ELIZABETH DALTON
395
The last volume of the correspondence to be published,
Letters
to Ottla and the Family,
has strengthened Brod's "pietistic" view of
Kafka (the word is Walter Benjamin's) by association with the
heroism of his sister. In 1942 Ottla divorced her gentile husband in
order to protect him and their daughters, was sent to Theresien–
stadt, and then volunteered to accompany a children's transport to
Auschwitz, where she died. "Evidently," wrote one reviewer, "she
shared some of her brother's saintliness." It would seem, however,
that if anyone had saintliness to share, it was Ottla herself.
Elias Canetti's study of Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer,
Kafka's
Other Trial,
gives us a Kafka whose life and work are an attack on
power and an evasion of it. Of
The Castle
Canetti writes:
No author ever wrote a clearer attack on subjection to the
superior, whether one views the latter as a higher power or as a
merely terrestrial one. For all sovereignty has here become one,
and is shown to be abominable.
Kafka's physical thinness, according to Canetti, is a withdrawal
from and an attack on power, and so is his creation of small animals.
Since he abominated violence, but did not credit himself with the
strength to combat it, he enlarged the distance between the
strong entity and himself by becoming smaller and smaller in
relation to it. Through this shrinkage he gained two advantages:
he evaded the threat by becoming too diminutive for it, and he
freed himself from all exceptionable means of violence : the small
animals into which he liked to transform himself were harmless
ones.
Thus Kafka's ambiguous attitude toward his compelling im–
ages of power becomes unequivocal: he abominates violence, attacks
power, and identifies himself with small harmless creatures. A Fran–
ciscan Franz emerges here, a gentle, saintly creature like the figure
in Brod's biography. Yet a passage from a sketch entitled "Memoirs
of the Kalda Railroad," cited later in the same discussion by Canetti
himself, suggests that Kafka's feelings about power and power–
lessness were darker and more complicated than this:
As for the rats that sometimes attacked my provisions, my long
knife sufficed to deal with them. . .. I spitted one of these rats
on the point of my knife and held it before me at eye level against
