Franz Kafkas Roman Das Schloß: Der moderne Mythos des Bewusstseins by Halina Nitropisch (review)

Much has been and will continue to be written about Franz Kafka, one of the most fascinating and beguiling writers of the twentieth century. Kafka’s oeuvre seems to capture things both profound and absurd: the morbid bureaucratization of modern life; enchanting but ultimately desolate Prague, both of and apart from the world; the enduring mystery of Judaism and Jewishness. Kafka’s writings contain elliptical musings on such subjects as remembrance, forgetting, and loneliness and speak to what Halina Nitropisch, in her beautifully written and philosophically sophisticated new book Franz Kafkas Roman Das Schloß: Der moderne Mythos des Bewusstseins, calls “[Walter] Benjamins Diagnose:” “In der Moderne habe die Ideenwelt ihre Zugehörigkeit zur Transzendenz eingebüßt und von nun an sei sie im ‘Innersten der Wirklichkeit’ zu verorten” (102). Das Schloß, she argues, is Kafka’s attempt to reconcile the social and theological forces at work in his (our) world. Melding literature, philosophy, and theology in an attempt to explicate and unravel this most unheimlich of novels, we discover, she says, that “In Das Schloß deckt Kafka das grundsätzliche Problem des modernen Menschen auf: seine metaphysische Unbehaustheit” (48).

The theme of “metaphysische Unbehaustheit” wends its way through Nitropisch’s book. Franz Kafkas Roman Das Schloß is not really a literary investigation of the novel itself. It includes few close readings of long passages, psychological interrogation of characters, or explications of complex narrative formulations. Instead, Nitropisch uses Das Schloß as a platform to explore the literary and theological world of early twentieth-century Europe, not just the Weltanschauung of Kafka’s writings but even more the complex relationship between (internal) being and (external) meaning. Nitropisch is philosophically erudite (it is not unusual to see references to Jabès and Valéry beside those to Plato, Barthes, Buber, and Scholem), and this would be interesting (if not particularly important) if it were not that it appears to be the means by which she assumes for herself the license to be far more creative in her readings and conclusions than one usually expects from a work of literary criticism focused on a single novel. Indeed, Nitropisch, has, in effect, written a book of historical philosophy, one that describes (and diagnoses) the modern condition. The book works with Kafka rather than on him. In Das Schloß, Nitropisch says, Kafka attempted to convey the way that, in modernity, intellect and language have become the sole organs of comprehension. Kafka’s novel, therefore, should not be understood merely as a parable of modern society in economic or political terms. Rather, it is, far more profoundly, about the loneliness of humanity itself when it becomes isolated from the possibility of transcendence. When “de[r] säkularisierte Mensch” (107) becomes “Subjekt als auch Objekt,” the inexorable result (and absurdity) is that he becomes “Täter als auch Opfer” (80), a means only to an end that interminably repeats itself, a recurring pattern of ego-centered questioning that leads always inward, a “Wesenlosigkeit” (114) that, like the narrative of the novel, always promises answers around the next corner, at the next meeting, in the next room—and never delivers.

Divided into five parts, the book weaves between a literary-contextual and philosophical-historical argument, focusing at times on the influence of other writers (Goethe, Rilke), on specific places and images (Prague, the bridge), or on theological archetypes (Plato’s shadow-world, Isaac Luria’s transcendent/immanent God). Nitropisch takes inspiration from Kafka’s opening scene of K. standing on a bridge before entering the village below the castle: “Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor” (7). The bridge connects the main road, the road away from consciousness linked with transcendence, to the village, the metaphysical zone of modern society, where every action is a selfreflective gaze, what she calls (in a beautiful turn of phase) a...