Franz Kafkas akustische Welten by Rüdiger Görner

Abstract

Reviews 169 as follows: ‘Die Tochter sei also weder traurig noch böse über die verletzenden Worte der Mutter gewesen, sondern habe den Anschein erweckt, sie fühle sich geborgen’ [The daughter is neither sad nor angry about the mother’s hurtful words, rather she gives the impression that she feels secure, p. 155] and classifies this as an example of ‘satire’; the fact that Hannelore slept for thirty hours is supposed to be ‘grotesque’. While it would be worth discussing the terms ‘satire’ and ‘grotesque’ in detail and elaborating on the function of ‘irony’ in Schwab’s texts (the play with literality and irony is crucial to his works, as Grete’s statement quoted above suggests), this example points to a central problem of the monograph: its use of passages taken out of context to illustrate its thesis misses crucial points. For example, since Hannelore is traumatized and afraid, putting her thumb in her mouth indicates a regressive turn. Thus, this short episode can also be read as a supreme example of Schwab’s exposition of language as a vehicle for brutality. Moreover, Grete — like almost all of Schwab’s characters — is not reliable and, to some extent, ‘is spoken’ by language and thus by the discourses that constitute it. While Uertz-Jacquemain has invested much work in the content summary, the other chapters are often overshadowed by the existing comprehensive theoretical elaborations and analyses found in other Schwab scholarship. It would have been beneficial to reduce the content summary and the overall number of topics treated in favour of detailed elaboration on theoretical backgrounds, a focus on the proposed topic and a contextualization of the examples discussed to highlight the productive ambiguity of Schwab’s texts. Marina Rauchenbacher University of Vienna Franz Kafkas akustische Welten. By Rüdiger Görner. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. 183 pp. €92.95. ISBN 978–3-11054–224–0. The significance of Franz Kafka’s relationship to the acoustic was first noted by one of his contemporaries, Walter Benjamin. In his essay on Kafka in 1934, Benjamin comments on a photograph of the child Kafka in which ‘the auricle of a large ear’ listens in to the landscape around him (Selected Writings, II.ii, 800). Writing to Gershom Scholem in 1938, he noted that, ‘Kafka listened to tradition, and he who listens hard does not see. The main reason why this listening demands such effort is that only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener’ (Illuminations, p. 143). Benjamin’s remarks draw attention to two aspects of Kafka’s acoustic world: firstly, that Kafka’s own listening experiences and habits had an important impact on his writing; and secondly, that the hearing organ in Kafka is not always embodied. Indeed, it is at moments of detachment or mechanization of hearing that Kafka’s insights are most interesting. Rüdiger Görner’s study Franz Kafkas akustische Welten contributes to the aural turn in literary studies over the last three decades. Many of Kafka’s Reviews 170 writings, such as the stories ‘Der Bau’ or ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’, with their unlocalizable and animal sounds, have already attracted comment from scholars of sound studies, but Görner here attempts a systematic investigation of acoustic moments throughout Kafka’s autobiographical, epistolary and literary writings. Görner’s guiding question is simply, ‘Wie hörte dieser Autor?’ [How did this author hear? p. 5]. To reverse the question, one might ask: how does writing reconstruct an auditory world? The book’s first section, ‘Befunde’ [Findings], begins with an examination of the auditory landscape that surrounded Kafka in the early twentieth century. Sociologists and public health officials were increasingly concerned about the crescendo of urban noise resulting in nervous breakdown. Theodor Lessing, whose treatise Der Lärm: Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens [Noise: A Polemic against the Sounds of Our Lives] was published in 1908, founded the German anti-noise league in the same year. The Berlin microbiologist Robert Koch compared urban noise to an infection, a metaphor which was adopted by literary writers. Kafka was part of this consensus, complaining on several occasions of an inability...