When I was in Israel, Haaretz ran a big piece on a Franz Kafka literary estate, lately found in bank vaults in the country, over which various parties are contending, including the German literary archives. The piece included the usual stinking use of Kafka as a Zionist adherent, with Holocaust fixins:
“I want to ask the Germans,” says [National Library of Israel official Ilana] Haber, rhetorically: “If Kafka who died in 1924, had lived longer, what would have happened to him?”
She immediately answers her own question: “He would have been sent to Auschwitz like his sisters and many of his family members. It was his luck that he died of tuberculosis.”
… “Here at the national library we have a huge archive of German Jews’ [works]. Those that they did not succeed in killing,” retorts Haber. “The National and University Library is the cultural curator of every Jew, wherever he is. Not just from Israel but from the entire Diaspora. Kafka was certainly one of them. These are matters that belong to the entire community; to the Jewish people in this country and abroad.”
This angers me so much I need to vent about it. First, Kafka was truly drawn to Zionism, and also repelled by it. He went to Zionist meetings and dreamed of going to Palestine, but he also dreamed of going to Amerika. He went to neither place. His life was miserable for tuberculosis over several years. This was not luck. If he had lived, he might well have joined his friend Max Brod in Palestine. But this is idle talk.
Kafka’s identity was strongly Jewish, but he saw himself as participating in a much wider culture. Kafka’s awareness of anti-Semitism pervades his work, as does his love of German literature. He did most of his work in Prague and Berlin.
One of Kafka’s literary executors (in addition to Brod, a Zionist, who defied his friend’s wish that he burn his papers) was a Czech Catholic writer named Milena Jesenska, with whom he likely had an adulterous affair in his 30s. To Jesenska, Kafka gave some of his most important work: his diaries. As the Nazis closed down their hobnailed fist on Czechoslovakia, Milena crossed the occupied city of Prague one night to entrust those diaries and the burning, exalted letters Kafka had written to her to Willy Haas, a Jewish screenwriter.
Milena surely feared for the future of the diaries and letters if she held on to them. Haas hid the documents and fled Europe for India during the war years. When he returned to Europe, he published the letters. Brod ended up with the diaries in Tel Aviv. They were published in ’48.
By then Milena was dead. As Philip Boehm writes in his introduction to his translation of the letters, Milena worked in the resistance to the Nazis. She wrote for the underground press and helped many Jews to escape Poland. She was arrested in November 1939 “and ultimately transported to Ravensbruck.” There she inspired her fellow prisoners with her spirit of resistance. And there she died in 1944, at 48. Many non-Jews died in the concentration camps.
Kafka depended for his literary imagination on many non-Jews. Goethe, Shakespeare and Gogol were important to his reading. He adored Jonathan Swift. When he tried to explain to his very conventional father why he was walking away from Judaism, as his father interpreted the process of urban/cultural enlargement that his son was experiencing, Kafka gave him Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, to show him by example how Franklin’s father’s rigidity had propelled the irreligious youth out of Boston, to Philadelphia, and toward a life of freethinking. We are all connected.
