LECTURE 12
WEIMAR CULTURE/KAFKA'S PRAGUE
1. BIRTH TRAUMA
From the beginning, the Weimar Republic suffered from a crisis of legitimacy: it was a regime that no one loved, and many loathed. Its representatives–uncharismatic Social Democrats–were forced to sign the universally hated Treaty of Versailles, which truncated Germany's borders and imposed punitive reparations payments. The German Right believed that Germany had not been defeated in a fair fight, but rather stabbed in the back, betrayed from within by socialists, revolutionaries, and Jews. On top of defeat, Germany in 1918-1919 had experienced episodes of street-fighting and revolution; the Right confused these consequences of defeat with the cause. In any case the resentments of the Right obscured the fact that Germany was a poorer country not only because Germany had lost the war but because 35% of the country's wealth had evaporated during the four years of fighting. The patriotic middle class had seen their savings wiped out, partly by the quadrupling of prices, and partly because many had sunk a great proportion of their savings in now worthless war bonds.
During the war the Germans had lost 2.7 million men (as many as the French and British losses combined). The death toll amounted to 4 percent of the total population, or 8 percent of the male population. With demobilization, many veterans were unable to find work at the very time when inflation was escalating the cost of living dramatically. In the meantime the war had thrown up a class of profiteers, bitterly resented for prospering while everyone else was suffering privation. Big industry–iron, steel, munitions–had done well at the expense of small producers, shopkeepers, and agriculture. Hence the stereotype of the fat, cigar-smoking capitalist in the political propaganda of the interwar years.
The amount of taxation required to meet the cost of reparations, social welfare programs for veterans, widows (1/2 million), orphans (2 million), the disabled (3.5 million), and the unemployed would have meant tripling the prewar tax levels at a time when living standards were considerably below what they had been in 1914. And Weimar governments lacked the basis of support and popular legitimacy to push through unpleasant but necessary measures: hence the terrible inflation of 1922-23. Restabilization of the economy was also painful: a quadrupling of interest rates; a tripling of taxes on farmers; the bankrupting of small shopkeepers; layoffs of thousands of civil servants and white collar employees.
2. BERLIN IN THE JAZZ AGE
A British visitor, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, described the atmosphere of postwar Berlin in terms that recall Simmel: "There is no city in the world so restless as Berlin. Everything moves. The traffic lights change restlessly from red to gold and then to green. The lighted advertisements flash with the pathetic iteration of coastal lighthouses. The trams swing and jingle....In the Tiergarten the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the grass is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes. Trains dash through the entrails of the city and thread their way among the tiaras with which it is crowned. The jaguar at the zoo, who had thought it was really time to go to bed, rises again and paces in its cell. For in the night air, which makes even the spires of the Gedachtniskirche flicker with excitement, there is a throbbing sense of expectancy. Everybody knows that every night Berlin wakes to a new adventure. Everybody feels that it would be a pity to go to bed before the expected, or the unexpected, happens. Everyone knows that next morning, whatever happens, they will feel reborn.... The eyes that in London or Paris would already have drooped in sleep are busy in Berlin, inquisitive, acquisitive, searching, even a 4AM, for some new experience or idea. The mouths that in Paris or London would next morning be parched for bromoseltzer, in Berlin are already munching sandwiches on their way to the bank."
In spite of the general privation and high unemployment Berlin continued to be a dynamic capital, with a new reputation for a lively night life. With four million inhabitants, it was nearly four times the size of the next largest city in Germany, Hamburg. The war and the subsequent inflation had discredited the Victorian values of the older generation, and youth were ready to participate in what Americans were calling the jazz age. No point in saving for marriage in an age of rapid inflation; better to spend and enjoy. Women cut their hair, used makeup, smoked, discarded corsets, and adopted the new rayon stockings. Men shed their handlebar mustaches and tried to look rakish, boyish, adventurous, or intellectual, with horned-rimmed glasses and hair brushed back instead of parted. Wild parties and bohemian manners were no longer confined to the fringes. Berlin became famous in the 1920s for nightclubs and sexual license–the world of Christopher Isherwood's novels (later transformed into the film/musical Cabaret ). Jazz age vitality went along with a consciousness of decadence in Berlin. The writer Erich Kastner summed up the scene: "In the east there is crime; in the center the con men hold sway; in the north resides misery, in the west lechery; and everywhere–the decline."
Kastner might have been describing one of Fritz Lang's movies, Dr Mabuse, the Gambler, which perfectly captures the postwar mood induced by the inflation. The film moves from the world of the slums to the world of the stock exchange and then to the cabarets and nightclubs–and everywhere chaos reigns, authority is discredited, power is mad and uncontrollable, wealth inseparable from crime. Thomas Mann is more subtle in his story "Disorder and Early Sorrow," where he shows how the hectic fever of the jazz age seeps into the sheltered world of childhood.
"The Weimar scene," writes Henry Pachter, who knew it well, "was rich with career people of a new type: the intellectual adventurers, those who lived by their wits without having specific skills and training. They might be entertainers, social thinkers, planners, politicians, managers in the new industries, culture tycoons, educators, consciousness raisers, prophets of new sciences or sects, liberators from sexual or other oppression, promoters–in brief, men and women whose rapid rise was achieved by relating to other people and whose real contribution was measured by the judgment of their peers." Cultural middlemen flourished, entrepreneurs and showmen like Lang in cinema, Piscator and Reinhardt in theater, who took avant-garde styles and techniques and found a mass audience for them. Newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and radio provided a market for every style, taste, and shade of opinion. For the first time there were hit songs on the radio, some with cynical lyrics that Brecht would have admired: "Wer wird denn weinen, wenn man auseinandergeht, wenn an die nachsten Ecke schon ne andre steht?" "Who's going to cry if we have to split up, since another is waiting at the next corner?"
3. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism was born in painting and poetry before the war, but the postwar period offered a mass audience for what had been an avant-garde phenomenon. In Chris Baldick's invaluable Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Expressionism is defined as "a general term for a mode of literary or visual art which in extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality.... German expressionism is best known today through the wide influence of its cinematic masterpieces: Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). Along with their much-imitated visual patterns of sinister shadows, these films reveal an obsession with automatized, trance-like states [and] the eruption of irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world." It's easy to see how these obsessive themes would appeal to the collective psyche of a nation traumatized by defeat in war and the loss of control represented by hyperinflation and mass unemployment.
From another point of view, expressionism is the artist/prophet's attempt to create a visionary world, to explode conventional (bourgeois) language and values, to break through the social crust that forms around people's psyches in order to give uninhibited expression to the energies imprisoned there. It's the opposite of the blase attitude described by Simmel in "The Metropolis and Mental Life." It's an apocalyptic and anti-authoritarian movement: in psychoanalytic terms one of its leading themes is oedipal revolt, the revolt of the younger against the older generation.
But German expressionism also looks backward to German romanticism, with its emphasis on the uncanny, the sense that the world is haunted by forces we can neither understand or control. To experience the uncanny is to sense the strangeness of an apparently familiar situation. From this experience it's a short step to a sense of entrapment, victimization, conspiracy. Hence the paranoid atmosphere of classic German cinema. In his famous book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer interpreted this obsession with hidden and uncontrollable forces as both a symptom of the trauma of German defeat in the First World War and a premonition of Nazism. Here was a sinister sort of "re-enchantment of the world": "The hecatombs of young men fallen in the flower of their youth seemed to nourish the grim nostalgia of the survivors. And the ghosts which had haunted the German Romantics revived, like the shades of Hades after draughts of blood" (Lotte Eisner).
4. THOMAS MANN
If Bertolt Brecht was Weimar's archetypal bohemian, the patrician author Thomas Mann was its most Olympian writer–detached, elegant, erudite. He had begun his career, at the age of twenty-five, with a huge novel about the decline of a bourgeois family, Buddenbrooks. He was no expressionist, but rather seemed a classic writer in the line of Goethe and Tolstoy. Nevertheless he leavened nineteenth-century realism with generous doses of Freud and Nietzsche, and was alert from the beginning to the vagaries of the sexual instincts and the power of Eros (and Thanatos). He built his fiction on a series of oppositions: north and south, order and anarchy, intellect and passion, health and disease. He was fascinated by the grotesque, by the phenomena of dreams and the unconscious, and he constantly resorted to irony, tragicomedy, and parody. His work revolves around "the conflict between the bourgeois, solid, material world which in its very vitality is indifferent to art, and the aesthetic world which in its very decadence questions and undermines the materialistic, instrumental view of life–a persistent Modernist theme" (Malcolm Bradbury).
Mann had written, during the war years, a massive tract entitled Confessions of an Unpolitical German. It was a defense of German culture, with its proud traditions of musical creativity and metaphysical speculation, against what he perceived as the shallow materialism of the Western powers. But Mann became a defender and supporter of the Weimar Republic, even as he foresaw its demise. He also recognized immediately the fraudulent and seductive character of fascism, as well as the thuggery and murderous violence of Nazism. In "Mario and the Magician" he commented obliquely, almost allegorically, on the power of the irrational in politics. In some respects Mann was nostalgic for the bourgeois world whose decadence he anatomized in his first novel and early short stories. He had an acute sense of the disintegration of the self in the modern world and developed a complex series of narrative voices and personae to capture that disintegration.
5. KAFKA IN PRAGUE
But none of Mann's experiments in multiple points of view and ironic narration went as far as Kafka's. Though they were both masters of German literature, they inhabited different worlds. Kafka, as everyone knows, was a doubly marginal figure, as a Jew writing in German in a city where the majority of the populace spoke Czech. Prague Jewry was more remote from Judaism than the Jews of eastern Europe were, or even the Jews of Berlin. The reason: an unusually rapid assimilation in a city where the Jews were the natural allies of the German against the Czechs.
Prague was an ancient central European city with an old Jewish quarter, haunted by legends (the story of the golem for example). But it was also a modern capital, seat of a vast and alien (German-speaking) bureaucracy ruling over a downtrodden populace (Czech-speaking) that did not know the meaning of the complicated regulations it had to obey. From these elements Kafka would build up a picture of human anguish in the face of the mysteries of existence that was both dreamlike and concrete, fantastic and real at the same time.
The world of Kafka's novels incorporates the maddening impersonality and inscrutability of modern bureaucracy in an image of an insecure medieval community derived from a ghetto Kafka remembered obsessively without ever having lived in it. His heroes are often isolated outsiders, scapegoats. Cut off from community and authority, they often become eavesdroppers, straining to get some sort of purchase on what's being said. What Kafka did was to convert the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence into images of the existential dilemmas of mankind as such. His stories are repeatedly concerned with questions such as exile, assimilation, endangered community, revelation, commentary, law, tradition, and commandment. In spite of the pervasive atmosphere of menace–there are hostile and inscrutable authorities above, and a generally indifferent but potentially violent crowd of common folk below–there is a comic note in virtually all of Kafka's work. This too is a legacy of Judaism: the sense of a radical discrepancy between the transcendent Creator and the paltry human creature. It's typical of the Hebrew text of the Bible that its characters are caught in a labyrinth of ambiguous messages. Endless interpretation, interminable analysis–this is an aspect of the Jewish tradition converted by Kafka into a particular kind of modernism. His characters are modern versions of Abraham or Job–always on trial.
The Prague ghetto was abolished in 1850, incorporated with the rest of the inner city under the name of Josefstadt in memory of the liberal benefactor of the Jews, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II. In 1900 there were roughly 450,000 inhabitants of Prague, of whom 35,000 spoke German, and many of these were Jews. Only 8 percent of Prague's population, the German-speaking elite enjoyed two splendid theaters, a huge concert hall, two universities, two daily newspapers, and an intense social life. But as one of Kafka's contemporaries noted: "In Prague the Germans live in quicksand. The political tension of the last few decades has made coexistence between the Germans and the Czechs an extremely uncomfortable matter, creating a climate of represses violence which limits the spontaneity of bourgeois life."
Kafka's grandfather was a kosher butcher in a small Bohemian village. With the official emancipation of the Bohemian Jews after 1848, Jews could move from the country to the city: the case of Prague is parallel to that of Vienna. Kafka's father Hermann (b. 1852) decided to seek his fortune in Prague, where he set up a retail store dealing in haberdashery, parasols, umbrellas, and walking sticks. He gradually expanded it through hard work and an advantageous marriage into one of the major wholesale businesses in the city and surrounding provinces. These were fashionable, decorative goods, part of a developing traffic in commodities appealing to an increasingly affluent bourgeoisie–Simmel's world of modern commerce.
Kafka followed a typical Jewish pattern: pious village grandfather, successful urban merchant father, professional son. A law degree landed him a job as a clerk in the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where he was responsible for interviewing the victims of factory accidents. He knew from the inside the cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus of paper work and hierarchy, indifference and incompetence, that he would satirize in his fiction. He also came to know well the terrible working conditions of the urban proletariat.
He began to lead a double life–bureaucrat by day, writer by night–and he described himself as a night-time writer, one whose work is born in the time when we cannot sleep because of feelings of dread. The initial breakthrough into literature seems to have come as a result of the conflict with his philistine father: the vigorous self-made man versus the neurotic and intellectual son. Freud described the pattern in 1908: "Those who succumb to nervous illness are precisely the offspring of fathers who, having been born of rough but vigorous families, living in simple healthy country conditions, had successfully established themselves in the metropolis, and in a short space of time had brought their children to a high level of culture." But Kafka fashioned an unforgettable image of modernity out of his neurosis.
6. SOUNDLESS EXPLOSIONS
He developed, quite early, his characteristic style–a stripped-down German that discarded local context. "Prague in his novels is a city without memory. It has even forgotten its name.... Time in Kafka's novels is the time of a humanity that no longer knows anything or remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets" (Milan Kundera). And while the past is vacant, the future is perpetually deferred. Hence the infinite regressions in Kafka, a good example of which is "An Imperial Messenger."
The key to this style: matter-of-fact presentation of the surreal. Kafka often renders the everyday event as impossibly difficult; and the impossible, unimaginable phenomenon as an everyday event. The characteristic retardation of time in his fiction fuses banality with menace and suggests the calmness, and clamminess, of a nightmare. There is a pervasive sense of jeopardy in the great labyrinth of arbitrary law, the indifferent officials, the hierarchies above hierarchies, the insufficient papers, the endless wait before a door that never opens. Benign divinity in Kafka's world is replaced by random arbitrations and absent authorities.
Kafka's theme: the existentialist anguish of man confronted with the mystery of existence–our inability to know where we have come from and where are going and what obligations we have to fulfil. He's not interested in the burden of guilt carried by the religious believer who has transgressed against known and clearly definable rules, but rather in a consciousness of transgression without any clear knowledge of the rules that have been broken. In the great novels, the characters never know where they stand and are confronted by fundamentally incalculable situations. Despite the reign of a super-bureaucracy, they are not informed of their rights, of their status or assignment, or of the charges against them. And they have a mania for interpretation–typical perhaps of the individual who is marginalized and deprived of power, and on a cultural plane, typical of the Jewish tradition.
The stories have an oneiric (dreamlike) character–they are like dreams in that they invite interpretation but seem to withhold the key. There is only a single point of view: that of the protagonist. The vocabulary is one of inference and conjecture: "apparently"; "maybe." The sentences often consist of two clauses: the first states a fact or a guess; the second qualifies, questions, or negates it. The conjunction "but" is common, and the frequent use of "even if" clauses expresses the tendency to cancel expectations and refute inferences. A lot of this writing is in the subjunctive. This is a world in which nothing ever gets truly resolved, in which any decisive, conclusive event would be incongruous, because no event or series of events could ever suffice to dissolve the enormous burden of doubt, ignorance, and apprehension that Kafka calls up from the first sentence. Very little actually happens in his world; what prolongs narration is not events, but anxious worried reasoning about them–the action consists largely of the formation, elaboration, and abandonment of hypotheses that never quite fit the case.
Kafka combines the archaic and the modern: reviving the furies of antiquity, the fatality lurking at the root of human existence, he encloses them within a prosaic framework of litigation, petty worries, and bureaucratic tedium. "Poseidon sat at his desk doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work." The long tradition of Western individualism is now at the end of the line; the hero is now a victim; and in his conflict with society he has suffered a stunning defeat. Hope is an illusion: "There is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us." Again: "The Messiah will appear only when he is no longer needed, he will arrive the day after his arrival, he will not come on the last of days, but on the day after the last." And: "The hunting dogs are still playing in the courtyard, but the hare will not escape them no matter how fast it may already be flying through the woods."
Kafka's usual hero is committed as well as resigned to routine, but the story really begins only with the disruption of routine, and proceeds mostly through attempts to return to routine. "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry: this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony." Kafka's protagonists attempt to convert disruption itself into an aspect of routine. It's the principle of the "soundless explosion"–withholding even a pianissimo where a fortissimo is expected (to use a musical terminology). This anti-sensationalism of tone, this refusal to make an issue of the unusual, confers upon the unusual and even upon the horrible a peculiar kind of intimacy. Kafka makes the strange familiar, the familiar strange.
From Kafka's diary: "Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate–he has little success in this–but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor."