"In Kafka I have found a large portion of my own experience of the world, of myself, and of my way of being in the world... [I have] a profound, basal, and therefore utterly vague sensation of culpability, as though my very existence were a kind of sin. Then there is a powerful feeling of general alienation, both of my own and relating to everything around me, which helps to create such feelings; an experience of unbearable oppressiveness, a need constantly to explain myself to someone, to defend myself, a longing for an unattainable order of things, a longing that increases as the terrain I walk through becomes more muddled and confusing... this innermost feeling of mine [is] of being excluded, of belonging nowhere, a state of disinheritance, as it were, of fundamental non-belonging." Vaclav Havel, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, April 26, 1990

*****

For newcomers to Franz Kafka, such as myself, what is known of the man and his work resides too often in a number of clichés, most popularly the eponymous "Kafkaesque." Suggesting a world defined as shadowy and dangerous, inhuman and perhaps mechanistic, the term also, like all clichés, forfeits any sense of subtlety. Without tracing it to its source, we lose a glimpse into the genius, sorrow, confusion, illumination, aggravation, humor, provocation and empathy that all reside in Kafka's work. Beginning the journey is not a little intimidating, and for that reason I am grateful that the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble has chosen for its inaugural production an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. Knowing the commitment of the company to works that traffic in the complex and sometimes conflicting aspects of genius, sorrow, confusion, humor and empathy (and perhaps even aggravation and provocation), this first full meeting with Kafka's famous work will help to dissolve the shadows around the cliché. I am also grateful the company has asked me to contribute some modest thoughts to the critical dialogue about the man and his work.

Approaching Kafka for the first time, I knew he was a German-speaking Jew living in imperial Prague, one of the jewels in the crown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I; I also knew of the havoc that conflict wreaked on the great imperium of central Europe. I knew Prague to be a city of spires and churches, of Mozart sonatas, of one of the oldest universities in Europe. Prague was the home of two proud peoples. One was the ethnic Germans who had lived in Prague and the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia for centuries (and whose political allegiance was to the Austrian emperor and their cultural fealty to Austria). The other was the native Czechs, who were experiencing at the end of the 19th c. a nascent political and cultural awakening which envisioned their own nation, with all its inherent political, economic and cultural freedoms.

These two groups, the so-called Germans and the Czechs were the two dominant groups in Prague. There were minorities - other Slavs besides the Czechs, such as the Slovaks, and Hungarians and even Roma - but it was the Jews who played the largest role aside from Germans and Czechs in the life of the city. And it was the Jews who were caught in the cross-fire (eventually, in a literal sense) in the conflicts between the Germans and the Czechs. Most Jews were German speaking, and identified culturally and politically with the Germans; certainly, the Czechs saw them as aligned with the Germans. To the Germans, however, while Jews might assimilate, might speak their language, might even advocate against Czech nationalism (particularly because under Austrian law, the Jews were promised legal protection and civic rights), Jews were still....Jews, Jews before, in spite of, being German. It is interesting to note that Kafka, due first perhaps to his exposure to Czech nurses and servants, but also to his perseverance in speaking and reading the language against the dictates of his own culture, learned and maintained native fluency in Czech. He thus belied the traditional linguistic divide that most Jews lived by and under in Bohemia and Moravia.

This world of displacement, of not belonging, of sublime threat, was the world into which Franz Kafka was born in 1883. His parents, whose families just a generation or two before the writer's birth had been impoverished peasantry, were solidly middle-class, and assuredly assimilated. Like most of their peers, the family was secular. Kafka would note in later years that his visits to the synagogue were usually limited to High Holy Days services, if that much. That is not to say, however, that either Kafka or his peers were unaware of their Jewishness - that was impossible. Where and how they lived, schooled and worked were still defined (or delimited) by their being Jews. Years after building quite a successful career at an insurance firm, Kafka would tell a fellow Jew who had asked for the writer's help in securing a position there that there would be little point in the effort. Kafka noted that he himself would likely remain the only Jew employed - not just at his level, but at the company as a whole. Athough some would later claim Kafka as a Zionist, he never publically committed to a politically active project concerning Jews and Judaism. Instead, he carried on working at the insurance company (his job was more interesting than a surface reading of his life might suggest: in his investigation of insurance claims, he was much involved in issues of improving conditions of labor and advocating for - as his education in the law prepared him to do - factory workers). He carried on living with his parents, a problematic choice in many ways given his toxic relationship with his father and his sense that his mother too was implicated in the family's ongoing contentions and tensions. He carried on with his own writing.

The picture we have of Kafka as he matured was someone who was seemingly removed from the outer world. In fact he was very much engaged in the cultural activity of the city, activity which inevitably linked to the political. Beyond the walls of home and office, he participated in a full and active social life. We have a member of his literary circle, his old friend Max Brod, to thank for the bulk of Kafka's work that has come down to us. One activity that re-introduced Kafka to Jewish culture, and its mother tongue for Central and Eastern Europe, was the Yiddish theatre. As an adult, Kafka would study Hebrew (and surprise people with his fluency), but it was Yiddish that held for him - and his peers - a fascination, a key to a truer, unsullied Judaism straight from the shtetls and other communities of Eastern Europe. There, Jews did not always dress in contemporary clothing, they did not wear their hair as Christians did, and most importantly, they did not forget (or worse, foreswear) their traditions and folklore. In 1911, when Kafka saw the first of approximately 20 performances given by a troupe led by the charismatic Polish Jew Yitzhak Levi, he was entranced. He wrote "some of these songs, the expressin, yiddishe kinderlach, the sight of this woman onstage, who, because she is Jewish, attracts us spectators because we are Jews, with no desire for Christians or interest in them - made my cheeks tremble." Later, Kafka would apply a sharper critical edge when speaking of Yiddish theatre as an art form, but he never lost his fundamental appreciation for it and its artists.

Kafka's relation to a literary heritage was similarly vastly important to his understanding of his own artistry. In this case, he claimed the scope of European literature as his patrimony. He named Doestoevsky, Kleist and Flaubert as writers whom "I regard as my actual blood relations," not surprising because in the work of these men, as in Kafka's, the protagonist frequently finds himself in exile not just from his community (defined variously, according to the particular author) but from himself. Like Doestoevsky, Kafka's sublime perspective eschewed the politics of the state and instead focused on the politics of the self. His first and foremost commitment was to his writing, to exploring his inner life, and his subjective being. This constant examination honed Kafka's gift of insight; his biographer Ernst Pawel notes that contrary to what most 20th c. critics ascribe to him - the gift of foresight - it is his insight, his ability to limn questions of power and humankind's relation to power structures, that we mistake for an eerie prescience.

The German title of The Trial is Der Prozess. As many critics have noted, the term "trial" is almost too simple a term to express what it was Kafka was portraying. The novel names a trial, but does not show it. It is the minutiae of accusation, entrapment, defense, and submission that is the crux of the tale. Certainly, Kafka's training and profession enabled him to converse knowledgeably about the threat of legal prosecution, but he does not give us a realistic rendition of a court case.

Interestingly, some biographers have seized on some events in Kafka's own life that seem suspiciously relevant to the topic he explores in The Trial. For instance, one critic noted that the opening action of the play corresponds to a sequence to a Yiddish play Kafka would have seen in Prague. Closer to home were events linked to his tortuous on-again, off-again to Felice Bauer, a German Jew from Berlin. Their relationship, and his letters to her, read like a serio-comic drama of its own; he also wrote about their relationship in his diary, to his friends, and even to her friends, frequently in terms of despair and horror. On the occasion of an engagement party in Berlin, attended by both families, he recalled "I was tied up like a criminal. Had they stood me in a corner, put me in real chains, posted policemen around me, and only let me look on like that, it could not have been worse." Later, in July 1914, he actually took part in - or more specifically, submitted - to a trial of sorts when Felice, her sister, and her friend Grete Bloch (to whom Kafka had written describing his discomfort, to put it mildly, with the idea of marriage, and more pointedly, Felice) sat the writer down in a hotel room. They presented what amounted to a court case against him, in terms particular and general. Felice was the "plaintiff," with her sister and Grete serving as friendly witnesses. Kafka's friend Ernst Weiss was "defense attorney," though one whose efforts were fairly useless.

The arguments dragged on for hours. Kafka refused to defend himself and remained silent, which infuriated Felice even more, who, according to Pawel, "kept unwrapping and displaying a whole hoard of grievances, 'well-thought-out, long-nursed, hostile'." Throughout this trial, Pawel surmised, Kafka thought Felice's friend "sat in judgment over him." His silence, Kafka later said, was "because I had nothing decisive to say. I realized that all was lost, realized also that I could still save it at the last minute through some surprise confession, but I had nothing surprising to confess." Indeed, not only did Kafka assume partial blame for having nothing (surprising) to confess, but later he also came to feel that he'd been his own "judge as well as executioner." He had submitted to, participated in, and thus validated their attack. However, the danger here is investing too much resonance between real-life events and the actions in the novel. This reading elides, obscures, the artist's power of imagination. And it was to his imagination that Kafka always turned more than the real world.

In late summer 1914, the heir to the imperial throne was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb. World War I stemmed, nominally, from this incident. In his own work, Kafka was perhaps inspired by real-life events, but - judging from his own words - he was more likely disgusted by the world beyond his writing desk. In telling comments, he relates his mission to write despite events in the newly warring world around him. Kafka wrote he was living "in the immense world that is within me," watching the world outside as at a distance. He said "I detect in myself...hatred of those who are fighting, [to] whom I passionately wish everything evil. From the viewpoint of literature, my fate is quite simple. The urge to depict my dreamlike inner life has thrust everything else into the background; my life has shrunk horribly and will go on shrinking. Nothing else can ever satisfy me." The end of August 1914 saw Kafka's first mention of the title Der Prozess, and the completion of the book's first chapter.

Kafka never finished this novel - or any others. In his own lifetime his work had begun to garner enthusiasts; he died in 1924 and the second great conflagration to sweep Europe interrupted the dissemination of his works. Fifteen years after his death, Kafka's hometown would be a truly German city, part of the Bohemian Protectorate established by the Nazi invaders. After Germany's defeat, a new generation of Europeans turned to Kafka's work as pertinent to the search for enlightenment in a post-war, post-Holocaust, post-atomic bomb world. In 1947, novelist André Gide and actor/director Jean-Louis Barrault adapted the novel into a play, and it is this version (translated by Joseph Katz and Leon Katz) that PTE is producing. Since then, the story in dramatic form has provoked the interest of some of the most interesting film and theatre artists of our time. Kafka's near contemporary in age, film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, shot a German-language version in 1948. In 1962, Orson Welles did a screen adaptation, with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K. Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay for the 1993, shot in Prague, version starring Kyle MacLachlan. On stage, Steven Berkoff did an adaptation of The Trial in 1973, completing his so-called Kafka trilogy (he also made pieces based on the The Penal Colony and Metamorphosis).

It is no surprise the novel has been adapted so many times. It contains many moments of theatricality, and a heightened theatricality at that. The audience is implicated in the story. It wants to understand the signs, to find sense and meaning in them, just as Joseph K wants to understand the signs he pursues; however, he cannot. Joseph K tries various tactics in an attempt to understand things: in one charged moment, he restages events for Miss Burstner. Throughout, we are pleased to note, there is much humor to be had in these situations, not the least from a rich eroticism which makes ridiculous something that might amaze. (Joseph K. goes to the law library, only to find obscene books and a randy female.) As the story continues, the play's scenes get more fluid, and they bleed into each other; characters from one scene or conversation overhear characters from another. Finally, Joseph K. ends his pilgrimage; he, like Kafka, has nothing to confess (nothing surprising, anyway) and submits - even abets - those who would condemn and punish him. The ending's refusal to placate and comfort may shock, but this is not a modern conceit. Shakespeare's Lear has a survivor of that play's horrors ask as he gazes on the almost-averted tragedy "is this the promised end?" Watching the last moments of The Trial, that question comes to mind. Where are the answers we are (sometimes) promised, where is the catharis we (usually) experience in the drama? The story seems to say, discomfortingly, that what we thought we knew about ourselves and our place in the world is just not so. Science cannot cure; the law cannot protect; and faith cannot save.

Yet are not these ideas also aphorisms? Bold art will always question these and all clichés, and have fun while doing so. And so PTE embarks on its great journey of asking questions, and enjoying the ride as they do so. For a lesson in embracing the ridiculous along with the sublime, Franz Kafka may have the last word. In January 1922 he went to a mountain resort in attempt to mediate the effects of the tuberculosis which would soon kill him. Signing in to the hotel, he noted an odd coincidence: "Although, in making my reservations, I had quite legibly spelled out my name, and although the hotel had already correctly addressed two letters to me, the desk clerk had me down as Joseph K. Should I enlighten them, or should I let them enlighten me?"

Julie Bleha, December 2004
*****

For further reading on Kafka's life and work, go to Ernst Pawel's masterful biography, The Nightmare of Reason, where many of the quotes cited above were found.