Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

Author:Walter Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781473524446
Publisher: Random House

Max Brod’s Book on Kafka

AND SOME OF MY OWN REFLECTIONSfn1

Max Brod’s book on Kafka is characterized by the fundamental contradiction between the author’s thesis concerning his subject and his attitude toward him. The latter serves to discredit the former seriously, and one has other reservations about his thesis, which states that Kafka was on the road to holiness. As for the biographer’s attitude, it is one of supreme bonhomie, with a lack of reserve as its most striking characteristic.

The very fact that this particular attitude could be paired with this particular view of the subject deprives the book of its authority from the outset. How this is done is illustrated, for example, by the turn of phrase with which ‘our Franz’ is introduced to the reader on a photograph. Intimacy with a saint has a definite designation in the history of religion: Pietism. Brod’s attitude as a biographer is the pietistic stance of an ostentatious intimacy – in other words, the most irreverent attitude imaginable.

The carelessness with which the book is put together is promoted by habits which the author may have acquired in his professional life. At any rate, it is hardly possible to overlook the traces of journalistic routine, down to the very formulation of his thesis: ‘The category of holiness … is really the only proper category under which Kafka’s life and work can be viewed.’ Is it necessary to state that holiness is a category reserved for life and that works do not belong to it under any circumstances? Is there any need to point out that the term ‘holiness,’ used outside a traditionally established religious structure, is nothing but a novelist’s phrase?

Brod lacks any sense of that pragmatic strictness which one may demand of a first biography of Kafka. ‘We knew nothing of first-class hotels, and yet we didn’t have a care in the world.’ Because of the author’s striking lack of tact, of a feeling for thresholds and distances, journalistic clichés have crept into a text which its very subject should have obliged to keep to a certain standard. This is not so much the reason for, as evidence of, the extent to which Brod has been denied any authentic view of Kafka’s life. His inability to do justice to his subject becomes particularly objectionable when Brod discusses Kafka’s famous testamentary instructions charging him with the destruction of his unpublished writings. Here if anywhere would have been the place to lay open basic aspects of Kafka’s existence. (He was evidently not willing to be responsible to posterity for a work the greatness of which he was at the same time well aware of.)

The question has been discussed from all sides since Kafka’s death; it would have been logical to pause here. Of course, this would have taken some soul-searching on the part of the biographer. Kafka presumably had to entrust his posthumous papers to someone who would not want to do his will. And neither the testator nor his biographer would be harmed by considering things in this way.

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