Franz Kafka: The Office Writings

"Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the ‘hell of office life’. But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in ‘the Manchester of the Empire’, which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908 and 1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe. Now, consider that Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers their economy of form. This work of allusion proceeds via several logics. “Kafka…was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform” One such logic—the logic of risk insurance–comes from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Though ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka struggled to enforce compulsory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacture, farms, and automobiles. Images from his work world, such as mutilation by machine, the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate such stories as The Metamorphosis , The Trial , and In the Penal Colony . True, it wouldn’t be many readers’ Moby Dick . But these writings are the outcome of an editorial selection of the juiciest of the lot. (You should see the ones that got away!) And, believe it or not, one advanced student at the University of Utah—under the pedagogic spell, perhaps, of the charismatic Professor Anne Jamison—wrote on the Web that it was her favorite book of all time. Several of the papers here reflect the traumas of the War: the insurance institute previously devoted to restituting for the trauma of workmen occasionally mutilated in factories must now deal with ‘factories’, so to speak—i.e., entire armies—whose whole remit is the manufacture of mutilated bodies. Kafka’s imaginative immersion in trench warfare would have conditioned his representation of ‘The Burrow’ and could excite a more intense and detailed reading of its architecture and psychic weather. But the more fundamental analogy between the fiction and the insurance world, as shown in these papers, ponders what ‘accidents’ of the human condition can be insured against and what cannot. Kafka’s stories are all about uninsurable accidents—such as dying, as in ‘The Hunter Gracchus’, but not finding one’s way to the regions of Death, let alone being charged with an unnamed crime, which brings about a distressful metamorphosis of sensibility. Kafka advocated vigorously for the establishment of a hospital devoted entirely to the treatment of shell-shocked veterans: he understood PTSD better than most bureaucrats. Kafka’s work-life was a pure immersion in disproportionate punishment. His day job was to remunerate workmen whose limbs—let us say—had been torn off by industrial machines. And what remuneration—a matter of kronen—would be truly proportionate to the disorientation and anguish of the victim? But this is an empirical confirmation of a perspective deeply implanted in childhood. In his ‘Letter to His Father’, the boy Franz locates the abiding sense of intrinsic disproportionality in a punishment inflicted on him by his father in the notorious ‘pavlatche’ incident. A pavlatche is ‘a balcony running along the edge of a house on the first floor or above, inside the exterior wall.’ Kafka remembers: I was whining persistently for water one night, certainly not because I was thirsty, but in all probability partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After a number of fierce threats had failed, you lifted me out of my bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche, and left me awhile all alone, standing outside the locked door in my nightshirt. … This incident almost certainly made me obedient for a time, but it damaged me on the inside. I was by nature unable to reconcile the simple act (as it seemed to me) of casually asking for water with the utter horror of being carried outside. Years later it still tormented me that this giant man, my father, the ultimate authority, could enter my room at any time and, almost unprovoked, carry me from my bed onto the pavlatche, and that I meant so little to him. There we have it, from the victim’s mouth. But the idea of proportionate justice implies finding an equivalent—the punishment—for something unlike it, the crime. Kafka had a horror of the injustice of asserted equivalents in many spheres, especially when the things alleged to be equivalent—or radically different—are subject at all times to internal metamorphosis."