On August 11, 1917, in a cold room in Schönborn Palace, Kafka’s lungs began to bleed. Tuberculosis, which he interpreted as a macabre collaboration between his brain and his chest, arrived to exempt him from real life, marriage, and work obligations. The pain began to kill him, but it proved to have a useful and redeeming aspect. With his suitcase in hand and a doctor’s note, Kafka left for the Bohemian village of Zürau. There he lived and wrote for eight months.
According to his biographer Reiner Stach, Kafka led a triple life in Zürau. To the villagers, he was the “doctor” from Prague, a friendly hermit; to his friends in the capital, he was a patient who wrote chronicles about country life. To himself, the Kafka of Zürau is the most enigmatic, the man who meditates on the deckchair, the author of a fragmentary and disconcerting metaphysics.
Explaining the Kafka of the Aphorisms led Stach to undertake a typically Jewish exercise: commenting on the commentary. Kafka jots down notes at the bottom of the page of the world; Stach takes that statement and compares it with other papers, puts it in context and clarifies—when he can—the writer’s philosophical calligraphy. The result is the most complete and illuminating edition possible (“You Are the Task”, Acantilado) of the octavo notebooks in which Kafka recorded his reflections on death, paradise, religion, and meaning.
Stach insists that the Aphorisms were Kafka’s original idea, even though they give the impression—like many of his texts—of surviving despite their author. The contents of the notebooks written in pencil were transferred to a series of 14 × 11 cm slips of paper, which he numbered. The 105 cards are in the National Library of Israel, as part of Max Brod’s legacy. There are also some aphorisms in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, along with Kafka’s notebooks, bringing the total number of aphorisms in Stach’s edition to 109.
The Aphorisms project never came to fruition during Kafka’s lifetime. After his death, Brod saw them as proof that his friend intended to renew Judaism and in 1931 published a selection in During the Building of the Chinese Wall. He placed them under the misleading heading “Considerations on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way.” Stach, however, warns that nothing in Kafka can be read in a purely religious sense and that, even if Jewish mysticism permeates his literature, it never abandons its nature to serve religion.
In Kafka there are “underground” connections with Kabbalah and Hasidism, the biographer argues, but his writing is not that of a mystic, not even in the Aphorisms. His religion is very personal, dark, and devoid of dogmatism. In Zürau, Kafka reread Kierkegaard and the Old Testament, which is why reflection on the loss of paradise occupies a central place. The constant updating of the Fall in every man—the “permanent event of expulsion,” as Stach calls it—forms an important core of his thoughts. It is in this sense that we must read his metaphors, such as the cage searching for the bird—the most quoted—or the rope lying on the ground, “more destined to be tripped over than to be stepped over.”
Gershom Scholem, who read Kafka in a mystical key—but with philological reasoning—recalled that a century before his birth there was a Kabbalist in Prague named Jonas Wehle, whose meditation on paradise is similar to that of the Aphorisms. Torn between messianism and the Enlightenment, Whele claimed that the Garden of Eden had lost more than man had lost. That is why Kafka asserts, according to Scholem, that good “in a certain sense lacks consolation,” and that mystical secularization—being a “secular rabbi,” as Steiner demanded—is a possible path for modern man.
Kafka offers a kind of heretical Kabbalah, explains Scholem. His texts have an electric impulse that only sacred writing possesses, and his images have to do with the interpretive despair of the Hebrews. The Word of God as a house with many apartments, whose doors are locked with keys that do not fit the locks. This fable, from an Alexandrian Jew quoted by Origen, is already typically Kafkaesque. And it is the Kafka of the Aphorisms, who preaches “a faith like a guillotine blade, so heavy, so light.”
There are other formulas taken from the Old Testament and Zürau’s readings: the Tower of Babel, the struggle—against God, like Jacob, or against the devil— the waters of the river of the dead, the almost Borgesian leopards that burst into a temple, the secret, martyrdom, hiding places, dogs, crows, and rooks (which in Czech is kavka).
Stach believes that Kafka may have spent the happiest days of his life in Zürau. There he found meaning in his illness and perhaps prepared himself for his death, which was not long in coming. An eight-month break allowed him to put his affairs in order, seek order, or at least a definition of chaos that satisfied him. The Aphorisms, a breviary for the disenchanted, is Kafka’s guide not to return to paradise, but to survive hell.
