Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (48 page)

Kafka is best known for three works of fiction,
Metamorphosis
(1916),
The Trial
(1925; posthumous), and
The Castle
(1926; posthumous). But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He often claimed that his primary aim was independence, yet he lived in his parents’ home until he left for Berlin; he was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; and he amused himself by imagining the most gruesome way he could die. He lived for writing and would work for months, collapsing in exhaustion afterward. Even so, he might jettison what he had done if he felt it was unworthy. He had relatively few correspondents, yet wrote to them often – very often, and very long letters. He wrote 90 letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several of between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him, and another long letter to a prospective father-in-law, whom he had met only once, explaining that he was probably impotent.
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Although Kafka’s novels are ostensibly about very different subjects, they have some striking similarities, so much so that the cumulative effect of Kafka’s work is much more than the sum of its parts.
Metamorphosis
begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature: ‘As Gregor Sams awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ This might seem as if the plot had been given away right there and then, but in fact the book explores Gregor’s response to his fantastic condition, and his relationship with his family and with his colleagues at work. If a man is turned into an insect, does this help him/us understand what it means to be human? In
The Trial,
Joseph K. (we never know his last name) is arrested and put on trial.
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But neither he nor the reader ever knows the nature of his offence, or by what authority the court is constituted, and therefore he and we cannot know if the death sentence is warranted. Finally, in
The Castle
K. (again, that is all we are told) arrives in a village to take up an appointment as land surveyor at the castle that towers above the village and whose owner
also owns all the houses there. However, K. finds that the castle authorities deny all knowledge of him, at least to begin with, and say he cannot even stay at the inn in the village. There then follows an extraordinary chain of events in which characters contradict themselves, vary unpredictably in their moods and attitudes to K., age virtually overnight, or lie – even K. himself is reduced to lying on occasions. Emissaries from the castle arrive in the vidage, but he never sees any sign of life in the castle itself, and never reaches it.
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An added difficulty with interpreting Kafka’s work is that he never completed any of his three major novels, though we know from his notebooks what he intended at the time of his death. He also told his friend Max Brod what he planned for
The Castle,
his most realised work. Some critics argue that each of his ideas is an exploration of the inner workings of the mind of a mentally unstable individual, particularly
The Trial,
which on this reading becomes a sort of imaginative case history of someone with a persecution complex. In fact, one needn’t go this far. All three stories show a man not in control of himself, or of his life. In each case he is swept along, caught up in forces where he cannot impose his will, where those forces – biological, psychological, logical – lead blindly. There is no development, no progress, as conventionally understood, and no optimism. The protagonist doesn’t always win; in fact, he always loses. There are forces in Kafka’s work, but no authority. It is bleak and chiding. Jewish, and Czech, an outsider at Weimar, Kafka nevertheless saw where that society was headed. There are similarities between Kafka and Heidegger in that Kafka’s characters must submit to greater forces, forces they don’t truly understand. He once said, ‘I sometimes believe I understand the Fall of Man as no one else.’
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Kafka parts company with Heidegger, however, in saying that not even submission brings satisfaction; indeed, satisfaction, or fulfilment, may not be possible in the modern world. This is what makes
The Castle
Kafka’s masterpiece, for many people a latter-day
Divine Comedy.
W. H. Auden once said, ‘Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.’
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In
The Castle
life in the vidage is dominated by the eponymous building. Its authority is unquestioned but also unexplained. The capriciousness of its bureaucracy is likewise unquestioned, but all attempts by K. to understand that capriciousness are nullified. Though obviously and perhaps too heavily allegorical of modern societies, with their faceless bureaucratic masses, verging on terror, their impersonality, marked by a pervading feeling of invasion (by science and machines) and of dehumanisation, Kafka’s works both reflect and prophesy a world that was becoming a reality.
The Castle
was the culmination of Kafka’s work, at least in the sense that the reader tries to understand the book as K. tries to understand the castle. In all his books, however, Kafka succeeds in
showing
the reader terror and the uncomfortable, alienated, disjunctive feelings that so characterise modern life. Eerily, he also prefigured the specific worlds that were soon to arrive: Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

In 1924, the year that tuberculosis killed Kafka, Adolf Hitler celebrated his
thirty-fifth birthday – in prison. He was in Landsberg jail, west of the Bavarian capital, serving a five-year sentence for treason and his part in the Munich putsch. There were several other National Socialists in prison with him, and as well as being given minimum sentences, they had an easy time inside. There was plenty of good food, they were allowed out into the garden, Hitler was a favourite with the jailers, and on his birthday he received numerous parcels and bunches of flowers. He was putting on weight.
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The trial had been front-page news in every German newspaper for more than three weeks, and for the first time Hitler broke through to a national audience. Later, he was to claim that the trial and the publicity surrounding it were a turning point in his career. It was during his time in prison that Hitler wrote the first part of
Mein Kampf.
It is entirely possible that he might never have written anything had he not been sent to Landsberg. At the same time, as Alan Bullock has pointed out, the opportunity was invaluable.
Mein Kampf
helped Hitler establish himself as the leader of the National Socialists, helped him lay the foundation of the Hitler myth, and helped him clarify his ideas. Hitler instinctively grasped that a movement such as the one he planned needed a ‘sacred text,’ a bible.
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Whatever his other attributes, Hitler certainly thought of himself as a thinker, with a grasp of technical-military matters, of natural science, and above all of history. He was convinced that this grasp set him apart from other men, and in this he was not entirely wrong. We need to remember that he started adult life as an artist and an aspiring architect. He was transformed into the figure he became first by World War I and the ensuing peace, but also by the education he gave himself. Perhaps the most important thing to grasp about Hitler’s intellectual development is that it was so far removed from that of most if not all the people we have been considering in this chapter. As even a cursory examination of
Mein Kampf
will show, this is because most of Hitler’s ideas were nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century ideas – the kind examined here in chapters 2 and 3 – and once they were formed, Hitler never changed them. The Führer’s ideas, as revealed in his table talk during World War II, are directly traceable to his thinking as a young man.
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The historian George L. Mosse has disinterred the more distant intellectual origins of the Third Reich, on which this section is chiefly based.
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He shows how an amalgam of
völkisch
mysticism and spirituality grew up in Germany in the nineteenth century, in part a response to the romantic movement and to the bewildering pace of industrialisation, and was also an aspect of German unification. While the
Volk
were coming together, forging one heroic PanGerman nation, the ‘rootless Jew’ was a convenient, negative comparison (though of course this was not at all fair: in Germany Jews could not be government officials or full professors until 1918). Mosse traces the influence of thinkers and writers, many completely forgotten now, who helped create this cast of mind – people like Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who stressed ‘German intuition’ as a new creative force in the world, and Eugen Diederichs, who openly advocated ‘a culturally grounded nation guided by the initiated elite,’ by the revival of German legends, such as the Edda, which stressed
Germany’s great antiquity and its links to Greece and Rome (great civilisations but also pagan). The point about all this was that it elevated the Volk almost to the level of a deity.
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There were nineteenth-century German books such as that by Ludwig Woltmann, examining the art of the Renaissance, identifying ‘Aryans’ in positions of power and showing how much the Nordic type was admired.
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Mosse also emphasises how social Darwinism threaded through society. In 1900, for example, Alfred Krupp, the wealthy industrialist and arms manufacturer, sponsored a public essay competition on the topic, ‘What can we learn from the principles of Darwinism for application to inner political development and the laws of the state?’
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Not surprisingly, the winner advocated that
all
aspects of the state, without exception, should be viewed and administered in social Darwinian terms. Mosse further describes the many German attempts at utopias – from ‘Aryan’ colonies in Paraguay and Mexico to nudist camps in Bavaria, which tried to put
völkisch
principles into effect. The craze for physical culture grew out of these utopias, and so too did the movement for rural boarding schools with a curriculum based on ‘back to nature’ and
Heimatkunde,
rendered as ‘lore of the homeland,’ emphasising Germanness, nature, and ancient peasant customs. As a boy, Hitler grew up in this milieu without realising that there was any alternative.
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In fact, Hitler never made any secret of this. Linz, where he was raised, was a semirural, middle-class town populated by German nationalists. The town authorities turned a blind eye to the gatherings of the banned ‘Gothia’ or ‘Wodan’ societies, with their Pan-German tendencies.
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As a boy, Hitler belonged to these groups, but he also witnessed the intolerant nationalism of the town’s adults, whose anti-Czech feelings boiled over so easily that they even took against the eminent violinist Jan Kubelik, who was scheduled to perform in Linz. These memories, all too evident in
Mein Kampf,
helped account for Hitler’s attacks on the Habsburgs for the ‘Slavisation’ of the Austrians. In his book Hitler also insists that while at school in Linz he ‘learned to understand and grasp the meaning of history.’ ‘To “Learn” history,’ he explained, ‘means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.’
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One of these forces, he felt (and this too he had picked up as a boy), was that Britain, France, and Russia were intent on encircling Germany, and he thereafter never rid himself of this view. Perhaps not surprisingly, for him history was invariably the work of great men – his heroes were Charlemagne, Rudolf von Habsburg, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Wilhelm I. Hitler therefore was much more in the mould of Stefan George, or Rainer Maria Rilke, rather than Marx or Engels, for whom the history of class struggle was paramount. For Hitler, history was a catalogue of racial struggles, although the outcome always depended on great men: ‘[History] was the sum total of struggle and war, waged by each against all with no room for either mercy or humanity.’
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He often quoted Helmut von Moltke, a nineteenth-century German general, who had argued that one should always use the most terrible weapons and tactics available because, by shortening hostilities, lives would be saved.

Hitler’s biological thinking was an amalgam of Thomas R. Malthus, Charles Darwin, Joseph Arthur Gobineau, and William McDougall: ‘Man has become great through struggle…. Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality…. All life is bound up in three theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive…. He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.’
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Malthus had argued that the world’s population was outstripping the earth’s capacity to provide for it. The result must be famine and war. Birth control and much-improved agriculture offered the only hope for Malthus, but for Hitler there was another answer: ‘a predatory war of annihilation as a means to an end, an historically all-important act in response to natural law and necessity.’ According to Werner Maser, one of Hitler’s biographers, his brutal attitude to ‘weaklings’ was transplanted from the teachings of Alfred Ploetz, whose book,
Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen
(The Efficiency of our Race and the Protection of the Weak), Hitler had read as a young man in Vienna before World War I. The following extract from Ploetz will show how his thinking had ‘advanced’ since the nineteenth century: ‘Advocates of racial hygiene [the new phrase for eugenics] will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence… In the course of the campaign it might be deemed advisable deliberately to muster inferior variants at points where the main need is for cannon fodder and where the individual’s efficiency is of secondary importance.’
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