This Reading Log analyzes the works of Franz Kafka. We’ll explore what Kafka’s views on absurdity, power, and human existence mean for us today.
Franz Kafka was reluctant to publish his work during his lifetime. Only at the request of his publishers did he reluctantly publish some of his writings, but the works that were published were not well received and rarely sold. The works included here are those that were published in books during his lifetime: Contemplation (1913), a collection of short prose, The Judgment (1913), The Stoker (1913), The Metamorphosis (1915), In the Penal Colony (1919), and the short story collection A Country Doctor (1919). A Hunger Artist (1924), a collection of four late novellas characterized by a concise and transparent style, was prepared for publication but published only days after Franz Kafka’s death. Franz Kafka was uneasy about publishing his work and requested that all of his unpublished manuscripts be burned before he died, but Brot, the executor of his will, disobeyed and published the full-length novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively, as well as a number of short stories he had not published during his lifetime.
Franz Kafka’s fantastic, surreal, and esoteric works seem all too real in some ways. In “The Judgment,” we see the protagonist despairing of his situation in his homeland and leaving for a foreign country, and in “The Stoker,” we see the protagonist struggling with marital problems and facing bankruptcy. In “The Stoker,” the protagonist is forced to move to a foreign country in a third-class cabin after an unfortunate incident in his homeland, but he finds that life is not always easy there. In “The Metamorphosis,” we feel the stinging gaze of the family toward the head of the household who loses his job and loses his financial ability. In such a situation, we end up becoming one of the cockroaches and longing for death. Later, when Hitler calls Jews “Ungeziefer” and executes Franz Kafka’s sisters in concentration camps, we get an eerie sense of Franz Kafka’s prescience. In “In the Penal Colony,” we see the grim reality of a dictatorship where perverted justice in the name of power drives people to their deaths, and in “A Country Doctor,” we see a “lost artist” torn between artist and citizen, between self-salvation and a comfortable, healthy life.
Many of the themes that appear in Franz Kafka’s short stories also appear in his longer works. The short story “Before the Law,” which was later inserted into The Trial, shows the inaccessibility of the law and man’s persistent desire for it. Josef K., an able and conscientious banker and bachelor, is awakened by a man who has come to arrest him. The interrogation in the magistrate’s courtroom turns into a disillusioning farce, and what he is accused of is never explained. In this situation, Josef K. takes it upon himself to go to the inaccessible courtroom and dedicates himself to his efforts to be acquitted of a crime he doesn’t even know about. He appeals to the mediators, but their advice and explanations only add to his confusion.
And “The Stoker” forms the first chapter of the work of Amerika. The protagonist of Amerika, a boy, Karl Rothman, is seduced by a maid and impregnates her, and is sent to America by his parents. There, he tries to find refuge with many characters of his father’s type, but his naivety and simplicity lead him to be taken advantage of everywhere, until he finds a job at the Nature Theater in Oklahoma, a dream world, as described in the last chapter. Franz Kafka once said that Rothmann would ultimately be his undoing.
The setting of Franz Kafka’s later work, The Castle, is a small village ruled by a castle. Time seems to stand still in this wintry landscape, and almost all of the action takes place in darkness. K. arrives in the village claiming to be a surveyor appointed by the castle authorities, but the village officials reject his claim. The novel follows K. as he tries to gain recognition from the castle. Despite the inaccessibility of the castle, K. is not a victim but an aggressor, challenging both the petty and arrogant officials and the villagers who accept their authority. But all of his schemes fail. “Like Josef K. in The Trial, he makes love to a maid, Frieda, who realizes that he is simply using her and leaves.
In Franz Kafka’s works, including “The Castle” and “Before the Law,” there are scenes in which those who have entered the castle first, that is, those who have established themselves in an organization or society, persecute and ridicule those who are trying to enter later. The more “ironclad” or despicable the gatekeeper, the more severe the obstruction. “In A Report to an Academy, we see a modern man looking for a way out and eventually losing neither the way out nor his freedom, but not realizing it, and the extreme dedication to a mission of dubious value is a theme that reappears not only in In the Penal Colony but also in A Hunger Artist.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the most important short stories. Contemplation, a collection of prose published in 1913, contains eighteen short stories. Some of them had already been published in two magazines between 1908 and 1910. In these prose pieces, Franz Kafka’s unique view of the world around him is depicted through motifs from his later works, such as friendship, the reflection in the mirror, the second self, the true self, ghosts, anxiety and loneliness, the difficulties of bachelorhood and the merchant’s life, his place in the family, having nowhere to turn, abandonment, misery, and riding on horseback.
Completed in 1912 and published in 1913, “The Judgment” was written in eight hours, from 10 p.m. on September 22 to 6 a.m. on September 23, according to Franz Kafka’s diary. This was the second day of Franz Kafka’s letter exchange with Felice Bauer, during which he first courted her. The Judgment, which has the character of a ‘novelle’, is known to be one of his favorite works along with ‘A Country Doctor’. From this point on, Franz Kafka believed that writing and ordinary civic life were incompatible and that one or the other had to be sacrificed, and the novella is the most widely interpreted of Franz Kafka’s works, with many different literary theories.
Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, has been exchanging letters with his friend in Russia for three years, but has not told him that he is engaged to Frieda Brandenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy family. But as the wedding approaches, he decides to share the news and writes a letter. However, in a conversation with his father, he realizes that his father has been in contact with the friend for a long time and that the friend knows all about him. Lying in bed, Georg’s father sits up angrily and scolds him for abandoning his distant friend. He tells him that his engagement to Frida is a betrayal of him and his dead mother. He then sentences his son to be drowned. Georg staggers out of the house, runs to the river, and jumps off the bridge into the water.
This story was written during Franz Kafka’s first relationship with Felice Bauer. The fact that the protagonist’s fiancée, Frieda Brandenfeld, also bore the same initials, F. B., as Felice Bauer, suggests that the story is related to her. In many ways, the character of a friend who went to Russia a few years ago because he was dissatisfied with his future prospects is similar to that of a writer who aspires to literature. Just as Franz Kafka himself was unconvinced by literature, this friend is ‘down in business’, ‘ill’, ‘out of touch’ with society, and above all, ‘single’. The relationship between this friend’s presence and Georg’s successful civic life seems to reflect the author’s struggle between marriage and literature: for him, marriage is a civic life that provides a warm and comfortable environment, whereas the literary path is a lonely and needy single life.
It seems paradoxical that Georg’s father favors his distant friend more than his son Georg, who is about to marry. Franz Kafka’s father doesn’t understand his son’s literary work and wants him to have a stable, conventional marriage. Georg submits to his father’s wishes because he blames himself for deviating from his original literary desires by settling for a stable civilian life, unlike his friend, who seems to be a split personality. In the final sentence, “unendlichen Verkehr,” which contrasts Georg’s death with his abandonment of his marriage, “Verkehr” has the meaning of “sexual intercourse” in addition to “transportation,” so the sentence of drowning can be read as a prohibition of sexual life. In this way, the drowning sentence imposed on the protagonist can be interpreted as the pure self’s condemnation of marrying Felice, which frees the other self in Russia from the fear that his artistic existence will be compromised by marriage. In this sense, “The Judgment” can be said to be the short story that summarizes Franz Kafka’s artistic thesis at its most essential.
“The Metamorphosis” was written in late November and early December 1913 and published in 1915. In this middle section, the stream of consciousness of the protagonist Gregor is narrated in the form of an internal monologue, in which Gregor’s thoughts are expressed directly and immediately, without any narrator. This work, which deals with the Oedipus complex along with “The Judgment” and “A Country Doctor,” is an expressionistic novel that portrays the figure of a marginalized human being who lives without the meaning of his existence in the modern society, and it is also considered an existentialist novel because it deals with the problem of existence. The novel alternates between mundane and adventurous time. The novel has been analyzed in various ways, including religious, psychological, and sociological interpretations, and filmmaker David Cronenberg has explored this Kafkaesque anxiety in works such as Videodrome, and Steven Soderbergh has exposed Franz Kafka’s reality as a power that oppresses workers in his film Kafka.
Gregor, a young traveling salesman, awakens one morning from a disturbing dream to find himself transformed into a hideous insect. When he doesn’t show up for work, his family knocks on the door and the manager of the company comes to find out why he hasn’t shown up. The boss suspects that Gregor’s suspicious behavior is related to company problems and threatens to fire him. Gregor tries to plead his case through the locked door, but the others can’t understand his muffled voice. When Gregor struggles to open the door a few minutes later, the manager runs away in a panic, much to the shock of his parents. In a threatening gesture, the father lets the bug back into the room, while Gregor is wounded and bleeding.
His sister, horrified by his appearance, brings him food, but he is unimpressed with the old food. Two weeks later, when his mother visits his room, she faints at the sight of a bug, and his father misjudges the situation and throws an apple at him, which hits him in the back, severely wounding him. With Gregor unable to provide for himself, the family tries to make ends meet. The father finds a job at a bank, his sister and mother work to help out, and they even open up a room to take in boarders.
One evening, while her sister is playing the violin for the boarders after dinner, the protagonist, mesmerized by the music, crawls into the living room. When the boarders are horrified to see the bug and want to leave the house, her sister convinces her parents that they can no longer consider the bug a brother and that they must somehow get rid of “that thing.” Gregor barely manages to drag himself back to his room to meet his end. The old maid removes the bug’s corpse, and the family, now at peace, goes on a picnic, happy for the holiday.
The fate of Gregor’s sleeping body is reminiscent of Laban’s dream in Wedding Preparations in the Country, which was completed in 1907 before this work. Here, instead of sending his physical body to the countryside, Laban wishes to remain in the form of an insect and rest in bed. However, in Laban’s case, the transformation process only takes place in his own mind. Also, while Laban wants to transform into an animal, this is not the case for Gregor. He wants to wake up from this unpleasant dream and return to the world of everyday work, and unlike Laban, he doesn’t try to identify the bug with his ego. He is, of course, torn between the world of work and the world of self, but he floats between the two worlds without a thorough awareness of self.
When he wakes up and analyzes the various reasons for this unbelievable situation, he realizes that there are many problems in his daily life. As a traveling salesman who visits people who don’t necessarily like him, Gregor is constantly tired and plagued by vague anxiety. He is in a position to pay off the debts of his father’s failed business and support his family, and he has been thinking of quitting his job in five or six years when he has paid off all his debts. However, he hasn’t decided where he will go or what kind of life he will lead after leaving the company. He has been secretly hoping to return to his original self while working in a job he doesn’t want, and this transformation will help him realize his suppressed wishes.
Gregor’s transformation into a worm inevitably forces his family to make their own transformation and move on with their lives, and they come to see him as a parasite that needs to go. Gregor’s sister, the most beloved member of the family and the one who had planned to send him to music school with her own money, is the one who bullies him the most. At first, she cares for him fiercely, “as if he were a wife,” but eventually, when she realizes that he has become useless to her, she cruelly turns her back on him. In this situation, Gregor concludes that his life is meaningless and dies in a state of reconciliation. Of course, the food doesn’t fit in his mouth, and the wounds from the apple his father threw at him are still fresh, but the impression is that he has accepted death voluntarily. After cleaning up the dead worms, his sister Grete takes the family on a picnic in the countryside, hoping for a better future, and the ending reflects the grotesque and dehumanizing nature of modern life.
“In the Penal Colony was completed between October 4 and 18, 1914, and first published by Kurt Wolff in 1919. When the work was introduced at a reading in Munich in November 1916, the audience and press reacted negatively, labeling Franz Kafka as a “horror ringleader. Written under the influence of World War I, the work is reminiscent of medieval torture scenes. This may reflect not only external political events, but also Franz Kafka’s own sadomasochistic tendencies. For him, the need to write was both a painful compulsion and a deep satisfaction.
When an esteemed researcher visits the exile, the officer in charge shows him the execution of a prisoner with the execution machine, which he takes pride in and skillfully operates. As a judge and executioner, he wants to use the process to demonstrate the superior and flawless performance of his machine. The prisoner has been convicted of insubordination and insulting his superiors. The officer insists that no investigation or interrogation is necessary for any offense, so the prisoner is not even given a chance to defend himself. The execution machine is a mechanical device designed to pierce the prisoner’s body with a needle and wipe the blood from his body for the offense he has committed. After twelve hours, the prisoner is supposed to die and be thrown into a pit. This system of execution had been practiced with fondness by the previous commander, but after his death and the arrival of a new commander, it became controversial. The officer asks the researcher to evaluate the system favorably, but when the researcher refuses, the officer himself enters the machine and lies down to convince him. However, the machine does not behave as it should, and instead of torturing the officer, it kills him.
The theme of this short is to show that the justice that dehumanizing, totalitarian systems of power cries out for is perverted to the extreme. It reads as the power clinging to irrational traditions of the past or blindly relying on fanatical means of pseudo-religious fanaticism to justify its totalitarian claims. It makes a mockery of the judicial system in a country with the rule of law: all powers – legislative, judicial, and executive – are in the hands of a single officer in charge of the machine. Furthermore, the defendant’s guilt is firmly determined from the outset, and the officer’s judgment is recognized as infallible. Execution in this world already has nothing to do with the crime itself, and the mechanical device symbolizes the fate of the human being. Humans do not know the verdict before they are executed and cannot defend themselves.
The officer, a fanatical worshipper of his dead predecessor, is a figure subordinated to a power that knows no limits and filled with a distorted ideology of justice. He is so devoted to his mission that he is willing to sacrifice himself by lying on the execution machine. But when the machine that is supposed to accurately carry out the verdict unexpectedly malfunctions, the officer, a faithful defender and believer in the legal system, is sacrificed by a system he believes to be perfect. But he doesn’t realize until the end that his faith is a delusion and an illusion. The officer shows a reversed relationship to the law compared to Josef K. in The Trial: while K. dies as a result of his ignorance of the law, the officer is victimized as a believer and defender of the law. In this respect, he contrasts even more sharply with the rural man in “Before the Law”. He dies after a lifetime of waiting to see the inside of the law, while the officer dies after a lifetime of upholding the law and living by it.
If we accept Brot’s interpretation of the story as a record of literary self-extermination, the officer’s death can be likened to Franz Kafka’s self-extermination as a result of his dependence on and obsession with the outside world. The officer, who follows the system to which he is subjected and is destroyed by it, suggests the hopeless end of the externalized self. In contrast, the role of the exploratory researcher seems to be a variant of the artistic self. One assumption is that the artist is the face of the scientist, and in his opposition to the inhumanity and injustice of the exile and his unwillingness to correct it, we can sense his indecisiveness, which, like the exile, recognizes that the society is riddled with injustice and contradictions, yet restrains him from turning to the outside world.
The researcher who is the point of view of the narrative is convinced that the trial process is unjust and the execution is inhumane, but because he is not a resident of the exile, he violates his duty as a researcher to uncover the truth. He is unwilling to reform the cruel and inhumane system of the exile, and moreover, he leaves them alone in the exile and hurries off alone, even though the mechanic and the freed prisoner beg him to take them with him. The officer and the researcher contrast in their attitudes toward their beliefs. The officer is strongly driven and steadfast in his beliefs, even though they are wrong, while the researcher knows that his ideas are right, but he does not have the courage to pursue them and remains a bystander until the end. Not only is he unable to stand up to the cruel system, but he is also shown to be unwilling to fulfill his duty as a writer to improve the world. In this sense, both men are enablers of totalitarianism, and in the end, Germany is unable to prevent Hitler’s Third Reich from being born.
Written in 1917, “A Country Doctor” was published as a collection of short stories in 1919. A Country Doctor is characterized by Kafka’s maternal uncle Siegfried Löwy, who actually worked as a country doctor in Trishu. In 1917, the year it was written, Franz Kafka became close to Felice again, becoming engaged to her for a second time in July, and in August he had his first bout with tuberculosis. By December, they had broken up again.
Hearing the bell ring in the middle of the night, the elderly country doctor rushes to a seriously ill patient. His own horse has died, and he needs a new one to pull his carriage to get there. The maid tries to borrow a horse from the neighbors, but no one is willing to lend her a horse on a blizzardy night. Suddenly, two sturdy horses emerge from the pigsty, and when the strange coachman secures them to the carriage, the carriage starts to run. The doctor is reluctant to go, not wanting to leave his maid Rosa in the care of a beastly coachman, but the carriage has already arrived at the patient’s house.
At first, the patient is not sick at all and asks to be left to die. However, when the horses poke their heads into the room through the window, the doctor checks again and sees a large, rosy gash on the boy’s back that cannot be healed. Even at the patient’s home, he can’t stop worrying about Rosa. At one point, the doctor becomes the patient and lies down next to the boy, while the boy’s parents and sister watch, and a strange song from the school choir plays. The boy accuses the doctor of incompetence, and as the situation around him becomes more threatening, the doctor hurries to get into the carriage, barely dressed, but as the horses slowly pull the carriage away, the choir’s singing follows. Realizing that he’s been tricked, the doctor doesn’t make it home and wanders out into the snowy night.
Two contrasting worlds exist for the country doctor. One is the doctor’s home, where he lives as a bachelor with his maid Rosa, and the other is the home of his patients, separated by a long road in a blizzard. Here, the ringing phone that urgently calls him in the middle of the night can be seen as a call from Franz Kafka’s original self. A doctor’s job is to treat patients, and Franz Kafka considers creating literature to be his natural mission. The doctor is isolated in a town where he can’t borrow a horse from anyone, and he doesn’t realize the importance of his maid, Rosa. However, the arrival of the beastly coachman changes the way he thinks about Rosa. Even though he thinks it is urgent to go to the patient, he is about to abandon his departure because of the unscrupulous coachman, who embraces the maid in front of him and puts his face to her.
This is the same as the artist’s consciousness that he cannot easily give up his engagement, even though he thinks that it is impossible to combine his artistic life with the comfortable civil life of a woman. The doctor cannot stop worrying about Rosa until the end, just as he cannot give up his fiancée, even though he thinks it is impossible to combine them. Like Franz Kafka, who had to abandon his civil and sensual life in order to live as a writer, but found it difficult to do so, the doctor’s obsession with Rosa leaves him forever lost in the middle ground between the two worlds. Rosa hides indoors, locking the door behind her to escape the coachman, but as the doctor heads to the patient’s house, he hears the door shatter in the coachman’s attack. Even as he tries to find his true self, the image of a cozy, erotic marriage continues to grow in his mind.
The horses that carry him to the patient’s house are unearthly. The death of the doctor’s horse can be seen as the death of his literary inspiration, and a strange artistic inspiration suddenly appears out of nowhere and reunites him with his original self. Therefore, the patient can be seen as the same person as the doctor. If the doctor who lives with the maid is an outer shell as a social being, the patient is the original self. This is clearly depicted in the patient’s whispered voice, which can be seen as an inner monologue after he lies down beside her. In other words, even after returning to his original self, the doctor’s constant worrying about Rosa, defining himself as a plundered doctor, is not helpful to the patient, who is his pure self. The patient and Rosa symbolize opposite realms. If the doctor’s relationship with Rosa is hindered by his mission of healing, the patient, who is the pure self, is hindered by the doctor’s obsession with Rosa. The fact that the patient’s wound is rosa seems to reflect the consciousness that the erotic life represented by Rosa interferes with the writer’s existence.
On the other hand, just as Franz Kafka becomes ill and eventually abandons his engagement, the doctor ultimately breaks up with Rosa because of his patient’s illness. Torn between his artistic life and his civic existence, Franz Kafka is constantly haunted and his thoughts continue to waver. Worrying about Rosa signifies his longing to move from the artistic realm back to the civic life. The doctor and patient, representatives of the two realms, are so exhausted by this conflict that they both want to die. The doctor’s inability to heal his patient’s wounds is also a sign of his inability to remain true to his writerly self. The country doctor cannot be a convinced writer, nor does he have the courage to be happily married. As a result of being caught between the two worlds, he belongs nowhere and is forever wandering in the mid-winter space.
Supposedly completed in 1917 and published in A Country Doctor in 1919, “A Report to an Academy” is said to have been influenced by Hoffmann’s “The Dialogue of the Dogs” and Wilhelm Hauff’s “The Young Englishman”.
Red Peter, a humanized monkey, is asked to give a report to the members of an academy about his former life as a monkey and his humanization. Full of narcissism, he takes great pride in his hard-won status. Unlike the other works, the protagonist here does not seem to be the same as Franz Kafka. First of all, Red Peter the monkey is unreliable because he is not yet well educated, and he describes his experiences in terms of his over-adaptation to the human world. In short, he’s self-deluded. As he reflects on his past, he overestimates the freedom he had in his animal state, when in fact he can only remember up to the point where he was captured by hunters and loaded onto a boat.
Today, Peter is performing a show on stage, but he is not truly free. It is a state of being painfully trapped in a cage and forced to ‘exit’. The ship on which he was captured and transported gave him a situation without an exit for the first time in his life, and he gave up on remaining a monkey because he could not live without an exit. Therefore, this ‘exit’ is not a path to self-actualization, but a forced adaptation. He is not a monkey, but he is not truly human either. This is most evident in his double life, where day and night are different. During the day, he performs on stage in a show, but at night he sleeps with chimpanzees and retains his animal nature. Human customs such as spitting, shaking hands, and drinking brandy do not indicate that he is a member of the human world, but only that he is superficially humanized.
Completed in the spring of 1922, “A Hunger Artist” was published in the October 1922 issue of Neue Rundschau and then in a book with three other short stories on June 11, 1924, eight days after Franz Kafka’s death. It tells the story of a clown who demonstrates to the audience his remarkable fasting skills. His manager gives him permission to fast for only 40 days, but he goes longer than that and dies a lonely death, shunned by the public. His arrogance to fast longer than Jesus, who fasted for 40 days in the wilderness, can be seen as a blasphemy against God.
The crowd’s interest in the fasting clown grows, and onlookers flock to the theater at night. After 40 days, the show’s manager convinces the fasting clown to eat some food again, and together with the crowd, they hold a small festival to celebrate the success of the fast. However, a few years later, the situation changes dramatically. As the audience’s interest in the fasting clown wanes, he rarely performs, and eventually he gets a job at a circus, where he is assigned a cage next to the animal cages. After a while, the manager forgets about the clown’s existence. So, with no one to keep track of his fasting days, he continues to fast until he is completely exhausted. Shortly before his death, he reveals the reason for his fanatical fasting: he has been unable to find food to his liking. After his death, a young, healthy leopard is placed in his empty cage.
The fasting clown seems to be a symbol of the compositional artist. To the spectator, fasting appears to be a hard-earned ability, but to the artist, it is a desire and an impulse that is in line with his or her essence. For the fasting clown, fasting, the easiest thing in the world, has a self-medicating quality. For others, it’s a strict abstinence, but for him it’s a natural act and a self-affirmation of his artistic life. Just as Franz Kafka was always skeptical of his literary creation and insisted on writing from his inner world, where there was no communication with the outside world, the clown’s fasting shows the same trait.
At first, the artist’s inner world seems to communicate with society because of the large crowds, but it is nothing more than the temporary whims of the public, who are always looking for entertainment. As their interest dwindles, he inevitably moves on to a larger arena, where the audience is only interested in the animals, and eventually he dies of public indifference. But it’s not as if he was truly in touch with society to begin with. He doesn’t understand why he’s fasting for his own pleasure, not only to the audience but also to himself as a circus manager.
The fasting clown is the only one who can understand his choice to satisfy himself. The main character fasts because he can’t find food that appeals to his taste. Not being able to find food that is essential to life is the same as not being able to find a way to sustain life. Turning to the writer’s environment, this is similar to Franz Kafka’s self-awareness that his literary life was incompatible with living in the outside world. The young leopard who enters the clown’s cage at the end is the complete opposite of the fasting clown.
This does not mean that we can make a final judgment on which is right: the normal, vibrant life or the artistic life of the fasting clown. The general audience, on the other hand, is portrayed as a heartless group of people who only seek self-gratification. Franz Kafka does not make a clear decision between art and civic life. However, it can be said that the fasting clown, who exists as the only audience for his art in a space where he cannot communicate with the outside world at all, like Gregor in The Metamorphosis, who has lost the ability to speak, shows the fateful figure of a marginalized individual, and the existence of an individual who is cut off from society is implied as a figure without an exit.
Franz Kafka’s last work, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, was completed in March 1924 and published in A Hunger Artist in June of that year. After writing this work, Franz Kafka became increasingly ill and unable to write. The motif of this work comes from a folk tale from the Czech region of Bohemia, where a race of rats is mesmerized by a song. In Franz Kafka’s literature, music is generally understood as a free flight, a longing for nourishment of the soul.
The story is about Josefine, a mouse who works as an entertainer, and her race of rats. Although her squeaks are nothing more than mindless squeaks, her song has a strange power over her race of rats. No one is immune to her song. This is all the more admirable since the rat race is not naturally fond of music. Hearing her voice, the rat race realizes and affirms itself and feels a sense of belonging.
It’s also a nostalgia for a lost childhood, a wistful remembrance of happier times. Josefine’s desire is for her art to be publicly recognized, for her to be praised more than any other figure in history, and for her fame to last through the ages. Although her pride contains vanity and the arrogance of an artist, the rats love her as a representative of their race and tolerate her pride. She asks to be excused from her duties on the grounds that she has a singing talent, but the rats refuse. Rumors spread that she has disappeared one day, and she is never found. In this way, she becomes a part of the history of the rat race and the Jewish people.
This work, like “A Hunger Artist,” deals with the relationship between the artist and the viewer. In this sense, it is also Franz Kafka’s own reflection on the artistry of his own work. At first glance, there may not seem to be any connection between the ridiculous and unpleasant woman and Franz Kafka, but in fact, there is a clear connection. For example, the woman’s desire to be exempt from other troublesome tasks in order to focus on her art was a big issue in Franz Kafka’s life. However, the story is told not from the perspective of the woman, but from the perspective of the rat race, the audience. Unlike the people of her race, who struggle to survive, she appears as a prima donna, far removed from reality.
On the other hand, Josefine has a very important function for the rat race. Her squeaky, high-pitched song, which rings out in the silence of the room, is a pitiful reflection of the rat race’s plight as the hostile world spirals around them. Unintentionally, Josefine’s song protects her race and gives them a sense of security, something that is sorely needed by a race of endangered mice, the Jews. Franz Kafka may not have expected his art to have an impact on his readers, but in this sense, artistic creation can play a very positive role. In this work, Franz Kafka takes an ironic look at his life as an artist, whose circumstances are different from those of normal people, and he believed that he would be forgotten by the public after his death, like Josephine, but he was proven wrong, as interest in Franz Kafka continues to grow around the world even today, 80 years after his death.
