Quote of the Day (Aharon Appelfeld, on Franz Kafka and the Holocaust)

“[Franz] Kafka died in 1924, years before the Holocaust, yet his name is connected to it, and not only because his three sisters and Milena Jesenská, a woman he loved, perished in concentration camps. All his puzzle-ridden writing is a kind of long nightmare about what was to come. I say ‘nightmare’ and not ‘prophecy,’ because what happened in reality was much more cruel than Kafka had imagined. Kafka felt, even more strongly than Freud did, that demons lurked behind the mask of Western civilization. Fifteen years after his death, they burst out of the cellar in the form of the S.S. and other heartless abbreviations. In Kafka’s work, the demons are defense lawyers and prosecutors, and there is still an illusion of justice. Words sound as though they still have value.”— Romanian-born Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018), “The Kafka Connection,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2001

Franz Kafka (pictured) died 100 years ago this month in Prague, of starvation resulting from laryngeal tuberculosis—an ironic echo of his classic short story, “The Hunger Artist.” But for additional reasons, I couldn’t let this anniversary pass without noting his continuing meaning for our time.

To start with, as Susan Halstead’s blog post this month for the British Library observes, the author is among the “very few [who] have been honoured by having their names used as the basis of adjectives occurring in almost every language”—in this case, to denote “a creator of bizarre worlds in which the uncanny and incongruous gradually infiltrate humdrum surroundings to devastating effect.”

(The most hilarious parody of this tendency, I think, came in the Mel Brooks’ film comedy The Producers, in which one of the title characters, Max Bialystock, angling to find an epically bad property to adapt to a musical, picks up a submission and reads aloud from The Metamorphosis, “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Bialystock flings it down in disgust: “Nah, it's too good!”)

As Appelfeld notes, as not merely a Jew but a secular Jew within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for most of his life, Kafka was profoundly alienated, part of a minority within a minority.

With his training as a lawyer, he also sensed how, as in his novel The Trial, individuals could become caught up in legal machinery they couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Nobody should be surprised that Hannah Arendt, the influential analyst of totalitarianism, referred so often to Kafka in her writings. The alienation that Arendt perceived as a necessary element to the rise of totalitarianism ran like an ever-present stream in Kafka’s comparatively slender output before he died at only age 40.