Before the Law

Born to an assimilated and religiously indifferent German-speaking Jewish family in Habsburg Prague, Franz Kafka produced a corpus of German-language short fiction, novellas, and novels marked by uncanny revelations about the fragility of life and meaning, the psychic violence embedded in social and familial life, and modernity’s nightmarish potentials. These made him one of the great figures of global modernism, a symbol of modern alienation, and a premiere symbol of troubled and skeptical “Jewish genius.” Kafka attended the University of Prague and completed a law degree in 1906. From 1908 until he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, Kafka worked as an insurance investigator for the state bureaucracy, a job he performed without enthusiasm but responsibly—work that informed his many fictions about risk and accident. Although much of the work for which he is famous went unpublished in his lifetime, stories he did publish between 1908 and his untimely death in 1924 bespeak his uncanny imagination and great themes of overwhelming father-son conflict; the impossibility of real communication, even through intimacy or art; the linkages among eros, animality, and shame and the omnipresence of all three beneath the veneer of civilization; the possibility that law, state, and civilization are actually machineries of incomprehensible and meaningless violence to which individuals stand naked and exposed; and what later writers would call the existential, “thrown,” or absurd character of life. Although Kafka did not speak openly of Jews and Jewish themes in his fiction, his diaries and intellectual life bespeak pervasive and intense engagement in questions of Jewish life and fate, particularly after 1911, when much of his greatest literary creativity still lay before him. Kafka had no interest in Central European forms of Judaism and tended toward socialist and anarchist sympathies at a moment when some close friends—including Hugo Bergmann, later rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—were embracing spiritual Zionism. But Kafka’s sense of existential displacement as an inescapable condition of life doubtless owed something to the peculiar situation of Habsburg Prague’s Jews, German by culture but belonging to neither of the Austro-German and Czech nationalist movements mobilizing to dominate the city. More importantly, some of his closest interlocutors, including his closest friend Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and his last great love interest Dora Diamant, were deeply engaged in postassimilationist thinking about Jewish religion, identity, nationhood, cultural revival, and Zionism. And in brief but intense moments during the last decade of his life, Kafka engaged with East European Jewish culture and Zionism, including both personal and intellectual immersions in Yiddish theater and serious, if fitful, study of modern Hebrew. Each of these enthusiasms, whatever its depth, share in a broader culture of German Jewish postassimilationism and renewed Jewish consciousness that looked to East European Jews as a source of alternatives to the assimilationist culture of their parents’ generation.