afka's `Trial' Is Ours: [FINAL Edition]

Cohen, Richard. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Washington,

D.C] 15 Jan 1989: w07.
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Even [Franz Kafka] biographer Ernst Pawel concedes that The Trial is a difficult book. Much can
be read into it, and even today we cannot be sure of the chapter sequence Kafka had in mind.
But a casual reading of the novel (if such a thing is possible) would lead the reader to conclude
that Kafka, in 1914, had written a book predicting the Holocaust. After all, Joseph K.'s crime
may well have amounted to nothing more than the crime of existing. But that is a crime that
cannot be prevented by imprisonment, since one continues to exist in prison. The only
punishment can be death. Multiply Joseph K. 6 million times, and you have the Holocaust.
Maybe that universality explains why Kafka has his admirers but not his partisans. Through him,
no particular system can be condemned. If he was prescient about Hitlerian fascism, then he
was just as prescient about Stalinist communism. (Milan Kundera's novels, especially The Joke,
are suffused with the sensibility of Kafka, but their target is the communist regime in
Czechoslovakia.) [George Orwell], on the other hand, was clearly writing about communism. But
1984 has come and gone. The future is now the present, and it is not Orwellian, but Kafkaesque
instead. -

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In 1984, the western world- especially the English-speaking part of it-noted that the year of
George Orwell's 1984 had arrived. Conferences were held all over the globe, and much was
written about Orwell and his most famous book. I participated in one of those conferences and
solemnly went along with what, even then, I thought was a charade. As a novel, 1984 is not
bad. As prescience, it has been a failure. In both categories, it cannot approach Franz Kafka's
TheTrial.
Since 1984 (the year), 1984 (the novel) has gotten mentioned less and less. Events, if not
history, have overtaken it. Orwell's Oceana, a Soviet-style state of the future, once seemed a
compelling prediction of what might happen. No one scoffed much, for instance, when in 1961
Nikita Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union would "overtake and surpass" the West by the
1980s and reach "full communism" by 1990. But with a year to go, Khrushchev's dream has
become the nightmare of Soviet disintegration.

Even by 1984, such trends were discernible. But Orwell and his book were politically useful
nonetheless. To a host of influential intellectuals who, like Orwell, had once been socialists (or
even communists) and who then had become either conservatives or neoconservatives, Orwell's
book was both an admonition (look at what could happen) and a vindication of their own
intellectual about-face.
But what about Kafka? Here we have a different story, specifically the story of Joseph K., the
protagonist of TheTrial. He is accused of a crime but never told what it is. His accuser is the
bureaucracy, which is both vast and faceless. After a while, Joseph K. comes to believe in his
own guilt. When, finally, he is executed for his non-specified crime, he is convinced his
punishment is deserved.
Even Kafka biographer Ernst Pawel concedes that The Trial is a difficult book. Much can be read
into it, and even today we cannot be sure of the chapter sequence Kafka had in mind. But a
casual reading of the novel (if such a thing is possible) would lead the reader to conclude that
Kafka, in 1914, had written a book predicting the Holocaust. After all, Joseph K.'s crime may well
have amounted to nothing more than the crime of existing. But that is a crime that cannot be
prevented by imprisonment, since one continues to exist in prison. The only punishment can be
death. Multiply Joseph K. 6 million times, and you have the Holocaust.
Kafka, a German-speaking assimilated Jew who lived in Prague, died in 1924. But his sisters and
many of the people he knew perished in Nazi extermination camps. One of his sisters, Ottla, is a
story unto herself. A rebellious woman, she married a non-Jew and converted to Catholicism.
When, in 1940, the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, Ottla was exempted from the newly
imposed anti- Semitic regulations. That's when her rebellious nature reasserted itself. She
divorced her husband, reaffirmed her Judaism-and perished in a concentration camp.
In Ottla-not to mention 6 million others-we have the vindication of Kafka's mad, dark dream.
Here we have the crime-being. And the executioneris not really an individual, but a vast
apparatus, largely faceless, largely anonymous. What was evidently lacking in Ottla's case was
Joseph K.'s sense of shame, of guilt. But other Holocaust victims felt it, and more than a few
victims of purges in communist countries evidently have concluded that theywere as guilty as
they were accusedof being. The bureaucracy-the party- cannot be wrong.
Of course, there is more to what we call "Kafkaesque" than a vague senseof one's own guilt.
John Updike, ina forward to a Kafka collection,referred to an "anxiety and shamewhose center
cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated." That,too, is "Kafkaesque." Indeed, the

wordis used to describe the bewildering demands and effects of modernity, everything from a
diffused angst to an inability to deal with the motor vehicle bureau, an institution that makes
Joseph K.'s of all of us.
Claims that Kafka himself realized he was writing about the future (cited by Updike, among
others) are disputed by scholars such as Pawel. But the point is that he did it-he described the
future, a future that soon engulfed his entire family and their civilization. Moreover, it was a
future that was neither fascist nor communist, but both-and all other ideologies as well. No
contemporary society can be free of Kafkaesque aspects. Even the most benign of them, the
United States, has had its Kafkaesque fits-the McCarthy period, for instance, when unknown
accusers charged some people with unspecified crimes and wrecked their lives.
Maybe that universality explains why Kafka has his admirers but not his partisans. Through him,
no particular system can be condemned. If he was prescient about Hitlerian fascism, then he
was just as prescient about Stalinist communism. (Milan Kundera's novels, especially The Joke,
are suffused with the sensibility of Kafka, but their target is the communist regime in
Czechoslovakia.) Orwell, on the other hand, was clearly writing about communism. But 1984 has
come and gone. The future is now the present, and it is not Orwellian, but Kafkaesque instead. -