Asking a fan to burn your work is a request that we might now, after Freud, characterize as passive-aggressive,” and might seem to us to be a mark of extreme egoism—a good friend like Brod will always refuse what is bad in you, and Kafka had to have known that, yet still made his wishes known. He made his wishes known possibly knowing that those wishes, too, would eventually be made known along with the novels and stories.

They are fastened securely, unaffected by any strain, and the blades can never snap out, any more than they will be flung out or bent.”

If Kafka didn’t want his manuscript fiction read, we can be sure that he never once hoped that his salaried memoranda might one day find an audience. And yet here we are, having just spent the last four days reading Kafka, and reading the worst of him—the most tedious, the most straight-faced, the facts.” Almost a century after Kafka’s death, we read him and he does not know that we read him, and we read what we want of him, and he has no say which page we flip to—whether to the first page of The Metamorphosis, or to his many love letters, to Felice, to Milena, or to his diary entries, or his report to the Second International Congress on Accident Prevention and First Aid in Vienna. Wherever we read him, however, the language is familiar. It is a language that derives from the personalities, many and varied, which we ourselves assume for the purposes of public functioning, and it is this common deceit—a conceit?—that compels us to read Kafka today. That in the future we will still read more of his fiction, of his Home Writings,” than of his Office Writings, is only because the fiction has managed to retain a spark of individual life, burning in defiance against, while also illuminating, any stricture imposed from above.

Finally, about that imposition: what does it ultimately mean that the essential fiction of modernity—actually, the first great fiction of modernity, the fiction of the airplane, and the submachine gun, of the Battle of the Somme and the sisters, three of them, Elli, Valli, and Ottla, who perished in the Łódź Ghetto and at Auschwitz; the fiction of the first mass-produced automobile and telephone and film, and of the first typewriter and computer”—what does it mean that such suggestive work had its genesis not just in the language of business, but in the very diction or grammar of bureaucracy?

Here, where we live, in Postmodernity, which is just the name for final market ascension over individual expression, Office-influence means that art has become work, and work has become art. In literature especially—an art that, more than any other, takes an investment of time and thought for its appreciation—the effects of this merger have been devastating. With the rise of MFA and other professional writing programs, people—young people who should be thinking and doing on their own—diligently apply themselves instead to learning how to write, and learning how to write well, as if that standard existed, and was the purview of the Academy, or the market. Literature is not life, though, or not all of life, which has itself been assailed by work’s prepotency.

Life has become work, too—”a lifestyle.” Today, every aspect of our existence has been overtaken by ideas of achievement, of productivity. We talk to each other, even to ourselves, of fulfillment, of goals. It was inevitable that our personal language would become that of managerial motivation, that we would administer seminars to the self. The home has become an office—”the home office.” People have begun bringing their computers into their beds. It is regarded as not just good practice but salutary to be “always connected.” Kafka the insurance scribe knew this was coming. He knew this, too: That the only way out was to get sick and die.

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.

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.