Amerika (2 page)

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

______________

There is little doubt that Karl Rossmann, the young hero of
The Missing Person,
who is banished to America by his parents, was Kafka's favorite alter ego. On sending his future fiancée, Felice Bauer, the first chapter, he urged her to receive the “little youth kindly, set him down beside you and praise him, as he so longs to be praised.”
¹
Readers will, I hope, not only come to share Kafka's affection for Karl, as I did while working on this translation, but also gain a new appreciation for this novel, which has for too long been overshadowed by
The Trial
and
The Castle.
If approached afresh, this book could bear out the early claim by Kafka's friend Max Brod that “precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.”
²

The Missing Person
is a poetically coherent work that can be read on a number of levels, as an episodic picaresque tale, a bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, a story of emigration or exile, a dark vision of urban civilization, a self-reflective modernist novel, and finally an at times dryly humorous send-up of the American dream. In creating his vision of America, Kafka was inspired by sources ranging from newspaper accounts of America, writings by European travelers, silent movies, and possibly the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin—which he pointedly gave to his own father to read
³
—as well as an established tradition of German-language writing about America, in which the New World was portrayed either as an idyllic refuge or as a dystopia.
⁴

As his diaries and letters suggest, Kafka's fascination with America grew out of a sense of imprisonment or inner exile. His native city Prague, which he once famously called a “little mother with claws,” could never be his
Heimat
(home or homeland). In a diary entry of 20 August 1911 he writes of wanting to spread himself out “in all earthly directions,” as he may be said to have done vicariously in his first novel.
⁵
This desire to break away from Prague, even if only in his imagination, never left him. Toward the end of his life, on seeing a group of refugees packed into the banqueting room of the Jewish Town Hall in Prague, he writes to his lover Milena Jesenská: “If I'd been given the choice to be what I wanted, then I'd have chosen to be a small Eastern Jewish boy in the corner of the room, without a trace of worry, the father in the centre discussing with other men, the mother, heavily wrapped, is rummaging in the traveling bundles . . . and in a few weeks one will be in America.”
⁶

When this novel first appeared in London in 1938 in Edwin and Willa Muir's beautiful English translation, there was little awareness of what Kafka knew about America, and, since he himself had never set foot on these shores, it was easy to dismiss what he liked to call his “American novel” as sheer fantasy. However, thanks to meticulous scholarly reconstructions of the annihilated world of the German-speaking Prague Jews and of the debates about literature, religion, philosophy, Jewish identity, and Zionism in which Kafka participated,
The Missing Person
no longer seems quite so ahistorical, nor so apolitical, as it once did.

Although Kafka never crossed the Atlantic, he had specific ideas about the kind of America he wanted to portray. For instance, when, on the suggestion of the poet Franz Werfel, his German publisher Kurt Wolff used an old-fashioned print of a sailing boat approaching New York Harbor as a frontispiece for “The Stoker”—the first chapter of the novel, which was initially published in 1913 as a separate story—Kafka protested on the grounds that he had portrayed “the most modern New York.”
⁷

Together with “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” “The Stoker” forms a trilogy of what Kafka dubbed his domestic tragedies. All three stories feature sons who are punished by their parents, and the manuscripts attest to the close relationship between these three characters: on several occasions in “Metamorphosis” Kafka wrote “Karl” rather than “Gregor” (the main protagonist in “Metamorphosis”), and similarly five times in the manuscript of “The Stoker” he mistakenly wrote “Georg” (the hero of “The Judgment”) instead of “Karl.”
⁸
Three days after achieving what he considered his literary breakthrough, in writing “The Judgment” during the night of 22–23 September 1912, he began to compose his “American novel.”

Unlike “The Judgment,”
The Missing Person
had a lengthy gestation—Kafka wrote at least three versions—and its roots extend far back in his imaginative life. We know from a diary entry of 19 January 1911 that as a child or adolescent he wrote a story with a related theme, in which America serves as a refuge. Then, after beginning a draft in winter 1911 (which has not survived), he wrote the first seven chapters of the novel between September 1912 and January 1913. He subsequently turned his attention to other projects, and it was not until October 1914—after he had started work on
The Trial
—that he wrote the last completed chapter of
The Missing Person.

The title
Amerika,
which emphasizes the setting and by which the novel has become widely known, is not Kafka's but rather was used by Max Brod in the first German edition in 1927—three years after Kafka's premature death of tuberculosis at the age of forty-one. Kafka himself clearly entitled the novel
Der Verschollene
(The Missing Person) in a letter to Felice Bauer in November 1912, thereby underscoring the fate of the young hero.
⁹

In the diary entry of 1911 about the juvenile “American” story Kafka recollects sitting with members of his family (unfortunately he does not specify his age at the time) writing a story featuring two brothers. One brother ends up in a prison in Europe, whereas the other—the “bad” one—escapes to America. An uncle grabbed a page from him, glanced at it, and declared to the rest of the family, dismissively, “The usual stuff.” The twenty-eight-year-old diarist describes how this verdict gave him a “glimpse of the cold space of our world” and made him feel “banished.” Those metaphors anticipate the predicament of the young hero in the opening lines of
The Missing Person:

Much ink has been spilled over these introductory sentences and, especially, the surreal description of the Statue of Liberty. In famously endowing the statue with a sword rather than a torch, Kafka defied conventional expectations. Although one reviewer noted this seeming slip, on the first appearance of “The Stoker” in May 1913,
¹⁰
Kafka declined to alter it in a second printing of the story in 1916, in which he made some minor changes. There can be no doubt that the choice of the sword was quite deliberate.

Some critics argue that Kafka transformed the American emblem of freedom into an icon of justice and that the sword is drawn not against “the social injustices bred by America's capitalism . . . [but] against Karl's conscience.”
¹¹
Others see the sword as a symbol of violence, anticipating the struggles that Karl will face against an inhumane technological civilization. Still others point to traditional representations of Justitia in European paintings. Moreover, the sword in the hand of Kafka's alienated version of the Statue of Liberty may recall the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword that guard the gates of the Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, at least in the influential old Greek translation of Genesis.
¹²

While some readers might be inclined to approach this novel as a dream narrative, in the manuscript Kafka sought to diminish this possibility and the psychological interpretations that it would invite. In the opening lines of the novel, just after Karl has glimpsed the Statue of Liberty, Kafka first wrote the following sentence and then immediately crossed it out: “He looked up at her and dismissed what he had learned about her.”
(Er sah zu ihr auf und verwarf das über sie gelernte.)
That crossed-out sentence, which almost sounds postmodern, might imply that the young hero is imposing his preoccupations on the statue—precisely the kind of easy psychological explanation that Kafka sought to exclude.
¹³
Just as it is impossible to dismiss as a nightmare the perception of Gregor Samsa in “Metamorphosis” that his body has been mysteriously transformed overnight into that of a bug (the text states quite unambiguously that “it was no dream”), we cannot simply explain away this surreal Statue of Liberty as a subjective perception of Karl Rossmann. Moreover, the placement of this altered monument at the beginning of the novel may be Kafka's way of warning us not to take the tale that follows as a realistic account of a young man's experiences in America.
¹⁴

There has been much debate about whether Karl Rossmann develops in the course of the novel, as one would expect of the hero of a bildungsroman. Kafka himself acknowledged a debt to one of the great English novels of development, Dickens's
David Copperfield,
specifically mentioning motifs shared by the two novels, such as “the story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial laborer, his sweetheart in the country house, the dirty houses etc.” However, he was critical of Dickens's “coarse characterizations” of his figures, which, having learned a great deal about narrative art from Flaubert, Kleist, and, despite often-shoddy productions in Prague, the Yiddish theater, Kafka had been able to avoid.
The Missing Person
bears only a parodistic resemblance to the classic European bildungsroman, Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister,
and is much closer to
Jakob von Gunten,
an anti-bildungsroman by the quirky Swiss modernist Robert Walser, about a character who sets out to become a nobody.
¹⁵

How can we explain the sudden ability of Karl Rossmann, who has few literary or artistic interests aside from a rudimentary ability to play the piano, to suddenly imagine himself changing his American “circumstances” through the sheer power of his playing? Kafka's diaries can shed some insight here, especially a series of seminal entries in June 1910 in which Kafka (or rather his partly biographical, partly fictional alter ego) explores how his education and upbringing have made it impossible for him to develop naturally and left him instead with a “dead bride”—a metaphorical term for his full potential. Could Karl have a comparable potential locked inside him? Be that as it may, his dreams of artistic success anticipate the last completed chapter of the novel, which features a giant theater and a character named Fanny who tells him that he is indeed an artist.
¹⁶

The element of social criticism in
The Missing Person
is more pronounced than it is anywhere else in Kafka's oeuvre. For instance, at one point Karl Rossmann remarks that America is a country where “one could not hope for pity” and where only those who are fortunate seem to “enjoy their good fortune amid the indifferent faces on all sides.”
¹⁷
At such moments Kafka's critical perspective on American society in the robber-baron era can seem remarkably congruent with that of American novelists such as Theodore Dreiser in
Sister Carrie
(1900) and Edith Wharton in
The House of Mirth
(1905).
¹⁸

Far more characteristic of Kafka's first novel than such explicit social criticism, however, are passages in which he transforms abstract critiques of modern urban civilization into vivid tableaux, thereby anticipating such early movie classics as Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
and Charlie Chaplin's
Modern Times.
¹⁹
Take, for instance, the depiction of the busy telegraph room in the enterprise of Karl's American uncle, where an employee's right arm lies almost inert, “as if it were a heavy burden,” and “only the fingers twitched away at a rapid and inhumanly uniform pace”; or the scene at the gigantic Occidental Hotel, in which the heads of the information-dispensing underporters become so hot they need to be doused with water.
²⁰
Through such unexpected details Kafka suggests analogies between the business world and the factories of America, which he never describes from the inside. Kafka, who as an accident insurance lawyer by day visited factories throughout Bohemia, could easily imagine the working conditions in similar enterprises in America.
²¹
On one occasion he expressed surprise that the workers injured in factory accidents did not come and break down the doors at his insurance company.

In creating his vision of America, Kafka drew on reportage by a Hungarian Jewish socialist called Arthur Holitscher, which he first read in installments in the journal
Neue Rundschau.
He bought a copy of Holitscher's subsequent book
Amerika Heute und Morgen
(America Today and Tomorrow) for his personal library and also attended an illustrated lecture by a Czech Socialist called FrantiÅ¡ek Soukup about his travels in America, which then also appeared in book form. Holitscher and Soukup both attribute the cruelly hectic pace of life in America to the predominance of the profit motive: “This murderous tempo, this fearful rush which only ceases at the grave.”
²²

While Kafka does draw on such material, he reveals himself to be a creative borrower. Take, for instance, the odd depiction of the Statue of Liberty in the opening paragraph of the novel. Although Kafka does not describe Ellis Island, he may be grafting onto his description of the statue an image that Holitscher used in portraying the island: “No Blake could have drawn or sung of the avenging angel who reigns over this island in a cloud of fear, whimpering, torture and blasphemy every single day that we spend in this free country.”
²³
It would be entirely characteristic of Kafka's magpielike ways if he had borrowed that Blakean angel from Holitscher, placing her instead on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and using the word “free,” which Holitscher imbues with heavy sarcasm, in a characteristically wry manner.