In a letter to Max Brod, of June 1921, Kafka reminds him that “most of those who have begun to write in German wanted to distance themselves from their Jewishness, usually with the vague approval of the father — the vagueness was precisely what made the approval scandalous. They wanted to distance themselves, but their hind legs held on to their father’s Jewishness, while the front ones met with no firm ground. And the despair which resulted served them as inspiration.” The Other appears as a grotesque figure gifted with four legs, but grotesquely unstable, the hind legs rooted in the old paternal soil, while the front ones flail in the void above the precipice.
Just as the delivery of one’s own identity — negotiable through the command of the real — becomes a form of treason, similarly trading one’s identity for another implies a usurpation. Kafka expresses himself categorically in relation to the act of usurpation of a foreign “possession” (language) belonging to another, even when not one single linguistic error can be found in the writing of the Other. (Is one speaking strictly of an “ethnic” possession? Kafka and so many other writers and linguists have brilliantly proven in their works what G. Calinescu pointed out in relation to the great Romanian linguists of Jewish origin, in his History of Romanian Literature, which had appeared during the difficult period of the nationalist dictatorship: the intellectual character of language.) Today, in our centrifugal modernity, it would seem that intense “migration” accelerates the impurity and the mobility of all languages seized from their native cradle, and that the “foreign” child participates in the same hurried immersion in the hybrid language of the epoch, this language having become a global home. The premise from which Kafka begins, contradicted both yesterday and today by the writing of other master craftsmen like himself, as well as by an ever expanding world of the exiled, in fact speaks revealingly only about Kafka’s own suffering.
The linguistic “piracy” of the foreigner? … The severe and exaggerated accusation rather allows one to detect Franz Kafka’s own suffering, brought about by his contact with the real, his persistent suspicion with regard to the real. When he refers to the uncertain position of the Jew in the world, we might think today of the growing and diversifying population of all sorts of exiles, “uncertain”—as Kafka writes in a letter to Milena—“in themselves, and in the midst of humanity … urged to believe that only tangible possessions give them the right to survive.”
The impossibility of writing in German also means the impossibility of living authentically, with full accreditation, in German. Of course, we remember the famous episode of Kafka’s conversation with some fellow guests during a vacation, when his interlocutors, German officers, after a few of Kafka’s replies, probably intrigued by subtle and bizarre phonetic differences, inquired about the “real” place of his origin:
Today, when I entered the dining room, the colonel invited me so cordially to their table that I had to give in. So everything followed its course. After the first few words, it was made clear that I was from Prague. Both of us, the general, who was in front of me, and the colonel, were familiar with Prague. So I am Czech? Well. Try to explain to these veritable German officers what you are in fact. Someone suggested “German from Bohemia,” and someone else “from a small neighborhood.” Then the subject was dropped and the lunch began, but the general, with his acute linguistic sensitivity, schooled in the Austrian army, was not satisfied. After we finished the meal, he began again to marvel at the sound of my German, perhaps more disturbed by what he saw than what he heard. At this point, I tried to explain that I am Jewish. Certainly, his scientific curiosity was then satisfied, but not his human feelings. In that moment, probably simply by chance — since the others could not hear our conversation, even if a certain connection existed — the entire group got up to leave, even though yesterday they had stayed on quite a while after lunch. The general too was very anxious to go, even though, ever so politely, he had brought our small chat to a sort of conclusion, before hurrying, with great big steps, towards the exit. This didn’t really satisfy my human feelings either: why should I be a thorn in their side? To have to remain alone, without exploding in a ridiculous fashion, lest they then invent some disciplinary measure against me.
At a certain point, Kafka confesses in his Journal that even his love for his mother seems derailed by the alienation of German expression.
What about the fear and the horror, the attachment and the repulsion, the compassion and the awkwardness provoked by his love — hate relationship with his father? How would the famous Letter to My Father have sounded if it had initially been written in Czech or, let us say, in Yiddish? What would have become of Kafka’s feelings and resentments?
The third impossibility with which the Jewish-German writer is confronted while trying to follow his inspiration (meaning his despair) is “the impossibility of writing differently.” Does differently mean “in another language?”
In a letter to Milena, Kafka confesses: “I have never lived among the Germans, German is my mother tongue, my natural tongue, but Czech is closer to my heart.” This is not only an indirect declaration of love for his young Czech translator, with whom he would maintain close relations, but also a declaration of love for other virtualities of the impossible, a reiteration of his incurable suspicions regarding the “attainable,” regarding the deceitful and corrupting hospitality of the possible. Yiddish, he thinks, could instill “a belief in himself which would overcome fear.” Kafka would reaffirm this intuition — also aspiration — above all in his correspondence with Max Brod. His relationship to Hebrew is vague, from afar, but its invocation seems no less intense. Again, it is a sort of impossible, essential, and last rediscovery, a language which he would hear frequently on his deathbed thanks to the young Dora Diamant, a rabbi’s daughter, who not only brightened his last days on earth but initiated her moribund lover in the sacred language before he died. Nothing, however, could resolve the unsolvable. Kafka had been born in the German language, he had formed and deformed himself in the language of his writing. His servitude to the mother tongue? More than anyone else, as much as he might like to do so, the writer cannot give up the placenta. The borders of the mother tongue are both circumscribing and limitless. The writer himself makes possible the depths of the “possibility” in which he in fact lives. In Kafka’s case, to speculate regarding another way of writing would be a vulgar innocence and an impertinence.
As the American writer Cynthia Ozick accurately observes, Kafka’s fear was not that the German language didn’t belong to him — he possessed it brilliantly — but that he did not … deserve it. Is it “the wish and the crisis of the split of the psyche from the articulation of expression,” as Cynthia Ozick thinks? In fact, Kafka insinuates that it is impossible to be Kafka when he writes that “every day at least one line must be aimed at myself. I try constantly to communicate the incommunicable. After all, it is nothing else but fear … fear radiating over everything, a small and great fear, the paralyzing fear of uttering a word, even though this fear could also be the aspiration towards something greater than any fear.”
To the three assumed negations, Kafka adds a fourth, namely “the impossibility of writing” pure and simple: “since despair was not something that could be tamed by writing.”