Kafka and the Bankruptcy of Faith; by Edwin Berry Burgum
We speak sometimes of our own writers of the "lost generation" of the twenties. But such terms are relative. American writers were by no means so lost at that time as their contemporaries in defeated Germany, and the importance of Kafka is that he was without question the most lost of them all. The fact that he was born of Jewish middle class parents in Prague when it was under Austrian domination only emphasized an alienation and insecurity which had become typical of the middle class generally. Culturally, moreover, Kafka was a German. He lived in Germany and wrote in the German language. And his attempt to escape a dominating father left his adolescence stranded upon the fluctuating shoals of the Weimar Republic. His own deep-seated despondency, which had not yet routed traditional obsessions of blind faith and vague hope, lay bare the perplexities of mind and the vacillations of conduct typical of German life generally under the Weimar Republic. His own diseased personality symbolized the disease at the heart of German Society. The progress of his personal deterioration paralleled the degeneration of the society that produced him. And his own life ended as abruptly and prematurely as that of the young republic, though he died of tuberculosis some years before Hitler set himself up as the brutal father-symbol of the German people. Whether the work of so disordered a talent will live at all or only for a select audience may be disputable. But its historic importance can hardly be denied. Kafka's novels cut through the distracting irrelevancies of superficial realism and afford a direct participation in the degeneration of personality of the petty bourgeoisie which began under Bismarck and was completed under Hitler. They present this degeneration even more vividly to the foreign reader than The Magic Mountain does, because Kafka is incapable of any reasoned judgment upon his material. He takes us into the personality structure itself, remaining unconscious of its nature since he shares it, and unconscious of its concealment in ordinary men beneath the conventions of social intercourse because of his own abnormality.
This interpretation of Kafka has received curious confirmation in the kind of praise lavished upon him by the small group of his admirers that existed in Germany and repeated by its even smaller American counterpart. They have extolled him not for the reasons which I have put forward here, but for those which would have appealed alike to his own attitude and those of the Weimar Republic. They have given an almost hypnotic attention to his perverse and mystical religious faith. In that conflict which kept him morose and helpless between a belief in God he could not renounce and a skepticism he could not deny, they have condoned the skepticism out of veneration for the faith. They have not seen that this dubious faith is psychological evidence of the dissolution of the reasoning process itself. Kafka was incapable of even that low and easy form of reasoning we call rationalization, so obscure and contradictory had become the springs of personal conduct in him during this period of social chaos. In the light of the great religious mystics of history, to emphasize Kafka's religious mysticism can only mean to share his own incapacity for reasoned judgment.
Only Max Brod, the wisest among his admirers and the closest to him, has suggested the possibility of a non-mystical approach to his work. Brod has published - apparently out of sheer sense of duty to the facts, since he does not relate it to his own exposition of Kafka's mysticism - considerable evidence that his personality was psychopathic. We may anticipate that sooner or later psychiatrists will discover that his novels are as rewarding an object of investigation as those of Dostoievsky. The types of abnormal personality are not as varied as in the pre-revolutionary Russian writer. But the presentation of the Particular type of which Kafka was himself an example is even more rich and detailed within its limits since he became progressively more psychotic as his short life ran its course. But a novel is presumably something more than the book of devotions for a degenerate mysticism or a case history in psychiatry. It is also a communication to some sort of general public. I shall therefore limit my interest in the theological and psychiatric aspects of Kafka's work to their bearing upon his novels as an expression of certain patterns of living in our own era and as the satisfaction of the aesthetic needs of a limited contemporary audience.
Since Kafka's last stories are almost exclusively devoted to his hallucinations, they may be used to clarify the orientation I am seeking. I take for this purpose the most extremely subjective of them all, "The Burrow". In this short story, which has a beginning but no end, the hero conceives that he is being pursued by what must be vaguely called enemies. But there is nothing vague about the defenses with which he surrounds himself. He first digs a tunnel into the earth in which he hides like a mole. He conceals the entrance with foliage, and for a time feels safe from pursuit. But it seems wise to make safety doubly sure by digging many branches to his tunnel. Thus he will be able to elude the enemy at numerous points by circling around behind him. Next, in case through some accident he should not be able to do so, he decides to make an exit at the other end. But no sooner has he completed this escape into the upper world than he realizes with dismay that he has also created another possible source of attack. Enemies may now enter at both ends and leave him caught at the middle. He becomes so frightened that he leaves his tunnel altogether. But above ground, even though he hides in the bushes, he feels unprotected on every side; he lacks the tangible comfort of both walls and darkness. So he returns, determined at least to protect his valuables (which remain as abstract as his enemies) by building a special vault for them. His labor is baffled by the sandy soil. But he manages to beat the wall firm by desperate blows of his head; and he is delighted to discover that the blood flowing from his wounds actually welds the sand into a cement. His satisfaction is immediately interrupted, however, by the faint sound of digging elsewhere. The disconcerting suspicion crosses his mind that his enemies may have turned his own plan against him, and started digging parallel tunnels so that they may break through almost anywhere at the strategic moment. Tough he listens intently and in every part of his maze, he cannot define the direction of the sound. He tries to close his ears to see whether it is a figment of his imagination. But he is too excited to make a fair test. In a crisis when his enemies may fall upon him at any moment, he flings himself the more hysterically into action. His only hope is to make the maze more labyrinthine. When the story breaks off, his frenzied digging is no longer guided by a plan and is already beginning to be baffled by fatigue.
Return to the article Edwin Berry Burgum (1894-1979)
Berry's Editorial of "The Contemporary Reader" (Full Text).
Policy statement by The National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions.
Text of Berry's testimony to the U.S. Senate, Senate Permanent Subcommittee.