Quarrel & Quandary (7 page)

Coming on Max Ferber again after a separation of twenty years, Sebald is no longer that uncomprehending nervous junior scholar fresh from a postwar German education—he is middle-aged, an eminent professor in a British university, the author of two novels. Ferber, nearing seventy, is now a celebrated British painter whose work is exhibited at the Tate. The reunion bears unanticipated fruit: Ferber surrenders to Sebald a cache of letters containing what is, in effect, a record of his mother’s life, written when the fifteen-year-old Max had already been sent to safety in England. Ferber’s father, an art dealer, and his mother, decorated for tending the German wounded in the First World War,
remained trapped in Germany, unable to obtain the visas that would assure their escape. In 1941 they were deported from Munich to Riga in Lithuania, where they were murdered. “The fact is,” Ferber now tells Sebald, “that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark.” Thus the latter-day explication of “I am here to serve under the chimney,” uttered decades after the young Sebald loitered, watchful and bewildered, in the exiled painter’s ash-heaped studio.

The memoir itself is all liveliness and light. Sebald recreates it lyrically, meticulously—from, as we say, the inside out. It begins with Luisa and Leo Lanzberg, a little brother and sister (reminding us of the brother and sister in
The Mill on the Floss
) in the village of Steinach, near Kissingen, where Jews have lived since the sixteen-hundreds. (“It goes without saying,” Sebald interpolates—it is a new note for him—“that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbors and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all.”) Friday nights in Steinach juxtapose the silver Sabbath candelabrum with the beloved poems of Heine. The day nursery, presided over by nuns, excuses the Jewish children from morning prayers. On Sabbath afternoons in summer, before the men return to the synagogue, there is lemonade and challah with corned beef. Rosh Hashana; Yom Kippur; then the succah hung with apples and pears and chains of rosehips. In winter the Jewish school celebrates both Hanukkah and the Reich. Before Passover “the bustle is dreadful.” Father prospers, and the family moves to the middle-class world of Kissingen. (A photo shows the new house: a mansion with two medieval spires. Nevertheless several rooms are rented out.) And so on and so on: the
blessing of the ordinary. Luisa grows into a young woman with suitors; her Gentile fiancé dies suddenly, of a stroke; a matchmaker finds her a Jewish husband, Max’s father. “In the summer of 1921,” Ferber’s mother writes, “soon after our marriage, we went to the Allgäu … where the scattered villages were so peaceful it was as if nothing evil had happened anywhere on earth.” Sebald, we know, was born in one of those villages.

In 1991—fifty years after the memoirist was deported to Riga—Sebald visits Steinach and Kissingen. (I almost want to say revisits, so identified has he become with Ferber’s mother’s story.) In the old Jewish cemetery in Kissingen, “a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movements of the air,” he stands before the gravestones and reads the names of the pre-Hitler dead, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligmann, Goldstaub, Baumblatt, Blumenthal, and thinks how “perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” He finds a more recent marker: a relative of Max Ferber’s who, in expectation of the outcome, took her own life. (The third suicide in Sebald’s quartet.) And then he flees: “I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.” A sign on the cemetery gates warns that vandals will be prosecuted.

The Emigrants
(an ironically misleading title) ends with a mental flash of the Lodz Ghetto—the German occupiers feasting, the cowed Jewish slave laborers, children among them, toiling for their masters. In the conqueror’s lens, Sebald sees three young Jewish women at a loom, and recalls “the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.” Here, it strikes me, is
the only false image in this ruthlessly moving and profoundly honest work dedicated to the recapture of phantoms. In the time of the German night, it was not the Jews who stood in for the relentless Fates, they who rule over life and death. And no one understands this, from the German side, more mournfully, more painfully, than the author of
The Emigrants
.

Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost. In two incomplete yet incommensurable novels,
The Trial
and
The Castle
, he submits, as lingering spirits will, a ghastly accounting—the sum total of modern totalitarianism. His imaginings outstrip history and memoir, incident and record, film and reportage. He is on the side of realism—the poisoned realism of metaphor. Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an archive of our era: its anomie, depersonalization, afflicted innocence, innovative cruelty, authoritarian demagoguery, technologically adept killing. But none of this is served raw. Kafka has no politics; he is not a political novelist in the way of Orwell or Dickens. He writes from insight, not, as people like to say, from premonition. He is often taken for a metaphysical or even a religious writer, but the supernatural elements in his fables are too entangled in concrete everydayness, and in caricature, to allow for any incandescent certainties. The typical Kafkan figure has the cognitive force of a chess master—which is why the term “Kafkaesque,” a synonym for the uncanny, misrepresents at the root. The Kafkan mind rests not on unintelligibility or the surreal, but on adamantine logic—on the sane expectation of rationality. A singing mouse, an enigmatic ape, an impenetrable castle, a deadly contraption, the Great Wall of China, a creature in a burrow, fasting as an art form, and, most famously, a man metamorphosed into a bug—all
these are steeped in reason; and also in reasoning. “Fairy tales for dialecticians,” the critic Walter Benjamin remarked. In the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan “K” attaches not to Keats, but to Kant.

The prose that utters these dire analytic fictions has, with time, undergone its own metamorphosis, and only partly through repeated translations into other languages. Something—fame—has intervened to separate Kafka’s stories from our latter-day reading of them two or three generations on. The words are unchanged; yet those same passages Kafka once read aloud, laughing at their fearful comedy, to a small circle of friends, are now markedly altered under our eyes—enameled by that labyrinthine process through which a literary work awakens to discover that it has been transformed into a classic. Kafka has taught us how to read the world differently: as a kind of decree. And because we have read Kafka, we know more than we knew before we read him, and are now better equipped to read him acutely. This may be why his graven sentences begin to approach the scriptural; they become as fixed in our heads as any hymn; they seem ordained, fated. They carry the high melancholy tone of resignation unabraded by cynicism. They are stately and plain and full of dread.

And what is it that Kafka himself knew? He was born in 1883; he died, of tuberculosis, in 1924, a month short of his forty-first birthday. He did not live to see human beings degraded to the status and condition of vermin eradicated by an insecticidal gas.
^*
If he was able to imagine man reduced to insect, it was not because he was prophetic. Writers, even the geniuses among them, are not seers. It was his own status and condition that Kafka knew. His language was German, and that, possibly, is the point. That Kafka breathed and thought and aspired and suffered in German—in Prague, a German-hating city—may be the ultimate exegesis of everything he wrote.

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy, ruled by German-speaking Habsburgs until its dissolution in the First World War, was an amalgam of a dozen national enclaves. Czech-speaking Bohemia was one of these, restive and sometimes rebellious under Habsburg authority. Since the time of Joseph II, who reigned between 1780 and 1790, the imperial parliament—centered in Vienna—had governed in German; all laws were published in German; all outlying bureaucracies and educational systems were conducted in German; German was the language of public offices and law courts; all official books and correspondence were kept in German. Though later rulings ameliorated these conditions somewhat, the struggle for Czech language rights was ongoing, determined, and turbulent. Prague’s German-speaking minority, aside from the official linguistic advantage it enjoyed, was prominent both commercially and intellectually. Vienna, Berlin, Munich—these pivotal seats of German culture might be far away, but Prague reflected them all. Here, in Bohemia’s major city, Kafka attended a German university, studied German
jurisprudence, worked for a German insurance company, and published in German periodicals. German influence was dominant; in literature it was conspicuous.

That the Jews of Prague were German-identified, by language and preference—a minority population within a minority population—was not surprising. There were good reasons for this preference. Beginning with the Edict of Toleration in 1782, and continuing over the next seventy years, the Habsburg emperors had throughout their territories released the Jews from lives of innumerable restrictions in closed ghettos; emancipation meant civil freedoms, including the right to marry at will, to settle in the cities and enter the trades and professions. Among Bohemia’s Jews of Kafka’s generation, ninety percent were educated in German. Kafka was privately tutored in Czech, but in his academically rigorous German elementary school, thirty of the thirty-nine boys in his class were Jews. For Bohemian patriots, Prague’s Jews bore a double stigma: they were Germans, resented as cultural and national intruders, and they were Jews. Though the Germans were as unfriendly to the German-speaking Jews as the Czechs were, militant Czech nationalism targeted both groups.

Nor was modern Czech anti-Semitism without its melancholy history. With the abolition of the ghettos and the granting of civil rights, anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out in 1848, and again in 1859, 1861, and 1866. In neighboring Hungary in 1883, the year of Kafka’s birth, a blood-libel charge—a medieval canard accusing Jews of the ritual murder of a Christian child—brought on renewed local hostility. In 1897, the year after Kafka’s bar mitzvah observance, when he was fourteen, he was witness to a ferocious resumption of anti-Jewish violence that had begun as an anti-German protest over the government’s denial of Czech language rights. Mark Twain, reporting from Vienna on the parliamentary wrangling, described conditions in
Prague: “There were three or four days of furious rioting … the Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.” In Prague itself, mobs looted Jewish businesses, smashed windows, vandalized synagogues, and assaulted Jews on the street. Because Kafka’s father, a burly man, could speak a little Czech and had Czech employees—he called them his “paid enemies,” to his son’s chagrin—his sundries shop was spared. Less than two years later, just before Easter Sunday in 1899, a teenage Czech girl was found dead, and the blood libel was revived once more; it was the future mayor of Prague who led the countrywide anti-Jewish agitation. Yet hatred was pervasive even when violence was dormant. And in 1920, when Kafka was thirty-seven, with only three years to live and
The Castle
still unwritten, anti-Jewish rioting again erupted in Prague. “I’ve spent all afternoon out in the streets,” Kafka wrote in a letter contemplating fleeing the city, “bathing in Jew-hatred.
Prašivo plemeno—
filthy brood—is what I heard them call the Jews. Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?… The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of the cockroach, which also won’t be driven out of the bathroom.” On that occasion, Jewish archives were destroyed and the Torah scrolls of Prague’s ancient Altneu synagogue were burned. Kafka did not need to be, in the premonitory sense, a seer; as an observer of his own time and place, he
saw
. And what he saw was that, as a Jew in Central Europe, he was not at home; and though innocent of any wrongdoing, he was thought to deserve punishment.

Inexplicably, it has become a commonplace of Kafka criticism to overlook nearly altogether the social roots of the psychological
predicaments animating Kafka’s fables. To an extent there is justice in this disregard. Kafka’s genius will not lend itself to merely local apprehensions; it cannot be reduced to a scarring by a hurtful society. At the other extreme, his stories are frequently addressed as faintly christological allegories about the search for “grace,” in the manner of a scarier
Pilgrim’s Progress
. It is true that there is not a word about Jews—and little about Prague—in Kafka’s formal writing, which may account for the dismissal of any inquisitiveness about Kafka’s Jewishness as a “parochialism” to be avoided. Kafka himself is said to have avoided it. But he was less assimilated (itself an ungainly notion) than some of his readers wish or imagine him to have been. Kafka’s self-made, coarsely practical father was the son of an impoverished kosher butcher, and began peddling in peasant villages while he was still a child. His middle-class mother was descended from an eminent Talmud scholar. Almost all his friends were Jewish literati. Kafka was seriously attracted to Zionism and Palestine, to Hebrew, to the pathos and inspiration of an East European Yiddish theater troupe that had landed in Prague: these were for him the vehicles of a historic transcendence that cannot be crammed into the term “parochial.” Glimmerings of this transcendence seep into the stories, usually by way of their negation. “We are nihilistic thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka told Max Brod, the dedicated friend who preserved the unfinished body of his work. In all of Kafka’s fictions the Jewish anxieties of Prague press on, invisibly, subliminally; their fate is metamorphosis.