Amorous politics

Was Kafka a political resister? His early biographer, Klaus Wagenbach, called him a socialist. Theodor Adorno saw defiance in Kafka's “autonome” art (135). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cited Kafka's stubborn bachelordom as a politics of flight. Steven Soderbergh imagined an anarchic, violent freedom fighter in Kafka. But might the poet from Prague be offering us another, universally relevant form of resistance? One closer to all of us, hiding in plain sight? Yes, I say: the politics of radical love. It simmers throughout Kafka's texts and explodes powerfully in his last attempt at a novel, his magnum opus, Das Schloß.

The protagonist, K., meets Frieda, who has a striking look (Blick) in her eye (Schloß 60). This look reveals her readiness for a great struggle. Despite knowing her for less than an hour, K. tells her that they will struggle together. They will become an unusual couple refusing to conform to the expectations of the world. Only by joining forces can they gain the necessary strength: “Die Widerstände der Welt sind groß, sie werden größer mit den größeren Zielen und es ist keine Schande sich die Hilfe selbst eines kleinen einflußlosen aber ebenso kämpfenden Mannes zu sichern” (63–64).

The parallels are unmistakable between “Frieda” and “Felice”: Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged. With Felice, he had the only satisfying sexual experience in his life, while they were staying in adjoining hotel rooms. He was overcome by her Blick: “Jetzt aber sah ich den Blick des Vertrauens einer Frau und konnte mich nicht verschließen,” and “schön der Blick ihrer besänftigten Augen, das Sichöffnen frauenhafter Tiefe” (Briefe 1914–17 173; Tagebücher 795). Just as K. will take the castle by storm with Frieda, Kafka now plans to establish an intimate, radical household with Felice. He will leave Prague for her hometown of Berlin, where they will sleep in separate rooms with an adjoining door, just as in that magical hotel (Briefe 1914–17 173).

Neither Kafka's nor K.’s relationship works out, but that subtracts nothing from their potential. The psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg argued that some couples develop a “private morality” that allows them to resist convention (175). Although coupling itself is conventional, amorous pairs are the unit most capable of defying established beliefs, Kernberg insists. Couples are stronger than individuals yet small enough to avoid groupthink. Their independence threatens unstructured groups like political parties or, in Kafka's novel, the village cliques. In a line that Kafka struck through in his draft, K. tells Frieda that her stunning gaze (Blick) belongs to her but also to something larger than her: “Es ist ein Blick, der gewissermassen noch gar nicht Ihnen gehört und doch ihnen mehr” (Schloß: Apparatband 182). A couple of pages later, K. and Frieda conjoin in lovemaking that feels like a shared ethics: they experience together “Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemeinsamen Herzschlags” (Schloß 68).

K. senses a similar possibility with Amalia, in the novel's second half. Amalia rejected a lewd advance by an official; she and her family are then shunned by the village and the castle. Amalia's act of saying no is revolutionary. K. describes her gaze, like Frieda's, as grave, direct, and imperturbable (ernst, gerade, unrührbar) and, later, as proud and “in seiner Verschlossenheit aufrichtig” (Schloß 55, 264). She tells K. that love need not be spoken, and then she reveals secrets to him with a conspiratorial smile: “Dieses Lächeln, trotzdem es traurig war, erhellte das düster zusammengezogene Gesicht, machte die Stummheit sprechend, machte die Fremdheit vertraut, war die Preisgabe eines Geheimnisses, die Preisgabe eines bisher behüteten Besitzes, der zwar wieder zurückgenommen werden konnte, aber niemals mehr ganz” (265).

Amalia recalls a man, who, like K., busied himself nonstop with thoughts of the castle. He neglected everything else, and people began to fear for his sanity. It ultimately turned out that he was not thinking about the castle at all but about the daughter of the castle's washerwoman. He got the girl, Amalia says, and then everything was fine (Schloß 324). Despite Amalia's sarcasm, her tale contains a lesson for K. His compulsion to understand the castle is his neurotic way of avoiding his desire. When we read Amalia's anecdote in conjunction with K.’s breakthrough moment with Frieda, we sense that he unconsciously fears another such encounter.

Perhaps with good reason. K. learns later, while lying in bed with the official Bürgel, that an amorous “Blick” can catalyze an explosive, dangerous communion (Schloß 410). The love-struck Bürgel insists that such an intimacy can literally rip apart the entire “Amtsorganisation,” annihilating everything—even the revolutionary couple. He exclaims fittingly, “Wie selbstmörderisch das Glück sein kann” (422-23). Amalia suggests that K. risk this. But his preoccupation with the castle allows him to evade this transcendent promise. After K.’s lovemaking with Frieda, such a scene never reoccurs.

Less than a year after Kafka abandoned Das Schloß, however, something comparably earthshaking happened to him. Just turned forty, he fell in love with the twenty-five-year-old Dora Diamant. Kafka reports that he is not yet happy but is “vor der Schwelle des Glücks” (Briefe 1902–1924 436). Two months later, he crosses that threshold, moving with Dora to Berlin. Berlin was caught in a brutal inflation, winter was coming, and Kafka's tuberculosis was worsening. But he no longer cared about death or about what people thought. He escaped his family and Prague, that “Mütterchen” with claws (Briefe 1900–1912 17). As Dora said, “tearing himself away from Prague was, even though very late, the great achievement in life without which one has no right to die” (Hodin 43). These last months in Berlin were Kafka's suicidal happiness.

Less than a decade after his death, the Gestapo raided the apartment of Dora—now a communist—and confiscated all of her and his papers. These were never recovered, but Max Brod famously found the other papers that Kafka had stashed in his desk drawers. These eventually became his unfinished novels, which, when published, sent tremors across Europe. The Nazis felt the need to prohibit him, as did some Eastern Bloc regimes. Our Western democracies allow him but potentially at their own peril. For although he is the writer of stasis, he is also the prophet of revolution. The world is one match stroke away from conflagration. This upheaval might be staring us, like K., right in the eye—in the form of an amorous gaze. You must merely be ready to see it. In the never-written ending to Das Schloß, K. just well might have. We might too.