Kafka's Tourists and the Technological Sublime

Current research that focuses on the transcultural and postcolonial aspects of Franz Kafka's oeuvre concentrates more and more on the motif of traveling in Kafka's texts.¹ Most prominently, John Zilcosky worked on the notions of traveling in Kafka's writings. In his book Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing, he focuses on a variety of popular, postcolonial, journalistic, and literary discourses that fuel Kafka's travel narratives. This research does not simply target a small, newly discovered niche in Kafka's writing, but highlights a central aspect of his work: Kafka's writings exhibit the modern subject as a traveling one, and his traveling protagonists are numerous. For example, there is Karl Rossmann, the main character of the novel America, who is sent to the United States by his parents, because he was seduced by the house maid, and has to embark on a disastrous odyssey through a truly Kafkaesque version of America. The strange trapeze artist in the short story "First Sorrow," who prefers to live up there on his trapeze, also needs to travel from time to time, and when he does, it is in a spectacular way, either by traveling in a race car or by inhabiting the luggage net of his train compartment. Also, K. in the novel The Castle is a lonely traveler who arrives in a village and pretends to be a land surveyor. And, of course, there is the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who is incapacitated because when he woke up one morning, he was transformed into a rather ugly bug and was therefore not able to start his journey.

This presence of traveling in Kafka's oeuvre is hardly surprising when one takes into consideration the infrastructural changes that Kafka witnessed in his time. From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, new technologies such as the telegraph, the train, and the automobile accelerated traveling and condensed space. The literature of this era reacted to this revolution in transportation. For example, in 1873 Jules Verne wrote his famous novel about a journey around the world in 80 days.² Also, Bram Stoker's Dracula constitutes an exquisite piece of media art that documented the journeys of the real estate agent Jonathan Harker to Transylvania and of Count Dracula to England.³ In 1909, a year in which Kafka wrote a travel report about his journey to a flight show in Brescia, Italy, the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti proclaimed in his Futurist Manifesto that space and time had died yesterday, and were re-born under the conditions of mass transit and communication.⁴ All these technologies and phantasmagorias of traveling were not only accompanied by a first wave of globalization, but also brought about a new form of traveling, namely tourism.

Although the tourist industry has its roots in the medieval pilgrimage that required a certain infrastructure to supply pilgrims with food and shelter,⁵ tourism emerged as a great economic enterprise only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a larger social group, namely the bourgeoisie, had enough funds to travel to places that were solely designed for leisure. This development was also connected to the extension of train and steamship lines, which made traveling safer, more comfortable and also cheaper.⁶ Larry Krotz, in his book Tourists, identifies Thomas Cook, the founder of the largest travel business company world-wide, as the key figure of the modern history of tourism, because he established in the 1840's the first train services that primarily provided transportation for leisure excursions (7).

Taking this expansion of a tourist economy into consideration, it is surprising that Kafka's modern subjects, although frequently traveling, are only in very rare cases tourists. In fact, all of the characters that I have mentioned above do not comply with the definition of "tourist" provided by the World Travel Organization: "A person travelling outside his or her usual environment for less than a specific period of time and whose main purpose of travel is other than the exercise of an activity remunerated from the...