Kafka lesen

Reviewed by: Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur by Peter Pfaff Ruth V. Gross Peter Pfaff, Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. 213 pp. Peter Pfaff’s Kafka lesen: Zur Methode seiner Literatur is a tour-de-force reading of an entire oeuvre. In an unusual addition to the volumes of Kafka scholarship, this imaginative and sometimes frustrating work of Kafka criticism is reminiscent of Kafka criticism of the 1960s; I am thinking here particularly [End Page 163] of Kurt Weinberg’s Kafkas Dichtungen: Die Travestien des Mythos (1963). Like Weinberg before him, Pfaff maintains that there is only one essential subject that runs through each of Kafka’s texts and is thus a thread through all of Kafka’s writing—Kafka’s struggle with Jewish law and his own place within that law. For Pfaff, Kafka’s individual texts are unintelligible until they become steps on the path of the whole. Pfaff starts from the premise that Kafka remains an enigma after all these years and cites some critics (G. Neumann, Derrida, G. Kurz, et al.) who have discussed the paradoxes and incomprehensibility of various Kafka texts. The present book is Pfaff’s attempt to illustrate the “red thread” that goes through all of Kafka’s literature. For him, Kafka’s works are really only one continuous text, a self-determining text that Kafka proceeded to expand and modify, but of which he never lost sight. In “Der kleine Ruinenbewohner,” an oft-cited text from 1905 that Kafka wrote and rewrote in his diary (one version was published), the speaker laments his upbringing and education. Kafka postulates a self and muses about free will. The point for Pfaff is that although the speaker does not like the person he has become, he also has no intention of “doing away” with himself. Although he feels inadequate, the speaker still affirms living. The meaning of free will includes choosing how one dies—Freitod. Kafka often conceived of choosing death, but he never wanted it for himself. Pfaff believes that the will to die is theoretically necessary for Kafka but practically impossible in his writings. Kafka did not want to be free by killing himself—he wanted to be free through writing. In Pfaff’s view, the “Ruinenbesucher” sets the tone for all of Kafka’s other protagonists: like Kafka, their creator, they are figures who cannot act according to the manner in which they think they should. Pfaff sees the early period as a precursor to the Kafka of the 1911–12 breakthrough in which his self-determination takes on the problem of his relationship to his Jewishness, of his being part of something bigger. “Das judaistische Sujet machte Kafkas literarisches Glück. Bisher war er nur sich selbst Gegenstand gewesen, nun handelte er außerdem von der Tradition seines Volkes und seinem persönlichen Verhältnis zur Judenheit” (59). From here on, the subject of Kafka’s works, according to Pfaff, is the “forgotten” Judaism of the protagonists (Karl Rossmann, Georg Bendemann, Gregor Samsa, Josef K.). They are all prodigal sons of sorts, and they resist their inner Jewishness and self-destruct accordingly. Albeit with great variety, Kafka tells the same story in each of his creations—at least in Pfaff’s reading. The main [End Page 164] recurrent thread in all of Kafka is that the protagonist is plagued by something that rises inside him from the depths and haunts him psychologically to create his undoing—namely, his forgotten Judaism. Pfaff is obviously a learned Kafka scholar who has copious knowledge of the man and works and great familiarity with the vast critical body surrounding them. But, without going into great detail in this necessarily brief review, let me say that I question the premises of his kind of literary criticism. Every symbol, every character, every venue, and every name—broken down into a numerological decoding—is for Pfaff to be read as a Jewish clue; e.g., Georg Bendemann’s Sunday is actually Yom Kippur; Georg, an assimilated Jew, wants to marry a Christian woman and that is one of the reasons his father condemns him; Josef K.’s first interrogation is done

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