Kafka: Literatur und Judentum (review)

106 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 189). In this [mal chapter, Knowles shows us the playwrigh~ fiercely committed to revealing the pathology ofpower in the larger realm ofworld politics. Awakened to the brutal reality ofpresent-day totalitarianism, we feel in his later plays a compelling sense ofurgency and moral purpose. Though none have achieved the acclaim ofearlier work, we are left with an abiding respect for a playwright who continues to evolve, pushing the boundaries to expose political denial and to demand ethical responsibility. Ronald Knowles has compressed in this small yet exhaustively researched volume a thorough and enlightened analysis ofPinter's perspectives. Particularly resonant are the analyses of The Birthday Party and The Homecoming. Though the syntax is on occasion complex and the references esoteric, Knowles' understanding oCone of the . twentieth century's most significant playwrights is so complete that one comes away with not only resounding insight into Pinter's work, but an empathic sense for his journey. Richard Stockton Rand Theatre Division Purdue University Kafka: Literatur und Judentum, by Giuliano Baioni, translated into German from the Italian by Gertrud Billen and Josef Billen. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1994. 291 pp. n.p.l. First published in 1984 (in Torino), this wide-ranging, densely argued book explores three important topics in cultural history: Franz Kafka's intellectual biography in its complex relations to Judaism; the Cultural Zionism ofMartin Buber and his Prague disciples ; and the constructions of ethnic or linguistic identity and cultural nationalism. More specifically, the book endeavors to show that Kafka's thought and fiction were shaped by the following biographical factors: a self-understanding as an outsider within each of his ethnic, cultural, or linguistic communities (Jewish, Austrian, Bohemian, German); a mournful belief that as a Western Jew he was cut off from the religious, national, and cultural roots ofhis ethnic tradition; a vague longing for an Eastern-style Jewish community; an intense personal and esthetic resistance to being coopted by his friends' utopian, doctrinal Zionism; an astute awareness of the ideological-institutional crises, including the perceived "Jewish problem," that gripped Central European societies ; an admiration, even envy, for the advancement ofGerman letters by "fully assimilated " Jews such as von Hofrnannsthal, Karl Kraus, Schnitzler, Wassermann, Werfel, and Stefan Zweig; and, in coping with all these factors, an obsessive pursuit ofa paradigmatic , universal literary modernism in German. Book Reviews 107 The Gennan-speaking community in Prague, small in relation to the Czech majority, showed no signs ofantisemitism and, therefore, did not (as in other parts of Central Europe) exact full assimilation from its Jewish members. On the contrary, it bred an "anti-Gennan" though German-speaking activist Zionism among its younger generation: Kafka's friends Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, and Felix Weltsch, and their joumalistic colleagues affiliated with the student association Bar Kochba and the journal Selbstwehr (Leo and Hugo Herrmann, Siegmund Kaznelson, Hans Kohn, and Robert Weltsch). They all came to insist on the separation of Jewish culture from, and the unmasking of all forms of assimilation to, the often antisemitic Austrian or German societies. They were inteP.ectually smitten with and spiritually roused by Martin Buber's Cultural Zionism or Jewish Renaissance, its fusion ofHaskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), Hasidism (Eastern-European mystical revivalism) and, above all, German-nationalist (as well as Nietzschean) neo-romanticism. Ritchie Robertson's pioneering book of 1985 on Kafka's Judaism, taking almost no account of Baioni's study (then available only in Italian), had ftrst drawn attention to Buber's "syncretist," Germanized theory of Jewish culture, his romantic-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and, ultimately, anti-democratic concept oforganic community. It seized on the paradox that Buber's vision (purportedly realized in East European Jewry) of mystical blood ties among all Jews and a mythopoeic productivity of their communal soul should have its ideological origins in Gennan cultural nationalism. By contrast, Paul Mendes-Flohr has-portrayed Buber's Zionist mysticism in much more benign ways, deriving it from certain German mystics, Arthur Schopenhauer, the European cult ofthe Orient, and Buber's literary reception of Hasidism (Divided Passions, 1984). Baioni's probing, highly critical treatment of Buber's Jewish-German symbiosis points to a number ofits internal contradictions. He associates Buber...