Amerika by Franz Kafka

 

More than 40 years ago, I entered the strange world of Franz Kafka in the usual way: reading "The Metamorphosis."  This strange story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up having turned in a bug (maybe a cockroach) fascinated me. The story begins with the struggles of a big bug in a Vienna household.  Over time his family adapts to his state and eventually continues with their life--the way humans adapt to every sort of horror we face.  

In Amerika, the central character, Karl Rossmann arrives in America, abandoned by his family. He begins a series of  misadventures that are a descent--some of his problems are of his own making through pride and stubbornness, some are bad luck.  But the descent is inexorable.  

The story left me feeling pain, both empathy for Karl and for the author. Kafka's life was short, isolated and miserable.  Below is a New York Times review of the 2009 translation of Amerika, the one I read. It gives much more context than I could.  When I first read Kafka, I thought he would be one of the authors of whom I read all he wrote.  That list includes Hannah Arendt, Mark Helprin, CS Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernard-Henri Levy, Leo Tolstoy (fiction) but not Kafka. The pain I feel as I read him makes his books a very occasional read (two in 40 years).

America, ‘Amerika’

By Adam Kirsch

Jan. 2, 2009

Most writers take years to become themselves, to transform their preoccupations and inherited mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it took a single night. On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”

Everyone who reads Kafka reads “The Judgment” and the companion story he wrote less than two months later, “The Metamorphosis.” In those stories, we already find the qualities the world would come to know as “Kafkaesque”: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate. But readers have never been quite as sure what to make of the third major work Kafka began writing in the fall of 1912 ­— the novel he referred to as “Der Verschollene,” “The Missing Person,” which was published in 1927, three years after his death, by his friend and executor Max Brod, under the title “Amerika.”

The translator Michael Hofmann, whose English version of the book appeared in 1996, correctly called it “the least read, the least written about and the least ‘Kafka’ ” of his three novels. Now Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka’s works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. “If approached afresh,” Harman promises in his introduction, “this book could bear out the early claim by . . . Brod that ‘precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.’ ”

Harman offers a compromise between Kafka’s intended title and Brod’s more familiar one by calling his version Amerika: The Missing Person ($25). And he follows previous English editions by retaining the German spelling of America, with a “k.” This lends the name, in American eyes, a more ominous and alien quality than it would have for the German reader. That “k” is hard to resist, however, and not just because readers have come to expect it. No writer has ever annexed a single letter the way Kafka did with “k.” Between the two in his own last name, Joseph K. of “The Trial” and K. of “The Castle,” the letter seems imbued with his own angular essence. Amerika is not America; it is a cipher for Kafka’s dream of a country he never visited.

The difference becomes clear in the very first paragraph, when Karl Rossmann sails into New York Harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty: “The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” The torch of liberty has metamorphosed into a punishing sword, an omen of the many chastisements in store for Kafka’s victim-hero. Indeed, America itself is a punishment for Karl, who was sent there by his parents after he got a servant girl pregnant back home. What Kafka actually writes, however, is that “a servant girl had seduced him,” and when Karl remembers the fatal episode, it is clear he was more the victim than the aggressor: She “shook him, listened to his heart, offered him her breast so that he too could listen but could not induce Karl to do so, pressed her naked belly against his body, searched between his legs with her hand — in such a revolting manner that Karl shook his head and throat out from under the quilts — then pushed her belly up against him several times; it felt as if she were part of him; hence perhaps the terrible helplessness that overcame him.”

Taking into account the fact that Karl is 17 and Johanna, the “girl,” about 35, this sounds less like seduction than rape. And it is a template for the way everyone Karl encounters in “Amerika” will ignore his desires and overpower his will.

In the first chapter, Karl tries to intercede with the ship’s captain on behalf of a stoker who has been mistreated, but his rich American uncle simply waves off his protests. Later, when Karl pays a visit to one of his uncle’s friends, Mr. Pollunder, his uncle treats it as a terrible transgression and cuts him off — even though Karl made sure to get permission beforehand. (This arbitrary rewriting of the rules looks forward to the unwritten laws of “The Trial.”)

While at Pollunder’s house, Karl is nearly raped once again, this time by a teenage wrestler named Klara. (“I won’t stop at one slap,” she threatens, “but shall go on hitting you left and right until your cheeks start swelling.”) When he escapes, he falls in with a couple of tramps, Delamarche and Robinson, who rob and bully him. He becomes an elevator boy at a luxury hotel but gets fired for crimes he didn’t commit. So it goes, humiliation after humiliation, until Karl ends up a virtual slave to Delamarche’s grotesquely obese mistress, the singer Brunelda.

It is enough to make the reader want to ask Karl what he demands of the stoker: “So why don’t you speak out? . . . Why do you put up with everything?” “Amerika” never provides a good answer to this question: Karl is simply helpless, unable to make sense of the world or get along in it. Not until the last chapter, when he finds a job in the enigmatic Theater of Oklahama (Harman preserves Kafka’s misspelling), does Karl seem to find a home in America — and even then, it’s possible that Kafka would have had other torments in store for him, if he had completed the novel.

Karl’s innocence is the main reason “Amerika” remains less persuasive a parable than “The Trial” and “The Castle.” To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height.

But the crucial innovation of the later novels, which makes their dream-worlds so convincingly uncanny, is the way Kafka’s avatars always seem to be colluding in their own punishment. In the first chapter of “The Trial,” when the officers come to arrest Joseph K., he thinks, “If he were to open the door of the next room or even the door leading to the hall, perhaps the two of them would not dare to hinder him.” But he doesn’t make a move to escape, just as, later on, he freely obeys the summons of the court and finally submits to his execution. It is his own sense of guilt, especially sexual guilt, that makes Joseph K. accept his trial.

Karl Rossmann, however, refuses to accept responsibility for his desires, and it is a mark of Kafka’s own immaturity that he allows Karl to be constantly seduced and abused, never to act as seducer or abuser. Compare Karl’s childlike description of sex with K.’s wholly knowing, wholly mutual encounter with Frieda, in “The Castle”: “She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other’s breasts; . . . like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other’s bodies.”

Klaus Mann, introducing an edition of “Amerika” in 1946, wrote that Kafka “deeply and simply loves his innocent creature, his favorite dream, his heir,” Karl Rossmann. But it was not until Kafka accepted the guilt of his “creature” and “heir,” and confiscated all but the first letter of Karl’s name as punishment, that he could become the poet of the inexpungible guilt in all of us.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of “Benjamin Disraeli.”

   

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of "Between Past and Future" by Hannah Arendt

When we say history is written by the victors, we are assuming or accusing the historians of writing propaganda.  But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in the 2nd chapter of Between Past and Future history began with Homer's impartial view--writing about greatness and courage on both sides of the tragic war that lead to the founding of Rome by the defeated.  

Here is Arendt on impartiality in history in Ancient Greece:

Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and so to praise the glory of Hector no less than the greatness of Achilles. This Homeric impartiality as it is echoed by Herodotus who set out to prevent “the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's own side and one's own people, which up to our own days characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat which moderns have felt expresses the “objective” judgment of history itself and does not permit it to interfere with what is judged to be worthy of immortalizing praise. Somewhat later, and most magnificently expressed in Thucydides, there appears in Greek historiography still another powerful element that contributes to historical objectivity. It could come to the foreground only after long experience in polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk, the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond to the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—in the way the world appeared and opened up to him δοκει μοι, “it appears to me,” from which comes δοξα, or “opinion”—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learn to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. The speeches in which Thucydides makes articulate the standpoints and interests of the warring parties, are still a living testimony to the extraordinary degree of this object activity.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, pg. 51-2

I wrote about the Preface of Between Past and Future here.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

 

I just finished Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby. 

The title is a promise fulfilled.  I have read a lot of Jewish history and listened to more in the dozens of episodes of "The Jewish Story" by the Rav Mike Feuer. 

Every history is selective, Tishby, by design, has to cram decades into sentences and eras into paragraph.  I like what she chose. Particularly, her description of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 showed how complex that disaster was.  When she describes everything the Jews did inside the walls to provoke the Romans and lose the conflict, the disaster seems inevitable.  

On the rise of Ultra Orthodox culture in Israel, she notes that their tradition and weird black hat uniform dress is a product of a 17th Century Eastern European subculture, nothing to do with Torah.  

The book was published before October 7, 2023, so it does not include the slaughter of innocents by Hamas terrorists. In a speech six months after the tragic events, Tishby was very clear in her views.

The speech us below.  I recommend this book as a brief, lucid history of Israel.  

----

This is the most challenging speech I’ve ever delivered, but it’s time the world wakes up to what the Jewish community has been saying all along. What we experienced on and since October 7 was sadly, predictable. We’ve warned of the danger of radical Islam or, more accurately, the radical Islamic Nazism that is constantly lurking at Israel’s borders. And we’ve warned of the ongoing grooming of Western civilization – through universities, the media, and social media. We warned what the phrase “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” really looks like. It means “itbach al Yahud” – “slaughter the Jews.” This demonization of Israel is not “progressive”, it’s not peaceful and it absolutely won’t Free Palestine. It is a modern-day blood libel calculated to incite, pave the way for, and then justify - a genocide. We’ve seen it for over three and a half thousand years of Jewish “lived experience”. It’s the generational trauma that is in our bones. We understand it. That, is our “Jewish privilege.” We knew where it would lead, and we are devastated to be proven right. Israel is one of the greatest stories ever told and its vilification is one of the greatest smear campaigns in the history of the world. But we have news for you: when we say Never Again, we mean it. When you tell us you want to kill us, we believe you. And when you set out to do it in the most horrific of ways, we will defeat you. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the families of Israelis and Americans held hostage by the Hamas terrorists and demand they return the hostages now! Bring them home! Above all I am grateful that for the generations to come, the Jewish people will still live, love, and thrive and reach out a hand to the world. And Hamas will be nothing but a footnote in history, just like those who tried to exterminate us before. Am Yisrael Chai

Marking Major Anniversaries

 

9-11 Memorial NYC

One reason for marking fateful days in history is to remember how much the world has changed in your own lifetime.

Fifteen years ago today, 11 September 2009, I was a soldier on a one-year deployment to the Iraq War with the US Army.

Fifteen years before that, in 1994, I was a civilian still not quite believing the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991.

Fifteen years before that in 1979, I was tank commander on the East-West border in Germany waiting for the Soviet invasion of that never happened.

Fifteen years before that I was an 11-year-old 5th grader at Robin Hood Elementary School in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Our school was a fallout shelter. Nuclear war was a shadow on life during the Cold War.

The world has changed a lot in some ways, and not at all in others.

In just over a week, I will be advocating for Ukraine in the US Congress. Russia invaded. The attack I was waiting for for the first four decades of my life happened in Ukraine.

Huge changes, some sad consistency.

Glory to Ukraine!

Icons on Ammo Boxes: Seven Galleries Show Ukrainian Art at NYC Art Week Preview

On September 4, on the eve of the beginning of  Art Week in NYC, I went to a gallery in Chelsea for the Volta Art Fair. Dozens of galleries exhibiting and thousands of works of art on display.  Seven of the galleries featured art by Ukrainians, both in Ukraine and from the Ukrainian diaspora.  

On gallery featured several Orthodox icons painted on ammo crates.  I saw the icons just passing and then looked closer at the one on the right in the photo above and noticed latches that are used on NATO machine gun ammo crates.  Ukrainian soldiers create these icons.  It was a lovely display of faith expressed in art in a country invaded by a tyrant.

Below are a sampling of what was on display by Ukrainian artists.

And one more icon

Quoting Hannah Arendt: Not Easy, but No Excuse for Fake Quotes

On Friday, 6 September, the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will begin the discussion of "Between Past and Future" first published in 1961. 

Recently, Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic direct of the HAC, wrote an excellent essay about the problem of made up quotes of Hannah Arendt and by extension all authors.  He is right. Read it here. 

Last month an insightful essay on this book was published on the HAC site.  It begins with a quote from Arendt's preface to the work that I marked as "theme" in the margin.  Here is the essay by Mark Aloysius, S.J.

The opening quote on the essay shows why quoting Arendt can be so difficult.  The 70-word sentence has three independent clauses, with three dependent clauses. Reading this sentence made me glad I am old enough to have diagrammed sentences in elementary school. The quote is an entirely appropriate opening for an essay on the HAC web site, but not the kind of thing that would get likes on TikTok or Snapchat. 

Here is the quote:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.”
(Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 10).

One of my many reasons for being a member of the HAC is the discussions that guide the reading of Arendt's complex thought.  After reading Arendt's preface, I transcribed the paragraph that the above quote is in. The 263-word paragraph has just five sentences. One is a simple16-word sentence quoting William Faulkner.  The other four have 60, 36, 70 and 81 words.  

The relatively snappy 36-word sentence has two dependent clauses.  The closing 81-word sentence has two independent clauses and four dependent clauses.  Arendt was not writing for social media.  

In a decade and a half of reading Arendt, the former ad writer in me has never found her quotable, but I have been able to discuss with enthusiasm what she has said with people who care about the human condition (to make a pun) in all of its complexity.

Here is the paragraph I transcribed:

"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid of in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.  Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a  continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it's broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.  Only because man is inserted into time, and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it in Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle of the body which gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes."

The (Pot)Hole Story -- Panama is a tough place to ride

 

First Week in Panama--The Daily Downpour

I bought a bike the first full day I was in Panama.  The bike is great. I wrote about it here.    

I quickly got good at dodging the rain. The weather app in my phone that is so reliable in America, is rubbish here. It says it will rain when the sun is shining and it will be cloudy when rain is falling in sheets.   

Rain I could handle.  But the farther I ride, the more I have to contend with potholes.  On a descent a few miles from the city, I hit a hole so deep it flatted the tire and tore a hole in it.  I wrote about that here.  

And the holes deep enough to flatten a tire are everywhere.  It's not so bad riding uphill, but downhill, I have to scan for holes the whole way! I'm riding the brakes and very focused--not having fun feeling the wind.  It's surely safer to roll down hills on high alert hands on the brake hoods, but it's not fun. 

On the way up the hills, the holes are no problem, but even riding the white stripe at the edge of the tarmac, buses and trucks have to move around me.  One the main roads in and out of the city, there are no shoulders.  

When there are shoulders, another hazard appears at random--sewers without covers.  Some of these uncovered drains are big enough to swallow a whole wheel, not just flat a tire.  I told a local guy about this. He shrugged and said people steal the covers and sell them for the metal.  When there is a shoulder, I ride just off the roadway and scan for the uncovered drain.  

I've been riding every day here, but my rides are getting shorter and are on roads where I have memorized the holes and know the hazards.  On Labor Day I will return to the US until mid November.  

When I return, I will have Gatorskin tires and be looking for weekend groups to ride with.  Right now, I'm feeling like the cocodrillo in the photo below is waiting in holes on every road here.