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that it comes to feel disembodied, while the body becomes the center of
what D.W.Winnicott calls "the false self." The disembodied self is
confined to purely mental activity, while the body can go out and
confront other people, without jeopardizing the integrity of the real
self. But for Kafka, the self that stays behind is the one in the greater
danger, having no solid corporality to protect it from the magical
transformations that imagination can induce. " I have, as I lie in bed,
the form of a large beetle, a stag-beetle or a cock-chafer, I believe.
. . . Then I'd pretend it was a matter of hibernating, and press my
little legs to my paunchy body. And whisper a few words , instructions,
to my sad body, which is close by me, and crooked. I've soon finished. It
bows, goes hastily and it will do everything as well as can be, while I
rest. " This is from "Wedding Preparations," written seven years before
Metamorphosis.
He has split himself like an amoeba: the self to be
asserted is detached from the self that abdicates.
That Kafka's father played a leading role in inducing this anxiety
is cogently suggested by the forty-page letter written when Kafka was
thirty-three years old. As evidence the letter is valid but incomplete, not
because it leaves the father's view out of account-it does not-but
because it ignores the anti-Semitism which tended to foster guilt
feelings and played a part in habituating Kafka to siding against
himself. In 1882, the year before he was born, a professor of theology at
Prague University published an article maintaining that the Jews were
committed by their religion to working for the destruction of all
Christians and all their property. The slander was repeated in a book,
August Rohling's
Der Talmudjude,
and in a spate of rabidly anti–
Semitic leaflets, which coincided with the first in a series of damaging
allegations that Jews were perpetrating ritual murder. In 1883 there
was a trial in Tisz-Eszlar, a Hungarian village, where Jews were
accused of slaughtering a Christian girl. Allegations of ritual murder
followed at irregular intervals. One of the most damaging was made in
1899 when an unemployed Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was indicted for
killing Anezka Hruzova at Polna, in northeastern Bohemia. The idea
that her blood had been used in Passover matzos was encouraged in
pamphlets, newspaper articles, and speeches, especially after the post
mortem reports that the body had lost large quantities of blood . In
October mobs rampaged through the old city in Prague, overturning
stalls and attacking shops, while similar incidents occurred in many
Moravian towns. In Prague Jews were attacked on the streets, windows
were broken in their shops and houses; when Kafka was nearly ten , a
servant girl's body was found in the Elbe near Kolin, where his uncle
