Continue reading: The problem started with the time machine

Bátora’s letter, signed by members of a far-right organization that goes by the acronym D.O.S.T., (meaning “enough” in Czech, and whose symbol is a clenched fist hitting a table), claimed that the festival was “organized by groups of homosexuals and lesbians whose demands against the Czech public significantly exceed the framework of mere tolerance.” Citing Ronald Reagan, whose anti-Communism has made him an enduringly popular figure in the Czech Republic, Bátora wrote that Eisen had betrayed the former president’s legacy and threatened to rupture the “good relations between our nations.”

American ambassadors, particularly those in small European countries, aren’t supposed to be in the business of stoking controversy. Not so for President Barack Obama’s appointees. Early last year, a State Department investigation revealed that the former ambassador to Luxembourg, a major Democratic Party fundraiser named Cynthia Stroum, had so demoralized her staff that some career foreign-service officers working under her fled for posts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month in Belgium, Ambassador Howard Gutman provoked a firestorm in the United States when he intimated that Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe was largely a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the surface, Eisen and Gutman have much in common: Both are prominent Democratic Party fundraisers, lawyers, and the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors. But their respective controversies could not have been more different: Whereas Gutman’s remarks provided fodder for those who seek to blame Jews for the hatred directed at them, Eisen’s intervention bolstered liberalism in a country that, still seeking its place in the post-Communist era, badly needs it.

The Czech Republic is known for its carefree attitude toward sex and sexuality: It has the highest divorce rate on the continent; it’s a popular destination for British stag parties; nearly half the population identifies as atheist; and it’s a major hub for the production of gay pornography. But these ostensible signifiers of social tolerance belie what is in fact a deeply conservative society.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, for one, took umbrage at the fact that Eisen, along with 12 other Western ambassadors, voiced support for Prague Pride. The same day that Bátora marched on the U.S. Embassy, Klaus, a founder of the country’s biggest right-of-center political party, issued his own statement, declaring: “I can’t imagine any Czech ambassador daring to interfere by a petition with the internal political discussion in any democratic country in the world.” (Klaus had made his own views on the parade well known the previous week by defending an aide who had referred to gays as “deviant fellow citizens.”)

Eisen, 51, whose mother is a Czechoslovak Holocaust survivor, was now thrust into the center of a political controversy that had been roiling the country for months. Bátora had already been fingered as a man with unpalatable views: A group of Czech senators called for his dismissal from the Education Ministry a week before he delivered his missive to Eisen. The senators had raised concerns about Bátora’s involvement with a now-defunct far-right political party that promoted the expulsion of Czech Roma citizens. Bátora had also praised as “brilliant” a 1925 anti-Semitic book called The Adulteration of the Slavs, which approvingly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and the works of German writers who would later go on to become leading figures in the Nazi Party.

Bátora’s presence in the Education Ministry threatened the country’s fragile center-right coalition government. (The most admired Czech in the world, Vaclav Havel, denounced Bátora from his sickbed.) Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, a distinguished Czech political figure and founder of the center-right TOP ’09 party, reportedly called him an “old fascist.” But it was Ambassador Eisen’s provocation that ultimately led to Bátora’s downfall.

Continue reading: The brouhaha moves to Facebook

Lerner, now 34 and married with a child of her own, is a descendant of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), better known as the Tosfot Yom Tov (the title of his tract on the Mishnah), who was the chief rabbi of Prague and went on to head the rabbinical court of Krakow. According to Lerner family lore, he declared that turkeys were verboten and that none of his descendants should eat the animal. Lerner’s extended family continues to observe his edict, though they wholeheartedly embrace turkey kitsch when the fourth Thursday of November rolls around.

The debate over whether turkeys were kosher didn’t emerge until the birds, indigenous to the Americas, were introduced in Europe in the 16th century. Fish and animals must meet certain specifications in order to be deemed kosher (fins and scales; hoofed feet, chews its cud). For birds, by contrast, the Torah simply lists those that Jews are not allowed to eat, and these are mainly birds of prey. Turkeys were not on that list—they weren’t known at the time. But according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the bird was ultimately accepted as kosher: a really big bird.

Yet the Tosfot Yom Tov refused to budge. Lerner admits she doesn’t actually think turkey is trayf. Rather, her refusal to eat comes out of respect and pride. “It’s a family thing far more than a Jewish thing,” she clarifies. And, she admits, it helps that her husband is a vegetarian.

If he were to turn into what was later to become Rue Sauton but was then still Rue d’Amboise, about halfway along the street, between a brothel masquerading as a brasserie and a tavern that served dinner with foul wine for two sous (cheap even then, but all that was affordable to students from the nearby Sorbonne), he would have found an impasse, or blind alley, which by that time was called Impasse Maubert, but up to 1865 had been called Cul-de-sac d’Amboise, and years earlier had housed a tapis-franc (in underworld slang, a tavern, a hostelry of ill fame, usually run by an ex-convict, and the haunt of felons just released from jail), and was also notorious because in the 18th century there had stood here the laboratory of three celebrated women poisoners, found one day asphyxiated by the deadly substances they were distilling on their stoves.

At the end of that alleyway, quite inconspicuous, was the window of a junk shop that a faded sign extolled as Brocantage de Qualité—a window whose glass was covered by such a thick layer of dust that it was hard to see the goods on display or the interior, each pane being little more than 20 centimeters square, all held together by a wooden frame. Beside the window he would have seen a door, always shut, and a notice beside the bell pull announcing that the proprietor was temporarily absent.

But if, as rarely happened, the door was open, anyone entering would have been able to make out, in the half-light illuminating that dingy hovel, arranged on a few precarious shelves and several equally unsteady tables, a jumble of objects that, though attractive at first sight, would on closer inspection have turned out to be totally unsuitable for any honest commercial trade, even if they were to be offered at knock-down prices. They included a pair of fire dogs that would have disgraced any hearth, a pendulum clock in flaking blue enamel, cushions once perhaps embroidered in bright colors, vase stands with chipped ceramic putti, small wobbly tables of indeterminate style, a rusty iron visiting-card holder, indefinable pokerwork boxes, hideous mother-of-pearl fans decorated with Chinese designs, a necklace that might have been amber, two white felt slippers with buckles encrusted with Irish diamantes, a chipped bust of Napoleon, butterflies under crazed glass, multicolored marble fruit under a once transparent bell, coconut shells, old albums with mediocre watercolors of flowers, a framed daguerreotype (which even then hardly seemed old)—so if someone, taking a perverse fancy to one of those shameful remnants of past distraints on the possessions of destitute families, and finding himself in front of the highly suspicious proprietor, had asked the price, he would have heard a figure that would have deterred even the most eccentric collector of antiquarian teratology.

And if the visitor, by virtue of some special permission, had continued on through a second door, separating the inside of the shop from the upper floors of the building, and had climbed one of those rickety spiral staircases typical of those Parisian houses whose frontages are as wide as their entrance doors (cramped together sidelong, one against the next), he would have entered a spacious room that, unlike the ground-floor collection of bric-a-brac, appeared to be furnished with objects of quite a different quality: a small three-legged Empire table decorated with eagle heads, a console table supported by a winged sphinx, a 17th-century wardrobe, a mahogany bookcase displaying a hundred or so books well bound in morocco, an American-style desk with a roll top and plenty of small drawers like a secrétaire. And if he had passed into the adjoining room, he would have found a luxurious four-poster bed, a rustic étagère laden with Sèvres porcelain, a Turkish hookah, a large alabaster cup and a crystal vase; on the far wall, panels painted with mythological scenes, two large canvases representing the Muses of History and Comedy and, hung variously upon the walls, Arab barracans, other oriental cashmere robes and an ancient pilgrim’s flask; and a washstand with a shelf filled with toiletry articles of the finest quality—in short, a bizarre collection of costly and curious objects that perhaps indicated not so much a consistency and refinement of taste as a desire for ostentatious opulence.

Excerpted from The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. Copyright © 2010 RCS Libri S.p.A. English translation copyright ©2010 by Richard Dixon. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

But as it turns out, 36 hours is simply not enough time to spend in Krakow if you’re looking to get an in-depth, nuanced look at this charming city in a country with a complicated Jewish past. The kid sister to storied tourist sites like Prague, Budapest, and Berlin–all mentioned in the very first paragraph of the Times piece–Krakow comes with its own baggage and a unique Jewish legacy that institutions like the Krakow JCC, Galicia Jewish Museum, and the annual Jewish Culture Festival are working to not only preserve but also renew. It takes time to see the many layers of Jewish life, both past and present, that linger in the streets of Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter that has since been revived as a tourist destination and even more recently has developed its own newfangled form of Jewish identity.

While according to the Times, which cited the city’s many art museums and hip hangouts, “All this means that Krakow may soon be the cool, post-Communist enclave with which Europe’s next crop of emerging cities is compared,” for this daily Jewish life publication there is more at stake. Namely, how to enjoy a city once home to so many Jews that, demographically speaking, can never be recreated. I still am not entirely able to reconcile this reality. But that’s the beauty of Krakow, a city that challenges its Jewish visitors to reconsider broad-sweeping notions of Poland both in its aesthetic appeal and its commitment to addressing its Jewish past and embracing a future in which Jewish life remains alive. You just have to look for it.

36 Hours in Krakow, Poland [NYT]

Some cities paper over their history, whether by encasing an idealized version of itself in immortal amber (Paris) or constantly rebuiliding so that it is never more than six months of construction away from total modernity (I am told parts of Beijing are like this). Other cities may be said to be haunted by their pasts, the ghosts truly existing only in the minds of the beholders—a main tourist destination in Prague, which I also visited, is the crammed, surreal Jewish cemetery whose youngest corpses date to the 18th century.

But Berlin is scarred. The horrific wounds that history has slashed across the city (and which, in many cases—and as the Germans are at the front of the line to admit—Berlin invited upon itself) remain. A glass cone sits atop the Reichstag, a deliberately obvious reminder of the 1933 arson that enabled the Nazis to solidify their grip on the country’s steering wheel. Around the corner, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, a line of bricks traces the path of the wall that once divided the free city from the unfree one. And just around the corner from that (and pictured above), in the middle of Berlin’s Mitte, or central neighborhood, is the city’s (or one of the city’s) Holocaust Memorial. It is rows of endless gray slabs, which don’t reach your knees at the installation’s edges but tower above you in its middle. Official name: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

There must be one of those indelibly German words for the blend of clear-eyed and ostentatious honesty and earnestness with which Berlin and Berliners acknowledge—more than acknowledge, because they are always the ones bringing it up—what their forefathers did to the Jews of Europe (which is to say, “murdered” them: They always use that word). Hitler is mentioned everywhere, even if, to avoid creating shrines for neo-Nazis, his picture is displayed nowhere. Berlin’s signs do not call it Kristallnacht: After all, that was lead Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels’s word for that horrific evening, a way of saying, in effect, that it was merely a “night of broken glass.” It is referred to in Berlin as Reichspogromnacht, or “the night of the pogrom that was sponsored by the government.” If the event in question were anything else, this would be some variation on the lady protesting too much. But, as I thought when noticing yet another memorial, you probably can’t have too many ways to remember the Shoah. I’ll find it difficult to forget, for example, the train tracks that carried the first transport of humans out of the posh (and, at the time, heavily Jewish) suburb just west of the city.

The Holocaust also plays a big, if not totally dominant, role at the city’s famed Jewish Museum. Two things stood out: The permanent exhibition, which skillfully told the history of the Jews generally through the specific, idiosyncratic history of German Jewry; and the Garden of Diaspora, a deliberately disorienting outdoor square featuring 49 pillars in rows and deliberately uneven ground, designed to induce the dizziness that Jews must have felt as they arrived on alien shores.

Many Germans, I was told repeatedly, dislike Berlin, even express a desire to disown it. This was true of the Nazis, of course—they hated its plain scenery, its cosmopolitanism, and, of course, its substantial Jewish population. But even nowadays, many see it as un-German, un-beautiful, and cooler-than-thou. Which is all probably true! Yet anyone looking for Berlin’s redemption would have to praise the way it has invited young people from around the world—but maybe especially Americans; and yes, American Jews—with its art scene, its nightlife, its diversity, its inexpensiveness, and its excitement. A recent Forward article captured this well, and although—the world being small—I ended up spending time with several of the very people featured in the piece, I suspect my experiences on evenings out in Kreuzberg and Neukölln would have confirmed the vibrant scene described by the article anyway. One night, we went to a bar in Friedrichshain, a working-class neighborhood of East Berlin turned typical gentrifying fantasy land, whose theme was Communist kitsch. Yes, that is a big picture of Marx. History here has been co-opted, tamed, and harnessed by the ironic perspective that time can provide. But there’s a big difference between ignoring history and doing what this bar does.

Later on in my vacation, I saw a memorial of a different kind in Paris. (“You Americans treat Europe like it was one big country,” a young French woman quipped when I related the many cities on my itinerary. This was in London.)

My French is all but non-existent, but basically: “STREET OF THE RIGHTEOUS: In memory of the Righteous who saved Jews during the Occupation.” Yes, it was all the fault of the Occupation, which was (by definition) something imposed from without: No French person had anything to do with the murdered Jews of France. That’s the French for you, and Paris, too.

At the same time, for all the crimes of collaboration, the Nazi occupation was the prime culprit in France, and everywhere else as well. No city on Earth has more to answer for than Berlin. But no city is more game.

When Podwal collaborated with Elie Wiesel on a book about the golem in 1983, his fascination with the city grew, but Communist rule made it inaccessible. It wasn’t until 1996 that he paid his first visit, in advance of “Jewish Dreams,” an exhibition at the local Jewish museum featuring 61 fantastical works he created in loving tribute to the city’s rich Jewish history and folklore. He has since returned more than a dozen times and now has a designated seat in the Altneuschul, or Old-New Synagogue, where the Maharal presided, and the current chief rabbi fondly refers to him as “one of the locals.”

Jewish imagery has dominated Podwal’s ink, pencil, gouache, acrylic, and watercolor works on paper, and he has done numerous Judaic commissions, from an Aubusson tapestry for Temple Emanu-El in New York to a Passover seder plate that is a best-seller in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop. But Prague is central to his art.

This love affair with the city will be in full bloom come April 6, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Podwal’s 12th children’s book, Built by Angels, which recounts various legends surrounding the Altneuschul—the oldest still-operational synagogue in the world—the same day that New York’s PBS affiliate is broadcasting House of Life, a film Podwal wrote and produced (in collaboration with award-winning classical music documentarian Allan Miller) on the storied history of the cemetery that sits behind it. Despite the inherent distinctions between the two genres, both works meld architecture and metaphysics, history and legend, into moving portraits of the Jewish experience that are elegiac but ultimately triumphant.

As its title suggests, Built by Angels attributes the creation of the Old-New Synagogue to celestial agents, who constructed it with stones from the Temple in Jerusalem. The angels decreed that the stones were to be returned when the Temple was restored. (One explanation for the Alteneuschul’s name attributes its roots to the Hebrew al tenai, or “on condition.”) Distinguished by its complex subject and Podwal’s skilled, magical tableaux, it is hardly a typical children’s book, and yet it still skirts the city’s darkest chapters. We are told that “whenever flames threatened,” the beating wings of white doves “blew out the blaze,” without mention that pogroms were as great a threat as natural disaster. Similarly, a reference to the golem who is “still locked in the attic” and “must not be disturbed” overlooks that he was activated to defend against anti-Semitic attacks. Rather, it finishes with the hopeful prayer still emanating from the synagogue: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Still from House of Life

House of Life is similarly redemptive, highlighting the conservators who piece together tombstone fragments so epitaphs can be legible once more. It is at its most powerful when resurrecting ancestral ghosts among the 100,000 that some estimate are buried in layers beneath the surface. After a guide points out the oldest of the 12,000 tombstones, belonging to Avigdor Kara, one of the few survivors of the infamous 1389 pogrom, the film’s narrator reads an excerpt from the elegy he wrote at the time that is still recited in the Altneuschul every Yom Kippur. Fact and fable often collide, as in a reenactment of the Maharal’s meeting with Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II on the Charles Bridge in 1583 in order to convince him to repeal an anti-Jewish edict. As legend has it, when mud and stones were thrown at the Maharal by the mob, they turned into flowers.

It is just this sort of “history”—tradition as delivered through fanciful tales—that seems to appeal most to Podwal. This, more than a simple love of Prague, is what ties the film to his broader body of work, an oeuvre rich in both kabbalistic symbolism—from the hamsah, an upturned palm meant to ward off the evil eye, to diagrams on the levels of God’s divinity—and surreal elements: flying Hebrew letters, books growing from trees, fruit forming constellations.

Mark Podwal

This embrace of Jewish mysticism is somewhat surprising given Podwal’s secular upbringing, not to mention his formal training as a physician. After a religious awakening of sorts at a Jewish summer camp, he attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed, though he never became observant. Still, he takes delight in his heritage and sees the Zohar, the principal text of the kabbalists, as a great source of visual inspiration.

At NYU Medical School, Podwal was drawn to dermatology because it was also a visual specialty and would leave time for his drawing. During his internship, in 1971, he published his first book, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which is made up of political drawings inspired by the upheaval of the 1960s. That brought him to the attention of The New York Times, which, in 1972, ran the first of what would be his many contributions, an illustration based on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The leap to children’s books in the 1990s marked a shift from black and white to color, though he has continued to make ink drawings for nonfiction books like Harold Bloom’s Fallen Angels and his own Doctored Drawings, both from 2007.

While Podwal has achieved recognition as a fine and graphic artist, he still maintains his successful Upper East Side medical practice, which has caused Cynthia Ozick to marvel at his ability to be “scientist and dreamer both.” This double life not only imbues him with a unique sensibility, but affords the financial freedom to ignore the advice a prominent, well-meaning curator gave him as his artistic career was taking off to “get out of his Jewish rut.” We, in turn, can accompany Podwal on his mystic journey. For as his repeat-collaborator-turned-friend, Elie Wiesel, astutely observed in the catalogue for “Jewish Dreams,” with his strange but familiar storytelling, Podwal stirs “recollections which without your being aware are part of your collective memory.”

Wherever the Castle was, though—if anywhere—Kafka worked for it. He made the language and protocols of its bureaucracy his own. More than for the Institute, more than for his own sense of self, Kafka worked for this ideal ministry, this ideal apparatus of oppression. The writing he did during the day at his workdesk would be transcribed into the margins of the writing he would do at his other desk at home and at night, constraining even his most fanciful imaginings with appropriate Castle form, and Castle diction. Kafka’s business writing became, in effect, Kafka’s writing business, and Kafka Inc. became Kafkan ink as his best stories found themselves straightened into assumed styles and genres. The essay, the speech, the Report to an Academy, the travelogue parody—Kafka’s fiction is anything but fiction. It was subsidiary work, always, of a “limited liability.”

What should be investigated, then, is Kafka’s embrace of the Castle—of his employer’s language, and rhetorical techniques. Such adoptions have almost always been accomplished in a spirit of subversion, and examples are copious, and brilliant: Andrei Platonov, who incorporated Stalinist slogans into his novels; mid-century American poets as diverse as Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg, who co-opted advertising language into verse practice; one also thinks of Lenny Bruce, who composed entire comedy routines reading from transcripts derived from his trials on obscenity charges. Kafka’s example is more ambivalent, however. It is not subversion so much as an author himself being subverted.

But this phenomenon of speaking in the voice of one’s superior, of eventually surrendering oneself to the voice of one’s superior, is best examined in extremis —through Nazism. It has become a commonplace to say that Kafka’s work prefigured, in image, or predicted, in word, the horrors of Nazism. That argument is most often advanced by a litany of external congruencies between Kafka’s fictional world and the Third Reich: bureaucracy (though the Nazis were always more efficient than the authorial imagination), the infringement of technology on daily life, random violence, unappealable official destinies, fates based on birth, etc. Kafka’s intuition of Nazism was far more personal, however, far more inwardly directed. It can be found in his characters’ desires to join something, to become part of something, whether a style or form of being, or even a Volk (which, in Kafka’s case, would have, perversely, been Judaism). Kafka’s people want to become one with another, but especially with a mass, or a power. They long to find a voice, a place, or station, to join an office, a ministry, a selfless Gemeinschaft or selfish Gesellschaft, a family, a religion. Their question at the door of the Law is Rainer Maria Rilke’s: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” For natives of Austro-Hungarian Prague, like Kafka, like Rilke (they were born eight years, and ten blocks, apart), angels come in hierarchies—Ordnungen in German, “orders”; the celestials have rungs and levels, too.

Kafka was desperate to link his art and life to each other, and to link his destiny in both to a respectable institution. This desperation derived from a desire to please his parents, perhaps, as if to satisfy a God he did not believe in. For a time, at the advent of the First World War, he even attempted to enlist in the army, but was refused as an essential worker in the service of State. The decisiveness with which the nervous, suffering Kafka attempted military service, and then the energy and application with which he campaigned for veteran’s rights and benefits after the War, seems obsessive, even pathological (he advocated to establish a sanatorium for veterans’ recovery in a resort called, of all things, Frankenstein).

“Some people have claimed that reconditioned square shafts are an adequate alternative to the newer cylindrical shafts.”

This desire to lose himself in another’s approval was almost animal, instinctual, as if a remnant of the impulse to herd, to disappear into the flock. It should be remembered that old Jewish cities such as Prague are still organized not by congregation but by communities. In Prague one could not, and still cannot, “belong” to a synagogue, but, instead, to the Prague Obec, the Jewish Community of Prague, which has a board of directors and president answerable only to the Chief Rabbinate of Bohemia and Moravia. To this day Prague’s Jews carry blue identification cards, though registration has been made wholly voluntary. There is safety in numbers, but danger in being counted, and there is absolution in both. One has only to think of the demonic heir to Kafka’s officialdom—the Desk Murderer of Nazism, the unaware, or half-aware, Schreibtischmörder. He is competent. He is useful. He and thousands of archons exactly like him decimated almost the entirety of Prague Jewry. People want to “belong.” People want to be hated and abused.

A person who works as a Nazi is just that, a Nazi, and everything he does is infused with the spirit of Nazism. Like that historical unfortunate, we, too, have learned the lessons of work, and incorporated them into our lives. The public has long penetrated the private, and the two spheres are now virtually indistinguishable. It is as if we repeat the words of Shakespeare’s Shylock: “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” Lately, though, we “execute” this instruction directly on ourselves.

This is only a poetic version of Marx’s thought, that bureaucracy manages to translate all social relations into a grammar of formal relationships between offices and ranks. Marx’s assertion can be transposed onto the community, or family. In our time, all relations, even the most intimate—those between lovers, those between a writer and a piece of paper—have been invaded with foreign language. This invading, adulterating force is today characterized as “the Media,” though its particular expression has historically been called many things: technical jargon, Amtsstil (the official Empire term for “officialese”), Orwellian Newspeak. Today, the individual has access to an unprecedented array of linguistic and identificational guises and feints—ways in which one might, through the Word, disappear into the mass. In The Metamorphosis the bugman Samsa goes from being a “he” to an “it.” His sister Grete says: “‘I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature, and so all I say is: we must get rid of it. We’ve tried to look after it and to put up with it as far as is humanly possible, and I don’t think anyone could reproach us in the slightest.’”

At the time he was writing The Metamorphosis, Kafka jotted in his diary: “In the next room they are talking about vermin.” Yes, they were, but in a new language. In translation, they were talking about Samsa. In translation, they were talking about him.

His origins lie before industry certainly, before widespread centralization. He began, in fact, when people stopped working for themselves and started working for others; when individual or familial subsistence gave way to earning a living. Work, in the 19th century, became largely an indoor activity, making daily labor—not in the fields and farmlands, but behind four walls in a plant—seem contained, a place where behavior could be scrutinized, and surveilled. Then, with the demise of the aristocracy and church estates as the markets opened to the previously disenfranchised, a middle-class emerged, grown out of the ranks of lowly employees promoted off the factory floor and behind desks.

At this juncture, deskwork had become almost totally detached from the real physical work it controlled. The European bourgeoisie never made much of anything, ultimately: they administered, administrated, directed. The typical officeworker or bureaucrat made nothing, but he made money, whereas his son, who would become an artist, made “something”—an artwork—that was worth “nothing.” The typical generational reaction to the values of the fin de siècle middle-manager was just this—art.

This was Kafka’s reaction, but he would have it both ways. He would be doubly representative, both of his generation, and of the generation earlier. Throughout the 19th century, merchant-managerial fathers groomed their sons to take over their businesses, but Karl Marx’s father was a lawyer; Gustav Mahler’s father managed a distillery; Walter Benjamin’s father was a banker and a dealer in antiques; Gershom Scholem’s father was a printer, and Karl Kraus’ father manufactured the paper on which his son wrote. The redoubtable head of the Wittgenstein dynasty was an industrialist, with interests in iron and steel.

Here then, is Kafka, the last of the line. As Theodor Adorno noted, the last of the Modernists were also the last of the bourgeoisie; Adorno’s father sold, but did not make, wine. Kafka would become another sort of last, too: He became the representative writer of the last generation of continuous Jewish life and art in Europe, almost two centuries after the beginning of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, when Jews first began clawing out of the ghettos. Kafka was an administrator who could not stand up to his parents (he was especially afraid of his father), whose relatives’ reputations—as Benjamin might have put it, their “auras”—intimidated him. He was the petit, clerkish son of a family that had had physical power (Kafka’s paternal people were schochets, Jewish ritual slaughterers from Osek, or Wossek, in provincial Bohemia), and spiritual authority (his mother’s side were rabbis). Hermann Kafka, pater familias, was a small business owner, the supervisor of a dozen employees; his shop on the Zeltnergasse (now Celetná ulice) sold haberdashery, gloves, slippers, and umbrellas. He also founded an asbestos factory, the Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co. His son, however, was devoid of a proprietor’s practicalities. Kafka didn’t just live in his head—he lived two lives in his head.

Into these bifurcations we should cleave two more: not just Kafka’s Judaism but the officially sanctioned anti-Semitism of Austro-Hungary, and then the exigencies of Kafka’s later Prague life, split between German, which he wrote in, and Czech, which he spoke fluently, and which became, after the War, his employer’s primary language. After the Empire’s fall, and Czech independence, Kafka stayed on at his reorganized company, known as The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for Czechoslovakia. Just like with women—Kafka was engaged three times, to two different women—he was a willing slave, and would serve any master.

As for anti-Semitism, it nearly prevented his career. Kafka thought himself lucky to have made it into Prague’s Charles University despite an unofficial numerus clausus—“the closed number” that imposed a quota on a university’s Jews—and so felt compelled to comport himself with respect and attention to his studies. That sense of election and duty would quickly disappear. Kafka began his study of law with an almost theological seriousness, only to degenerate in his practice into routine prosecutions of corrupt hotel owners in Marienbad. This disconnect between the Law’s authority and the law’s application bred cynicism, as did the bias of a modern social welfare state that supported workers’ equality but not equality for Jews; such contradictions had to be daily resisted for Kafka to function at either one of his desks. The initial idealism, even optimism, that characterized his university study also characterized his first attempts at writing stories; tellingly, Kafka began his writing life in earnest at the same time as he began his coursework in law. Once employed, however, that youthful energy was suffocated, destroyed.

Soon, the utopian, picaresque spirit of his first novel, America (also known as The Man Who Disappeared), was deadened, numbed by the grind. Work constantly obtruded on Kafka’s enthusiasms, as his most private occupation—the writing of stories, the invention of worlds—found itself annulled in the selflessness of legalistic formulations. Such technical prose matured Kafka, which is to say it also leeched from him any plentitude of spirit. While legalisms allowed him to strip his stories, along with his personality, permitting him to present his fictions along with his terrible depressions and psychosomatic illnesses as mere recountings of the “facts,” the law’s recursive, casuistical constructs also served to entangle Kafka more terminally in his loneliness, and his failure. Need anyone be reminded that none of Kafka’s novels were ever finished? Why? Because they could never be proven. They could never be definitively adjudged.

Kafka’s career finally ended in 1922, when he retired early due to illness, on a miserly pension of 10,608 Czech crowns per annum. Toward the end of his tenure, friends had begun calling him František, the Czech version of Franz; he was still one of two Jews allowed to work at the Institute (he did not enjoy the company of the other). Meanwhile, the world had fallen apart. Forty million people had died throughout Europe, millions more had lost limbs in accidents amid the workplace of history, and, above all, literature now had the movies to contend with: Kafka enjoyed The White Slave Girl, The Heartbreaker, The Thirsty Gendarme, and Theodor Körner. We are far from the first fields, and the eclogues of pastoral poets.

G.S., because these are his rooms, says, “Good day, sir. What can I do for you?” He says this in German, or maybe in Czech; our setting is the Prague of Austro-Hungary.

The other man, slight and sharp, says, “I’m here about insurance, and do I have a deal for you!”

G.S. says,” Yes? Come to think of it, I’ve been considering a new life-insurance policy . . .”

“I don’t sell that type of insurance,” says the man. “I sell a different kind.” He takes a breath, begins: “I sell insurance against lengthy legal proceedings; I sell insurance against abuse for land surveyors; insurance against being used as a human bridge, and insurance against being turned into a giant insect . . .”

Needless to say, the man—perhaps he’s an angel—has the door slammed in his face.

What happens next?

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The first line of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

In the story’s modern rewrite, set in our world where all wrongs are rightable, and the law is always accountable, the unfortunate G.S. might not be turned back into a human, but—if a policy-holder—would certainly be compensated generously for this accident, with extra for “pain and suffering.”

* * *

Franz Kafka wrote as insurance against suffering the fates of his characters. It was as if every hour he spent writing, by candlelight and, later, by electric light, was an installment paid against darkness. He knew that with a stroke of the pen he could conceivably, at any time, have restored to Joseph K. his easy life before The Trial, and obtained for land surveyor K. a better position with a gentler Castle. But this is what makes Kafka the great writer of what has been called Modernity: That he stayed true to his fictions, and retained their tragedy.

“An original cylindrical safety shaft for wood-planing machines using the Schrader system, a product of the engineering works of Emil Mau und Co. in Dresden.”
Also, it should be said that no penstroke was ever that simple for Kafka, especially when it came to the writing he did at night. Kafka worked most days of his adult life as a lawyer in the insurance industry, and this in an age when what a lawyer did more than anything else was write: intra-office correspondence, reports, and official briefs. The only time Kafka wasn’t working, the only time he wasn’t writing for the workplace, he was on-leave, recovering from various ailments, including the tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1924, at the age of 40. Those leaves—spent both in sanatoria and at home, where he lived with his parents—were also intended as opportunities for Kafka to labor on his fiction, especially on his novels, but paradoxically, or inevitably, most of those occasions were squandered, or uninspired, and Kafka would return to the office, and so to his office writing, not refreshed, but disappointed anew.

A selection of Kafka’s office writings has just been translated for the first time into English, and published by Princeton University Press as Office Writings, appended with the obligatory commentaries, charts, prefaces, and postfaces, by a triumvirate of scholars: two professional Kafkans, Stanley Corngold, and Benno Wagner, accompanied by Jack Greenberg, a law professor and civil rights attorney famed for his work in the desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education, whose Supreme Court ruling overturned the Kafkaesque logic of “separate but equal” in American schools.

This event—finally, the translation and publication of the last known scrap of Kafka’s work left untranslated, and unpublished—brings us to the subject of this series: how Kafka’s office writings influenced his fiction, and what that influence means. Kafka’s office writings, as presented here, cannot be read on their own (they are incomprehensibly boring) but, instead, must be read as companions, to demystify the three novels and stories (which are anything but boring). Taken together, though, both workaday fact and masterwork fiction create a network of connections that exposes not just the concerns of a single writer, but also that of a singular culture—the culture of the Office, which has imposed itself on what used to be our lives.

The four sections that follow, to be published over the next four days, proceed chronologically. On Tuesday, we’ll post Before Kafka, in which we’ll explore Kafka’s antecedents, and the societal girders and politics that were behind his workplace life. On Wednesday, in Kafka, we’ll read about the man himself, about his particular workplace, while addressing the office writings directly. On Thursday, in After Kafka, we’ll read about the culture of the workplace that burgeoned in the years after Kafka’s death, and examine parallels between Kafka’s bureaucracy, and that of the Third Reich. Then on Friday, we’ll conclude amid the pessimistic future of Office Life—and, exhausted, we’ll rest.

Sure enough, the guest spots continue this Sunday night, as the Golem appears on The Simpsons, the best confirmation yet of his fame. In a belated Halloween special, Bart discovers the Golem asleep in Krusty the Klown’s prop room.

The writers obviously did their research—Krusty (born Herschel Krustofski, in case you haven’t heard), doesn’t hesitate to tell the now fixed story of how, in the 1600s, Rabbi Loew molded the Golem to fight his community’s enemies. The tale was once much muddier: in the earliest published account, written by Leopold Weisel in 1847, Rabbi Loew essentially creates the Golem to do the dishes. Only with I.L. Peretz and Yudl Rosenberg‘s versions, published around the turn of the century amidst a resurgence of anti-Semitism, was the Golem promoted to savior status. Or as Krusty put it: “the legendary defender of the Jews, like Alan Dershowitz, but with a conscience.”

The animation should also delight the Criterion Collection crew: visually the Simpsons‘ Golem perfectly mimics the broad-bodied, wide-haired costume German expressionist filmmaker Paul Wegener created to star in his own Golem movies. In the last, and only surviving entry of Wegener’s silent trilogy, shot between 1915 and 1920, the Golem falls for the rabbi’s daughter, and goes on a rampage when that love’s denied.

A scene from Paul Wegener’s 1920 The Golem: How He Came Into the World

The waking of the Simpsons‘ Golem has some horrible, unexpected consequences, too: Krusty recruits the Golem to gun down hecklers at comedy clubs. The routines rub off. When the Golem finally opens his mouth to speak (a rare feat in Golem lore), he has the voice of a Borscht Belt comic (channeled, without too much trouble, by Richard Lewis). It sounds like he “should be selling egg creams in Brighton Beach,” he tells Bart and Lisa, both unamused. “That’s what we call Jewish comedy. You don’t have to understand it because the words sounds funny. Meshuggenah! Hilarious!”

This may just be the canniest use of the Golem since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: uniting the exhausted legend of the Golem with another tired trope—an aging brand of stereotyped, self-deprecating humor. Did I mention the Golem’s neurotic, too? “I mangled and maimed 37 people, and I told a telemarketer I was busy when I wasn’t!”

It’s a style of take-my-wife-please yuks that has had little place in my heart, or on The Simpsons. The show’s central conduit for depicting and satirizing Jewish culture, Krusty, may be a Jewish comic, but he has always had as much in common with Jerry Stahl as Jackie Mason. Who else could follow a retelling of the Golem story by saying he’ll “need a shoebox full of blow” to get through a sketch?

Most tales about the Prague Golem end with the creature being put back to sleep by his master, but The Simpsons segment ends with a wedding. Perhaps in answer to Wegener’s unrequited love story, Marge and Lisa make the Golem a Playdough mate (Fran Drescher, sounding, remarkably, even more grating than usual). She, too, has taken lessons from Henny Youngman. “What’s with this outfit?” she says looking at her multicolored dress, “It looks like a lion ate a parrot and then threw up!” It’s enough to make Homer ready the ax—”back to the drawing board”—before the starstruck Golem stops him. I can only guess where they’ll go on their honeymoon—I wouldn’t want them to bake beneath the Bermuda sun—but maybe now the Golem will finally get the respite he deserves.