CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA NOTES AND REMINISCENCES

BY GUSTAV JANOUCH
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY MAX BROD
TRANSLATED BY GORONWY REES
FREDERICK A. PRAEGER
NEW YORK



BOOKS THAT MATTER

Published in the United States of America
in 1953 by Frederick A. Praeger Inc.,
Publishers 105 West 40th Street,
New York 18, NY.

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53:5323

Printed in Great Britain



PREFACE
MAX BROD'S INTRODUCTION and Gustav Janouch's opening
sentences to this book are in themselves sufficient explanation of its
genesis and of its place in Kafka's life. Indeed, in view of these two
authors' personal friendship with Kafka, and Dr Brod's unrivalled
knowledge of his life and his work, any further comment may seem
unnecessary and even impertinent. Yet to some readers at least the
local setting of these Conversations with Kafka may be unfamiliar,
and some aspects of them surprising, and to such readers an ad­
ditional word of introduction may not be unhelpful.

The Conversations, for all their directness and simplicity, are com­
piled with such literary skill that they seem to convey not only
Kafka's words, gestures, physical appearance, tone of voice, but al­
so the very air of time and place and circumstance in which Kafka
and his young friend took their walks together. This atmosphere
which they breathe is a very special one, perhaps now never to be
recovered; only less vivid than the impression they give of Kafka's
personality is the sense of the city of Prague itself, to which Kafka
was at once so native and so alien. In one of the conversations Kaf­
ka says that the distance from the Karpfengasse, in the Jewish quar­
ter, to his homeland is immeasurably far, but from the Jewish
quarter to the Teinkirche is much, much farther; and his remark
seems to crystallize everything which both bound him to Prague
and alienated him from it. For it is to a particular part of Prague
that these conversations belong, the Judenstadt or Jewish quarter,
with its medieval synagogue and its ancient Jewish cemetery; and
the Judenstadt is not only a physical but a spiritual locality. Kafka's
walks may begin at the insurance office on the Poṅič, the business
centre of modern Prague; across the river is the Hradschin, the

fortress which today, as for so many centuries, is the seat of an alien
power; from the quay where sometimes he walks springs the great
bridge which carries the statues of the twelve Kings of Bohemia;
the walks end at Hermann Kafka's shop in the baroque palace built
by a German noble. But the city in which he and his friend walk
and talk is not the Prague of the Czechs, nor the Prague of the
Germans, but the Prague of the Jews, the Prague, as Kafka himself
says, of the Ghetto, still alive despite the destruction of all its build­
ings except its most ancient monuments. So firmly are the con­
versations placed in their setting, that now to the many ghosts
which haunt the wonderful city we must add the tall, stooping fig­
ure of the writer and the boy as they pursue their way from the
Poṅič along the Altstädter Ring to the Kinsky Palace.

It is, however, as ghosts that they walk. The world they repre­
sent has vanished beyond recovery. Indeed, it may well be that The
Trial and The Castle are its most solid and enduring monuments.
For the association of Kafka and the Judenstadt is no accident of
time and place. Those who care to trace the personal histories of
the many artists and writers mentioned in these pages will find that
they compose one of the most terrible documents in European his­
tory. Among them are Milena Jesenská, with whom Kafka was
once in love, dead in a concentration camp; Ernst Lederer, dead in
a concentration camp, with mother, wife, sister, and brother; Josef
Čapek, dead in a concentration camp; Ernst Weiss, dead by his own
hand; Erich Hirt, fate unknown; Otto Pick, dead in exile; Rudolf
Schildkraut, dead in exile; Rudolf Fuchs, dead in exile; Ludwig
Winder, in Palestine; Felix Weltsch, in Palestine; Johannes Urzi­
dil, in New York; Johannes R. Becher, in Berlin. Like the Baron
de Charlus' sonorous death roll of his friends, it is a list which recalls
an irrecoverable past, but also commemorates a terrible fatality to
Europe. For this roll of death, suicide, and exile records the de­
struction of a complete cultural world, which mediated between
the East and the West of Europe: moreover, and even more tragic,
this destruction was only a part of the annihilation of the 6,000,000

Jews of Central Europe from whom the peculiar culture to which
Kafka belonged drew a large part of its sustenance.

This is not the place to analyse the special virtues and vices of that
world which, open to East and West, was also to a large extent
self-enclosed. It is, however, relevant to note that within it the Jews
played a special part, and that Kafka, himself a Jew and a con­
vinced Zionist, was in many ways representative of it. It would in­
deed be easy to say that Kafka himself belonged to this world so
completely, and with such self-consciousness, that he foresaw its
end. For what else is the terrible death of Josef K. in The Trial, with
the executioner twisting the knife three times in his heart, dying,
as he says, 'like a dog, as if the shame of it would outlive him', but
the end of Kafka's own people; what else is The Castle but a Zion­
ist epic of that people's effort to found a community and a home?

The answer to such questions is, of course, that The Trial and
The Castle are much else besides. In part they are, as Max Brod
points out, autobiography; in part also, and more profoundly, they
are religious exercises, 'a form of prayer'. What seems certain, how­
ever, is that in the position of his own race, on the last stage of its
century-old trek towards its ancient home, yet on the eve of the
worst pogrom that has yet been known, Kafka found a myth so
closely related to a universal reality that through it he was able to
express, not only his specifically Zionist beliefs, but his entire re­
sponse to the human situation. For Kafka, in a sense, every human
being was a Jew, as he indicates when he says of anti-semitism,
'They beat the Jews and murder humanity'.

One of the merits of these Conversations is that in them Kafka
himself reveals, more directly and explicitly than elsewhere, to
what an extent the Jewish problem absorbed and dominated his
thoughts. It is not so much, however, that the Jewish problem ob­
sessed him exclusively but rather that his extreme self-conscious­
ness as a Jew coloured his thoughts on every problem and led him
to give his ideas a specifically Jewish formulation. Sometimes, it is
evident, this was carried to extremes which led to complete



misunderstanding and bewilderment on the part of his young com­
panion, no greater, however, than the misunderstandings it has in­
spired in many of his critics and interpreters. Indeed, one might say
that wherever Kafka seems most obscure one must interpret him,
as he himself puts it, 'in a Jewish sense'. This is perhaps particularly
true when he is concerned, as so often in these conversations, with
what for him were the two fundamental ideas of the Truth and the
Law, ideas which for him were inextricably intertwined, and in
relation to which it would be possible to define all his other ideas.
For if a large part of Kafka's work was devoted to analysing, with
a rabbinical minuteness and complexity, problems of responsi­
bility, of guilt, and of sin, yet his statement of these problems can
be understood only in the light of his mystical and religious view
of what constitutes truth and law. For guilt and sin are for him
conceivable only as a negation of truth and a departure from the
law. Again, if the idea of alienation, whether from the father, or
from society, or from God, is everywhere and always dominant
in him, and the root of the sense of isolation and loneliness of which
he so often speaks here, yet it is not merely a negative idea (though
at times he speaks as if it were and then condemns himself for his
pessimism, 'which is a sin'); it is the idea of separation, a fall, from
a state of being which is subject to the law, and being subject to
law can be sought and grasped as truth. For Kafka, in practice, the
effort to end this alienation took the form of Zionism, the belief
that he and his race could only be saved by a return to the prom­
ised land; yet this belief had its foundation in a religious, and still
profoundly Jewish, sense that this land was promised only because
there they might create that community under law which was
their historical and their divine mission.

Considered in this light, Kafka's writings are one of the last great
gifts of the Jewish people to the Europe which, failing to assimil­
ate them, persecuted them and expelled them. And Kafka's strug­
gle to discover, create, accept a state of being which is subject to
law and revealed as truth is equally one of Europe's last great



efforts to master the irrational and accidental. By reason of this
struggle, it is tempting to compare Kafka with another Jewish
writer, Proust, who in this century, with the same almost over­
scrupulous awareness of the difficulties which face any attempt to
discover a truth underlying human life and a law which its de­
velopment exhibits, nevertheless with equal heroism persisted in
the attempt. It is this quality of heroism in their aims and in their
achievement which makes Kafka and Proust most alike among the
writers of this century and sets them apart from the others. For
while others may compare with Proust or with Kafka in subtlety
and rigour of analysis, there are no others who, with the same
power of observation and penetration, the same mastery of a psy­
chological calculus for measuring the smallest, most fatal, of hu­
man actions, still persist, in face of the evidence, in believing men
capable of greatness.

In Kafka this belief gives to his heroes a genuine nobility and
grandeur that are otherwise absent from modern European litera­
ture. It is a nobility conferred by Kafka's conviction that every
single act of every single minute of every hour of every day is a
moment in a moral struggle which faces men inescapably with the
possibility of terrible defeat or, less probably, indeed almost im­
possibly, of victory. The intensity with which Kafka held this con­
viction often makes Kafka himself and his heroes absurd; absurd­
ity is indeed the very air of their existence; nevertheless, despite or
because of absurdity, they never cease to be noble because, even
in their greatest humiliation and degradation, they still preserve the
quality of being men, which for Kafka is precisely the possibility of
being judged. 'I am a man under judgement', he says, and means
that he is a man with a right to be judged, even though sentence
will certainly be passed.

It is because, at so many points and on so many topics, these
conversations express Kafka's preoccupation with the problems of
moral responsibility that they are of such particular value. And if
at the same time they emphasize that in this preoccupation Kafka

saw himself as a representative of his own people, they will per­
haps serve to dissipate many misconceptions not only about Kafka,
who too often has been admired as much for his weakness as his
strength, but about his people, whom Europe owes so immeasur­
able a debt and has repaid with such immeasurable cruelty. It may
be that one day they will once again return to play their part in the
tradition they have so enriched. It may be that that tradition will
itself perish and the final expulsion of the Jews be seen to coincide
with its death blow. Until such possibilities have been decided,
Kafka's work will remain as an indestructible monument to the
greatness his people achieved even in the wilderness, a symbol of
the experience, the struggle, and the suffering, not only of himself
but of his nation.

GORONWY REES

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