Kafka on the Battlements: Fighting the Great War in “The Great Wall of China”

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This article reads Franz Kafka’s 1917 story, “At the Building of the Great Wall of China” (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer) and the related fragment “An Ancient Manuscript” (Ein Altes Blatt) in relation to World War I. It proposes that Kafka’s story provides a hitherto neglected prism on the topic – and hence offers also a fresh way of conceptualizing and talking about war’s place in Kafka’s oeuvre and modernist literature more generally. More specifically, the article focuses on three ways in which “At the Building of the Great Wall of China” refracts the war: through its thematization of the nationalizing force of militarism; through its relations to Kafka’s office writings on war trauma; and in its treatment of mistranslation and language conflict. Typically, Kafka has been framed as uninvested in war. As this article helps to show, Kafka’s work was inescapably involved in complex ways with the conflict, both patriotic and critical.