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Preface

Pictures from a Collaboration

In spring 2003, a blue and white poster appeared in the Department of German at

Princeton announcing a lecture to be held at Columbia University. The lecturer was a

certain professor Benno Wagner, who would speak on Kafka’s novels and stories in

relation to statistics, risk, insurance, biopolitics, and the protocols of thought experiments.

The technical approach sounded intriguing, but since Columbia is two hours by train

from Princeton, I wrote to Benno Wagner, inviting him to present his ideas once again at

Princeton at a brown bag lunch.

Benno wrote back of his pleasure in coming, and the event took place. I found it

eye-opening: the perspectives were original—indeed, in Benno’s adjective of choice,

“stunning”; and from that moment on, we stayed in email conversation, sending our own

work back and forth—and more. The notion of a joint venture soon emerged, and Benno

took the lead in creating a consortium of the universities of Siegen (where he teaches)

and Princeton, with the aim of creating a state of the art website called “The Virtual

Kafka Bureau.” That project, which involved many visits and conferences, is well

underway; and the results of one of the conferences held at Weimar in 2006 have

appeared in “Für alle und für keinen”: Lektüre, Schrift und Leben bei Nietzsche und

Kafka.1

I spent spring 2004 at the Internationales Forschungszentrum

Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, reading Nietzsche and Karl Kraus by day and translating
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and editing stories of Kafka by night.2 Benno read these pages and made inspired

comments, including a captivating explanatory footnote to Kafka’s story “The Burrow,”

which I will quote in full to give you a sense of his critical prowess:

Kafka’s title Der Bau, a word that recurs throughout his

work, poses an insuperable difficulty to the translator. The

German word means “building, construction,” but since we

are dealing here with an underground construction

produced by a badger-like animal, the word of choice

would seem to be “burrow.” Once we have committed

ourselves to this “burrow,” however, we have sacrificed an

element of tension that is a constitutive part of the story:

the doubleness of a structure that is built horizontally

underground but is represented in the mind of the badger-

narrator in “higher” terms, terms more suitable to a

structure built vertically above ground. (In typical Kafkan

fashion, the narrator is dissociated from the truth of what he

depicts). This tension is concretely conveyed in the word

the narrator chooses for the nodal points of his construction

—Platz (square). For what is disconcerting is that these

“squares” are also vaulted chambers and in the most

important instance constitute a Burg, a castle--an

underground castle! Previous translators have rendered this

Burgplatz (literally, “castle square”) as “castle keep,”

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employing the old-fashioned word “keep,” which means a

castle stronghold. But this word conceals the disorientating

tension of an underground structure that is perpetually

misconceived by the animal-narrator as an aboveground

building. In a word, this “discourse” of architecture

conveys the vanity of the creature that persists in imagining

itself to be of an altogether higher evolutionary type.3

How a translator’s difficulty with a single word, put in a strong critical light, opens up the

widest prospect on Kafka’s persistent account of what is called méconnaissance.

This footnote appeared in my Kafka’s Selected Stories, to which Benno also

contributed an essay titled “‘No one indicates the direction’: The Question of Leadership

in Kafka’s Later Stories.” (The phrase in quotes comes from “The New Lawyer,” the

first story in Kafka’s first longer publication, A Country Doctor: Little Stories [1919]).

Benno’s essay concludes with a prototype of the argument that informs the present book

and which we call “the potential of Kafka’s works to anticipate their own reception, to

inscribe into themselves the logics of readers to come” (p. ***, infra).4 In Benno’s

words,

Instead of directing his readers to this or that

country on the ideological map (the sword-waving

business entertained by most of his contemporary

writers), Kafka offers another attitude toward the

complexity of modern knowledge based on a way of

reading his stories: like the Chinese architect in

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“Building the Great Wall of China,” readers are

invited to travel through them, across new provinces

of knowledge, feeling the risk of the journey and the

importance of small differences and, occasionally,

of laughter, against the backdrop of an age of

violent uniformity. . . . There is a stance toward the

world at large in this. It is best articulated through

the detailed study of his submerged European

culture and, following the twofold reference to

politics and poetics in Kafka’s leadership game,

through the procedures and strategies of literature

itself. (KSS 320-21).

Benno’s home university, the University of Siegen, was somewhat more (though

not a lot more) accessible from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire than Princeton. So

on a couple of weekends, we found ourselves together in Prague, eager to renew the live

bond between ourselves and Kafka and finding it hard: by a logic of literal displacement,

Kafka’s homes and offices, which might still have held his aura, were now urbanized,

gentrified. The Kinsky palace at the center of Prague, where Franz Kafka went to college

and Hermann Kafka had his shop, is a bookstore and a meeting hall; and another shop of

Hermann Kafka’s, on Zeltnergasse 3, which once displayed the Kafka (“jackdaw”) icon,

is part of an arcade and a mall. The building at Na poříčí 7 that housed the Workmen’s

Accident Insurance Institute, where Kafka labored for fifteen years, is now the Hotel

Century Old Town, part of the Mercure chain (“over 700 hotels worldwide”); and
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privileged travelers spending the night in the room where Kafka once located “the hell of

office life” can be fortified at the hotel’s Braserie (sic) parisienne Felice. At a building

at the corner of Paris Street (Pariska 30) and the Vltava (Moldau) quay, on one ecstatic

night, from December 22-23, 1912, Kafka composed the story The Judgment, which

came out of him “like a regular birth”; the room witnessed his literary “breakthrough.” In

the depressing months following, he was often at the point of throwing himself out of the

window into the river. The pampered guests of the InterContinental Praha that now

occupies this spot (“our concierges [can] show you the most authentic places”) are likely

to be cool to such impulses.

The displacement and hence the disintegration of Kafka’s aura is egregious in

Prague. An acquaintance, Leon Wieseltier, enacted this displacement on his own body.

He had gone to see Kafka’s grave in the Jewish Cemetery, where he encountered a

French film unit just finishing its work—a documentary on the life and death of Kafka.

To complete the life, they had constructed an exact replica of Kafka’s gravestone on the

putative principle of mimetic aversion. A documentary based not on things but on their

reproductions would produce the requisite alienation effect, merely offering the

“representation” that “All is True”--and hence not.

The cinematographers seemed to be done with their work. They were packing up

their things and getting ready to leave, but the replica of the gravestone was still standing.

Leon asked them what they intended to do with it. “Abandon it,” they said. “Then I can

have it,” said Leon. “Comme vous voulez, Monsieur.” So Leon asked his companion to

photograph him carrying off (the papier-mâché relic of) Kafka’s gravestone.

We return to my meeting with Benno that day. Having observed these

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displacements--along with the way this destruction had been “made good,” since the city

was now littered with anemic “Kafka Squares” and “Kafka hotels”--and continuing to

crave contact with our author, we had no choice but to head for a wireless café, where we

could call up computerized images of Kafka at a time he walked through the streets of

Prague (“Da geht Kafka!”); and there we lingered until the quantity of cheap cigarette

smoke drove us from the room.

This change in civic venues allowed for more and more live conversations; and

here, during our several meetings in Prague in spring 2004, we hit upon a second project.

A major work of scholarship by Benno Wagner had just appeared. With the late Klaus

Hermsdorf, he had edited a volume of some 1000 pages (with an apparatus of yet another

900 pages) consisting of Kafka’s office writings (Amtliche Schriften), with copious

commentary. This volume was good enough to take its place in the so-called definitive,

in fact readerly edition of Kafka’s works known as the Kritische Ausgabe (Critical

edition) published by S. Fischer in Frankfurt a.M. Our new idea was to produce an

American edition, in which we would include translations, with ample commentary, of

the juiciest of Kafka’s legal writings, in the attempt to illuminate Kafka’s fiction from

this underestimated source. Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no automatic office

drudge. As one of the legal brains of the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the

Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary and thereafter of the Czech Lands, he was a

brilliant innovator of legislation addressing a variety of salient problems emerging from

the rapid industrialization of Bohemia, the “Manchester of the Empire.”

Franz Kafka: the Office Writings appeared in 2009 at the Princeton University

Press but would not have been doable without the intellectual support of a third co-editor,
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Jack Greenberg, Professor of Law at Columbia University and an eminent authority of

civil rights. In the course of a meeting with Jack to discuss matters of common interest,

we mentioned the importance of Kafka’s legal briefs for workmen’s compensation

insurance, a fact that interested him. He found the material rich enough to want to make

it the basis of a seminar at the Columbia Law school titled “Kafka and the Law,” which

he and I then taught, together with Benno, who made frequent visits, during the spring

semesters 2006 and 2007. Chapter 10, “Dissenting Discourses,” is an offshoot of a

lecture that Benno presented to the seminar.

Throughout this project, we were to make some wonderful discoveries, finding in

these legal documents the template of Kafka’s political thinking—a balancing act

between sovereign and popular authority, with violence lurking in the shadows—as in his

story “Building the Great Wall of China”--along with many of his most gripping images,

which originated in the quarries, land surveyors, and underground bulwarks that

preoccupied him at “the office.”

We have now arrived at the project immediately at hand: a sequence of

interlinked essays on aspects of Kafka’s novels and stories that struck us as compelling

from the standpoint of a shared sensibility. For our work on Kafka since 2003 has been

influenced by each other’s writings and conversations—not every published piece to the

same extent, the degree of the interpenetration of consciousnesses varies--but we have

done our work in an atmosphere of collaborative thought. Some of the chapters

following were written with a very explicit awareness of the other’s contribution to a

particular interpretative knot, an indebtedness specifically marked in the book titled

Odradeks Lachen: Fremdheit bei Kafka (Odradek’s laughter: Kafka’s foreignness) by our
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dedicating our essays to one another.5 These essays, much modified, now appear in the

present volume as chapter 2, “The Birth of Writing from Suicide Statistics (The

Judgment)” and chapter 6, “The Ministry of Writing (The Castle).” Of all the essays in

the present volume, it is in these that we have achieved the greatest degree of a shared

critical consciousnesses.

This consanguinity of outlook was happily noticed by two expert readers. In a

sharp review, the Germanist Mary Cosgrove wrote: “Several essays [in this volume] also

show how strangeness emerges from the familiar structures of the civilized world.

Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner agree that the strangeness of the everyday arises as

a result of the collapse between the public and private spheres: bureaucracy, statistics,

and the creation of the modern, quantifiable Durchschnittsmensch are thus sources of

creative inspiration for the representation of uncanny, familiar strangeness in Kafka's

work.”6 In another smart review, Heather Benbow saw our common concern: “With the

theme ‘Fremdheit bei Kafka,’ the editors of this volume have drawn inspiration from the

figure of Odradek (Die Sorge des Hausvaters), a creature who encapsulates the puzzling

nature of Kafka's fiction, with its constant conflict between literal and figurative

meaning, proliferation of themes, and exoticizing of the everyday. Within this broad

brief, the contributing authors are able both to explore perennial themes in Kafka

scholarship, such as the practice of writing (Stanley Corngold, Wolf Kittler, Benno

Wagner) . . . .”7 Here, our real, lived collaboration was quite wonderfully reconstructed

spontaneously by two expert critics. It is this sort of mandarin confirmation of our

intuitively felt consonance of thought and sensibility that encourages us to proceed on

this full-length venture in shared authorship.

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For all this apposition of sensibility, however, the reader will find chapters of

different tendencies throughout this work. This variation is owed to the fact that some of

the material in these chapters was originally published by me and some originally

published by Benno Wagner. Although we have reviewed and in many cases rewritten

each of these chapters line by line, it is evident that they move in somewhat different

directions; there are different strains. Yet they are meant to be complementary. The

logic of this complementarity is the subject of our Introduction.

Stanley Corngold

Cambridge, U.K., December 2009

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