Kafka und Kierkegaard: Meditation über die letzten Dinge by Hideo Nakazawa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka und Kierkegaard: Meditation über die letzten Dinge by Hideo Nakazawa Traci S. O’Brien Hideo Nakazawa, Kafka und Kierkegaard: Meditation über die letzten Dinge. Munich: Iudicium, 2016. 238 pp. Though Nakazawa’s work sometimes veers off course, he aims to specify Kierkegaard’s influence on Kafka. He promises to analyze Kafka’s challenging stance on Kierkegaard (in the aphorisms of Blue Octavo Notebooks) via Kafka’s rejection of Kierkegaard’s “doppelte Bewegung” in Furcht und Zittern. Nakazawa also promises to decipher references to Kierkegaard in Kafka’s correspondence with Max Brod about their real-life dramas. An analysis of these texts, so Nakazawa, reveals Kafka’s “erstaunliche Umdeutung” of Kierkegaard, [End Page 138] a reinterpretation that is itself closely related to Brod’s philosophy of religion. Nakazawa thus leads his reader through the friends’ philosophical discussion as well as their “menschliche” or indeed “allzumenschliche” dramas. Nakazawa finds fault with most—though not all—Kafka scholars primarily due to their inability to cope with the density of Kafka’s aphoristic language. Others, starting with Brod himself, have been at a complete loss to explain Kierkegaard’s possible influence on the famously enigmatic author. In his introduction, Nakazawa dismisses two recent books on the subject for missing “eine sichere Tatsachenbasis” and for propagating “nur vage Eindrücke” (16). With such comments, he is setting the bar for his own project very high. Nevertheless, Nakazawa makes good on many of his claims. He places Kafka’s initial comments on Kierkegaard in the context of his broken engagement with Felice Bauer, which paralleled Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine Olson. Nakazawa also notes that Kafka generalized his fear of commitment onto modern western Judaism: Assimilation into Christian society meant a loss of connection to “die letzten Dinge” (17). In fact, the nod in Nakazawa’s subtitle is taken from one of Kafka’s letters to Brod: “Was ich zu tun habe, kann ich nur allein tun. Über die letzten Dinge klar werden. Der Westjude ist darüber nicht klar und hat daher kein Recht zu heiraten” (43). During his stay in the Zürau sanitarium, Kafka was working through such philosophical and religious conundrums, often in response to Kierkegaard’s Furcht und Zittern. Where Nakazawa convinces—which is frequently—he relies on close readings of Kafka’s aphorisms and puts them in reasonable contact with both Kierkegaard (as well as other writers important to Kafka) and the letter exchange with Brod. In chapters three and four particularly, Nakazawa’s conclusions are impressive. He rejects the idea that Kafka was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard and, as promised, pins the disagreement onto Kierkegaard’s use of a “doppelte Bewegung” to explain the paradox of Abraham’s experience: “Kafka denkt, Kierkegaard habe sich in einen logischen Widerspruch verrannt” (64), that is, he explains the unexplainable (and that via the absurd). But Nakazawa extends the argument to dwell on positively stated theological implications. Under the subtitle “Baum der Erkenntnis und Baum des Lebens” (70–73), for example, Nakazawa discusses several “last things”: God, paradise, truth, and knowledge. He concludes his smart reading of these aphorisms by asserting that “Kafka Gott nicht als ‘vom Menschen wesensverscheidene Person’ deutet, sondern einen von ‘Teilung’ oder ‘Lüge’ freien Zustand des Menschen, [End Page 139] den man auch göttliche Seinsdimension des Menschen nennen könnte” (73). This section alone makes the book worth reading. Although it may diverge from his concern with Kierkegaard, chapter four is similarly thought-provoking; Kafka’s concept of “das Unzerstörbare,” born of his intellectual dialogue with Schopenhauer und Tolstoy, is the focus. That “für Kafka das Unzerstörbare etwas Göttliches ist” (92) demonstrates, so Nakazawa, an affinity with Tolstoy. Despite significant overlapping of his argument with Brod’s, namely, that the Kafka of these Zürau aphorisms is not a poet of despair, Nakazawa seems unwilling to let that stand: “Zwischen Kafka und Tolstoi gibt es auch einen unübersehbaren Unterschied, weil er, anders als Tolstoi [ . . . ] des Transzendenten nicht gewiss war” (93). According to Nakazawa, Kafka’s concept of the indestructible necessitated the destruction of self, making life in this world impossible. That he had just deftly uncovered exactly this—the...