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PARTISAN REVIEW
Germans tried to use Thomas Mann to fight Kafka. They made Mann a
symbol of ptogressive bourgeois literature acceptable to the working class and
turned Kafka into a negative symbol of bourgeois art who represented a great
danger for the working class. This artificial antithesis always puzzled me. Why
should they favor Mann , who had always been strongly influenced by
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner? Why Mann, the author of
Dr.
Faustus,
one of the most pessimistic novels of the twentieth century , which
prophesies the end of art and culture and humanistic thought? And why
should Kafka be poison for the proletariat- the author of
The Penal Colony,
the prophet of the tragedy into which man is pushed by a totalitarian system ,
an author who has so convincingly described man's struggle for the victory of
the true and the good ? Yet the Mann -Kafka comparison was the main theme
of the GDR delegation's remarks at Liblice.
But I'd like to go back a bit. The biggest paradox was really of comic
proportions-if one can speak of comedy in such melancholy circumstances.
Not a single work of Kafka 's had ever been published in the German Demo–
cratic Republic-not a single short story or parable. But suddenly , within a
short space of time, two books about Kafka appeared . In 1961 it was
Kafka–
WeltbddundRoman
by Klaus Hermsdorf, and one year later ,
Franz Kafka–
Werk und Entwur/,
compiled by Helmut Richter. The East German reader
thus found himself in a peculiar situation . He could read critical analyses
about a German author whose works were inaccessible to him .
Both Hermsdorf and Richter were at Liblice and presented the official
GDR line , which they had defended in their books . But it was only after the
Liblice Conference that the importance which the GDR attached to Kafka was
fully revealed. Two "fronts" had formed . The " pro-Kafka" front included
representatives of many different types of literature and many countries. The
GDR delegates were the only ones on the other side of the barricades . Their
situation was very difficult, of course . I asked one of them quite frankl y,
"How can you talk such nonsense?" He glanced around, then hinted that if
he could speak freely . . . but there was a high-ranking member of the East
German Communist Party among the delegation who kept tabs on everybody
and gave them their orders .
The conference had the greatest repercussions in two countries-Czecho–
slovakia in a positive sense , and negatively in the German Democratic
Republic. The conference also found a negative response among the pro–
Gomulka, pro-regime critics in Poland, and when I published an account of
the conference's discussions they all backed the GDR position . But the over–
whelming majority of Polish intellectuals deplored the attacks on Kafka. As
for the Russians, they did not even take part in the argument. They hadn't
published anything by Kafka before Liblice and they refused to publish him
