Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (review)

110 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 in its magnitude, can never vanish again; so long as there are men on the earth there also will be the irresistible desire to complete the building." Brod's main thesis is played upon by the story: "The age ofthe frrst generation went past, but none ofthe succeeding ones showed any difference; except that technical [or: artistic] skill increased and with it the desire to fight. To this must be added that the second and third generation had already recognized the senselessness ofbuilding a heaven-reaching tower." Brod had characterized Herzl's plan with these words: "The general, publicly recognized mass immigration would bring the idea to life at one blow." Kafka's story ends: "The city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms." Like "The Great Wall ofChina" (as Robertson and Baioni have pointed out), "The City Coat of Arms" appears to be Kafka's metaphorical expression ofskepticism towards the idea that a culturally nationalist agenda should replace the universal task ofliterature. Arnold Heidsieck Department ofGerman University of Southern California Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient, by Sander Gilman. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 328 pp. $18.95. In Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient, Professor Sander Gilman of the University of Chicago, an energetic and productive scholar in Psychiatry and also German Studies, presents us with a detailed report of the social climate in which Franz Kafka (1883-1924) lived, -worked, grew ill, and died. This climate was pitilessly antisemitic. As a result, according to Gilman, Kafka lived in shame and worked in fear, as he watched his ugly body sicken in a way he could not fail to understand (he became tubercular, even though Jews were by and large supposed to be immune to tuberculosis ). This "Jewish self-hatred," which is the title of another of Gilman's major studies, is to be found in Kafka's stories, letters, and diary entries. Despite all manner of "twisting and turning," Kafka himself adhered to an antisemitic view of himself, and this became the obsessive content ofhis work. Gilman is writing on the cusp of a sea-change in literary scholarship, which he, more than anyone else in German studies, has helped to bring about. This is the idea that literary works should be read as ifthey were no different from notes and jottings by the author in question--or for that matter from articles, speeches, and books written by the author's contemporaries, such as professors and doctors and journalists and also po~itical agitators and crackpots. What is important is not the way the literary work Book Reviews III might differ from these "texts" but the way they all amount to the same thing. (One can leave aside Gilman's undeveloped notion of"ironical distance" found in Kafka's novels and stories.) All texts in a given period have like testamentary value to a prevailing "discourse" ofrace, gender, sexuality, and illness; and in the case of Kafka as well, all contribute to the Central European obsession with the otherness,of Jews-their ugly otherness, an ugliness that "explains"---one may say this, speaking from the standpoint of the sources Gilman cites, Kafka included-the murderous hatred they reaped. For "the Jew," whom Gilman constructs on the basis of his freewheeling reading of his sources, is a dirty, scabrous, fetid, diseased, effeminate male of the third sex, on whose body his difference from all good and healthy things is indelibly inscribed. This view is one that Gilman also attributes to Kafka. Now, it is true that Gilman's sources paint this picture of the Jew. This is his fIrst claim. His second claim, that every Jew necessarily holds this opinion of himself, having "internalized" it as his own, might be useful as a working assumption. But the thesis that Gilman considers the "unique contribution" of his book is one that readers ofKafka, even as he is presented in this book, will fmd hard to take: it is the view that Kafka reproduced this vile caricature ofhimself. According to Gilman...