolution of Kafka’s bequest.more from Judith Butler at the LRB here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:29 PM | Permalink
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Judith Butler:
"So it seems we are to understand Kafka’s work as an ‘asset’ of the Jewish people, though not a restrictively financial one. If Kafka is claimed as a primarily Jewish writer, he comes to belong primarily to the Jewish people, and his writing to the cultural assets of the Jewish people. This claim, already controversial (since it effaces other modes of belonging or, rather, non-belonging), becomes all the more so when we realise that the legal case rests on the presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people."
Ms Butler raises a number of important points.
Given Kafka's own statemets it seems rather absurd that his works should come to "belong primarily to the Jewish people" as purportedly represented by the state of Israel. Kafka was in fact deeply conflicted about Zionism - "I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it" - even by his own Jewishness.
His ambivalence wasn't mere posturing. He knew what it meant to experience discrimination first hand. He was subject to the type of 'polite' prejudice that was commonplace in his day. In a letter to Max Brod he spoke of being snubbed by an Austrian general who quickly terminated their chat when he discovered Kafka was a Jew.
Kafka's inner conflict comes across as more of an existential struggle than anything explicitly Jewish in a political and/or religious sense. The angst he expresses puts one in mind of his short story Metamorphisis - "Isn't it natural to leave a place where one is so hated?... The heroism of staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be exterminated, even from the bathroom."
Despite his acute understanding of discrimination, Kafka nonetheless lacked a strong primary sense of 'belonging' within a Jewish context. He was detached from it, viewing it with philosophical distance. The following comment tends to confirm that view:
"What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."
Posted by: Jay Cables | Feb 25, 2011 2:24:55 AM
A little question of common sesnse: If Ireland represent the Irrish people, even those that are living in USA and are American citizens? If Armenia is representing the Armenians, that after the Genocide, are living all over the world as devoted citizens of their new countries and they will never visit Armenia? If the answer is "yes", so Israel represent the Jewish people, even those that are anti-Zionists...
That put us to the second question: if the universal Kafka is a Jewish writer? If Jesus is a Jew, so Kafka. Of course that as Jesus Kafka belongs to all and is understood by all. I will quote a letter to better understand this Jewish question identity of Kafka nad not this short paradoxal quote:
Excerpt of a May 1920 letter from Franz Kafka, 36, to Milena Jesenska, 24, a Catholic writer married to a Jew:
You don’t seem to be afraid of Jews. And that is rather heroic considering the last two generations of Jews in our cities and—all joking very far aside!—when a pure, innocent girl says to her relatives, “Let me go,” and moves to one of these cities, it means more than Joan of Arc departing from her village. Furthermore you may reproach Jews for their particular type of anxiety, nevertheless such a general accusation shows a more theoretical knowledge of human nature than a practical one, more theoretical because first the reproach does not—according to your earlier description—apply to your husband, second—according to my experience—it does not apply to most Jews, and third it only applies in isolated cases, but then very strongly, as it does to me.
The strangest thing of all is that the reproach is generally unfounded. Their insecure position, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, would above all explain why Jews believe they possess only whatever they hold in their hands or grip between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live, and that finally they will never again acquire what they once have lost—which swims happily away from them, gone forever. Jews are threatened by dangers from the most improbable sides or, to be more precise, let’s leave the dangers aside and say: ‘They are threatened by threats.’ An example close to you. It’s true I may have promised not to speak about it (at a time when I scarcely knew you) but now I mention it without hesitation, as it won’t tell you anything new, just show you the love of relatives, and I won’t mention names and details since I have forgotten them. My youngest sister is supposed to marry a Czech, a Christian; once he was talking with one of your relatives about his intention of marrying a Jew, and this person said: “Anything but that, just don’t go getting mixed up with Jews! Listen, our Milena, etc.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milena_Jesensk%C3%A1
Posted by: Mirel | Feb 25, 2011 11:24:09 AM
Kafka, Modern Jewish Experience and the Holocaust
Excerpt from Interview with Professor Aharon Appelfeld
Author and Professor of Literature in Be'er Sheba University
Q- You said that the Holocaust is above all a Jewish experience. On the other hand, in
Masot be-guf rishon (“First-Person Essays” [Heb.]) you write that the person who first
helped you find the words to express your own personal experience in the Holocaust
was Kafka, and he isn't considered an essentially Jewish writer. Shouldn't the
Holocaust be thought of, then, as a universal case of suffering that transcends the
Jewish experience?
A- Most of the people in the ghettos, the labor camps, and the extermination camps
were Jewish, and therefore the Holocaust was a Jewish experience. But it was not a
one-time Jewish experience and it was a modern Jewish experience, not a traditional
Jewish experience. Kafka is a good way of illustrating this. Kafka was a Jew in his
heart and soul. He learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He attended a beit midrash in
Frankfurt and he wanted to settle in Palestine. He had lots of women, but most of
them were Jewish. I don't mean that he proclaimed his Jewishness every morning, but
that he was connected with Jewishness in every sense of the word. For example, the
pounding at the castle — the desire to enter and understand this mystery — is a very
Jewish longing. For good reason, authors such as his colleague Max Brod tried to find
kabbalistic meaning in his works.Consider, for example, his two greatest works, The
Trial and The Castle. He felt that he was a defendant who had done no wrong. A man
is sitting at home or in a pension, looking forward to breakfast, and suddenly someone
comes in and says, “You're under arrest! You are accused!” for no reason and no
purpose. That's the classic Jewish situation, manifested most acutely during the
Holocaust. It was a situation of total guilt with no sin. People were accused, taken
from their homes, shut up in ghettos, led to railroad stations and from there to
not because they had done anything wrong but because
Jewish blood flowed in their veins. Kafka illustrated the absurdity of Jewish life in
Europe even before the Holocaust. In this sense Kafka grasped the lowly position
Jews held in European civilization.
Q- Would you say, then, that the Holocaust sums up the absurdity of European
civilization?
A- To a certain extent, yes. After all, Jews believed that if they abandoned their
heritage, customs, way of life, and faith, and integrated into European civilization,
assimilated into the fabric of European civilization, they would be doing the best thing
for themselves and their surroundings. So they did it in Germany, France, even
Poland. Most Jews between the two world wars were on the brink of abandoning their
Jewishness en route to a Jewish universalism or cosmopolitanism of sorts. The
tragedy is that at that very moment someone came and told them, “You can't do that.
You're a stranger. Your thoughts, your mentality, and your nature are alien. You're not
only alien; you're also dangerous, and we're going to obliterate you.” In other words,
just as the Jew's every fiber leaned toward assimilation, there came a radical, satanic
force that not only halted this trend but wiped out the people who were inclined to
pursue this process. That's the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Q- In fact, however, Kafka largely represented that assimilationist trend.
A- Kafka performed a psychic analysis of the defendant. Although he refrained from
mentioning the Jew explicitly in order to give this absurd situation a much broader
meaning, this, in essence, is Jewish psychology. A Jewish fate, if you will.
Interestingly, this analysis led him indirectly to Zionism, and he even wanted to settle
in Palestine.
http://yad-vashem.org.il/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203863.pdf
Posted by: Mirel | Feb 25, 2011 12:59:28 PM
A shameful, bigoted piece couched in "oh,so intellectual" wordery. Judith Butler is a truly miserable bitch.
Posted by: aguy109 | Feb 28, 2011 7:50:10 AM
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