Here's a bit about Kafka's life that Mat might pass to his student, in case s/he gets hermeneutically challenged by a Christian reading:Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:(Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony"The Christian criticism of the 1940s and 1950s turned this work upside down, into a justification of Divine Justice. Carrol
***** ...Mention has already been made of Kafka's work as an insurance assessor in the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, and its possible role as a source for his imaginative fiction. Indeed [Max] Brod thought it self-evident that, as he put it, 'whole chapters of the novels _The Trial_ and _The Castle_ derive their outer covers, their realistic wrappings, from the atmosphere Kafka breathed in the Workers Accident Institute'. He also recalls Kafka's anger at the meekness of workers mutilated in avoidable industrial accidents, who approached the Institute as suppliants instead of storming it and smashing it to bits.[21] To this we might add Kafka's experiences of the family businesses, the fancy-goods store owned by his father and the asbestos works in which he was for a time a partner. Undoubtedly, these provided him with first-hand experience of industrial relations, practices, and conditions. In 'Letter to his Father' Kafka recalls Hermann Kafka's 'tyrannising' way with his employees, whom he regarded as 'paid enemies', to which Kafka adds that his father was in turn their 'paying enemy'.[22] In his diary he expresses his sympathy for the women in the asbestos factory whose work threatens to turn them into dehumanized, exploitable objects before they escape at the end of each shift (5.XI.12; D1[_The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-13_, ed. Max Brod, tr. Joseph Kresh, London: Secker and Warburg, 1948]: 231). His professional duties brought him into contact with industrial enterprises in and around Prague, with the devious ways of employers unwilling to pay the appropriate accident insurance premiums for their workers, and often with the complicity of workers themselves. And he was himself, of course, also an employee, familiar with the uncertainties and frustrations of his class. It has only recently been realised that, in 1912, as Anthony Northey reports:
Kafka the insurance agency employee was also involved in the creation of an Association of Officials of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, the closest these white-collar workers could come to forming a union: Kafka was treasurer of the Association for a brief period. Thus, Kafka occupied the two conflicting position of factory-owner and union leader at the same time.[23]
He was evidently underpaid for his level of qualifications, and as a Jew was lucky to find employment at the Institute -- he happened to know the President in 1908, Dr. Otto Pribram, himself a converted Jew. In 1917, Kafka wrote to Brod that the Institute was now 'closed to Jews' (13.XI.17; LFFE [_Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors_, ed. Max Brod, tr. Richard and Clara Winston, NY: Schocken, 1978]: 165). His professional experiences undoubtedly inform his fictional presentations of technology, for example in _The Man who Disappeared_ [Amerika/America] and 'In the Penal Colony'. They are also reflected in the detailed attention to the conditions of employment imposed on K. in _The Castle_. Andrew Weeks has traced the parallels between this novel and the protracted struggle of Habsburg civil servants (the white-collar 'trade union' to which Kafka belonged) for a code of service, illuminating the connections with a class struggle very close to Kafka's heart.[24] Issues of status, autonomy and dependence, are already present, for K. at least, 'between the lines' of the letter which seems to confirm his appointment as the Castle's land-surveyor, but in which he perceives a threat to reduce his existence to 'life as a worker. Service, foreman, work, conditions of pay, duty, worker, the letter was swarming with it' (DS [_Das Schlo� (The Castle)_: 35). K. is fearful that such a life, planned for him by the Castle, will be one of subjugation, effectively nullifying the threat he poses, in his own mind, at least, to the established order....
[21] Max Brod, _Franz Kafka: a Biography_, tr. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. 82-4.
[22] 'Letter to his Father', in _Wedding Preparations in the Country and other Posthumous Writings_, with Notes by Max Brod, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), p. 181.
[23] Anthony Northey, _Kafka's Relatives: their Lives and his Writing_ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 96.
[24] [W.J.] Dodd (ed.), _Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle_, [London: Longman, 1995], pp. 171-88.
(Bill Dodd, "The Case for a Political Reading," _The Cambridge Companion to Kafka_, ed. Julian Preece, pp. 138-139) *****
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Yoshie
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