Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T17:31:54.614Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Paper Chains: Bureaucratic Despotism and Voluntary Servitude in Franz Kafka’s The Castle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Michael Löwy
Michael Löwy*
Affiliation:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article is an attempt at a ‘political’ reading of Kafka's The Castle, as an ironical, radical critique - from a libertarian perspective - of the despotism of the modern bureaucratic apparatus. This reading is not self-evident. Like all Kafka's unfinished novels, Das Schloss is a strange and fascinating literary document that creates perplexity and inspires various contradictory and/or dissonant interpretations. And like The Trial it has been the object of very many religious and theological readings. Michael Löwy concludes by arguing that commentators have neglected the character of Amalia, one of the most impressive female figures in Kafka's work, who is at the heart of the libertarian individualism of the Prague writer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , November 2004 , pp. 49 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Notes

1. On Kafka’s libertarian sympathies and his links with anarchist circles in Prague, see my article ‘Kafka et le socialisme libertaire’, Réfractions, no. 3, Winter 1998-9.

2. Brod, Max (1972), Postscript to the first edition, in Kafka, Le Château, Paris, Gallimard, pp. 518-21.

3. Heller, E. (1982), Franz Kafka, Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. 105.

4. Buber, Martin (1962), Zwei Glaubenweisen, Werke, Vol. I, Heidelberg, Lambert Schneider, p. 778.

5. Kafka (1957), Préparatifs de noce, Paris, Gallimard, p. 49. (This is a French translation of Hochszeitsvorbereitungen in dem Lande, translated into English as Wedding Preparations in the Country. Translator’s note.)

6. Kafka, ibid., p. 97.

7. Kafka, Le Château (French translation of Das Schloss), p. 1155. (Page references are to the French translation in trans. Vergne-Cain, B. et al. (2000), Récits, romans, journaux, Paris, La Pochothèque. For an English translation see trans. Muir, W. and Muir, E. (1992), The Castle, Everyman’s Library. Translator’s note.)

8. This is the position argued by Alfred Döblin, ‘Die Romane von Franz Kafka’, Die Literarische Welt, 4 March 1927.

9. Kafka, Le Château, op. cit., pp. 558-9.

10. ‘The chains of tortured humanity are made of ministerial papers.’ Janouch, G. (1952), Kafka m’a dit, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, p. 141.

11. Kafka, Le Château, op. cit., p. 1215.

12. González García, José María (1989), La máquina burocrática. Afinidades electivas entre Max Weber y Kafka, Madrid, Visor, pp. 42-3, 161-7. On the same topic see also Traverso, Enzo (1997), L’Histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Paris, Cerf, pp. 45-57.

13. Weber, Alfred (1910), ‘Der Beamte’, Neue Rundschau, October, pp. 1321, 1322, 1323. It is interesting to note that, according to A. Weber, Jews escape this enslavement because they are rejected and excluded by the bureaucratic apparatus, which forces them to lead an individual existence that is richer in subjectivity. We think of K. the surveyor… That said, Astride Lange-Kirchheim’s attempt to find analogies, sentence by sentence and word by word, between Alfred Weber’s articles and Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony seems to me forced and, in the final analysis, unconvincing. It leads the author into obvious absurdities, like the parallel between bureaucracy’s upper and lower levels mentioned by the sociologist, and the upper and lower structures of the killing machine described by the writer… See Lange-Kirchheim, A. (1986), ‘Alfred Weber und Franz Kafka’, in Demm, Eberhard (ed.), Alfred Weber als Politiker und Gelehrter, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 113-49. The analogies with Das Schloss in the last part of the article are more relevant.

14. Ibid., p. 1419.

15. Ibid., p. 1262.

16. Ibid., p. 1358.

17. Adorno, T. W., Prismes, p. 226.

18. The libertarian socialist Gustav Landauer had published a German translation of De la Boétie’s De la servitude volontaire in his journal Der Sozialist in 1910 and 1911. There is no indication that Kafka knew the text, but it is not impossible that it was known to the Prague anarchists among whom he moved.

19. Kafka, p. 288. References are to the French translation Préparatifs de noce à la campagne, op. cit.

20. Kafka, pp. 110-13. (References are to the 1950 French edition La Muraille de Chine et d’autres récits, Paris, Gallimard. This is a translation of Beim Bau der chinesischen Mur, which has also been translated into English as The Great Wall of China. Translator’s note.)

21. Le Château., p. 1328. Of course K. is by no means a revolutionary. He immediately adds: ‘But at bottom I have no complaint; if an administration is good, why not obey it?’ But the conditional ‘if’ introduces doubt: is the castle administration really that ‘good’?

22. Ibid., p. 1195.

23. Ibid., p. 1152.

24. Here the French translation is unsatisfactory. See (1994) Das Schloss, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, p. 93.

25. Ibid., p. 112.

26. This is a passage deleted by Kafka and reported by Max Brod in a 1946 postscript in (1984) Le Château, Paris, Gallimard, p. 531.

27. Ibid., p. 1216.

28. Ibid., pp. 1198, 1237. Here too the French translation is faulty; see Das Schloss, op. cit., p. 113.

29. As Hannah Arendt so pertinently writes, ‘he is discovering that the normal world and society are in fact abnormal, that opinions which everyone accepts as sane are in fact completely insane and that actions obeying the rules of this game are ruinous’, Arendt, Hannah (1944), ‘Franz Kafka’, in (1987) La Tradition cachée, Paris, Christian Bourgois, p. 113.

30. Le Château, op. cit., p. 1340.

31. This passage is quoted by Max Brod in his postscript to the third edition of the book (1946) in Le Château, op. cit., p. 530. I have mentioned earlier (see note 26) K.’s negative reply to the suggestion that he has come to ‘bring happiness’.

32. Ibid., pp. 1268, 1329.

33. Ibid., p. 1428.

34. Ibid., p. 1369. The book’s translator/editor also notes this similarity.

35. Robert, Marthe, Seul comme Franz Kafka, pp. 230-1.

36. Arendt, H., op. cit., p. 105.

37. Kafka, Le Château, op. cit., p. 1437. The critic David Suchoff calls Pepi’s incendiary dream ‘anarchic’ and a liberation by fire from the domination of the Herren (Gentlemen, Masters, Lords). See Suchoff, D. (1994), Critical Theory and the Novel, Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 156.

38. Ibid., pp. 1338-9, 1343. Quite different is the behaviour of her little brother Barnabas, who tries desperately to get himself accepted to work at the castle: as soon as he finds himself ‘up there’, ‘he loses all the courage he had as a young boy’ and ‘shakes with fear’ before the officials’ (pp. 1329, 1373).

39. We can see what a grave error the eminent specialist and philologist Bert Nagel makes when he writes: ‘In Kafka women appear not only always as marginal figures or even simply in walk-on parts, but also as beings of a lower moral rank. This is true to such an extent that in the whole of his work there is practically no sympathetic female figure or even any honest woman.’ Nagel, Bert (1983), Kafka und die Weltliteratur, Munich, Winkler Verlag, p. 237. Which raises the question as to whether the commentator has in fact read Das Schloss… Kafka’s sympathy for brave, non-conforming women ready to break with convention to follow the demands of their conscience is confirmed, among others, by his admiration, fascination even, for the socialist and feminist Lily Braun whose Memorien einer Sozialisten (1909) he used to distribute to all his friends. (See Kafka, Correspondance 1902-1924, Paris, Gallimard, p. 334.)

40. Kafka, ‘Lettre au père’ (‘Letter to His Father’), in Préparatifs de noce à la campagne, op. cit., p. 183. Translation slightly altered following the original ‘Brief an den Vater’, in Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, p. 141. Kafka’s mother was Julia Löwy. According to Kafka her daughter most resembled her mother’s family.