Mann and Kafka An interrupted round of golf

Thomas Mann never met Franz Kafka, but he was an avid reader of his works. How, then, did Mann discover Kafka, how did he interpret him, and what role did an interrupted round of golf have in it all? Find out in this article by writer and philosopher Grzegorz Jankowicz.

We do not know exactly when Thomas Mann turned his attention to Kafka’s work. Some believe it was through the actor Ludwig Hardt, an outstanding rhapsodist who read German-language literature at his public appearances. Kafka appreciated Hardt’s stagecraft, and his household library held a copy of an anthology Hardt edited with pieces for recitation. On 9 March 1921, at Berlin’s Meistersaal, Hardt read a Kafka short story for the first time. His repertoire ultimately came to include nine of Kafka’s works from two collections: Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1920). Ludwig’s anthology also contained works by Mann. The latter could, therefore, have heard Kafka’s prose during one of the actor’s performances.

According to another theory, Mann owed his discovery of Kafka to Max Brod, who wrote a sketch of his friend’s work in 1921 for Die Neue Rundschau. A year later, the same journal published Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, which Mann may have noticed, but of this we have no evidence. On 7 June 1925, Brod – who was blessed with remarkable talent for promotion, capable of uniting allies and constantly increasing his social capital – published an article in Berliner Tageblatt to mark Mann’s fiftieth birthday. He wrote that his late friend had reserved the highest admiration for the ‘maestro Mann’, considering him to be a peerless stylist. He also contended – thoroughly misleadingly – that the two authors shared a similar approach to art. After something of this sort, Mann could not ignore Kafka’s work; nor was it fitting to reject Brod’s interpretation of his writing. And indeed, in his later statements, we see the clear influence of Brod’s readings, which were taken as fundamental and irreproachable. When Brod was gathering funds to publish his friend’s books in the early 1930s, Mann gave him unconditional support. A year earlier, the editors of Die Lebenden had asked him for a list of neglected writers who deserved to be revived. Mann did not hesitate to include Kafka.

Golfing in swimwear

In Mann’s Diaries, entries on Kafka only appear after 1935. These are enthusiastic, yet very curt notes. For instance, on 4 April of that year, Mann noted he was continuing to read The Metamorphosis, and adds, with great conviction, that Kafka’s legacy outstripped everything that had been written in the German language for several decades. Any text when compared to a piece by Kafka is ‘philistine rubbish’. These are strong words, but we find nothing else to back them up in Mann’s private writings. Under the date of 5 July 1935, we find information about a trip to the countryside, during which the old master made a failed attempt to play golf in a bathing costume, and then read Kafka’s The Castle. 

Mann’s most sustained statement on Kafka comes from the early 1940s. This story is well known, it has been reconstructed on several occasions, so I shall limit myself to recalling the main facts, following the path marked out by Jürgen Born, author of the excellent Kafkas Bibliothek.

Mann's preface

In May of 1940, Mann received a letter from his long-time publisher, Alfred Knopf. They were both residing in the USA – Thomas in Princeton, Alfred in New York. The latter had decided to reintroduce Kafka’s The Castle to the American readership. The first edition had been ignored. It had sold around a thousand copies and, although a few people had responded enthusiastically, it could hardly have been called a publishing success. Knopf liked successes, especially when he was convinced a book was outstanding. He thought The Castle to be among Franz Kafka’s greatest achievements. He arrived at the conclusion that the next edition should contain a piece by Mann. As he was known and appreciated in the USA, Knopf further explained, Mann could break the resistance of the American public. Mann did not respond at once, but not because he had no desire to return to Kafka, only because other matters were occupying him. Just over a month later, the introduction was ready.

Mann took the path Brod had cleared in his afterword to the first edition of The Castle. Essentially, he saw all the social metaphors in the pages of Kafka as secularised religious and theological concepts. He saw this writing as an attack on the boundaries dividing immanence from transcendence, an attack waged by protagonists who longed for the truth, but were weak and lost, whose efforts could only end in failure. He also appreciated Kafka’s artistic ethic, his devotion, his asceticism of sorts, undermining the sense of any non-literary activity. In this, Mann argued there was a persistence worthy of the great spiritual masters, discarding worldly things and seeking enlightenment. From today’s perspective, it all sounds a bit caustic and naive, taking into account that Walter Benjamin had already pointed out other aspects of Kafka’s work, challenging Brod’s reading. Benjamin thought that Max, while surely a devoted friend and skilful promoter, distorted Kafka’s writing, paring it down to what might be accepted by a somewhat sentimental bourgeois reader.

Kafka the master of dream visions

The most important fragments of Mann’s piece pertain to the dream logic of Kafka’s novel. According to Mann, all of Kafka’s works imitate dreams to generate a comic effect. This remark, while seemingly innocent and positive, holds a covert critique of Kafka’s project. In the end, despite their linguistic intensity, The Trial and The Castle take the German language into inspiring regions it had never been, they are peculiar works that most appeal to those who appreciate oddities. According to Mann, Kafka is a humourist amusing us with juggling tricks.

It is hard to imagine a one-dimensional appraisal. Firstly, Kafka never imitates dreams, his stories never try to recreate their logic. This is how he viewed the reality around him! In this work, the world is unmasked as a dream that has stepped past the boundaries of the nocturnal kingdom and spread everywhere. Kafka does not erase the boundary between the rational and irrational, he does something more radical; he convinces us this division is not binding (and never was). We are accustomed to thinking this way, we have created social conventions to grapple with our fear of the unknown, but this says more about our needs than about the reality in which we must live. Mann was unable to accept this conclusion, neither epistemologically nor existentially. His writing was grounded in rationalism, the matrix of his novels was the simple and elegantly phrased thought. A person errs, stumbles, falls, but when we see him from the outside we have no doubt what has happened. In Kafka the world has not slipped from its groove; it was never there in the first place. A person could actually one day be arrested for no reason and without explanation, only to hear that nothing ever happened and one should go on back to work.         

Laughter in Kafka

The point of laughter in Kafka is different. According to Brod’s anecdote about the famous debut reading of the first chapter of The Trial, Kafka laughed till his belly ached. Does this mean the tale of Joseph K. is a comedy, and we ought not to take it so seriously? Quite the contrary. Kafka’s laughter is a veil hiding existential confusion in the face of something that cannot be neutralised through rational thought. The point is not that Kafka’s works are impenetrable parables whose meaning we shall never perceive. Their meaning is all too clear, they conceal nothing from us. They more try to unmask, expose, illuminate, demonstrate and even reveal. The problem is that the face of reality Kafka uncovers is hard to accept; we resist reconciling ourselves to the fact that the world works as it does, unfolds at this pace, and that such incredible things occur in it. Our reaction to Kafka’s axe splitting the frozen sea of our inner selves can vary widely: tears, laughter, terror… But not calm, and this is precisely what Thomas Mann desired most, in life and in art, which is why his approach to Kafka is positive, but not entirely affirmative.


For Adam Zagajewski