Born in Prague in 1883, Kafka was fluent in Czech but chose to write in German, the more serviceable language for reaching a wider audience at the turn of the century. Actually, he wrote in Prager Deutsch (Prague German), the dialect spoken by the German-Jewish and -Christian minorities in the Bohemian capital. It was plain in comparison to High German, with its rather flamboyant colloquialisms. Users of this dialect, however, preferred to regard it as pure. Some writers of this school, if it can be called such, sought to make up for the poverty of Prague German by dressing it up with various artistic embellishments. Kafka, on the other hand, went in the other direction and strove for an almost ultra-economic simplicity. Prague German, he felt, was more “truthful” than High German: Using it skillfully, he was able to make it work for him in a way that was purely his own, and from it he devised an excellent instrument for tearing away facade, whether it be that of seemingly harmonious relationships or the bustling efficiency of a bureaucratic nightmare.
Successfully using this German dialect afforded its speakers and writers some resilience against the Czech society of Prague at that time, which was hostile to its German exile community. (Kafka was, culturally, an exile.) The Prague German dialect gave them comfort and a confidence in their own culture—one that reflected their own values, history, and aspirations. The status of Prague’s German-speaking exiles, whether their condition was self-imposed or not, was marginal at best, a not uncommon case with exiles almost anywhere in the world. In Kafka’s case, however, his marginality was compounded by the fact that he was Jewish and therefore, a member of a minority within a minority that was as anti-Semitic as the host culture. He owed his triumph over troubling circumstances to the written word. Kafka’s ability to overcome adversity at least in the practice of his art indicates how the hardships that an artist in exile often undergoes can sometimes contribute to achieving the goal for which he strives. It doesn’t really matter whether the artist incorporates these obstacles, wittingly or not, into the work; it’s enough that these circumstances exist and have had to be dealt with on some level. Kafka’s success brings to mind that of other exiles, such as Theodor Adorno, V. S. Naipaul, and C. L. R. James…even Ovid, for that matter. One wonders what their output might have been had they not had to forge lives in areas of the globe where they were considered “other.”
Kafka, being no stranger to the predicament of the exile, made use of his insider’s knowledge in some of his most memorable short works. In “The Judgment,” an exile in Russia who is never named, seen, or heard during the course of the story, exerts, while absent in every real sense, a defining power over the other characters—Georg, his father, and his fiancée, Frieda. The exile, Georg’s friend in Russia who, owing in part to his extended absence assumes in the minds of the three characters qualities that he does not and perhaps could never possess, plays a pivotal role in the events that take place on the worst and last day of Georg’s life. It is their three versions of the friend (at one point the father asks Georg if that friend really exists) that determines their behavior toward one another in the story. In his diaries, Kafka wrote that the friend is the strongest connection between Georg and his father, for it is through this link that his father is able to reassert himself as paterfamilias and his son’s enemy and that Georg is able to submissively accept him as such. Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates. She indeed reacts in the story only to what she believes that friend to be; her interaction with her fiancé is merely incidental.
In “The Stoker,” which is also the first chapter of his novel Amerika, Kafka explores an exile’s marginality as it exists in the face of bureaucracy. According to one of his diary entries, Kafka modeled this short work on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Rossmann, the protagonist, has fled a nightmare situation in his native land in the hope of building a new life in the United States, believing that he has gained a new voice—one that can turn wrong to right. Upon arrival in this new land, Rossmann speaks up for a victimized stoker, demanding justice for him from the ship’s captain and other high-ranking officials. In a sense, he is arguing on behalf of not only the stoker but himself as well, as someone who was wronged in another situation.