ARTicles vol. 3 i.3c: Kafka’s Modern Family

He was almost thirty, worked as an insurance clerk, had written little, published less, and lived with his parents. In 1912, Franz Kafka showed few signs of becoming a writer who would define the twentieth century. He tried to write about two brothers, one of whom went to America while the other stayed in Europe, but the project failed. He remained despondent until September, when he wrote his breakthrough story, “The Judgment,” in a single night. At last, Kafka could write freely. This burst of creativity resulted in an incomplete novel that Kafka later referred to as The Man Who Disappeared. Published posthumously as Amerika, this work is a fantasia on the immigrant experience. When the European teenager Karl Rossmann sails into New York harbor he sees the Statue of Liberty clutching a sword instead of a torch. Kafka never visited America, but he creates his land of opportunity from fact as well as imagination. In addition to contemporary accounts of America, Kafka drew on three sources to create the style that would make him famous: Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, and the Yiddish Theatre. Kafka wrote Amerika under the influence of Dickens’ David Copperfield. He admitted, “it was my intention to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have got from myself.” Following Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel, he too wrote about a young man’s difficult coming of age. Just as David loses his trunk to a man he trusted, so Karl constantly loses his suitcase. Kafka, however, uses the suitcase as a psychological stand-in for Karl’s identity; like Karl, it is abused until it disappears in the end. And just as Karl meets an angry young woman, Clara Pollunder, in a mysterious mansion, so too does David encounter the frustrated Rosa Dartle in Steerforth’s house. Kafka intensifies Rosa’s violent sexuality to create Klara, who first practices ju-jitsu on Karl and then invites him to her room. The subtler themes of Dickens roar to life in Kafka, lit by the “sharper lights” of modern times. While Kafka depended heavily on Dickens in evolving his own style, he also mined Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, one of his favorite books. Its story of a young man’s journey through a maze of trials to independence profoundly influenced Amerika. Franklin gained passage on a ship to New York by pretending he had gotten a girl pregnant; Karl is sent to America because he really has done so. Most importantly, Kafka borrows the structure of his novel from Franklin’s adventures; Karl trusts a series of father figures who betray and expel him, just as Franklin fell prey to manipulative mentors. Kafka owes much to Franklin’s moral that a young person can separate from his family, make a name for himself, and regain his family’s respect. Amerika subverts that ideal, showing a young person leaving his family, descending the social ladder, and losing his own name. The last major influence came from the Yiddish theatre. Beginning in 1911, Kafka obsessively attended performances by Yitzhak Levi’s troupe in Prague. He loved this theatre for its “shabbiness.” Performed in a run-down Prague café, it featured exaggerated acting, extravagant sets and costumes, and unintentionally comic special effects. The language they used also affected Kafka’s prose, from the sad, ironic use of “Jewish” humor to the absurdly heightened drama of the scenes. In Amerika, Karl’s meeting with his ship’s stoker takes its dramatic life from the Yiddish theatre. Kafka sets the scene in a tiny space, noting small physical details, adding elaborate theatrical gestures, and filling in Karl’s thought almost as “asides” to an audience. In the novel’s last scenes, set on the way to the mysterious Theatre of Oklahoma, Kafka appropriates the strange and hilarious images he saw in a performance of Yakov Gordin’s God, Man, and Devil. The first scene shows a conversation between God and the Devil with angels flying around the Throne. When Kafka shows white-robed angels on pedestals, he borrows a technique used in this production to depict flying. But he dispels any magic in the scene by describing the “almost laughable” spectacle of ordinary young women in bad costumes, playing trumpets out of tune. Even the Statue of Liberty plays the part of a sword-brandishing angel, guarding the gates of Paradise from Karl’s Adam. Although these fictional works influenced Kafka’s style, he also drew on factual sources for his Amerika. One of these sources was personal: several of Kafka’s relatives had emigrated to America and sent accounts of life back to Europe. His cousin Otto Kafka arrived in New York in 1906, and by 1911 worked his way up to owning an export firm and marrying an upper-class American woman. Otto’s brother Franz came to New York in 1909, and Otto sent him to a prep school outside the city. A corrupt partner forced Otto out of business in 1912, and he had to rebuild his fortune. All of these situations appear in Kafka’s novel: Karl meets his Uncle, a shipping magnate who started with nothing, visits a country house outside New York, and then loses his prosperity. Another cousin, Emil Kafka, had lived in Chicago since 1904 and worked at Sears, Roebuck. Kafka’s descriptions of department stores and huge offices probably come from Emil’s accounts. Kafka mentions their letters and visits home, and must have used their experiences as a source of Karl’s adventures in America. Because Europeans in the early part of the century found America fascinating in its modernity, travelogues about American life became popular. In June, 1912, Kafka attended a lecture by Dr. Frantisek Soukup, a Czech sociologist who had visited America to study its political and social structures. The mass protests and labor problems that flood the streets of Karl’s America seem drawn from Soukup’s writings and lectures. When Karl sees a pre-election rally by a local politician, Kafka uses Soukup’s accounts of campaigning to create a political fantasy. Because Karl sits on a balcony far above, the parade below turns surreal. Instead of a soapbox, the candidate speaks from atop the shoulders of an immense man. The campaign posters, illegible from Karl’s point of view, form white walls. And workers holding old car headlamps blind the passersby. By exaggerating details of American life, Kafka remakes the image of America in grotesque forms. No factual source is as important to Kafka, however, as Arthur Holitscher’s 1911 travel diary America: Today and Tomorrow. This German work gave Kafka a geographical and architectural sense of America, and the photographs and descriptions Kafka saw there found their way into his novel in many forms. His appreciation of “the size of America” comes from pictures of the New York skyline, seen both from street level and from skyscraper construction sites high above the city. Holitscher’s visit to the Athenaeum Hotel in Chautauqua provides the model for Karl’s experience in the opulent Hotel Occidental. When Karl sees the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge at vital moments in the novel, both images come directly from Holitscher’s book. Kafka departs from realism by placing a sword in the Statue’s hand and by transporting the bridge to Boston. In a more chilling example of Kafka’s transformation of fact, he borrows the Theatre of Oklahoma from a picture Holitscher titles “Idyll in Oklahoma.” In a section on the plight of African-Americans, the photograph depicts a lynching. Karl has just renamed himself “Negro,” and boarded a train for Oklahoma, complicating the idea of the Theatre as a place where “all are welcome.” Kafka transforms these real-life details in the novel, making the familiar unfamiliar. Out of these many influences and sources, Kafka crafts an urban fantasy. The works that followed over the last twelve years of his life spoke the language of modernity, with all its speed, machinery, and bureaucracy. Amerika rose from a Europe looking longingly toward the future and seeing that future in America. In his Futurist Manifesto of 1909, the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti called for artistic expression based on “violence, cruelty, and injustice.” When Karl sees forty gleaming elevators at a hotel, dreams of being an engineer, or watches traffic “hurtle by at lightning speeds,” he lives Marinetti’s era of “aggressive action.” He finally disappears into the immensity of America, just as the heroes of Kafka’s later works would disappear into the justice system or the belly of ruthless machines. In setting his first novel in a hyper-modern America, Kafka both acknowledged his debt to literary and historical sources and paved the way for the art of the twentieth century. Akiva Fox is a second–year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.