We … shook hands; I took off my hat and then held it to my chest, we stepped back as one does when a train is about to start, as if to show that all is over and one is reconciled to it. But the train did not start yet, and we approached each other again; I was glad of that, she asked after my sisters. All of a sudden the train slowly began to move, Frau Klug got her handkerchief ready to wave, called that I must write to her, did I have her address? She was already too far off for me to be able to reply in words; I pointed to Löwy from whom I could get her address, good, she nodded quickly to me and to him and waved her handkerchief, I raised my hat, clumsily at first, with more ease the farther away she was. Later I remembered my impression that the train was not really moving away but only going the short distance through the station to act a scene for us and then disappear. When I was half asleep that same evening Frau Klug appeared to me, unnaturally small, almost without legs, wringing her hands with a despairing expression, as if some great misfortune had befallen her.
The drama of a whole life is contained in this diary note, the events cut like a film — unrequited love, the pain of parting, a lapsing into death, the return of a woman cheated of her happiness.
The shift into fantasy so characteristic of Kafka’s writing, also found as something to be taken for granted in the passage just quoted, has often tended to obscure the fact that the author’s apparently hopelessly eccentric consciousness in fact closely reflected the social problems of his time. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kafka’s concern with the Jewishness that was lost to him. Characteristically, academic German literary criticism, particularly in Germany, showed very little understanding until the 1980s of a subject that was obviously of prime importance to Kafka himself. Even today the critics have not really compensated for this deficiency, which is due to an almost willful lack of understanding, and consequently Zischler’s study of Kafka’s diary entry of October 23, 1921, is particularly interesting. “Afternoon, Palestine film,” writes Kafka, without further comment. Zischler explains that this film, which bore the title Shivat Zion, was a documentary made in Jerusalem about the building of Jewish Palestine by the pioneers there, shown by the Zionist Selbstwehr (“Self-defense”) organization at a time when more and more Jews were thinking of emigrating because even then their situation was becoming increasingly difficult; it must, he says, have made a lasting impression on many of the Prague Jews who went to the private screening at the Lido-Bio cinema. Afterward, Zischler tells us, a film of the Eleventh Zionist Congress and Gymnastic Exhibition in Karlsbad was shown. It is not clear whether the gymnastic competition was a Jewish one, but that is not out of the question, for the realization of the Zionist utopia was primarily linked with an appeal to youth, and ideas of the physical training and physiological regeneration of the people were very much to the fore, as indeed they had been since the early nineteenth century in the emergent nationalist German ideology from which Zionism always took its cue. In the image of themselves that they projected, the two peoples, awakening from long oppression or rousing themselves from alleged neglect, were almost exactly the same, even if their standards and ambitions were different.
A reporter for the Selbstwehr journal, quoted by Zischler, describes how the Sunday-morning habitués of the Lido-Bio had to wait until the first showing of the Palestine film was over; it began at eight-thirty in the morning. “More and more salvos of applause are heard from the interior of the hall,” he writes, adding that a woman who had taken a look at the screen inside told the other people waiting, “You hardly want to believe they are Jews, they don’t look like it at all, I don’t know, but their blood must have changed.” This story reminded me of another which, like my experience of the flying Robert in the movie, dates from the year 1976. I had been to a performance of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise at the Coburg Landestheater, against my real inclinations because I dislike both the continuing misuse of this play, which I regard as rather questionable anyway, and German theatrical culture in general. At any rate, when what turned out to be an unspeakable performance was over and I was on my way out I heard an elderly lady, who must have been in full possession of her senses during the “great days” of the German people, telling her friend in a confidential whisper: “Well, he certainly played Nathan well. You might have thought he was a real Jew.” So unfathomable is this utterance that anyone who contemplates it must surely be overcome by vertigo, as indeed one is before most of the manifestations of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The overriding concept of those mirror-image identities is the myth of the Chosen People, to which the Germans blindly subscribed at the time when their ideas of national emancipation were taking a wrong turn. Whereas Herzl may still have been trying to square the circle when he suggested that German would be the language spoken in Zion, Hitler (somewhere in his table talk, I think) came to a conclusion which he thought irrefutably justified the annihilation of the Jews: there could not be two Chosen Peoples.
The “Palestine film” was the last of Kafka’s visits to the cinema mentioned in Zischler’s book. What Kafka thought of the film we do not know, either from him or from any other source. All that is certain is that he did not go to the cinema very often afterward. At least he was spared Triumph of the Will, though we may wonder what he would have thought if he had been obliged to watch all that marching. Let me be allowed one more discursion. According to Zischler, on September 20, 1913, the day when Kafka, in a state of long-term depression, felt the tears come to his eyes in a movie theater in Verona, the films Poveri bambini, Il celebro bandito Garouche, and La lezione dell’abisso were showing in the cinemas of that city. La lezione dell’abisso (“The Lesson of the Abyss”) was the precursor of the heroic Alpine genre in which Leni Riefenstahl made her name two decades later. In 1935 Riefenstahl — who, I am told, is still swimming and diving in the blue waters of the Maldives — was shooting a film high among the snow-white, cloud-capped mountains of Bavaria. There is nothing visible but the sky, while the Führer, a numinous being who is never seen (the audience views everything as if with a divine eye hovering above the world), is in a plane approaching the city of the Meistersingers where the Reich party rally is being held. Soon afterward he drives through the streets with a great retinue. Of the old, touching Germany that once came into Kafka’s mind as he leafed through Die Gartenlaube (“The Garden Arbor,” a family magazine), there is nothing to be seen for the sheer press of human beings — they stand shoulder to shoulder everywhere beaming, standing on projecting vantage points, walls, stairs, balconies, hanging out of windows. The Führer’s car moves through a positive torrent of people. And then, without warning, comes the strange, enormously evocative series of pictures in which, again looking down from high above, the audience sees a city of tents. There they are, stretching as far as the eye can see: white pyramidal structures. At first, because of the unusual perspective, you do not see exactly what they are. Day is just dawning, and gradually, in the still twilit landscape, people come out of the tents alone or in twos and threes, all going the same way as if they had been called by name. The edifying effect is rather reduced when you see the men in close-up performing their morning ablutions bare-chested, a frequent emblem of National Socialist hygiene. Nonetheless, a magical picture of those white tents lingers in the mind. A people traveling through the desert. The Promised Land appears on the horizon. They will reach it together. But eight or nine years after this vision was recorded on film we shall have, instead, the black ruins of Nuremberg, the city where Zischler was born in 1947 when it still lay in rubble and ashes.