SOURCE: "Beaurocracy in Art and Analysis: Kafka and Weber," in Journal of the Kafka Sociely of America, Nos. 1-2, 1991, pp. 4-16.

Sociology of literature is based upon the assumption that literary fiction, through the personal concern of the artist, reflects societal conditions. Yet, surprisingly little sociological work has been undertaken to analyze the reflection in literature of bureaucracy as a social phenomenon—at least in the German speaking countries. Elsewhere the administrative novel as a special genre has been extensively discussed (Egger 1959; Kroll 1965; Savage 1965; McCurdy 1973) and anthologies edited (Coser 1963; Holzer, et al. 1979) to teach the sociology of bureaucracy through literature. This neglect of the bureaucratic contents of German literary fiction in general, and of Franz Kafka's in particular, is all the more astonishing as Kafka's older contemporary Max Weber (1864-1920) is commonly regarded as the leading sociological theorist of bureaucracy. In literature departments, on the other hand, bureaucracy is usually not dealt with as a literary motif (Frenzel 1976a; 1976b); the main currents of Kafka interpretation are transcendental and psychological while the bureaucratic aspects in Kafka's work are regarded as marginal, although his novels owe a great deal of their grotesque impact on the reader to such bureaucratic settings. Only recently has the bureaucratic paradigm been applied to Kafka, while additional parallels to Weber have been developed by German literature specialists.

While other novelists view bureaucracy predominantly from the outside and through the perspective of the individual confronted with repressive parts of the state apparatus (police, military, judicial branch), Kafka displays an unusually differentiated insight into the internal mechanisms and the social functioning of bureaucracy. This makes it worthwhile to first elaborate Kafka's treatment of bureaucracy by applying Weberian categories. Approaching Kafka through literary sociology will bring to the fore a far reaching congruency of the conceptualization of bureaucracy in his major novels, The Trial and The Castle, with Weber's model of bbureaucracy. Second, with the immanent parallels given, it is tempting to investigate to what extent Kafka's way of treating bureaucracy reflects his personal office experience. Contrary to outright critics of bureaucracy, its evaluation tends to remain hidden with sophisticated authors like Kafka. Therefore, the assessment of bureaucracy, which Kafka the artist and Max Weber the social scientist posit, is to be compared-the latter contrary to his emphasis on value-freedom in sociological analysis. Finally, I shall relate Kafka and Weber in yet another way by following two clues that point to an—albeit indirect—biographical relationship between both men. The literary approach, the sociological approach, and the sociology of literature approach focus on Kafka's bureaucratic experience as well as on his exposure to Weber's analysis, appear to justify the claim that bureaucracy must be attributed more weight in interpreting and understanding Kafka than is cus tomarily the case.

KAFKA'S WORK IN WEBERIAN PERSPECTIVE

There is hardly another author in the world of literature whose work appears so deeply colored by features of the bureaucratic state apparatus. This is indicated by the technical nature of the titles of most of Kafka's short stories and novels, for example: "Report to an Academy," "The Penal Colony," "The Judgment," The Trial and The Castle. Kafka, like no writer before or after him, uses core institutions of the modern state as the scenery for his novels; the penal colony, the judicial court, and the castle as the center of bureaucratic power are all, in a Weberian sense, the agents of political domination in everyday life and exercise a monopoly of physical power over civil society as the distinctive feature of the modem state.

Kafka's characters and protagonists are taken from the professions; country doctor, salesman, military officers, managing bank director, surveyor and—most prominently in the two novels under consideration—civil servants of various ranks, and the law professions. The author's imaginary counterparts, although not civil servants specifically, nevertheless also belong to the historically new professional service class, such as the managing director and surveyor who serve, or aspire to serve, in private and public bureaucratic organizations.

Weber's Model of Bureaucracy

In order to convey to the reader the richness of Kafka's observations on bureaucracy I shall systematize the ma terial by applying the characteristics of Max Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy. This ideal type is an abstraction of features which distinguish the modern type of legal/rational political domination from traditional (feudal or patrimonial), as well as from the unstable form of charismatic domination. Legal/rational domination relies on professional (contrary to honorary) personnel who receive monetary rewards, are specifically trained, employed full-time, appointed, and promoted according to objective criteria (performance or seniority) instead of being elected or selected according to social origin. This configuration is historically juxtaposed to the feudal rule of landlords, to whom the office is just an annex to their estate from which they make their living. In bureaucracies, the monarch or parliament have appropriated all means of production (as, for instance, opposed to the custom of self-equipment in traditional communal society); thus the office is financially and physically separated from the household, instead of alimenting civil servants in the palace. The bureaucratic apparatus is characterized by a hierarchy of command, and monocratic decision-making has replaced collegial decisions in chambers. Decision-making follows formal regulations within specialized areas of jurisdiction, instead of producing voluntary ad hoc decisions in all matters coming up to officials who happen to be available. This formalization renders political domination calculable for society as well as for the ruler. Furthermore, communication is basically written and recorded so that monitoring is possible through the hierarchy and by external control agencies. In the course of the historical formation of the bureaucratic structure, civil servants develop as a distinct social class with their own code of honor and professional role understanding, including disciplined work and impersonal decision making. This model of legal/rational domination can be applied to the picture Kafka paints in both The Trial and The Castle, and these bureaucratic dimensions can be found in his works. It is not to judge their empirical adequacy, for this would do injustice to Weber's ideal type which exaggerates reality, as well as to Kafka, who of course transcends reality through irony.

The Categories of the Weberian Model Applied

Josef K. and K. are mostly confronted with subordinate officials of the lowest status: messengers, the usher, clerks, K.'s two undisciplined assistants, the schoolmaster in The Castle, servants in the bank, an official thrasher, and warders. As the protagonist in both novels, initially at least, has no personal experience with the higher strata of officials, it is through these subaltern characters and civil figures that he forms his first image of court and castle bureaucrats. Only occasionally does the protagonist himself observe the social life of the bureaucrats and technical procedures, such as the early morning circulation of files in The Castle (ch. 19). In order to achieve a still higher degree of objectivity, Kafka even deviates from his typical approach of viewing the world through the protagonist's subjective perspective; instead, he has other characters (the village mayor, the attorney, and the portraitist) give K. lectures on hierarchical communication, departmental specification of jurisdictions, or the decision-making process. This occurs most impressively in chapter 5 of The Castle and chapters 7 and 8 of The Trial.

The separation of private household and public office, which is important in Weber's historical account of the emergence of European states and bureaucracies, does not yet appear fully developed in Kafka's bureaucratic world. Even higher civil servants have beds in their offices (at least in The Castle), and on the subaltern level the private living room is often used for official purposes. Indeed, officials receive clients while lying in bed: so do the village mayor and other officials in The Castle (Erlanger, Bürg el) when working at night. K. and his fiancee are still asleep in the classroom, which serves as their bedroom, when the children and the teacher enter. The official portraitist has a bed in his room in the court (Josef K. even has to climb over it). When Josef K. visits the court, he is disoriented because he finds the courtroom hidden in a multistory house and has to enter it through a private flat. Offices are also situated under the roof, where the laundry is drying.

Closely related to the separation of office from house-hold is the monetary payment of officials. Only under this condition, in Weber's view, can political control over the "staff of domination" be fully exercised, because officials without property are totally dependent. That is to say, they do not have the potential to become self-controlling in such a way as that of the nobility in premodem society. Again, Kafka's bureaucracy does not measure up to the "fully developed" Weberian type. In particular the lowest ranks depend upon receiving natural goods as remuneration and thus often live in the office building like K. after his degradation to school clerk. Furthermore, monetary payment is so low that officials in The Trial turn corrupt—an aspect which fills Josef K., the principled and explicitly incorruptible bank director, with disgust. It is also this factor which exposes the female characters to the sexual harassment of the officials, because they cannot afford to attract their hate by denying them favors. The consequences are fatal, as the case of the Barnabas family (Amalia) shows.

In turn, full-time employment is not the rule. Only the higher echelons are professional civil servants and are in a position to devote themselves fully to office work, while the servicemen often keep having a private basis of subsistence (Barnabas as a shoemaker); indeed, the honorary village mayor does his official paperwork merely during evening hours. The typical layman administration [Dilettantenverwaltung], which Weber likes to contrast with the professional bureaucracy, is accurately depicted through the mayor in The Castle by his sloppy file keeping and irregular work on incoming proceedings. He also needs the village teacher for communication and seeks his wife's advice.

Professional training is implied for the higher officials in the novels; they are obviously jurists. In The Trial, a law student is helping the investigative judge and envisions a future career as a state attorney. As the higher officials are generally not individually characterized but are displayed as examples of the functionary type without a biography, there is no need for Kafka to elaborate; juridical training had become the rule for higher civil service in the Habsburg empire from the middle of the 19th century.

Striving for career advancement along formalized patterns is a more visible aspect of bureaucratic life in the writings of Kafka. Josef K. is afraid of the competition from the deputy director of his bank when his own professional attention is increasingly distracted by the trial. The thrasher, who punishes the warders, as well as the warders themselves, are afraid of losing their promotions. In general, however, the concern is less with advancement in an established career as with entering a career or a position, be it K.'s unsuccessful attempt to be employed as a surveyor, or Barnabas the messenger's hope to become elevated to the status of a full-time servant.

Hierarchy appears in the novels in various forms. First, there is the hierarchy of offices: in the court system, as well as between the village administration and the Castle offices where the hierarchy runs from K.'s servicemen through K. (school clerk), the teacher, the mayor, the village secretary in the Castle (Bürgel), Erlanger, and finally, Klamm. The way the higher offices function is normally not transparent for lower officials and the protagonists. Higher echelons also appear to be following different rules and decision criteria. Second, the characters of the stories act in hierarchical interpersonal relationships, with the higher officials not being directly accessible for lower members of the system. K. requires some time and advice to discover this hierarchical order. Third, the social order corresponds to the hierarchy of offices: subordinate officials are poor and hardly distinguishable from K. vis-a-vis their social conduct. Only when they are on an official mission are they distinct: Barnabas, having brought a letter, displays a dirty shirt when dropping his fine coat. Subordinate servants, even in the court, can be distinguished only by wearing signs on their collars and bright buttons, while they are indistinguishable from the clients in any other respect. Furthermore, the state/Castle officials gather socially in a particular pub, the "Herrenhof", while the villagers drink beer in the "Brückenhof," the only place K. is permitted to go. Klamm, representing the top of the hierarchy, is even separated by a room of his own in the "Herrenhof." As K. initially does not understand or accept the special status of the officials and the private/public role distinction, he starts observing Klamm secretly and tries to establish contacts by using personal relations.

Discipline—in Weber's perspective the product of an increasingly methodical conduct of life (and rationalization in general) culminating in devotion to one's calling—is a dimension which sets apart the higher officials from their servants and subjects who still follow a traditional mode of life. Subalterns, too, are characterized by inactivity, both in the sense of completely depending upon orders and of sluggishness in executing given or ders. They also do not sufficiently concentrate on their jobs, but are easily distracted and follow private objectives: while K. himself does not get up in time from his bed in the classroom, his two assistants are constantly fooling around. Obviously, they have not undergone professional training to assist the surveyor. However, we also find that the investigative judge in The Trial is keeping pornographic material in his dirty manual. In general, though, the higher officials are featured as being completely absorbed in their office work. They handle cases in a principled manner, interpret the law from a higher perspective than the subordinate courts, observe their departmental boundaries, and exert themselves by working even through the night, therefore having to sleep in their offices. The protagonists learn from people familiar with Klamm or Sortini that these higher officials are suffering from the burden of their duties, are nervous and permanently tired owing to a chronic lack of sleep. These dysfunctional consequences of excessive office work contrast with the masters' social behavior in that they turn angry, and even vengeful, when clients disturb their administrative work. In their secluded office life they appear "like children," such as when they are struggling for their share of the files in the morning. When they are out of the office and no longer bound by discipline, sexual greed and reckless personal exploitation of female service personnel give the officials almost human traits. Office routines appear to have shaped the personalities of the higher civil servants; they dislike appearing in public, abhor light, and are easily irritated by the slightest changes in exterior arrangement of the work place. K. and Josef K. suspect the officials of hiding and avoiding contact with them.

The typically bureaucratic impersonality of official/client relations, deriving from written communication, formal decision programs, status differences, specialization, and internal controls, is almost completely missing in Kafka's novels. Momus, the village secretary of the Castle, of course, emphasizes that claiming the report is his duty, but seemingly understands K.'s resistance and is trying to persuade K. (with the help of the pub's landlady). In general, too much of Josef K.'s and K.'s sought after success depends on personal relations occasionally backed by bribery, than impersonality in Weber's sense. What at first glance could appear as impersonal conduct of the higher officials is simply a lack of interest in the case and the person being investigated. Officials mostly act impersonally in that they hardly show signs of emotions like despair, hate, rage, or love.

Division of labor, demarcation of jurisdictions, and specialization within an office and between horizontally and vertically arranged authorities, between lower and higher courts as well as within the Castle and among various reviewing agencies, are well described in both of the novels. Here we come across phenomena such as departmental identification and selective perception, instances of filtering information in hierarchical and boundary-crossing communication, and deadlocks in the decision-making process as when K.'s record gets lost and he is consoled that it is bound to turn up one indefinite day, or when contradictory decisions arrive as to his employment.

Communication and decision-making processes structured by hierarchy and area of jurisdiction are, in particular, extensively dealt with by Kafka. Between hierarchical offices, written communication is predominant and confusion arises when the mayor cannot find the letter concerning K.'s case. Higher courts will receive the records of lower courts and review the cases on the basis of the records without entering the stage of information gathering, but are likely to arrive at completely different decisions without informing the lower courts about their decisions and reasoning. Another feature of vertical communication consists of written reports to higher echelons and offices. In The Castle, K. is asked by Klamm's village secretary Momus (who cannot specify the purpose), to give account of his activities for a report to the Castle. Momus has to admit that the report will probably never be read by the superiors, but insists that the procedure be carried through. Communication between client and authority appears particularly pathological as higher officials are existentially removed from "real life" in a spatial as well as intellectual respect. In their offices they do not know what is going on in the world and what motivates people. They are not familiar with the particularities of an individual case like K.'s. What is not represented in the records does not exist for them. In The Trial, Josef K. complains that the officials lack contact with the citizens and have no sense of human relations; the judges, therefore, have to rely on the attorney and ask his advice on how to assess a case. Stating his point in written form would not help Josef K. with the court, as he is certainly advised by his attorney. In contrast to interagency communication, the client/office relationship decisively depends on face-to-face contacts and informal networks, and induces Josef K. to manipulate the social fabric at the price of becoming dependent on boundary persons such as Frieda and Barnabas, or Dr. Huld and Titorelli. Conversely, the letter K. intermediately receives from Klamm praises surveying work K. has never done and is arbitrarily interpreted by the mayor. Written reports and statements are necessarily a selective mirror of real life or would be endless and infinitely detailed. This consideration is explicitly outlined in The Trial, and it makes Josef K. abstain from the necessarily "endless, accurate description of all deeds and events of his entire life", which could be of relevance for the court to recognize his innocence. K., too, refuses to give Momus a "detailed account of today's afternoon" (ch. 9), because he does not see what purpose it is to serve other than to disappear into the registry. As Josef K. does not know what he is accused of, he is lacking criteria of relevance for a statement, and as K. is not given an explanation relating the purpose of the report in his case, he refuses to cooperate.

Deviation of Kafka's Bureaucracy from the Model

The difference between the picture Kafka draws and the Weberian model is partly rooted in the fact that Kafka's bureaucracy is not of the legal/rational type shaped by the concept of Rechtsstaat, but obviously represents the older patrimonial bureaucracy. The lack of formal decision-making rules (including external juridical controls of the bureaucracy) has been noted above. It should be added that impersonality—literally the treatment of a client without respect to his (particularly ascribed) social status—juridically presupposes the principle of equal rights for all citizens. It is precisely this aspect of Rechtsstaat which is missing. As the absence of external controls accounts for the disinterested manner in which K.'s case is handled, and for his employment being ultimately a matter of patrimonial grace, the missing standard of equal treatment causes the very personal way the protagonists try to promote their cases. This is the reason why they ultimately existentially depend on the goodwill of the officials even in procedural matters of the Castle administration and the court. Equally, secrecy of operation and ambiguity of decision-making standards are properties not contained in the Weberian ideal type of legal/rational domination. In both novels, the protagonists do not manage to see through the system, not even after receiving insider instructions. Their subjective individual rationality, grounded in common sense and expe rience of their own professions as banker and geographer respectively, is confronted with the rationality of a system they do not understand; the more so as the decision-premises of court and castle are unknown, and the charge against Josef K. and the seriousness of the need to employ a surveyor, respectively, are kept in the dark and rules and regulations of the "machine"—a metaphor used in The Penal Colony—are not transparent.

Nevertheless, the features of bureaucracy displayed in Kafka's novels can be related to all of the Weberian dimensions of bureaucracy. Thus far, we have shown little more than the depth at which Kafka deals with bureaucracy and the heuristic value of Weber's model in analyzing the text of an artist. That Kafka's bureaucracy deviates from the historically "fully developed" type of bureaucracy, to a certain extent, is also a reflection of bureaucratic reality during the Habsburg monarchy. It is also, of course, an artistic device.

KAFKA'S OFFICE EXPERIENCE AS A REFERENCE POINT OF INTERPRETATION

How does this wealth of sociological and, in particular, bureaucratic observation combine with the main currents of Kafka interpretations which almost completely neglect this aspect of the work? Do the deviations from the ideal type just illustrated, typical of Kafka's technique of running counter to the reader's expectations, remind one of the technique of estrangement [Verfremdung] Bertolt Brecht was later to employ? The artistic peculiarities of style and composition, which make Kafka a forerunner of expressionism as well as surrealism, were bound to induce competing interpretations as to the meaning of his works and the message Kafka wanted to convey.

The typical Kafka text derives much of its powerful effect from the intensity with which it simultaneously invites and frustrates interpretation. (Bemheimer)

Be it the metaphysical interpretation as in Kafka's struggle with God and for justice (Brod), be it the biographical interpretation referring to Kafka's conflict with his father personified in the supreme court or Klamm, whose approval and acceptance he is longing for but does not achieve due to his failure to live up to his father's standards of physical, professional, and marital success (Canetti; Binder)—these interpretations pay far too little attention to the obvious reflection of Kafka's professional experience as a bureaucrat. While many biographical aspects are recognized as simple transpositions in the novels, surprisingly the bureaucratic contents reflecting Kafka's personal experience in the state related Bohemian Workers' Accident Insurance Agency are not taken at face value. Already Max Brod had conceded:

It is clear that Kafka received a great deal of his knowledge of the world and of life as well as his skeptical pessimism from his office experience, from his contact with the laborers suffering from injustice, from the dragging official routine, and the stagnating life of the records. Entire chapters of the (two) novels take their shell, their realistic cover from the milieu experienced in the … Insurance Agency. (Max Brod; my translation)

It was writers like Musil, Döblin, Tucholsky, and Brecht who appreciated the bureaucratic contents of Kafka's works as early as the 1930's; Brecht even drew a parallel between Kafka's institutional allegories and the coming of the Nazi system with its insecure legitimacy, absolutist, and terrorist state apparatus. Furthermore, it is remarkable that in the Soviet Union Kafka was read as an author depicting the bureaucratic universe of that society, and illuminating the individual's exposure to bureaucratic powers. Obviously, interpretation is shaped by the sociopolitical situation of the reader and his or her idealist or materialist intellectual background.

Hermsdorf has edited the official documents Kafka produced during his short career in the semi-state insurance agency. Several of the points which have been made above with reference to the Weberian model are underpinned by Hermsdorf. For instance, that reports are not read was Kafka's office experience: he officially complained that not all annual reports about accidents and risks in the factories could be read by the insurance agency. Kafka was concerned about it, and he very much tried to improve the dangerous machines in the factories. These events were later to be described as the complicated execution machine in "The Penal Colony." Further-more, decisions of the agency were, in fact, based on incomplete information without contact with the firms and inspection of the sites. Not only are the titles of the officials in the novels the same as those used in the agency, but even the Italian names of some of the characters, such as Titorelli, Sortini, and Sordini point to Kafka's experience as a substitute in the private Assicurazioni Generali in 1907! In projecting his physical symptoms (sleeplessness, irritability) onto his characters, Kafka was attempting to distance himself from the office and the alienation caused by the division of labor. After all, he had already left the agency when he finished The Castle in 1922.

Weeks has convincingly argued that K.'s struggle to establish his terms of employment in The Castle, and the general poverty of the subaltern officials, reflect the demands of the lower civil servants' movement (1909-13) for better salary and job security in the civil service order during the Habsburg monarchy. Kafka was still an untenured apprentice in the agency (1908-10), when a new code began to regulate the status of public employees. These were kept a level apart from the civil servants, prohibited from the provision of room and board, and received a salary decided on only after a probationary period. Kafka, thus, strongly depended on the approval of his superiors, and had to apply several times for salary increases. In 1913 he became an active member of the recently founded professional organization of Jewish officials.

Furthermore, the problem of being accepted as a surveyor in The Castle probably reflects the situation of Jews in the Habsburg empire (as in imperial Germany) vis-a-vis being admitted to government service. That Kafka, a professional jurist, ended up in the Workers' Insurance Agency is typical, because Jews were only admitted to state related offices of a non-authoritative nature. But even there it was difficult to get a job. Kafka managed to be accepted because the father of a school mate held a leading position there. Indeed, among several hundred employees there were only two Jews (Binder). In The Castle, K., at the end of his confrontation with the village mayor (ch. 5), insists on equal rights, stating "I do not want a gift of grace from the castle, but my right."

Kafka was able not only to adopt the perspective of the subaltern stratum in the office he was familiar with from the beginning of his career, but also had gathered experience in higher echelons; this becomes visible particularly in his last novel, The Castle. By 1913 he had advanced so far in the hierarchy that he was superior to 30 clerks, and in 1920 he was promoted to secretary of the agency (section head), a rather responsible position which involved conceptual work and representation of the agency in the law courts. Therefore, his picture of Klamm in The Castle could well mirror his own role understanding (Binder 1979).

Besides his experience in the Workers' Insurance Agency, Kafka was also contemplating his entrepreneurial activity, which is seldom commented on. Between 1911 and 1917 he had functioned as a silent partner (with his father's capital) in an asbestos firm, an enterprise that finally failed. Albach (1968) has drawn attention to the peculiar character of entrepreneurs in Kafka's early short stories; they are regularly not in control of the economic process, but rather its victim, thus objectifying Kafka's anxiety and subjectively felt burden of entrepreneurial responsibility in the person of the bank manager Joseph K. or Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis.

Maybe the large range of potential associations allowed for by Kafka's metaphors occasionally stimulates farfetched interpretations of details. In the last resort, this is probably the very distinction between artistic and analytical work. Nevertheless, in view of Kafka's rich bureaucratic experience condensed in the novels, alternative approaches which take into account Kafka's profession, his training as a jurist, and his thorough historical reading (including a 1906 oral examination in the history of law), should also be envisioned to provide an understanding of the novels.

KAFKA'S AND WEBER'S EVALUATION OF BUREAUCRACY

If we assume that Kafka's novels are not merely grand metaphors for transcendental or psychological problems, but at least can be additionally regarded to mirror the author's serious personal concern about his position and function as a public official, it is legitimate to look for Kafka's evaluation of bureaucracy as a social phenom enon.

Although the immediate impression of his personal suffering from office work could lead us to conclude that bureaucracy is negatively evaluated, this would be too simple an answer. On the contrary, there are various dimensions along which Kafka's evaluation of bureaucracy can be summarized.

Functional Criticism

As a bureaucratic insider of the Workers' Accident Insurance Agency, and as a citizen who often had to apply for a passport, Kafka is critical about the social distance between citizens and authorities, about filtering processes in hierarchical decision-making, and about the fictional basis of decisions relying on insufficiently read reports. Furthermore, Kafka is functionally critical of the judicial system of his time with regards to personal biases and secrecy. As we have seen, he even attacks corruption. The author through the perspective of Josef K., takes the standpoint of the goal-rational actor confronted with bureaucracy's pathologies. On this level of analysis, McDaniel is correct in pointing out the difference between Kafka's view and Max Weber's so-called effectiveness-thesis stressing precision, continuity, discipline, thoroughness, reliability, universal applicability, and performance as criteria of effectiveness. However, this argument is too unsophisticated with respect to Kafka and to Weber. In fact, both authors are ambivalent in their judgements. There can be no doubt that Kafka, when taking the point of view of the organization, would subscribe to Weber's emphasis on precision, discipline, and reliability. In The Castle, these possibilities of bureaucracy are underlined by informants to K.; the system's perspective, which is not K.'s perspective, emphasizes positive aspects, while K. perceives the social costs ac cruing to the individual official, such as tiredness or signs of alienation in general, and to the client.

Formal versus Substantive Rationality

At this point of the analysis, both Kafka and Weber tend to employ the machine-metaphor, and thereby draw our attention to the merely formal rationality of the system. This implies the paradox that a formally rational system produces substantively irrational results—a fact that is fervently expressed by Kafka:

Having listened to the explanation of the mayor, how the Castle's bureaucracy functions, the following dialogue develops:

Mayor:"… doesn't the story bore you?"

"No", said K., "it entertains me."

Then the mayor: "I do not tell it for your entertainment."

"It entertains me merely in that I get an insight into the ridiculous entanglement that eventually decides about the existence of a man," said K. (my trans.)

A similar scene is contained in The Trial, when Josef K. argues with the thrasher punishing the two warders who had misbehaved when Josef K. was searched at the beginning of the story:

Had I known they were to be punished or even that they could be punished, I would not have told their names. I do not believe they are guilty. Ihe organization is guilty. Guilty are the high officials.… If you had a high judge under your rod, K. said … indeed I did not prevent you from thrashing, on the contrary, I gave you money so that you gained power for a good purpose.

What you say sounds credible, the thrasher said, but I won't let you bribe me. I am employed in order to thrash, thus I thrash. (my trans.)

These dialogues indicate what is known in organizational sociology as goal displacement, and hint at the inclination of the apparatus to produce results or deeds that are substantively irrational. Kafka also realizes that achieving substantive rationality depends upon the high officials' capability to define reasonable goals for the system. But the higher officials hide themselves, and the top ranks of the Castle are even empty. However, the bureaucratic machine, universally applicable as it is (Weber), functions to implement all sorts of tasks, no matter how well they are legitimized or what consequences they bring about.

Those social scientists who are not familiar with Weber's political writings, and (even worse) interpret the ideal type of bureaucracy as a prescriptive model, will probably be surprised to learn that Max Weber, too, was an acid, at times even outrageous, critic of the politico-administrative machinery of the German empire (particularly in 1917), because he was aware that the system produced irrational results. Apolitical as he is said to have been in life, Kafka, as a writer, nevertheless calls the systemic rationality of the Habsburg monarchy into question. However, he did not go as far as Weber, who considered confronting the Kaiser in court. Rather, he seems to have tried to survive under the given circumstances and to subject himself to the system's formal rationality. In The Trial, Josef K. is considering his situation:

Almost every defendant, even very simple people, begins to deliberate at the very beginning of the trial how to improve the system, and in this respect they often waste time and courage, which otherwise might have been better used. It is simply best to accept the given circumstances. (my trans.)

In succumbing to this device and excluding considerations of absolute justice and substantive rationality from his pondering, he seems to persuade himself:

There was no guilt. The trial was nothing else than a big business of the sort he experienced in the bank.

What the outright political attack was for Weber, the satire was for Kafka. Ernst Fischer reports that Kafka's friends burst out in laughter when he read to them the beginning of The Trial, specifically the passage where Josef K. considers legitimizing himself to the warders by producing his bicycle driver's license.

Anthropological Criticism

Apart from functional criticism from the point of view of the individual and doubts about the rationality of bureaucracy when perceived as a system, Kafka (and Weber) embarked on a third level of critical evaluation which could be called the anthropological dimension. As a result of the Occidental process of increasing formal rationalization of all of life's spheres, Weber not only observed the "disenchantment of the world" and the "Zerfall kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten," but also saw the "iron cage" of a bureaucratized world replace traditional ways of life and shape personality. For instance, in a political statement, made together with his brother Alfred at the 1909 Vienna meeting of the "Verein für Sozialpolitik," Weber complained that the needs of bureaucracy brought about the "Berufs- und Diplom-Mensch" [professional person with a university degree]:

A dreadful idea that the world one day would consist of nothing but professors … even more dreadful is the vision that the world shall be filled with nothing but those small wheels (of a machine) … people clinging to their tiny positions and aiming at a somewhat bigger little position.… What can we do to oppose this machinery in order to spare a remainder of humanity from this parceling , out of the soul, from this rule of bureaucratic ideals of life?

He envisioned this specialized, professionally trained, functionally adapted type would replace the "Kulturmensch." Where Weber's aristocratic individualism clashed with the upcoming professional man, Kafka experienced this conflict in coming to terms with his role as a fiction writer. On one hand he had to earn his living through office work, on the other hand he aspired to be an artist. Reducing office hours was the compromise. Although in his later years Kafka was well aware that he personally needed the bureaucratic subsistence of life and the relieving office routine, he complained in a letter to Milena that:

with respect to his inherent traits he was an official, thus a member of the gutter class [Auswurfklasse] of the European professional man [Berufsmensch]. (Binder 1976, my trans.)

Is it not a striking parallel that Kafka resembles Weber even in the wording? Should there be more than "Wahlverwandtschaft" between Kafka's and Weber's conceptualization and evaluation of bureaucracy?

INTELLECTUAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RELATIONSHIPS

Although Weber died in 1920 and Kafka in 1924, Kafka was still 20 years Weber's junior; and though the two never met, they were connected biographically by two influential mutual acquaintances: Alfred Weber, Max's younger brother, and Otto Gross, one of Freud's first disciples.

Otto Gross (1877-1920) turned Freud political and his sexual anarchism brought him in touch with the Bohemian scene in Schwabing and in Berlin. Not only was Kafka acquainted with Gross and inclined to cooperate in a planned journal "Letters for Fighting the Will to Power," Otto Gross's father, the criminologist professor Hans Gross, was one of Kafka's academic teachers in Prague from 1902 to 1905. In 1913, the long smoldering father-son conflict escalated after Otto Gross had played a dubious role in two suicides and become dependent on drugs; he was taken into custody by the Berlin police on the personal request of his father from Austria. This incident caused wide-spread public protest in literary circles and it is assumed that it inspired Kafka in writing "The Penal Colony." Not merely did he compare the death machine to apparatuses used in asylums, some analysts even attribute to the Gross affair the enigmatic introductory sentence of The Trial: "Somebody must have slandered Josef K."

In 1907, Gross had submitted an article to Weber's Archiv far Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik on the liberation of women which provoked an annihilating letter of rejection by Weber. Nonscholarly reasons might have caused Weber's scorn, for Gross had practiced his theory with female acquaintances in Weber's social environment. Nevertheless, Otto Gross's forced hospitalization drew even Max Weber into action: Professor Gross had claimed guardianship over Otto's son, basically on the ground that Frieda Gross had retreated from civil society to a colony of anarchists in Ascona. Characteristic for Max Weber's personality, he traveled to Ascona in 1914 to help Frieda Gross, his wife's schoolfriend, to defend her maternal rights against her father-in-law. Taken the acquaintance between Gross and Kafka, it is not unlikely that Kafka had some familiarity with the sociologist Max Weber.

The second biographical connection is less indirect and could well have had a bearing on Kafka's evaluation, if not conceptualization of bureaucracy. Max's younger brother Alfred Weber was professor of sociology at Prague University during 1904-1907 and even awarded Kafka the Juris Doctor degree on 18th of June 1906, as Wagenbach discovered. This, however, was only a formal procedure of introduction to the rector of the university, as in those days one was not obliged to write a doctoral thesis. Although A. Weber cannot be regarded as Kafka's academic supervisor and Kafka did not attend Weber's lectures, Kafka was probably familiar with Weber's ideas from what Max Brod, an admirer of Alfred Weber's, told him. Even more directly, Kafka must have been exposed to Max Weber's sociology of religion, which extensively treats ancient Judaism. Max Brod asked him to read a draft of a chapter he had written in 1920 which dealt with Weber's theory. Brod and Kafka debated over this chapter by exchanging letters. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Alfred drew on the body of knowledge and the evaluations he shared with Max, including those on bureaucracy. Last but not least, as a jurist Kafka underwent training in legal positivism, acquired knowledge in the history of law and had at least a sketchy overview of the state apparatus. Although Weber's seminal work on bureaucracy was not published early enough for Kafka to have read it, we may assume that Kafka knew some of the sources of Max Weber who was also a jurist by training. Albach, furthermore, assumes that Kafka might also have become acquainted with Sombart's and Weber's works about the entrepreneur and capitalism in his subsidiary field of "Nationalökonomie." Moreover, it is not unlikely that Kafka followed A. Weber's statements after Weber had gone to Heidelberg University in 1907. For instance, he could have read about the Weber brothers' contribution to the 1909 meeting of the "Verein für Sozialpolitik," from which I quoted above. This is particularly likely, as Alfred Weber had played a leading role in Prague's public life during 1907 and returned there on several occasions. Most importantly, though, Kafka is more than likely to have studied the article "The Official" by Alfred Weber (1910), which appeared in the Neue Rundschau, a journal Kafka regularly read. Lange-Kirchheim has conclusively proved on a linguistic basis that Kafka, in writing "The Penal Colony" in 1913, took metaphors (in particular the notion of bureaucracy as a technical apparatus) from this article that condemned and ridiculed the mentality of civil servants in line with M. Weber's statement of 1909. In "The Penal Colony," Kafka alludes to the quasi-religious image that was widely attributed to state bureaucracy in the Austrian and German empires and which A. Weber coined as "Staatsmetaphysik."

The Weberian influence on "The Penal Colony" is also of some general importance for Kafka's literary production. Lange-Kirchheim argues that the story constitutes a turning point in Kafka's opus: the leitmotif of law-guilt-punishment after 1917 became transposed from the hitherto dominant intra-family-constellation as in The Judgement and The Metamorphosis into a societal frame of reference (state, society, history). The father, henceforth, is replaced by the impersonal authority of the "apparatus" as in The Trial and The Castle—thus constituting a theoretical reorientation from psychology to sociology.

CONCLUSION

Kafka, like no other German language novelist of the 20th century, wove the notion of bureaucracy into his fiction (especially in The Trial and The Castle). My thesis is that this could have more to do with Kafka's office experience than is generally acknowledged. Furthermore, a Weberian influence on his conceptualization and evaluation of bureaucracy is likely. That main stream literary science and the established Kafka experts have, so far, not elaborated upon the bureaucratic imagery of Kafka's work could have resulted from a lack of familiarity with bureaucracy, and a preoccupation with the idealist tradition.

The parallels with, and divergences from, Max Weber's model or ideal type of bureaucracy are complemented by Kafka's largely congruent assessment of bureaucracy. Although it is ambivalent and originates from his differentiated understanding (functional, systemic, anthropological), as well as from his personal experience with bureaucracy, such an antithetical appreciation can also be found in Max Weber's work when we pay attention to the paradox of formal and substantive rationality and take into account his political writings.

The amazing congeniality of Kafka and Weber as to analysis and evaluation of bureaucracy can certainly be understood from the intellectual currents of the "Zeitgeist" and a common intellectual background including juridical training, interest in the sociology of religion, and psychoanalysis. However, the two-albeit indirect-biographical linkages between Kafka and Weber, through Otto Gross and Alfred Weber, undoubtedly raise the imnnanent parallels of the artist's and the analyst's treatment of bureaucracy well beyond a mere "Wahlverwandtschaft."