Kafkas [Un-]Glück: Zur negativen Dialektik des Schreibens by Volker Steffen (review)

Few would dispute that Kafka’s works deal with such topoi as guilt, punishment, law, and alienation. Volker Steffen‘s premise, based on Walter Benjamin, is that in order to really understand Kafka, one must also deal with the concept of happiness in his work; yet it is precisely happiness, as a topos, that has never been the subject of study in Kafka scholarship. According to Steffen, however, discussing happiness in Kafka can be approached only through its opposite, unhappiness.

Using the term negative dialectics, invented by the Frankfurt School to suggest a mode of thinking that deals with a subject through paradox and differentiation, Steffen understands Kafka’s writing to be all about his own desire for happiness, a state which he himself was incapable of attaining and thus a state in which none of his protagonists will ever find themselves. In a provocative move, Steffen, somewhat enigmatically, calls Kafka “ein Autist des Glücks” (7). If he means that Kafka was incapable of being happy by some predisposition or neurological disorder, he is presenting posthumous psychoanalytical speculation. If however, he has simply come up with a clever image to describe our perception of Kafka from the vantage point of a century later, then it may well be a useful term.

In his work on Kafka, Walter Benjamin already designated Kafka’s writing as a form of “Märchen für Dialektiker” (9). Steffen augments that argument by describing all of Kafka’s works as fairy tales, or rather, anti–fairy tales that prevent a happy ending. Steffen calls them fairy tales of negation with unhappy endings.

Once it has been established that Kafka and his characters are happiness-challenged, what does Steffen have to say about his characters and his writing? Focusing on the novels as well as some of the shorter texts, Steffen ties together comments from Kafka’s diaries with the fictional work to make a persuasive case for the centrality of this topos in the Kafkan oeuvre. He points out that the only true happiness in Kafka is always the happiness of others, as in Der Verschollene; very quickly, these images of happiness turn into images of death. And of course, for Kafka there can be no happy ending, so even in this most cheerful of his novels, there is no real ending.

Steffen cites Kafka’s “slasher-fantasies” in his diaries and letters—those descriptions of turning knives on others, as well as oneself—and concludes that there is a kind of comical element to these sadistic fantasies, as indeed, the Amerika novel should be read with a mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude. (In reading this, I suddenly saw Kafka as young, death-obsessed Harold in the cult movie Harold and Maude.) But, to be sure, Kafka’s writing fantasies that suggest these desires for violent death are more than a kind of expressionistic sensationalism—they lead to his own satisfaction in the happiness of writing, and thus his writing itself is simultaneously both happiness and, dialectically, unhappiness. Kafka compared his desk to a grave, and Steffen surmises that Kafka’s logic might conceive of death as the picture of true happiness: the eternal process of writing.

Steffen compares Kafka to both Sade (sadistic in his fantasies and sexual imagination) and Wittgenstein (dismissing the idea of hope from the world, as Wittgenstein did the idea of sense) and relates his K. characters to Thomas Mann’s many death-obsessed characters, like Hanno, Hans Castorp, and Adrian Leverkühn. For Kafka the happiness that lies in existence is always seen in conjunction with its negation—the unhappiness of death. According to the negative dialectic, this would be the ambivalent logic of (un)happiness at work.

Steffen’s research is thorough; in this slim volume he discusses the major interpreters of Kafka, demonstrating how they skirt the issue of the theme of happiness without ever really discussing it in depth. His style can be a bit off-putting, as he...