Kafka, Our Contemporary

In communist Prague, Kafka was banned. Something similar happened in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries, so their citizens were not able to read Franz Kafka. The political authorities of those countries were aware that the author’s portrayal of totalitarianism was so accurate and lucid that any reader would recognize it as a hyperbole of the political system in which he lived.

During my school years in Prague, my teachers, if they ever mentioned Kafka at all, did not refer to him as a Czech author but, following the official line, as a German writer. The fact that he was Jewish did not help him to be accepted in that system either. The persecution of the writer’s work went so far that once, when I was leaving the country, crossing the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, the Czech customs police confiscated my copy of The Trial.

In the year we have just left behind, the world was commemorating the centenary of Kafka’s death. In June, the month of his death, I participated in one of the rare colloquia dedicated to him by his city: the international congress organized by the Jewish Museum in Prague. Then I visited the activities that the Czech capital offered up to its great writer. The Museum of Literature devoted barely a corner of one of its large halls to him, underlining his use of German; thus, the current nationalist vision was linked to the official narrative of the communist era: Kafka is still an outsider. The prestigious contemporary art museum, DOX, dedicated an exhibition to him, although much of the art on display had little to do with the honoree.

In short, Kafka has never been a prophet in his own land, except as a trivialized tourist attraction. In Europe and America, on the other hand, he has been and still is regarded as a prophet: the clairvoyant work of the writer speaks to us of a West that is also that of our times.

Kafka, a Jew whose mother tongue was German, never ceased to regret not writing in Czech, a minority language that he mastered to perfection. Moreover, he felt uprooted in his city. This uprootedness, which characterizes his work, connects him with those who read him today in the multilingual Western metropolises where the sense of belonging to a predominant culture is weakening. Moreover, the readers of today, should they feel the uneasiness of the contemporary “liquid” world, fully identify with the anguish of exile that fills the Prague author’s work, in which nothing is solid and everything seems like a nightmare.

Kafka, who finished his law degree and worked in several insurance companies, was able to closely observe human vulnerability in the face of the soulless machinery of institutions. His characters are permanently watched; in The Trial there is always someone looking out of the window, whether it is when Josef K is arrested or when he is murdered. “Like a dog,” says the narrator, but it seems as if the anonymous observer at the window is thinking this. In The Castle, a couple of companions spy on K at all times, even when he makes love to Frieda. Kafka predicted the surveillance that prevails in our contemporary world: there are cameras in supermarkets and airports; telephone conversations with hospitals and banks are recorded. But today’s Westerners even surpass the surveillance in Kafka’s world: we gladly make it easy for those who want to know everything about us by posting images of our privacy on social media and leaving traces everywhere of what we do and what we like or dislike.

Denunciations of the vulnerable are part of Kafka’s universe, and are treated as something fateful. Kafka prophesied what throughout the 20th century would become the practice of European totalitarianisms, where denunciations were the order of the day, especially against the innocent. The practice of denunciation has become a daily practice in the social media of today’s Europe, where the denounced has no possibility of defense. There are judges who use complaints as a political weapon and prosecute citizens, even if no crime has been discovered for years. These judges are part of the army of anonymous Kafkaesque officials who take an innocent person and do not let him go, finding him guilty, so that the reader is not surprised when the victim is executed.

Kafka’s protagonists are often trapped in dead-end situations caused by absurd rules enforced by mechanized bureaucrats. The Central European culture of Kafka’s time wanted to allow a return to human intimacy and to escape from the order imposed by an all-powerful state -the Austro-Hungarian Empire-, and from the control that bureaucracy exerted over the individual. Kafka understood this tendency and analyzed it in his books before it took its terrible dimension in the form of totalitarianism and world wars. His work is prophetic because it portrays the world that, since his death, has been built throughout a whole century: for the second time, authoritarianisms are lurking. We will always have to read Kafka to know precisely what this implies.

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