Writing in The New Republic in 1941, W. H. Auden expressed his regret that The Great Wall of China, “which contains, in my opinion, Kafka’s finest work and is certainly the best introduction to him, has yet to appear here [in America].”
The English version of Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, which was published in German almost a decade after Kafka’s untimely death in 1924 as collected and edited by Hans-Joachim Schoep and Kafka’s friend Max Brod, did not arrive in the immigration line in New York Harbor, as Karl Rossmann does at the beginning of Kafka’s (misnamed) novel Amerika, until 1946, when it did so in the translation of Willa and Edwin Muir.
. . . to hear their sometimes discordant music in a comfortingly familiar Judeo-Christian key.
And as Brod took liberties with Der Verschollene, the title of Kafka’s picaresque Bildungsroman about Rossmann, so he did with the label he affixed to a set of aphorisms that Kafka composed in the northwestern Bohemian village of Zürau in 1917–18 and Brod included at the end of Great Wall. Kafka hadn’t called them anything; Brod called them Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg: in the rendering of the Muirs, “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way.” Though the Muirs’ edition of the aphorisms was the first in English, it was not the last; there are now several, including the 2004 edition by Roberto Calasso, translated into English by Geoffrey Brock and Michael Hofmann in 2006. They are also the texts that make up the book under review, first published in German by Reiner Stach in 2019 and now expertly translated by Shelley Frisch. This new version marks at least two significant advances for Kafka’s Anglophone readership, both pointed out by Frisch in her translator’s note: it retains the German text for comparison to the English, and it includes Stach’s detailed commentary on each short text.
But, speaking of these short texts, what, exactly, are they?
Brod’s title, not used but referred to in the present volume, has caused no small amount of controversy and has fallen out of favor (if it ever really commanded favor) for the way in which it prompts the reader to think theologically about Kafka’s pensées, to hear their sometimes discordant music in a comfortingly familiar Judeo-Christian key.
Still, Brod’s title retains merit, for at least two reasons. First, it does not use the word “aphorisms.” I borrow the Pascalian pensées from Paul North’s 2015 book The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation, but Brod’s Betrachtungen—“reflections, meditations”—is perhaps even better. (Betrachtung was also the title of Kafka’s first published collection in 1912.) In the case of the present work, a category like “aphorisms” is forced to include—though it technically cannot, as Stach points out—such utterances as the delightful “Psychology, for the last time!” (Aphorism 93), or the provocative “A cage went in search of a bird” (Aphorism 16), or the cryptic “A belief like a guillotine, as heavy, as light” (Aphorism 87). These sit alongside more traditionally aphoristic pronouncements like Aphorisms 77 (“Dealing with people engenders self-scrutiny”) and 78 (“The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a source of support”).
If the first reason for crediting Brod with at least some insight into what Kafka was up to has to do with literary genre, the second has to do with the substance of the ideas. In his wonderful foreword, Stach is at pains to persuade the reader that Kafka’s reflections do not sit easily in any tradition. He claims that they “cannot be reconfigured to signify a revival of a tradition”; that his use of “the good” (das Gute) “is not the same as in Plato or in Christianity, despite the obvious lines of influence”; that “Kafka’s ‘truth’ is clearly not the kind found in Judaism or one of its mystical movements.” As I read the reflections, however, the continuity with religious and philosophical tradition is one of their most notable and fascinating features.
I will give just a few examples. First, consider Aphorism 70/71: “The indestructible is one thing; it is each individual person and at the same time it is something common to all, hence the supremely indivisible connection among people.” For the reader who comes to this text from the perspective of the Western philosophical tradition, it is impossible not to hear an echo of the Stoic doctrine of participation in the divine reason that undergirds the concrete unity of the human race, a doctrine that was influential on, for example, the Roman statesman Cicero in his Laws.
Again, in Aphorism 64, Kafka writes:
The expulsion from Paradise is in its principal aspect eternal: and so, although the expulsion from Paradise is definitive, and life in the world is inescapable, the very eternity of the process nevertheless makes it possible not only that we could remain in Paradise forever but that we are indeed there forever, whether we know it here or not.
Stach remarks that the idea of the “expulsion from Paradise” obviously comes from Genesis, but claims that “this is where the parallel to Judeo-Christian mythology ended, and Kafka carried the idea further.” Did he, though? The idea of a pretemporal or atemporal fall goes back to the Christian theologian Origen, itself a heritage and reimagining of Plato’s suggestions about recollection and the soul’s preexistence in the Meno and the Phaedo. The further claim that we are always in Paradise whether we know it or not is easily connected to the repeated insistence in the Confessions of St. Augustine, himself a Christian Platonist, that God is always present to us even when we refuse to be present to Him.
Again, in Aphorism 54 Kafka rigorously distinguishes between what he calls the “world of the spirit” (geistige Welt) and the “world of the senses” (sinnliche Welt), which Plato had called the intelligible and sensible worlds:
There is nothing other than a world of the spirit; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual realm, and what we call Evil is only a momentary necessity in our eternal development.
Stach notes the connection to “Plato’s theory of forms,” but much more could be said. The connection of “evil” (das Böse) to the sensory world comes to us through Neoplatonism, and Plotinus in particular, and the stark claim that the spiritual world is the only one that really exists is the same radicalization of a Platonic idea that is found in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I cannot imagine that it is a coincidence that Stach’s observations about Kafka’s “seesawing between extreme abstraction and unfailingly compelling pictoriality,” or his way of using images “not . . . to illustrate his arguments,” since “they are his arguments,” are equally true of Plato, who resorts to invented myths—that is, word-pictures—whenever rational argument finds its limit. In Plato, as in Kafka, the barrier between “philosophy” and “literature” is fluid or, rather, non-existent.
He is a representative—a monumental, even epochal one.
All this is to say that the experience of reading Kafka is enormously enriched by interpreting him precisely as a link in a great chain of multiple and interrelated traditions (ancient philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity, to name the three most significant ones). He is a startling and idiosyncratic representative of Western intellectual reflection, it is true, but he is a representative—a monumental, even epochal one—all the same, as Auden had already pointed out in 1941. Kafka’s creative engagement with the classical tradition is frequently in evidence, from short pieces like “Prometheus,” “Poseidon,” and “The New Advocate” (about Bucephalus, the horse of Alexander the Great, becoming a lawyer) to more subtle references like the antagonist Klamm in The Castle, almost certainly intended to evoke not only the German adverb klammheimlich (“secretively”), but also the German word’s apparent Latin antecedent, clam (“secretly, hidden from, unknown”), the former pointing up the methods of the Castle toward those outside, the latter its intrinsically mysterious nature. Kafka’s encounter with biblical tradition is at least as creative and far-reaching, as the Hebrew and comparative-literature scholar Robert Alter documented two decades ago in “Franz Kafka: Wrenching Scripture.”
Because this is so, attention to such matters in the commentary would have been welcome and valuable. Kafka’s “traditionalism” is, in my view, more extensive and significant than the introduction lets on, and therefore demands attention in a detailed commentary on the text.
What Stach does provide, however—a fine-grained and perceptive intratextual account of how Kafka’s meditations from Zürau do and do not reinforce each other in a kind of concordia discors—is impressive. In painstaking detail, he maps the dense web of verbal and thematic connections that Kafka weaves throughout. With Stach’s guide in hand, the reader can move back and forth through Kafka’s reflections, even as Kafka himself may have done when recording the texts that constitute the Zürau aphorisms on unbound numbered slips of paper when copying (and sometimes modifying) them from his notebooks.
Stach’s analysis, aided by Frisch’s lucid translation, is substantial and useful, and it consistently provides food for further thought for the reader who ruminates on Kafka’s brief and oracular pronouncements. In short, The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is an indispensable aid for navigating Kafka’s often disorienting but rewarding verbal sallies.
In her translator’s note, Frisch writes that we “have come a long way from Max Brod’s original packaging of the aphorisms under the title Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, which nudged Kafka’s words in the theological direction Brod hoped to take them.” Perhaps we have come too far. Thomas Mann once identified Kafka as a “religious humorist.” That was in 1940 and, though it is less fashionable to say so now, it seems to me that it remains—as do so many other unfashionable things—basically correct. But wherever one lands on that particular interpretive question, the value of the present book for understanding Kafka is not in dispute. It is an achievement of the first order by two scholars whose knowledge of their subject can only be called intimidating, and it should be received with gratitude. Its place as an essential volume for the study of Kafka in the Anglophone world is already secure.
