Marcello Veneziani questions the legacy of Franz Kafka, suggesting that despite his literary greatness, Kafka’s work has contributed to a more despairing and desolate worldview. Veneziani explores harsh critiques, particularly those by Gunther Anders, who sees Kafka’s narratives as pervaded by negative narcissism and an acceptance of evil without resistance. While Kafka’s work documents an era devoid of hope and religion, Anders controversially accuses him of being a precursor to fascism, arguing that Kafka’s portrayal of passive acceptance of suffering and evil makes him a bad teacher, promoting a bleak and fatalistic outlook on life.
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What if Franz Kafka were a bad teacher? What if his work, though grand, had contributed to making the world more desperate and bleak, more desolate, imprisoned in its emptiness and nothingness?
Yesterday marked the centenary of his death, and for months there has been a continuous flood of publications and praises about the great Bohemian writer.
But what if we changed our perspective, abandoned the panegyrics and hagiography, and questioned his legacy as an author and his impact? Kafka showed that literature can be about not only dreams but also nightmares, and that it can leave marks on readers not by evoking emotions but by leaving them petrified. With Kafka, literature does not offer beauty, consolation, repair, or an escape to other worlds, but describes, stark and bare, the inexorable dominance of evil and the impossibility of escaping its iron fate.
A few years ago, in Grande ospizio occidentale, Eduard Limonov described Kafka’s work as “Austro-Hungarian third-rate literature passed off as prophetic work,” even going as far as to exalt as a genius “a neurotic insurance clerk.” This harsh and unjust critique contrasts with the more reasonable “incorrect” reading, as he called it, by philosopher Gunther Anders (née Stern) in 1951, in a text titled “Kafka, Pro and Con,” translated in Italy by Quodlibet. This severe, relentless critique, from one Jew to another, outraged Kafka’s devotees, starting with the custodian of Kafka’s work, Max Brod, who, against the author’s wishes, published what Kafka did not want to bring into the world upon his death.
Anders believes that Kafka was pervaded by a negative, masochistic narcissism. His analysis starts from a Kafkaesque declaration that confirms it: situating himself outside the declining Christianity of his time and outside the Jewish religion, Kafka in his fourth notebook says of himself: “I am an end or a beginning.” A cosmic egocentrism, akin to the delusions of the late Nietzsche.
What Anders finds horrifying in Kafka is that the protagonists of his novels find themselves in absurd and distressing situations but live them as if they were normal. When Gregor Samsa wakes up as a cockroach, he does not express bewilderment, pain, or anger but accepts that condition without dismay. It is not the eruption of evil that is the dominant trait of Kafka’s narrative but the absence of any reaction, resistance, rebellion, or refusal by the victims, who adapt to the condition they fall into. An absolute, grotesque, inhuman realism, endured with transcendental dullness. Kafka sacrifices intelligence and reason, as well as any civic and political sense. And this, for Anders, is to be deplored. I translate: he is a bad teacher. The victims of his stories collaborate with the perpetrators, accept torture: they feel excluded from the world, deprived of rights and duties, at fault.
The critique is sharp and precise but then exaggerates when accusing Kafka of being a precursor to fascism, as it would justify it beforehand by writing “in favor of blind and absolute obedience” and sacrificing intelligence. Anders makes a symmetrical distortion to the Kafka devotees who saw, on the contrary, in his work an early denunciation of Nazi horrors. His work neither justifies nor denounces what would later happen; rather, it demonstrates that evil on earth did not begin with fascism but preceded it, indeed it is inherent in the world; it is reality.
His work is the document of an era that has lost reason and religion, hope and trust, the future and tradition. It is the curse of life, understood as condemnation and as a prison in which we are not locked inside but outside. Excluded. We are first condemned and then commit the crime. The Kafkaesque inversion between punishment and crime is the metaphysical translation of what would later become a cornerstone of socialism: it is society, with its injustices and inequalities, that drives those who suffer them to commit crimes; the fault does not lie with the individual but with society and those in power. In Kafka, it is instead a grim fate that looms over man.
Kafka, notes Anders, does not believe in Providence and its “last, ephemeral descendant,” progress; he does not believe in divine justice. The indictment is harsh and concludes with a verdict without appeal: Kafka is a realist of the dehumanized world, of which he ends up being an apologist; he is an impotent and defenseless moralist, an agnostic and atheist, who was not a believer but did not have the courage of his own irreligion; indeed, he believed like Marcion in a malevolent God; in any case, he is an atheist who is ashamed of it and makes atheism a theology. Brod will rise up against this verdict, saying that Anders created a straw man and struck it down, but it has nothing to do with the real Kafka; he reduces him to a servile defeatist and atheist, whereas for Brod, he is a religious spirit who criticizes intermediate authorities but does not place himself outside Judaism and faith in God. Anders would reply that Kafka’s was a religion without belief; he is not a homo religiosus but “a great storyteller of fables.”
In short, Kafka is a great writer but a bad teacher. And the trail left by his followers is disastrous. He taught that being is evil, life is an absurd nightmare; we are nothing, we live in nothing, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Panorama, n.24, June 4, 2024
