Franz Kafka: Der "Landarzt"-Zyklus: Freiheit—Schrift—Judentum by Marcel Krings

Abstract

Reviewed by: Franz Kafka: Der "Landarzt"-Zyklus: Freiheit—Schrift—Judentum by Marcel Krings Abigail Gillman Marcel Krings, Franz Kafka: Der "Landarzt"-Zyklus: Freiheit—Schrift—Judentum. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 341 pp. The fourteen stories that Franz Kafka collected in the volume titled Ein Landarzt (Kurt Wolff, 1919), are seldom read as a unit; I am embarrassed to admit that it never occurred to me to do so. Critical reception of individual stories has been uneven, to say the least. "Vor dem Gesetz" and "Bericht für eine Akademie" have been analyzed innumerable times, and the twosentence-long "Auf der Galerie" has been extensively interpreted through lenses of biography, socialism, even feminism. Yet "Besuch im Bergwerk" has barely been studied since Malcolm Pasley's 1964 essay, and "Ein Brudermord" has also been neglected, perhaps because it has been deemed "realistic." The best-known of these stories have been interpreted from widely diverse perspectives, even as many have argued that they demonstrate the very impossibility of interpretation. An illuminating monograph by Marcel Krings reckons with, and redresses, this uneven reception history. Krings's first premise is that the stories collected in the volume Ein Landarzt form a textual corpus: a cycle with thematic and stylistic coherence that must be interpreted as such. The plain evidence is undeniable: Kafka wrote the stories between 1914 and 1917 for publication, arranged them in a particular order, and planned to title the volume Verantwortung. Krings devotes a chapter to each story in turn, starting with "Der neue Advocat" and proceeding to "Ein Landarzt," to the third story "Auf der Galerie," through to number thirteen, "Ein Traum," and the final story "Bericht für eine Akademie." (He adds a bonus chapter on a fifteenth story, "Der Kübelreiter," which Kafka omitted at the last minute.) The individual chapters, lucidly written and printed with the invaluable presence of footnotes, begin by narrating the stories' composition and reception histories, which create the context for astute close readings in dialogue with primary sources and scholarship. The consistency of the chapters and easy access to notes make this volume a pleasure to read, although one wishes that Krings had supplied an index. Krings second stated motive is to refute the allegation of noninterpretability, still widespread in Kafka Studies, though perhaps on the wane in the twenty-first century. Krings's introduction affirms that Kafka's protagonists may indeed be poor exegetes, because too tired or impeded [End Page 94] or unpracticed in the art of reading, but urges critics to look beyond those limitations. Freiheit, Schrift, Judentum: The volume's subtitle identifies three omnipresent themes in the cycle that serve as the touchstones of Krings's hermeneutic. The first is perhaps the most complex. Freiheit, in this context, refers to the surrender of freedom, as perhaps articulated most clearly by Rotpeter ("It was not freedom I sought"). To renounce freedom is to pull back from that which is absolute, pure, unknown, and unknowable—from death. Since to choose freedom would be a form of suicide, to give up freedom is to choose life, even if imperfect, embodied, degraded. The second term, Schrift, connotes the written texts, such as the "old books" Bucephalus studies, which in Krings's reading represent scripture—the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Torah. These texts contain laws that obligate and demand ceaseless study. Judentum refers first of all to well-rehearsed biographical and historical facts. Kafka composed the stories after spending four years investigating Jewish tradition and history and following intensive study of the Hebrew Bible in 1916. Also relevant is the author's despair about the "Jewish Question" based on his critique of his father's generation's failure to transmit anything more than souvenirs of traditional Jewish life to their children. But Judaism in Krings's study is not only a matter of modern identity; it is treated with a thoroughness seldom seen in studies that approach Kafka as a Jewish writer. Krings finds in the Landarzt stories a sustained argument about the prescribed duties and rituals of Jewish observance. These are based on images of reading, obsessive study, confinement, and accountability (the Akademie) as well as in myriad intertextual allusions to Jewish sources...