Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond

336 Pages·2004·9.489 MB·English

by  Mark H. Gelber (editor)

Conditio Judaica 50
Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte
Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch
in Verbindung mit Alfred Bodenheimer, Mark H. Gelber und Jakob Hessing

Kafka, Zionism,
and Beyond
Edited by
Mark H. Gelber
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2004
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ISBN 3-484-65150-4 ISSN 0941-5866
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Contents
Introduction. Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks 1
Scott Spector
»any reality, however small.« Prague Zionisms between the
Nations 7
Niels Bokhove
»The Entrance to the More Important.« Kafka's Personal Zionism 23
Hans-Richard Eyl
»Der letzte Zipfel.« Kafka's State of Mind and the Making of the
Jewish State 59
Andreas B. Kilcher
Anti-Ödipus im Land der Ur-Väter. Franz Kafka und Anton Kuh 69
Vivian Liska
Nachbarn, Feinde und andere Gemeinschaften 89
Iris Bruce
Jewish Education: Borderline and Counterdiscourses in Kafka 107
Gabriel Moked
Kafka's Gnostic Existentialism and Modern Jewish Revival 147
Eveline Goodman-Thau
Metamorphosis as Messianic Myth. Dream and Reality in the
Writings of Franz Kafka 157
Delphine Bechtel
Kafka, the »Ostjuden«, and the Inscription of Identity 189
David A. Brenner
Uncovering the Father: Kafka, Judaism, and Homoeroticism 207
VI Contents
Benno Wagner
»Ende oder Anfang?« Kafka und der Judenstaat 219
Gershon Shaked
Kafka and Agnon: Their Relationship to Judaism and Zionism 239
Alfred Bodenheimer
A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka's Hebrew
Notebooks 259
Mark H. Gelber
The Image of Kafka in Brod's Zauberreich der Liebe and its
Zionist Implications 271
Ritchie Robertson
The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka 283
Shimon Sandbank
The Look Back: Lot's Wife, Kafka, Blanchot 297
Mark M. Anderson
Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions 307
List of Contributors 321
Index 323
Introduction
Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks
The essays collected in this volume are revised versions of lectures presented
at an international conference, entitled: »>Ich bin Ende oder Anfange Kafka,
Zionism, and Beyond.« The conference, held in Jerusalem and in Beer Sheva,
was the fruitful result of a cooperative effort, bringing together the Franz
Rosenzweig Research Center of Hebrew University, the Leo Baeck Institute,
Jerusalem, the Goethe Institute, Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University, Beer
Sheva. I would like to thank the partner institutions and the individuals who
joined in this effort to make the meeting possible, especially Gabi Motzkin and
Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Rosenzweig Center and their staff; Shlomo Meir of
the Leo Baeck Institute; Christine Günther of the Goethe Institute and her
assistant Heike; and Suzi Ganot, administrative assistant of the Abrahams-Curiel
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University.
The idea to organize this international meeting focusing on Kafka and Zion-
ism was originally generated by Niels Bokhove of the Dutch Kafka Society in
collaboration with Hans-Richard Eyl of Jerusalem. In the first stage of planning,
Gerhard Kurz of the University of Gießen and Jakob Hessing of the Hebrew
University became supportive and consulting partners in this endeavor. Although
I personally joined the organizational team after a general idea of the conference
began to form, it was still early enough to allow me to participate in shaping the
intellectual parameters of the meeting according to my sense of the priorities of
topics, the desireability of including certain participants, and the need to contex-
tualize the substance and direction of discussions which might take place. I am
indebted to Hans-Richard Eyl for his continuing enthusiasm about this project
and his individual contribution to the organization of the conference.
At the outset, a few words should be said about the background, conception,
and structure of this gathering, and the essays which are included in this col-
lection, because international Kafka conferences do not take place everyday, or
every year, or even every decade in Israel, despite the relative importance and
stature of Kafka in Israeli academic discourse and intellectual life in general.
The last major international symposium held in Israel which was devoted to
Kafka and his writing took place at the time of the centennial of his birth in
1983. It was initiated and funded by the Austrian embassy. At that time, the
prime mover behind the academic activity focusing on Kafka was Barbara
Taufar, the dynamic Austrian press and cultural attachée, who subsequently
became quite well known or even legendary in Israel. Actually, this particular
2 Introduction
Kafka activity in Israel was divided into two parts: first, an evening symposium
in Jerusalem at the Van Leer Institute, followed by, second, a full day meeting at
Ben-Gurion University. The Kafka-»Wanderausstellung« of the Austrian docu-
mentation center for literature was shown at the Z. Aranne Central Library in
Beer Sheva during the time of the symposium. I had the honor of chairing the
ceremonial opening and evening symposium in Jerusalem. The Austrian ambas-
sador and other distinguished guests were present: Eduard Goldstücker, a grand
old figure in Kafka reception history with a special personal connection to Israel,
came from Sussex to give the inaugural lecture. He was followed by Walter
Sokel, one of the doyens of American Kafka scholarship, and Werner Welzig, an
Austrian Germanist, who was then rector at the University of Vienna. Two or
three hundred people, at least, attended the evening event at the Van Leer Insti-
tute. As I recall, there were not enough seats in the large lecture hall, and people
were sitting in the aisles and standing in the back and against the walls. The full
day of lectures in Beer Sheva was entitled »Franz Kafka: His World and Ours.« I
remember that this symposium was very well attended also. Preciously little, if
anything at all, was said at that time in Jerusalem or in Beer Sheva about Kafka
and Judaism or Kafka and Zionism. Following Max Brod's well-known identifi-
cation of two oppositional tendencies within Kafka - the one which tended to-
ward loneliness, his »Einsamkeitssehnsucht«, and the one which sought commu-
nity, »der Wille zur Gemeinschaft« - it is fair to say that the lectures given in
1983 and the following discussions focused on the former tendency, from the
perspective of his biography and writings. In retrospect, I think that those ses-
sions were in many ways indicative of the general state of German-Jewish schol-
arship and research at the time. Basically, the Jewish aspects were mostly re-
pressed.
The conference entitled »Ich bin Ende oder Anfang: Kafka, Zionism, and Be-
yond«, in contrast to what transpired in Israel in 1983, was designed to focus on
Kafka's tendency toward Gemeinschaft. Of course, as with most matters con-
cerning Kafka, the topic is much more complex than Brod conceived of it. De-
spite the important work of Hartmut Binder, Giuliano Baioni, Ritchie Robertson,
Iris Bruce, Mark Anderson, Sander Gilman, and others who have exposed and
explored many of Kafka's Zionist sympathies, antipathies, and interests, Kafka's
complicated Zionist connection, or better manifold connections, are largely un-
appreciated in scholarship and mostly unknown, outside small pockets of spe-
cialized readerships. I learned this first-hand a few years ago, when I lectured on
German-Jewish literary relations at the University of Graz in Austria, a place
where Kafka is well-known and read, certainly. But, my Austrian students were
rather shocked to hear that Kafka was Jewish and that his writings could be read
cogently from Jewish and Zionist points of view, or in conjunction with Jewish
and Zionist materials and contextualizations.
The purpose of this meeting and this volume of essays, then, has been to
narrow the focus of the discussion to Zionism, while at the same time encour-
aging an expanded sense of the term itself, as well as promoting a broad con-
Kafka in Israel - Preliminary Remarks 3
ception of Kafka's intellectual and literary encounter with Zionist ideas or with
ideas related to Zionism. When the topic of the conference became known
abroad during its initial planning stages, a prominent American colleague in
the profession, who has published a good deal on Kafka, sent me a message
asking if it would indeed be possible to devote an entire conference to this
narrow topic! He appeared to be quite doubtful about it. Subsequently, I began
to prepare a list for myself of some of the more obvious aspects, which might
figure in the proposed conference. The list included the following:
- Kafka's discussion with Felice Bauer during their first meeting in August 1912
about visiting Palestine together, which supplied Kafka with sufficient reason
or an excuse to write her a month later, ushering in a very productive period
in his career as a writer, which included several hundred pages of letters writ-
ten to Felice over the next several months; also Zionism as a sub-text of their
relationship as it continued to develop, and the failure of Kafka to establish a
permanent or lasting relationship with either Zionism or Felice;
- his relationship to Brod's developing Zionist commitment and his closeness to
members of the Bar Kochba group in Prague, especially to Hugo Bergmann and
Felix Weltsch, including his great interest in Bergmann's career in Palestine;
- his encounter with Yiddish, Yitzhak Loewy, and the Yiddish Theater and his
ideas about Yiddish as an expression of Jewish nationalism, taking into ac-
count Jewish nationalist options for Kafka in the diaspora;
- his abiding interest in the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr and his liter-
ary relationship to it, as well as his reception of Zionist writings;
- his visiting of the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913;
- his responses to Buber's writings, as well as Kafka's own literary contribu-
tions to and interest in Martin Buber's Der Jude and the Buber-Kafka corre-
spondence;
- his keen interest in Jewish education and his enthusiastic support for the es-
tablishment of a Jewish school in Prague and later his great interest in Sigfried
Lehmann's Jüdisches Volksheim in Berlin;
- his horticultural activities and their possible relationship to Zionist theory and
practical agricultural enterprise, as preparation or as substitute for pioneering
in the land of Israel;
- his decision to learn Hebrew, his Hebrew teachers and lessons, his reading of
Brenner, and the Hebrew notebooks in the Nachlaß;
- his various plans to immigrate to Palestine, to work either as a manual laborer
or as a waiter in the restaurant which would serve up Dora's cooking, and the
late preparations and discussions with Hugo Bergmann about travelling with
Bergmann's wife and coming to live in theyishuv;
- his complicated reception of Zionist writings in his own literary work and
consideration of the conflicted view that Zionism presented Jewry with a
healthy alternative to the sickly Jewish existence in the diaspora, which the
Western Jew and Kafka himself embodied;
4 Introduction
- his response to Hans Bliiher's anti-Semitic Secessio Judaica (1922) taking
into account its claim that the Zionists will prevail among Jewry, despite a
major pogrom which would devastate this (for Blüher) degenerate people;
- his interest in Bank Hapoalim and its bank shares;
- the late testimony of friends, like Brod and Bergmann, who addressed
themselves to Kafka and Zionism in their writing or the legacy of Kafka
among those working in Israel, like Werner Kraft;
- the reception of Kafka in Hebrew literature and the Hebrew translations (by
Shenhar, Kornfeld, Shenberg, Keshet, Miron, and Sandbank), the role of
Schocken, and the studies by Israeli scholars, like Hillel Barzel, Gabriel
Moked, Gershon Shaked, and Shimon Sandbank, to name the most important;
- Kafka in Israeli art and cinema.
All of these topics seemed to me from the outset to be within the purview of
this meeting, but actually merely as possible points of departure. If, as Sander
Gilman has claimed, Kafka drew on discourses that are heavily coded as Jew-
ish, but that self-consciously erase or distance themselves from this labelling,1
the same may be said for Zionism and its various discourses and their potential
meanings in terms of his literary production. Examining and explaining the
mechanisms and sense of this distancing or alienation from Zionist discourses
in Kafka's writings would also be an important aspect of the deliberations
within the framework of our sessions. In all likelihood a complex cultural
system which figures in the discussion between Kafka and Zionism might be
elucidated. I would like to emphasize from the beginning that this conference
was not conceived as an opportunity to appropriate Kafka for Zionism, in the
sense of Max Brod,2 but rather to amplify the scholarly discussion by admit-
ting the complexity of the topic itself, to emphasize its potential importance in
overall assessments of Kafka and his career, and to attempt to understand a
dimension of Zionism as a portal, which Kafka, Brod, and others saw as an
entrance way to something larger and more significant that lies beyond it.3
When we consider the essays collected in this volume, it is possible to deter-
mine the extent to which this initial conception was realized.
Regarding the publication of the lectures, I would like to thank sincerely the
Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-
Gurion University and the Research and Publication Committee of the Faculty
of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion for authorizing grants to
help subsidize the costs of preparing and printing the manuscript. Also, the
Moshe and Margarita Pazi Fund for the Study of Bohemian Jewry made
1 Sander L. Gilman: Kafka goes to camp. In: Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and
Thought in German Culture 1096-1996. Ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes.
New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1997, 427^33, here 428.
2 See Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 1966, passim.
3 See Mark H. Gelber: Max Brod's Zionist Writings. In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck
Institute 33 (1988), 437-448.