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John U rzidil recalls personal traits no more eccentric than re–
quired to constitute anyone an individual. Kafka "detested noise, and
although far from being phlegmatic, he never got excited. He was
fond of understatement." He had "an enigmatic smile," and "always
seemed to be somewhat embarrassed." But he was "quiet, gradual,
serene, free from adjuncts, difficult to comprehend sometimes, not
always easy to manage.... " Oskar Baum remembers his character
as "indescribably charming," full of "kindliness and readiness for
sympathetic consideration." Ludwig Hardt saw how he was respected
by his "little hunchbacked servant-girl," and how
his
"laughter was
something to hear."
The strangeness, which nevertheless lingers in the personal recol–
lections, however edited by love or propriety, is further denatured
by absorption into a familiar system. Kafka is a Jew, the eternal
alien, and "from his Jewish soul he has said more in this simple tale
about the universal situation of Jewry than can be gleaned from a
hundred scientific treatises" (Max Brod) . Kafka was psychologically
maladjusted, with an anxiety neurosis, and a father fixation which
turned his life into a continuous struggle to "escape from father"
(Frederick J. Hoffman- and Kafka himself).
His curious, chaste stories are discovered, in review, to fit into
traditional patterns with which we are currently at ease. W. H. Auden
reminds us that the novels "belong to one of the oldest literary
genres, The Quest," and are only another variant of what we have
always known in fairy story, legend, epic, and allegory. Lienhard
Bergel argues that
The Burrow
is a metaphysical treatise on the clas–
sical theme of "the relationship between mind and reality, between
the effort of man to construct a rational world ... and the outside
world which is dominated by irrationality." Jean Wahl and Albert
Camus find a poetic expression of Kierkegaard's theology, which John
Kelly brings up to date in the terminology of the neo-Kierkegaardian,
Karl Barth. Edwin Berry Burgum completes the list by convincing
himself that Kafka's "diseased personality," his "conduct typical of
German life generally under the Weimar Republic," and his attitude
which "anticipates the psychology of fascism" once more confirm the
politics of Stalinism ( 1942-3 vintage) . "We [we Stalinists, presum–
ably] who are more happily situated than Kafka can draw from his
novels the desolate pleasure that there too we should have gone if
we had been unable to believe in the potentialities of democracy
and the common man."
This process of cultural absorption is, as in all such cases, cor-
