DURING THE 1960S, 1970S, AND 1980S, Paul Raabe’s edition of Kafka’s stories titled Sämtliche Erzählungen sold a million copies in Germany alone and functioned as the main textual source for many Kafka scholars. This edition contains a curious emendation that has a certain exemplarity. Both the manuscript and all the authorized published versions of Kafka’s story “The New Lawyer” (“Der neue Advokat”) contain the sentence “Im Allgemeinen billigt das Barreau die Aufnahme des Bucephalus” (In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus, KSS 60). If any sentence of Kafka’s might be termed authentic, it is this one: it is found in the manuscript, in an early printing in Theodor Tagger’s journal Marsyas (1917) and in the first book version, A Country Doctor: Little Stories, 1920 (Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen). But there was something about the word “Barreau” (a clear importation from the French “barreau”) that evidently disturbed Paul Raabe; without consulting a dictionary, he chose to change the word “Barreau” to “Bureau.” For long time this travesty could be found in Raabe’s edition, which remained definitive until the 1990s, when Kafka’s true word was happily restored. Meanwhile, such emendations are not harmless: this one generated more than one dissertation based on the fantasy of an entire bureaucratic apparatus involved in the authentication of Bucephalus. So if you do not want your reading to be based on philological sand, you must have a reliable editorial basis for your interpretation. Otherwise you are writing about a topic of your own — or in this case, Paul Raabe’s — invention.

What I have to say is directed against a tradition of exegesis that takes Kafka’s wording for granted. At the same time it is a plea for taking seriously the interdependence of edition and interpretation. A few premises need to be discussed in this context.

First, consider the meaning of a word. The meaning is never something separate from the material sign. Not only is the material basis of the word the one and only proper source of an edition, but it is also the indispensable point de repère for every interpretation.