FRANZ KAFKA ONCE CLAIMED that all human beings were caught between two competing technological systems: one sponsoring “ghostly” absence (the postal system, telegraph, and telephone) and one encouraging “natural” presence (trains, planes, and automobiles). To humanity’s woe, the ghostly side was winning: “To attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of souls, [humanity] has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane — but nothing helps anymore: These are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing” (LM, 223; BM, 302). Kafka famously spent most of his life on the side of the ghosts, sending Felice Bauer up to three letters per day for weeks on end, yet never boarding a train that would have brought him to Berlin in a few hours. This question — Why does Kafka not get on a train? — recurs for media theoreticians, and their answer is clear: Kafka, the techno-wizard, wants to create a literary “feedback loop” (Endlosschleife) rivaling those produced by films, gramophones, and parlographs. But this argument fails to acknowledge the quiet irony in Kafka’s claim that the “natural” technologies transport humans at decidedly unnatural speeds; they are invented precisely “at the moment of crashing.” If traditional critics have fatefully forgotten the medial “other” of Kafka’s literature, then media theorists have equally forgotten that other’s other: Kafka’s counter-alliance of modern transportation technologies, which allow faraway lovers to engage in “natural intercourse [natürlichen Verkehr]” yet unnaturally alter these lovers through mechanization and speed. Kafka’s trepidation regarding such technologies extends back to his early years as a tourist and business traveler, when racing automobiles appear, as in the 1911 accident Kafka witnesses on the Parisian boulevard, the lines of cars bumping into each other in Amerika: The Missing Person (Der Verschollene, 1927), the rumbling omnibus in The Judgment (Das Urteil, 1913), and the daredevil Munich sightseeing trip in the 1911 novel fragment, Richard and Samuel (Richard und Samuel). Even more than automobiles, trains are for Kafka constitutionally “violen[t],” not least because they almost doubled their speeds in his lifetime alone (D1, 69; Ta, 43, entry of 29 Sept. 1911). As Karl Rossmann notes in The Missing Person, trains ferociously “thunder” across rails and over “vibrating” — sich schwingenden — viaducts (A, 101; V, 151, trans. rev.).