Jewish Studies Franz Kafka
by
Vivian Liska, Benjamin Balint
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0254

Introduction

Franz Kafka (born 1883, Prague, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria) was a German-language writer whose works—most famously The Trial (Der Prozess, 1925) and Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915)—gave us the twentieth century’s most imperishable fables about disorientation, guilt, and absurdity and, more generally, about the human condition in modernity. His writings, particularly his diaries and letters, also point to the complex ways “Western” Jews have negotiated between assimilation and tradition. The son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, Franz Kafka was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. In his “Letter to the Father” (“Brief an den Vater,” 1919), Kafka blames his father for his alienation from his own Jewish heritage. “It was conceivable that we might have found each other in Judaism.” But the flimsy vestiges of Judaism passed on to him, Kafka writes, were “an insufficient scrap . . . a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke. . . . It all dribbled away while you were passing it on” (Letter to his Father. New York: Schocken, 1966, p. 182). Kafka’s conflict with his father gets its fictional expression in his breakthrough story The Judgment (Das Urteil, 1913). Kafka did associate with German-Jewish intellectuals in Prague, including Max Brod, who would become Kafka’s promoter, literary executor, and first biographer. Kafka proved no less sensitive than Brod and his Zionist friends to the roiling anti-Semitism that would reach its horrific climax only after Kafka’s death. (Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.) Kafka witnessed firsthand the rising racism that accompanied the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, including a three-day riot in Prague in December 1897. Yet Kafka did not take refuge in the embrace of Jewish belonging. “What have I in common with Jews?” he later remarked. “I have hardly anything in common with myself” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Translated by Ross Benjamin. New York: Schocken, 2023, p. 330). At age twenty-five, after earning a law degree at the University of Prague, Kafka was hired at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. One of only two Jews among the 260 employees, he earned a reputation for diligence but found the office drudgery unbearable. He remained there until 1917, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. With considerable reluctance, Kafka published some fiction during his lifetime, including The Judgment, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie, 1919), and A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt, 1919). A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1924) appeared shortly after his death. For the rest, we owe the survival of Kafka’s works to Brod’s disregard of Kafka’s instruction that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. After the Second World War, Brod edited a collected edition of Kafka’s works and letters (published in seven volumes by S. Fischer Verlag in 1976).

General Overviews

Kafka’s intense but ambivalent sense of his own Jewishness, expressed in his correspondence and diaries, contrasts with the almost total lack of explicit references to Jews or Jewishness in his literary texts. The entries in this section variously relate Kafka’s concern with questions of Jewish culture, tradition, and identity and their relation to his development as a writer. Cools and Liska 2016 is an erudite collection that confronts the tension between Kafka’s singular, often inscrutable narratives and their resonance with universal themes. In Corngold 2004, the preeminent American Kafka scholar interprets the author’s ascetic yearning for transcendence through his search for belonging, marriage, the Law, and above all for artistic fulfillment. Gilman 1995 reveals the intricate interplay between Kafka’s personal struggles and the broader cultural pathologies that shaped his work. Gray 1973 is a foundational critical study that combines literary analysis with psychological insight to probe the inner workings of Kafka’s enigmatic texts. Heller 1975 is a penetrating philosophical study that situates Kafka within the broader currents of European modernism while illuminating the tension between the earthly and the transcendent that animates Kafka’s writing. Liska 2009 offers an original reading of Kafka’s use of collective pronouns—“we” and “our”—as a gateway to understanding the notion of community and belonging in his work. North 2015 offers a bold interpretation of Kafka’s work as a form of “atheology”—a radical departure from traditional religious and metaphysical frameworks. Politzer 1966 is a seminal exploration of the intricate interplay between form and meaning in Kafka’s oeuvre. By weaving together historical context, textual analysis, and philosophical inquiry, Robertson 1985 reveals Kafka as both a product and a critic of his time. Sandbank 1989 traces how Kafka’s themes of absurdity, alienation, and bureaucratic entrapment reverberate through the narratives of both contemporary and later authors. Suchoff 2012 examines the linguistic and cultural nuances that shape Kafka’s narratives, arguing that his engagement with Yiddish, Hebrew, and German reflects a profound, if conflicted, relationship with his Jewish heritage.

  • Cools, Arthur, and Vivian Liska, eds. Kafka and the Universal. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

    Kafka’s work engenders a paradox: it is both assigned a universal significance and considered paradigmatic for the expression of the irreducibly (and largely Jewish) singular. The contributions in this volume approach this paradox from a variety of perspectives.

  • Corngold, Stanley. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

    DOI: 10.1515/9781400826131

    This brilliant study complements Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), a judicious selection of two decades’ worth of Corngold’s investigations—rhetorical and philosophical—of Kafka’s prose.

  • Gilman, Sander L. Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

    This insightful survey sheds new light on Kafka’s literary work by coming to terms with how Kafka internalized the anti-Semitic discourses of fin de siècle Prague. Gilman explores Kafka’s sense of physical and existential vulnerability, linking his anxieties about health, sexuality, and identity to the pervasive medical discourses of his time.

  • Gray, Ronald. Franz Kafka. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

    In addition to providing a useful chronological table synchronizing Kafka’s life and works and a good overview of early Kafka reception in France, England, the United States, and Germany, this balanced study argues that Kafka’s art is at its best when he recognizes his own condition and renders “the account of his own degradation, projected into fiction” (p. 199). While remaining attentive to Kafka’s formal innovation, Gray is particularly drawn to the tension between Kafka’s personal alienation and his universal relevance.

  • Heller, Erich. Franz Kafka. New York: Viking, 1975.

    This trenchant monograph puts ambivalence (between love/work, fame/oblivion) and paradox (or—as Heller puts it—Kafka’s skill at “conclusively stating the inconclusive”) at the center of Kafka’s work. Heller positions Kafka as a profound thinker whose works resonate with the philosophical dilemmas of modernity, particularly those of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

  • Liska, Vivian. When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

    Explores how Kafka’s complex attitude toward Jewish community is paradigmatic for the ambivalent responses of major German-Jewish writers to self-enclosed social, religious, ethnic, and ideological groups in general. Through this lens, Liska explores how Kafka, along with other German-Jewish writers, imagines communities not as cohesive, but as fractured, precarious, and often defined by exclusion or impossibility.

  • North, Paul. The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

    In this original reading of Kafka’s “Zürau aphorisms,” the author examines Kafka’s reflections on the theological ideas—messianism in particular—that undergird secular modernity. North argues that Kafka’s writing dismantles theological concepts such as salvation, divine justice, and authority, without replacing them with secular alternatives.

  • Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

    This is a trenchant series of essays on Kafka’s use of deliberate ambiguity in his stories and parables, from the briefest fragments to the unfinished novels, each of which “deliver messages which are essentially incommunicable” (p. 284). Politzer deftly analyzes Kafka’s use of parable as a narrative strategy that challenges the boundaries of interpretation.

  • Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: Judaism, Politics, Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

    An interdisciplinary examination of Kafka’s work, situating it at the intersection of Jewish identity, political thought, and literary innovation, and a pioneering examination of “the principal documents of Kafka’s exploration of Judaism” (p. vii). Paying special attention to the aphorisms in Kafka’s Octavo Notebooks, Robertson shows how this concern both gave Kafka a rich store of imagery and deepened the philosophical-religious underpinnings of his writing.

  • Sandbank, Shimon. After Kafka: The Influence of Kafka’s Fiction. Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

    Sandbank, a leading translator of Kafka’s writing into Hebrew, meticulously traces Kafka’s influence through a number of modern writers, including Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Borges, and Agnon. Many of their readings of Kafka, he suggests, are telling misreadings. By examining the echoes of Kafka in their works, Sandbank articulates the ways in which Kafka’s unique voice transcends his immediate context and paves the way for new modes of storytelling.

  • Schonfeld, Eli. The Remnant: Franz Kafka’s Letter; A Study on the Margins of Judaism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.

    DOI: 10.1515/9783111442938

    A nuanced examination of what remains Jewish in Kafka’s oeuvre against the backdrop of the author’s insistence that he received from his father “a nothing of Judaism” (Letter to his Father. New York: Schocken, 1966, p. 182). This book goes beyond the search for Jewish themes in Kafka’s writing; it treats Kafka not just as a writer to be read, but as a way of reading.

  • Suchoff, David. Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

    DOI: 10.9783/9780812205244

    A subtle and learned attempt to uncover the hidden but fraught presence of Jewish language and tradition in Kafka’s works. Suchoff highlights Kafka’s unique position within the Jewish literary tradition, demonstrating how his writings resonate with a hidden openness that challenges rigid interpretations of identity and belonging.

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