I had, typically, a strong proclivity toward both the observational thrills of reporting and the introspective opportunities afforded in covering the Jewish world, as well as obsessions with religion and cheesy pop culture (with which the Jewish world abounds), not to mention writing. I had until that point been relishing the looming opportunity to muck around in even more puddles of Jewish culture, with Tablet still in its pre-nascent stages. But all the news about the economy tanking and the impending death of Journalism had put a pressure on me I had yet to experience in my adult life—now, I was supposed to feel lucky just to have a job. Talk about a kein ayin hora. Suddenly, it seemed that my work was tightening around me, posing a threat to a large part of my identity: the unique role I played as a rebel and incorrigible seeker of exotic experiences as the child of an eighth-generation rabbi father and Jewish communal worker mother.

I decided to look for a therapist, guided by little more than my insurance company’s website and the vague idea that I wanted to see someone Jewish and female. I still can’t quite say whether this preference stemmed from a desire for someone who would mirror myself and provide comfort in a similar manner to my mother, some vestigial “insider” impulse, or was simply the least restrictive qualification I could apply, given the demographics of the New York City therapeutic community. As it turned out, my tenure as the patient of a woman I’ll call Sharon Stein helped enormously, but not for the reasons I, or anyone else, could have predicted.

****

Sharon is in her mid-60s and exudes the graceful toughness that I associate with a certain kind of Jewish woman. Her large features and skeptically-set mouth reminded me of an Ashkenazic version of my beloved late grandmother. As soon as I met her, I felt a familiar, if constricting, kinship. I immediately began to question my decision. Did I really need another mother, or aunt? Would she be able to understand my complicated relationship to my Jewishness?

But I found that what felt “Jewish” about her, at least initially, also felt good. Her specific brand of dark humor and matter-of-fact assessments seemed neutral and comforting, and I liked that she acknowledged ideas that had become taboo among women my age: that romantic longing sometimes drives us, that we want babies, and that we get irrationally angry when we feel like other people have what we, too, are due. Her folksy way of commiserating with my endless frustrations—“most people are schmucks,” “you’ve gotta have the chutzpah to decide who the people you want in your life are,” “there’s no point trying to relate to people who haven’t suffered”—just about balanced some of her more cringe-inducing self-help platitudes. She didn’t judge me for my obsession with omens, or my superstitious attachment to certain jewelry, but did take strong issue with my laziness and self-pity. I settled into a pattern of talking around the subject of my work. I slowly began to trust her, and to appreciate the symmetry in talking to someone who relied on Jewishness as a code, and obviously shared some of my familial neuroses, but seemed somehow immune to their crippling effects. A functional nut! Maybe I could be one too.

One day at work, though, four or five sessions into my time with Sharon, my issues with Jewish organizational life reached a fever pitch. I had a pathological desire to turn and run from the Jewish world, from the realm of neurotic writers, and from New York City, into the Wild West of the mind: California, working with kids, driving through mountains, freedom from Yiddish puns, arguments about Israel—even bagels had become sinister. Even in the heat of this anxiety, I knew I was conflating my job and my family and my personality and my fate, and perceiving an inappropriately grandiose narrative where there was just a quiet indie drama—but still, I was losing my grip.

Once in Sharon’s office, I took a deep breath and began describing my mounting desire to flee, heightened by the sense that, career-wise, I had gotten something I wanted but paid too dearly for it. I weepingly confessed that I was finding the focus on my people—our people—too parochial, and that I sometimes looked down on family members who had narrowed their professional worlds in this way. Without thinking, I offered frantic caveats—that many of my best friends were Jewish, that I love the holidays, that all else being equal, I would prefer to marry a Jew—none of which changed the fact that, at the moment, I would have given anything to be able to turn my back on the whole thing.

As I talked, Sharon’s face, peering out from that day’s scarf-brooch combo, went from expressing patient curiosity to amused condescension. When I paused for air, she jumped in. She explained that she too had struggled with her Judaism when she was younger, had dabbled in Buddhism and eventually came back to all the “wonderful” things about our faith. I sputtered that it wasn’t an issue of my personal Judaism, but of my work and my role in my family and my feeling that I was a fraud among the East Coast Jewish intelligentsia. She countered by telling me about how she had once attended a lecture about Judaism and the law and how it had gotten her more interested in the religion—maybe I should try something like that? Maybe I could write about klezmer music’s effect on other musical forms? Had I considered the idea of taking pride in being Jewish because “so many of us are so bright”?

At this point, I gave up trying to respond, but the coup de grace was still to come. Unbidden, Sharon launched into a story about how she had reluctantly joined a Torah study group at her Reform synagogue. At first, she explained, she was concerned that it wouldn’t be intellectual enough, but—through pluck and determination—she was able to bring her own perspective to the group, which then took everyone in an unexpected and “fascinating” direction. As she reached the triumphant climax of this tale of personal discovery, I glanced at the clock and realized we—she—had gone almost 10 minutes over our allotted time. I gathered my things, stood up and thanked her. Same time next week?

A few days later, I called Sharon’s receptionist and cancelled my next appointment. I never went back.

Over the next few months, I parsed the experience on my own. I had gone to Sharon looking for, at best, a way into understanding and, at least, an escape. Instead, what I got was a brochure. Just like my mother, just like my aunts—like me, even, in some ways—Sharon was incapable of impartiality when it came to the question of a young Jew questioning her place in the tribe. Instead, as I was drowning under the pressure to put a lens of pride on all things Jewish, she presented me with a surreal example of precisely what was making me feel suffocated in the first place.

But, like my grandmother used to say, God writes with a crooked hand. Sharon’s performance turned out to be a comically apt manifestation of the elusive thing I had been bothered by—the “pride blinders” that otherwise thoughtful people develop when conversations turn to Jewishness. And in hindsight, she provided me with a ripe Jewish story of my own—tricking me, in a way, back into engagement with this topic that had become so fraught. As my generalized anxiety waned, I woke up to my natural state of curiosity. Just as Judd Apatow could probably make a hilarious movie exploring the lives of professional golfers, and J.D. Salinger could likely write an intriguing novel from the perspective of a poor octogenarian (well, maybe he has), even the less talented among us have any number of paths we can go, but often function best within a certain realm. Maybe Jewishness won’t be mine forever, but Sharon helped me remember where my interest in the topic lay: myself.

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.

In 1908, after two years of employment, Kafka left that firm to take up a more prestigious position with The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, a semigovernmental institution responsible for administering insurance in the province of Bohemia, but answerable to Vienna k.u.k.—kaiserlich und königlich, imperial and royal,” its autocratic description—crownseat of the Crownlands. Bohemia was just one of 18 provinces of an Empire that stretched from the German Reich to the Russian wilds, and Prague, Bohemia’s capital, Kafka’s home and birthplace, was only the third city of that Empire, after Vienna, capital of Cisleithania, and Budapest, capital of Transleithania, or the Kingdom of Hungary—dealings between provinces were complicated; the Empire’s fetish for organization led only to chaos.

A cylindrical safety shaft from the engineering works of Bohumil Voleský, Prague-Lieben.”

Prague, then, was half-metropolis, half-provincial, a dark, Gothic city where German-speakers lived alongside ethnic Czechs, while political allegiance was split between German-language fealty to Empire and Czech desires for self-determination, finally realized by T.G. Masaryk in 1918 with the founding of the first Czechoslovak Republic. These two factions were united by an envying mistrust of the Reich, and also by the mediating presence of Socialists and Jews—two minority designations that often applied to the same set of people. They could be found at solidarity meetings one day, then on the next night at the Altneu synagogue, in whose attic lives the Golem. Across the Vltava River, known in German as the Moldau, loomed The Castle”—Das Schloß, also known as the Hrad.

Workers’ Accident Insurance was first established in Europe due to a multitude of factors, not least this rise of socialism. The Germanic Socialist workers’ movements of the late 19th century—practical embodiments of Marxist thought, infused with French esprit as perfected in the insubordination of the 1871 Paris Commune—arose in response to the growth of industry, which demanded practical and fair relief from its efforts to effectuate Modernity. A balm had to be found in this newly technological Gilead to heal workers’ injuries incurred in the service of the Industrial Revolution. The Empire’s comprehensive workers’ accident insurance plan was based on that of the German Reich, which unified in the same year as the Commune appeared, 1871. Marx began his work in the 1840s in the Reich’s strongest territory: Prussia.

Unlike the multinational Empire, however, Germany was a nation-state: It was both a state responsible for practical administration, and a nation interested in preserving national character—a character defined by perceived mental and physical fitness, and even superiority, suffused with folk vestiges of the Romantic movement. Accordingly, the welfare of Germany’s workers was intimately bound up in ideas of commonweal, and common origins. The Empire, by contrast, was a multinational hodgepodge that had to create a social welfare state if not out of concern for its disparate workforce, then to maintain its fractious coalitions—to placate its competing nationalisms and political platforms, and to counteract the agitation of anarchist and secessionist groups (such as the one that spawned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand early in the next century). It might follow, then, that workers’ insurance helped keep the Empire together at a time of divergent allegiances. It might follow, also, that Marx’s Socialist doctrine can be read as a pretext—truly, a pre-text —to legislation that provided insurance to workers helping to bring about a revolutionarily capitalist, consumer society.

In 1887, four years after Kafka’s birth, the Empire implemented its policy of workers’ accident insurance, and founded its Institutes. Unlike in the Reich, the Empire’s insurance was organized according to geographic territories, and not by types of trades. Whereas Germany established a Metalworkers’ Trade Association and a Textileworkers’ Trade Association, the Empire established Prague’s Bohemia branch, which covered all trades throughout Bohemia, and which accepted Kafka for employment after he was finished insuring the best boats, and wealthiest companies, of Trieste (Assicurazioni Generali’s was the oldest type of insurance: Modern commercial insurance was founded two centuries earlier in London to indemnify the first private firms interested in international maritime shipping).

Now, however, Kafka worked not for the mutual benefit of large industry and the Crown, but as a mediator between the concerns of the working class and its management, between that management class and the Institute, and, lastly, between the Institute and Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna. Initially, Kafka’s Institute job was as a deputy clerk, or assistant secretary, but he was eventually promoted to become Senior Legal Secretary—an Obersekretär —the indispensable righthand man, a sort of Court Jew, to the organization’s Director, Doctor Robert Marschner (a note about titles: in the office he was always addressed as “Herr Doktor Kafka”). As Obersekretär, Kafka’s responsibilities included risk classification (which involved evaluating the degree of danger of a certain job, and so setting the level of premium to be paid by business owners), and improving the Institute’s efforts at accident prevention. The latter duty required Kafka to dabble in public relations, writing informative bulletins and even popular newspaper articles—his chief outlet was the proletarisch, large-circulation Tetschen-Bodenbacher Zeitung—hoping to educate management, labor, and the general public in advances in workplace safety.

‘The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800-4000 revolutions per minute.’
“The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800–4000 revolutions per minute.”
While at night Kafka was writing stories about the infinite and eternal construction of The Great Wall of China, and about a Flying Dutchman set adrift on a deathship, floating forever amid ports of call, during the day he was writing interminable pages about the perils of wood-planing machines (“the introduction of the cylindrical safety shafts in wood-planing machines is finally progressing well”), the perils of chimney-sweeping, and brandy consumption in quarries, problems with automobile insurance (as the majority of cars were then driven by chauffeurs, the vehicles themselves had to be classified as businesses), and the risk classification quandaries posed by the recently electrified elevator (Where is the electrical generator stored? Who, exactly, has access to the elevator’s switches?).

To read these 18 examples of office writing without the context of Kafka’s other work, without knowing who, in fact, Kafka ever was, is essentially to go to work. Here is a sampling of their titles, some provided by the book’s three editors, and others by Kafka himself, or by his newspaper editors: “Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery”; “On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors”; “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge”; and “Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public.” Their style, even more so than the style of Kafka’s stories and novels, is neutral. Their subject matter is expectedly worse: specialist, abstruse, culled from the most humdrum and desiccated of corporate genizahs.

Then again, we should remember that nobody asked us to read them. Sigmund Freud’s laundry lists probably aren’t any better (though they might prove equally as revealing). Indeed, to read the office writings as one is supposed to, like a good student of the Kafkaesque, or a diligent K.-like worker, is instructive: it is to understand Kafka’s art anew, and to be reminded of the discreet, double-life of modern working man, whose true, pleasure-giving interests lie almost entirely outside of the workplace. The Office Writings are the Ur texts to Kafka’s extracurricular fiction, Kafka’s precursors as much as Talmud (which he did not know well), and Hasidic wonder stories, Hamsun and Kierkegaard and von Kleist and Flaubert, Dostoyevsky’s psychological murderers, and Dickens’ urban grotesquerie and grit.

‘The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.’
“The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.”
The examples of this connectivity are simple—of how the work-work influences the artwork—but the interpretations, and the ramifications, are not. In the aforementioned “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines” of 1910, Kafka argued that the square shafts that supported the blades used to plane wood were responsible for a regrettable number of accidents and maimings, including the loss of parts of fingers, or, rarer, the severance of entire appendages. Because these shafts were square, gaps would appear between the blades screwed to a turning shaft and the lip of a worktable. A worker’s finger would become stuck in these gaps—four gaps for each single revolution of a square shaft, revolving 3800 to 4000 times per minute—resulting in debilitating injuries. Kafka’s solution was innovative, but seems elementary: He proposed to introduce a newly patented model of cylindrical shaft—a round shaft (with its blades hidden under flaps or between wedges) that obviously lacked sharp quadrilateral corners, and so lacked the gaps that would trap, and — in the days before plastic surgery—irreparably harm. Kafka describes how his solution would benefit workers and management (workers would be healthier, and so more productive; the cylinders were even more “cost-effective”), while emphasizing the carnage of such accidents with what, at the time, was a novelty: images, illustrative plates showing both injured hands, and multiple views of the cylindrical shaft. This commissioning was one of the first uses of illustrations in a business report—Franz Kafka, father of multimedia.
‘Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.’
“Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.”

This report can be convincingly linked to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” In that story of inscription as incision, a convicted felon is punished by torture, and death. The vast, unwieldy apparatus that accomplishes this punishment inscribes on the body of this convict the exact nature of his transgression; the sin becomes internalized through the medium of the flesh, in a mark of Cain for the Machine Age. While no introduction of “cylindrical shafts” could overturn such a metaphysical damnation, there is no doubt that the image of a body inscribed by technology springs from Kafka’s arbitrating experience with traumatized workers. Kafka’s deskbound milieux of inscription and accountancy is also where we first hear about the first primitive computer, a variety of calculator known as the Hollerith machine, used for the processing of statistical data using the technology of the “punch card” (the machine’s process was inspired by the practice of punching a railway ticket, and so encoding it with information; the Hollerith’s best success was with the Nazis, in their use of it to schedule the train deportations of European Jewry). In Kafka’s fiction the human body is the Punch Card of Modernity. In modern life, the body has become the storage, “the muscle memory,” and so the casualty, of the workplace—both physiologically, and psychologically.

Another example of Kafka’s appropriation of insurance work is more direct. Often the attractions of philosophical influence, the wisps and correspondences of ideas, and complex technologies, obscure mundane inspirations and models. In 1914, the same year as he wrote “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka wrote a report editorially entitled “Accident Prevention in Quarries.” In it, he faulted quarry owners for paying wages in alcohol, and for allowing workers to work when drunk, and without the proper safety equipment such as goggles (“It is true that safety goggles are frequently issued to the workers, but the men find them impossible to use, or they are prejudiced against using them, so that the goggles are usually found in the workers’ pockets during the workday. Such a situation can exist because supervision of the operation is either inadequate or altogether lacking.”)

Kafka condemned the entire quarrying industry as under-regulated, and accused the sector’s inspectors of not reporting problems, and not recognizing the fundamental nature of the dangers that quarrying posed: “Quarries call for a kind of inspection that differs from that required by other operations. In this work, it is not a matter of safety devices that, once acquired, will last and be useful for long periods of time; what matters is efficient excavation, which has to be planned over and over so as to fit with the ever-changing soil conditions.” These inspectors comprised an inspectorate class emplaced in response to the legal prohibition against the Institute inspecting the premises of any business it insured, in order to protect the businesses’ trade secrets. These inspectorates would prove “independent” in other ways, too, often settling upon widely divergent meanings for workplace safety ratings of “satisfactory,” and “normal”—to Kafka’s displeasure, and the Institute’s incomplete evaluation. Here, in this report, Kafka also introduced photographs, now of delinquent quarries, noting depictions of unsafe conditions such as teetering boulders, and precarious piles of rock.

He writes, about Fig. IV:
“At the very top to the right in the debris, marked with ‘B,’ a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size, lies almost suspended above a projecting rock wall. At the center of the picture, marked ‘S,’ a man can be seen working at a dangerous spot, 4 meters above ground, without being attached to a rope. Debris is not removed, and quarrying work has been pushed forward almost to the edge of the walkways shown through the railing.”

With “a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size,” we are reminded, palpably, of the chilling last scene in “The Trial”—the execution of Joseph K. This is his sacrifice by two unknown men, his diabolical akeidah.

“Not to leave K. standing motionless, exposed to the night breeze, which was rather chilly, he took him by the arm and walked him up and down a little, while his partner investigated the quarry to find a suitable spot. When he had found it he beckoned, and K.’s companion led him over there. It was a spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder was lying. The two of them laid K. down on the ground, propped him against the boulder, and settled his head upon it.”

This quarry is the site of martyrdom, character’s and author’s—a wounding for the working cause.

This is where one held K.’s throat, “while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.”

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.