SOURCE: “Franz Kafka and Literary Nihilism,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 6, No. 3, September, 1977, pp. 366-79.

[In the following essay, Emrich analyzes Kafka's complex relationship to nihilism.]

That the political movement known as Nihilism originated in Russia is a well-known fact of modern history. Literary nihilism, a much less consciously organized movement, also has its origins in Russia. The word “nihilism” first emerges in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862), where the young Bazarov, a representative of Western materialism and radical sceptical thinking, is described as a nihilist. In the following violent debate over this figure, after whom revolutionary groups in Russia then called themselves Nihilists, although they had at first sharply rejected the figure of Bazarov as a caricature of their own intentions, Dostoevsky, whose own novels and theoretical writings were primarily concerned with the struggle against Western materialism, atheism, and nihilism, had the following to say:

Nihilism came into existence among us Russians because we are all nihilists. We were only frightened by the new, original form of its appearance. The dismay and worry of our intelligent men, who sought to discover the origin of the nihilists, was funny. They actually did not come from anywhere, but have always been with us, in us, and among us.¹

With this, Dostoevsky utters a truth which is not limited just to the Russians and their specific ways of life, those ways of life that, even before Turgenev, appear in drastic form, for example, in Goncharov's ingeniously portrayed character of the idle, hopelessly melancholy Oblomov, who shied from and despised all social obligations (1859). The fact that the nihilists have been with us, in us, and among us all the time is rather a more comprehensive truth which holds for a very wide range of human reality and human consciousness.

In his analyses of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche saw the cause of this phenomenon in the fact “that the supreme values”—belief in God, in immortality, in ethical principles—“are being lost. A purpose is lacking: the answer to the ‘why’ is lacking.”² With this Nietzsche formulates, as does Dostoevsky, the fact that the majority of contemporary humanity, usually without knowing it, finds itself under the reign of nihilism because the question of the highest meaning and purpose, the “why” of human existence, is no longer answered within society, which concentrates on purely material striving for possessions.

Nietzsche, however, went a step beyond Dostoevsky in proclaiming that the heralds of the supreme values, the Christians, were in origin and essence also nihilists. Christianity is the actual cause of Western nihilism, because it has depreciated the whole material world, has defamed it as a world of sin, has transferred the supreme values into the next world: “It is a mistake to point to ‘social emergencies’ of ‘physiological degenerations’ or even to corruption as the cause of nihilism. It is the most honest, most emphatic time. Need, spiritual, physical, intellectual need, is in itself by no means incapable of producing nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning, and desirability). These needs still permit quite different interpretations. But: nihilism lies in a quite specific interpretation, in the Christian-moral interpretation.”³

With this Nietzsche formulates a remarkable double aspect of nihilism. Both the life and thought styles of man, restricted to purely material things, know no supreme values, and the moral way of life oriented toward the pure beyond are covered by the concept of nihilism.

Franz Kafka found himself exactly in this two-sided problematical situation, both in his literary creation and in his actual life situation, when he constantly speaks about the “struggle” between two “opponents” in his works and in his personal preoccupation with his environment. These “opponents” either drive him out of worldly existence on grounds of absolute moral commandments and demands or want to restrict him to a material life through reference to the duties of society, family, wife, and occupation. Kafka seeks to escape from both the annihilation of the material through the absolute and the annihilation of the absolute through a totally relativized material existence, abandoned to itself.⁴ With this he occupies—like Nietzsche—a special position within the modern phenomenon of nihilism and our preoccupation with it. In order to be able to establish and articulate this more precisely, I must delve a bit further. Dostoevsky's statement that nihilism has always been with us, in us, and among us is all the more surprising, since Dostoevsky himself was a devout Christian who awaited not only the salvation of Russia, but that of mankind from the Russian Orthodox Church. He meant thereby that within religion itself a permanent struggle with “nothingness” is taking place, yes, that religions would not even exist without knowledge of the nihilistic possibilities existing in all men and in all times. Even the Old Testament fights not merely against idolaters, but also against atheists, who idolize their own bellies and deride all higher values, following their own material interests. And the theological reflections on the relationship of being and nothingness led among Christian mystics even to a positive evaluation of nothingness, to its identity with God Himself.

This comes up again on the philosophical level with Hegel, who equated absolute being with nothingness, because by its very nature it can never appear, can never be assigned any concrete existence. In Buddhism nothingness is the supreme religious category.

“The spirit who always negates” is for Goethe inseparably tied up with human existence itself. Without this spirit there would be no productive activity, no striving for supreme values and perceptions.

No one, however, can or would want to assert that the Christian mystics, the Buddhists, Hegel, and Goethe were nihilists in the modern sense of the word. In today's linguistic usage, nihilism arises only as nothingness, comes to stand by itself, and makes everything nothing and worth nothing, both material phenomena and the higher spiritual, psychic, and moral values. Everything becomes “meaningless” and “disgusting,” which is why concepts such as disgust, boredom, meaninglessness and absurdity are the central, constantly recurring terms in the nihilistic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In his study, Experimentum suae medictatis,⁵ Walther Rehm showed that literary nihilism in Germany arose at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, in Ludwig Tieck's novel William Lovell (1794–1796), in Jean Paul's dream-composition, “Speech of the Dead Christ From the World Structure, That There is No God,” which was conceived about 1789-1790 and later incorporated into the novel Siebenkäs, and above all in the novel The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (published in 1805), author unknown. Ludwig Tieck and Jean Paul portrayed nihilism as one possibility, among others, and described it as a phenomenon which had to be conquered. But their wrestling with this phenomenon, rising almost to outbreaks of despair, shows how powerfully the awareness of impending doom was already present within them. Jean Paul criticizes figures like Roquairol in his novel Titan as fateful appearances of the Zeitgeist, becoming more and more powerful. At the very beginning of his Introduction to Aesthetics (1804), he describes them as “poetic nihilists,” who transform everything into a futile aesthetic “game” through their lawless phantasy. Poetic nihilism, he writes here, “results from the lawless arbitrariness of the contemporary Zeitgeist—which is perfectly willing to selfishly destroy the world and the universe just in order to clear a free playground for it in the resultant nothingness.”⁶ Jean Paul did not originally put the complaint that God does not exist into the mouth of the dead Christ, but into the mouth of the dead Shakespeare, obviously because of the conviction that already in Shakespeare's tragedies the danger becomes apparent that the world, left to itself, as it were, remains in a state of permanent murderous self-destruction. “Take God out of the universe,” writes Jean Paul, “and everything is destroyed, every higher spiritual joy, every love, and only the wish for spiritual suicide would remain, and only the devil and the beast could still ask to exist.”⁷

But literary nihilism is perfect in the novel Die Nachtwaschen des Bonaventura (The Nightwatches of Bonaventura). The author clearly identifies himself with it, which was probably also the reason why he wanted to remain unknown. The work ends with the word “nothingness” as the “Echo in the Ossuary.” Men are puppets, dolls, masks, with which an “insane world creator” stages a meaningless and monotonously unvarying absurd farce, which evokes only endless boredom and disgust. The living are in reality dead, their movements merely illusion; in reality they are always treading only in the same place. But the dead are senselessly, repeatedly alive, continually celebrating their nonsensical roles. Hamlet lives on and writes to Ophelia:

Everything is a role, the role itself and the actor who plays in it, and in him again his thoughts and plans and enthusiasms and pranks—everything belongs to the moment and escapes quickly, like the word from the lips of the actor. Do you want to free yourself from the role, down your own self?—Look, there stands the skeleton, throwing a handful of dust into the air, and now it crumbles away itself;—but mocking laughter follows. That is the world spirit, or the devil—or the echo of nothingness! To be or not to be! How simple I was then, when I raised this question with my finger on my nose, how much simpler were those who asked it after me, and had the wildest ideas of what it all meant. I should have first questioned being about being itself, then non-being would have made sense too. In those days my theory of immortality was still from that school and I applied it to all categories. Indeed, I was truly afraid of death because of immortality—and by heaven, justly so, if after this boring comedie larmoyante another one like it was to follow—I think it has nothing to do with it!⁸

With this both the content and the structure of nihilistic literature were anticipated and established. They appear in extreme form in Büchner and Grabbe, reappear again in Naturalism and Expressionism, in order finally to reach a new climax in lonesco and Samuel Beckett⁹: the world play as a meaninglessly revolving carrousel on which the end flows again and again into the beginning; man on the carrousel as automaton, puppet, animal, or thing, caught up in an endless journey, which is actually standing still¹⁰; man as an eternally living-dead man, who can neither live nor die¹¹; durable presence of catastrophe, which becomes a normal, permanent condition; cancelling out of the comic and the tragic through the grotesque, through which they become indistinguishably one in the indissoluble union of laughter and terror; and, finally, identity between formalized burlesque farce and immediate despair.

In Büchner the characters are already dead when the curtain goes up. His play Danton's Death begins with the sentence, “Danton (to his lover Julie): No. listen! People say there is peace in the grave, and the grave and peace are the same thing. If this is so, then in your lap I am already lying under the earth. You sweet grave, your lips are bells of death, your voice is my funeral knell, your breast my grave mound and your heart my coffin.” In Act 3 he says, “The cursed phrase: Something can not become nothing! And I am something, that is the rub!—Creation has spread so much that nothing is empty anymore. Everything is teeming. Nothingness has murdered itself, creation is its wound, we are its drops of blood, the world is the grave in which it is rotting. We are all buried alive and like kings laid in three—or fourfold coffins, under the sky, in our homes, in our coats and shirts. Indeed, only whoever could believe in annihilation could be helped.” And in Act 4 Danton summarizes his despair with the words, “The Universe is Chaos. Nothingness is the future god of the universe.” This is exactly in accord with the theme and form of the contemporary plays of Samuel Beckett: the catastrophe and death are already present at every moment, but nevertheless we cannot die. In Beckett's play End Game the world has already exploded, and the characters perpetually reflect the inevitability and incomprehensibility of their living-dead existence in monotonous repetitions.

But also in such a totally different writer as Gerhart Hauptmann the world creator god appears in almost all the dramas at the same time as the eternal slayer, so that a way out of the killing can be hoped for only in “nothingness.” His tragedy Electra ends with the words, “The world shall finally die: it like us!” At the end of the tragedy Veland stand the words, “In nothingness some day.”¹²

Compared to this Franz Kafka represents a totally different position within nihilism or vis-á-vis nihilism. In the sketches “Er” (“He”) (1920), Kafka writes:

It is a question of the following: Many years ago I was sitting, certainly sadly enough, on the slope of Laurenzius Hill. I tested the wishes that I had for life. The wish that became the most important or most appealing was to gain an attitude towards life (and—this was to be sure necessarily tied up with it—to be able to convince the others of it in writing), in which life would actually keep its natural sharp ups and downs, but at the same time would be recognized with no less clarity than a nothingness, than a dream, than a floating in the air. A nice wish maybe, if I had wished it correctly. Perhaps as a wish to hammer a table together with painstaking workmanship and at the same time to do nothing, but in such a way that one could say “Hammering is nothing to him,” but “Hammering is truly hammering to him and at the same time also nothing”; whereby the hammering would have become even more daring, more determined, more real, and, if you want, still crazier. But he could not wish like this at all, because his wish was no wish, it was just a defense, a bourgeoisization of nothingness, a breath of liveliness, that he wanted to give the nothingness, into which he had then barely taken his first conscious steps, but that he already felt as his element. It was in those days a form of farewell, which he took from the illusory world of his youth; besides it had never directly deceived him, but only allowed him to be deceived by the speeches of all surrounding authorities. The necessity of the “wish” had been produced in this way.¹³

Kafka's position, then, differs in a decisive point from the position of the nihilistic literature just depicted. With him nothingness is to be sure also “his element,” into which he inescapably wandered as he left the illusory world of his youth, saw through the deceptions and lies of all authorities around him. But he wants to “defend” himself against the absolute annihilation of all existence. The hammering, material action, should remain a real hammering, a real, maybe even a meaningful and essential activity, although at the same time it is irrevocably a nothingness, an unique meaninglessness, so that this simultaneity of reality and nothingness takes on the character of “insanity.”

Only when one has comprehended the paradoxical nature of Kafka's position do the structures and meanings of his enigmatic writings become clear. It is just this permanent self-contradiction, which he himself also always sees through as a self-contradiction and painfully bears, that shapes the form and meaningful strength of these writings. For this self-contradiction is necessary and indelible. It can never be honestly solved in a world in which the supreme values have actually disappeared, and therefore also concrete empirical existence with all its activities threatens to crumble into nothingness, into meaninglessness. Kafka is primarily concerned with the rescue of this concrete life, already reduced to nothing, as improbable as this may appear upon first viewing his work, and as much as the self-critical sneering remark about the “bourgeoisization of nothingness” seems to parody this rescue attempt and to lead to the absurd. He wants to give concrete human existence a “law” establishing form and meaning, a new “command,” a supreme court, although he knows that it is impossible, that such a law will always remain “unknown” and unattainable:

It's not idleness, bad will, clumsiness—even though something of all this may be in it, because “vermin is born from nothingness”—which makes or doesn't even make everything fail for me: family life, friendship, marriage, occupation, literature, instead it is the lack of ground, air, commandment. It is my task to create these, not that I can then catch up on the things missed, but so that I haven't missed anything, because this task is just as good as another. It is actually even the most original task or at least a reflection of it, just as one can suddenly step into the light of the distant sun by reaching the top of height in the rarefied air.¹⁴ This is also no exceptional task, it has certainly already been frequently presented whether indeed to such an extent, I don't know. I haven't brought any of the demands of life along, as far as I know, but only the most common human weaknesses. With this weakness—in this respect it is a gigantic strength—I have strongly taken up the negative aspect of my times, which is certainly very close to me, against which I never have the right to fight, but to represent it in a certain sense. I had no inherited share in the slight positive element, as well as in the uttermost negative element, tilting over to the positive. I was not led into life by the already heavily sinking hand of Christianity, like Kierkegaard, and I haven't caught the last tip of fleeing Jewish prayer mantle like the Zionists. I am the end or the beginning.

(H 120f)

It is a decisive factor that Kafka here unreservedly clearly identifies himself with the nihilism of his times, that he no longer sees the smallest possibility of renewing religious traditions or even of establishing relations with them. If one follows his thought trend to the end, then it even critically rejects any chance to form today's world and society anew by means of a negative dialectic be it the modern dialectical Protestant theology of a Kierkegaard or Karl Barth all the way to Paul Tillich, or the negative, socio-critical dialectic of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Their dialectic nevertheless hopes for a reversal of the negative “in extremis” into something positive, since that dialectic is permanently negating everything in existence which is socially calamitous, even if—exactly as with the dialectical theologians—this positive is never formulated, may never appear materialized, is never reachable through concrete actions,¹⁵ but can manifest itself only as “utopia,” as a postulate, as an ever-present concept of true humanity, true happiness, or true undistorted humaneness out of the immanent dialectical movements and changes of human history and society.

Kafka opposes these collected possibilities of modern thought and hope. For him they are a long-lost play. His “battle” just is not valid to the times. He is not a “critic of the times” neither in the sense of a conservative pessimistic critique of the times (as we practiced from Tocqueville through Oswald Spengler down to Arnold Gehlen, Ernst Topitsch and Toynbee), nor in the sense of the so-called progressive revolutionary critique of the times. He feels himself rather to be a “representative” of this time which is criticized by everyone whose “negative qualities” he has strongly absorbed. In the sketches “Er” (“He”) Kafka writes:

He doesn't live for the sake of his personal life, he doesn't think for the sake of his personal thinking. For him it's as if he were living and thinking under the coercion of a family, which itself is teeming with life—and brain power, for which he however represents a formal necessity according to some law unknown to him. He cannot be let off free because of this unknown family and these unknown laws.

(B 295)

Therefore, Kafka wants neither to reform nor to revolutionize society. He does not want to commend to it any historical-philosophical recipe or even a panacea through which it could be freed from its sicknesses and crises. He much rather wants simply to recognize society and to describe it as it is, or, as he formulated it in a letter to Max Brod, “… it is my endgoal to scan the whole human and animal kingdom to recognize their basic preferences, desires, moral ideals … in summary I am, therefore, concerned only with the human and animal court of justice.”¹⁶ For him the human and animal community is at the same time the human and animal court of justice. For in this kingdom there is incessant motivation, judgment, seeking for justice or injustice, the meaning or absurdity of an occurrence or of a thought. Our reflections and inner monologues are nothing more than attempts to motivate our own and others' lives, to justify or accuse and condemn. “Everything belongs to the court” it says in the novel The Trial (181). But this human and animal court of justice is also totally disoriented. Its court procedures and records continually run in all directions in a disaster or disorder and absurdities. No one knows the definitive lawbook, the highest court. But in ancient, religiously oriented times there seemed to be still a supreme judge and, correspondingly, also a clearly organized and founded order of justice, even though it might be dreadful and pitiless,¹⁷ like the old commander's order of justice in “The Penal Colony.” But under the modern, new and ever so human and “always cheerful” commandant every form of courtly justice is finally destroyed. Thereupon production goes on with chaotic cheerfulness: “For miles the most ambitious pounding started. No pause was permitted, only a change of hands. The arrival of our snake was already announced for the evening, till then everything had to be pounded to dust, our snake tolerates not even the smallest pebble” (T 525f). Mankind disintegrates into dust. The workers themselves become “snake feed,” the food of the devil snake, whose arrival is announced at the end of each workday, indeed, for which in the final analysis all earthly work in modern times is being accomplished.

The nihilistic degree of this vision of Kafka's can no longer be outdone. The whole modern workaday world is invalid, produces nothingness with pauseless work, the total pulverization of all meaning in the name of evil, which has become absolute.

Still Kafka feels responsible and directly obligated to this working world that is being pulverized into nothingness. He feels himself tied to unknown laws which could form this workaday world; indeed, he also seeks the “unknown family” of this new human race, that is, for a still undiscovered, meaningful order within this self-annihilating society. Despite his despair he clings firmly to his own writing, because this writing, as he formulates it, represents a formal necessity for modern society according to some law unknown to him.

What does this mean? Wherein lies this formal necessity? Again and again, Kafka has felt and thoroughly reflected on his exceptional position within modern literature and society; thus already in his sketches of 1910, in which he says that he has stepped out of the “current of the times” (T 22), he no longer is swimming in this stream like all the others. This extreme critical distance excites extreme despair to be sure, the inability to live and to think like everybody else. But it also provides extreme clarity, because “the man,” as Kafka writes in 1921, “who doesn't come to grips with life alive, needs one hand to ward off despair over his fate a little—it happens very imperfectly,—but with the other hand he can gather in what he sees among the ruins, because he sees other things and more than the others do, after all he is dead in his lifetime and the real survivor” (T 545).

Here in an extremely disconcerting manner, yet sharply marking Kafka's particular position, the old nihilistic topos of the living-dead is reversed into its opposite. The living-dead man no longer circles without purpose in the carrousel of time, but becomes a man who realizes its meaning and becomes the survivor.¹⁸

In the sketch “At Night” Kafka describes contemporary humanity as a sleeping mass which imagines itself sleeping in “Houses,” “In secure beds, beneath a secure roof,” while in reality, it lies “in a desolate region … under a cold sky on cold earth, thrown down where formerly one had been standing.” And he closes with a question to himself: “Why are you awake? One person must be awake, it is said” (B 116). Mankind has been sleeping unsuspectingly, without consciousness, surrendering to “nothingness,” for wasteland and cold are unambiguous pictures of nihilism. Remember Nietzsche's words: “The wasteland is growing.” But Kafka himself is the lone waking watchman, the only one who, like no other, has, through this nihilism, totally swept away the last remainder of illusions, hopes, utopias. But just this is what his formal need for the human and animal community signifies: “Only forward, hungry animal, does the way lead to edible sustenance, breathable air, free life, even if it be beyond life. You are leading the masses, great tall general, lead the despairing through the mountain passes lying under the snow, which no one else can discover. And who will give you the strength? He who gives you the clarity of vision” (T 572).

So what Kafka is after is the discovery of the passes lying under the snowy wastes of our century and hidden from all which lead to a free life, to breathable air, to edible nourishment, that is, to a purpose, to an existence worthy of a human being. We know that icy cold snowy wastelands are also in other writings of Kafka, such as in The Castle or in “The Country Doctor,” symbols of the “frost of our most wretched time” (E 153). In the middle of this snow—or, more accurately, under this snow—Kafka wants to find the ways which lead out of it, of course; and this testifies to the illusionless clarity of his vision, in the complete consciousness that such a free life lies “beyond life”: therefore, it is unattainable here on earth.

Nevertheless he escapes neither into the beyond nor does he regress into the unsuspecting life, gaily splashing on its way, which—somewhat as in the novel The Castle—amuses itself in the steaming baths in the village huts, almost buried beneath the masses of snow. Rather, he holds steadfastly to the permanent self-contradiction, to ways to a free life which is and remains unattainable. The search itself is his task, his inescapable duty, even if he knows that it is fruitless, will lead to no tangible result, even if it is clear to him that he will “perish in the search,” as is stated in his early work, “Description of a Fight” (B 59).

The search, the examination, the research, the experiment—these are the decisive categories which determine the form and content of his works. All his works are basically one large experiment. In the story “Researches of a Dog” all possibilities are questioned and experimentally tested through the means and methods of science, of art (musical dogs), and also of religious meditation and practice to come over to the truth out of this world of lies, where no one is found from whom one can discover truth “to ascend into lofty freedom” (B 256), to arrive at “another science” “than the one practiced today, a final science, which made freedom honored more highly than anything else” (B 290). In the story “The Building” all possibilities are investigated, in endless reflections and experiments, of erecting a building in which one can live fearlessly and securely. In the stories of the Building of the Chinese Wall the problems arising through the attempt to erect a structure of humanity or a heavens-storming structure, in which mankind can exist with a meaning, are unfolded and reflected upon. The “laws,” according to which people live are reviewed, and a compulsory empire is searched for which could guarantee a lasting order worthy of mankind. In the novel The Castle, the earthly land in which we all live in our love relationships, our profession (K.'s activity in the village school), or in the confusion of the officials, who incessantly register and seek to regulate everything we think, feel, and do, although it never seems to succeed with reason and insight, is measured in the painfully grinding questioning by the surveyor K.

Kafka could never be freed, “let go” from these researches, because he, in spite of all the defeats and absurdities which must necessarily always develop out of such questions and experiments aiming at the ultimate and most extreme points, was firmly convinced that an absolute “law,” an indestructible court, exists, that nihilism therefore cannot be the last word of our times, not the final pitiless truth: “Man can not live without a lasting trust in something indestructible within himself” (H 44). He felt it to be the real obligation of his writing to make this indestructibility within ourselves conscious as an existence—in spite of its unknown nature. It cannot become conscious without the destruction, free of illusion, of all false laws and orders in which we find ourselves, without unmasking the “choir of lies” (H 343), and especially those lies which promise escapes out of the nihilistic chaos.

Franz Kafka was the most radical nihilist of our time, however, not in the sense of those literary nihilists who fell prey to nihilism, becoming its mouthpiece, as it were, but in the sense of a critically observing man who continuously fights it by unmasking it, who uncovers its roots—that is what the word “radical” means. His statement, “I am the end or the beginning,” exactly denotes his position. He is the end because he repels all consolations which come from the past, it matters not whether they be religious or social revolutionary consolations and hopes, somewhat in the sense of Ernst Bloch's “Hope of Principle,” for example; he is the beginning, not because he conquered nihilism. He has not conquered it and also did not want to conquer it. For nothingness was his own “element,” and he forcefully represented the negative elements of his time. But because Kafka, comprehending nihilism in its core and scope, enticed the knowledge out of his researches that nihilism is not the final, definitive truth and reality of our human existence, that buried under the masses of snow there are passes at hand which lead to freedom, that in us there exists a court which is ineradicable, the “unknown law,” and with it an “unknown human family.”

This instance is no longer God, can no longer be a transcendental reality. This is the abyss which separates us from the past. It lies within ourselves as the indestructible element that we do not know and that nevertheless remains present within us, ever demanding. It could or should also form the “beginning” for a new formation of the concrete man—and animal-community—after all other religious and social revolutionary forms have failed. “The fact that nothing else exists, except the spiritual world, takes hope away from us but gives us certainty” (H 46). The material world is totally annihilated and dissolved into dust. The so-called intellectual world of world-views and ideologies is, as Hegel already shrewdly remarked on in his “Phenomenology of the Spirit,” in truth a “spiritual animal realm,” enveloped in animal interests and power-fights, and because of this at the same time is totally annihilated. Kafka's statement that there exists nothing but the spiritual world signifies—also in Hegel's and Kant's sense of categorical, lawgiving imperative—that, on the contrary, the remaining, indestructible substance of man can never be touched by nihilism and relativism, but is our only real imperishable reality, even if we ourselves do not know it. It “takes hope away from us,” it robs us of illusions, of being able to constitute a realm of freedom and justice in the jungle fight of history. It “gives us the certainty” that in the midst of this jungle fight—not beyond it—nothing else counts and exists except the spiritual world, that everything else inevitably remains prey to nihilism.

Exactly in this sense did Kafka remain true to his Judaism, when in his conversation with Gustav Janouch about the latter's plan to write a play, Saul, he declared:

The correct word leads; the incorrect one misleads. It is no accident that the Bible is called scripture. It is the voice of the Jewish people, which is not something belonging historically to yesterday, but something totally contemporary. In your drama it is however treated as an historically mumified fact, and this is false. If I understand you correctly, then you want to bring today's masses onto the stage. They have nothing in common with the Bible. This is the core of your drama. The people of the Bible are the summary of individuals through a law. The masses of today, however, oppose every summary. They strive apart on grounds of inner law-lessness. This is the driving force of their restless movement. The masses hurry, run, go storming through time. Where to? From where do they come? No one knows. The more they march, the less they reach a goal. They uselessly use up their strength. They think that they are going. In so doing they only plunge—marching in place—into empty space. That's all.

(J 103f)

Kafka had asked before, “And the center of gravity? Where is the center of gravity of the world in this drama?” Janouch answered:

“It lies down below in the mass basis of the people. In spite of the single individual figures it is a drama of the anonymous multitude.” Franz Kafka drew his thick eyebrows together, pushed his lower lip out a bit, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue and said, without looking at me: “I think that you are proceeding from premises. Anonymous means the same as nameless. But the Jewish people has never been nameless. On the contrary! It is the chosen people of a personal God, that can never sink to the low level of an anonymous, and therefore spiritless mass, if it holds fast to the fulfillment of the law. Only through the fall from the form-giving law can mankind become a gray, formless and, therefore, nameless mass. But then there is no longer an above and below; life flattens to mere existence; there is no drama, no fight, just the using up of material, decay. This, however, is not the world of the Bible and Judaism.” I defended myself. “I'm not concerned with Judaism and the Bible. The biblical material is just a means of representation of today's masses for me.” Kafka shook his head. “Exactly! What you want is not right. You can't make life into an allegory of death. That would be sinful!” “What do you call sin?” “Sin is the backing away from your own mission. Misunderstanding, impatience and indolence—this is sin. A writer's task is to carry over his isolated mortality into immortal life, the accidental into the lawful. He has a prophetic task!”

(J 102f)

Notes

1. F. M. Dostoevsky, Literarische Schriften (Munich, 1920), p. 359.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte, Erstes Buch: Der europäische Nihilismus, Absatz 2, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Auswahl in 2 Bänden, with an Introduction by Gerhard Lehmann (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1939), II, 318.

3. Nietzsche, p. 317.

4. See, for example, Franz Katka, Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit, eds. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1967), pp. 617-618, 756.

5. Walther Rehm, “Experimentum suae medietatis: Eine Studie zur dichterischen Gestaltung des Unglaubens bei Jean Paul und Dostojewski,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts Frankfurt am Main 1936-40 (Halle a. d. S.: Niemeyer, 1940), pp. 237-336.

6. Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, V (Munich: Hanser, 1963), p. 31.

7. Rehm, p. 243.

8. Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, with an Afterword by Adolf von Grolman (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1955), pp. 134-135.

9. For more detailed remarks and evidence for this thesis see Wilhelm Emrich, “Georg Büchner und die moderne Literatur,” in Polemik: Streitschriften, Pressefehden und kritische Essays um Prinzipien, Methoden und Massstäbe der Literaturkritik. Chapter IV: “Barocke tristesse im faschistischen Zeitalter” (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1968), pp. 131-172, also Chapter II: “Pressekampagne,” sections “Lamentieren statt konfrontieren” and “Warum wagen sie so wenig?”, pp. 33-42.

10. See the interesting examples of analogous phenomena in Expressionist lyric poetry and in nineteenth-century French Symbolism in Kurt Mautz. Georg Heym: Mythologie und Gesellschaft im Expressionismus (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1961).

11. See Kafka's “Hunter Gracchus” figure, which derives from an extensive nihilist tradition. Even phenomena like that of Richard Wagner's “Flying Dutchman” are indebted to this tradition, albeit they are guided by the intention to find a “salvation” from this living-dead nihilistic form of existence. See Mautz for further examples. Kafka, however, did not cling to this tradition, as indicated below.

12. Wilhelm Emrich, “Der Tragödientypus Gerhart Hauptmanns,” in Protest und Verheissung: Studien zur Klassischen und modernen Dichtung, 3d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1968), pp. 193-205.

13. Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1954), pp. 293-294, hereafter cited as B. The following abbreviations are also used for the works cited below, which are all published by S. Fischer: Franz Kafka, Erzählungen (1946) E; Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass (1953) H; Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka (1951) J: Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (1953) P; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910-1923 (1951) T.

14. All through Kafka's work we find the symbols of the quest for “breathable air” in a world in which one cannot breathe, for “edible food” which contemporary society does not possess (Der Hungerkünstler, also the reflections in the Forschungen eines Hundes on the origin of “food”), for dwellable “soil,” which exists nowhere (Der Bau). More precise analyses of these symbols may be found in Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka. 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1970).

15. See Theodor W. Adorno's sharp criticism of the active political involvement of his own social revolutionary students, who had been influenced by him, in his “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,” in Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2. Suhrkamp edition No. 347 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969).

16. Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1958), p. 178.

17. See Kafka's diary entry: “Wüten Gottes gegen die Menschenfamilie. Die zwei Bäume. das unbegründete Verbot” (T 502).

18. Here Kafka takes up again, from a critical point of view, the nihilistic motif of “senseless walking,” that is really a “continual treading on the very same spot”; Kurt Mautz (note 10 above) has thoroughly documented and analyzed this motif, which can be traced from the nihilistic literature of the nineteenth century through Expressionism down to Samuel Beckett.