When building the Great Wall of China

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When the Great Wall of China was built, there is a handwritten text by Franz Kafka in March 1917, which was extracted from the writings left behind after his death and published as a narrative. He describes the turn of the collective people to the construction of the Great Wall and its mystification. In addition, an almost omniscient leadership and a very distant empire are outlined.

Embedded in the text is a passage that Kafka had already published as an independent story called An Imperial Message in September 1917 in the magazine Selbstwehr and in 1920 as part of the story volume Ein Landarzt .

In 1931 , Kafka's friend Max Brod published the first volume of Kafka's prose from the estate under the title When the Great Wall of China was built .

Emergence

In the course of his life, Franz Kafka wrote down countless drafts of literary texts and various other comments in writing exercise books or on loose sheets of paper. The spectrum of these notes ranges from disjointed individual words to stories that are ready to be printed. According to his own admission, Kafka destroyed an unknown number of such sketches of ideas; only a small part he worked on until publication. After Kafka's death, Max Brod preserved and sifted through the remaining material, selected text passages which, in his opinion, displayed “the characteristic of artistic unity and perfection” and published them together with Hans-Joachim Schoeps as “unprinted stories and prose from the estate “- so the subtitle of the first anthology.

The handwritten original of the story of the building of the Great Wall of China established in this way can be found among other texts in the third of the eight so-called octave books that Kafka used from 1916 to 1918 for writing of the above-mentioned type. In the afterword to the first printed version, which appeared in the magazine “Der Morgen” in 1930, H.-J. Schoeps the following:

“When the Great Wall of China was built” dates back to 1918/19. The final version of the extensive novella shared the fate of numerous other works to have been burned by their poet. A lucky coincidence saved from this fate a little sketchbook which I found in the estate and which still contained at least a few closed parts of the first draft. The two stories published here are self-contained parts from the novel, which has been lost as a whole. [...]

This first publication, as well as many subsequent editions, does not present the entire text to be found in the original manuscript between the heading “When building the Great Wall of China” and the next heading “An old sheet”, but dispenses with the reproduction of a section about twenty sentences long was first published in 1937 as a “fragment on the construction of the Great Wall of China”.

content

An anonymous narrator, obviously interested in many things, reports as a contemporary witness looking back on the era of the building of the Chinese wall. First he describes in detail the system of performing the wall as a mosaic of individual sections. Scattered over the entire border, two parts were built towards each other. After they were united, the builders moved on and built new sections far away. This was the only way to keep their enthusiasm and creativity going. In addition, the whole people - even the smallest children - were in the mood for the construction of the wall decades before the start of the building. For those involved in construction, work was not a mere obligation, but a need that unites the people. It was about much more than the construction of a structural engineering system. One scholar even suggested that the Tower of Babel could still be built with the wall as a foundation. On the other hand, the narrator also gives reasons that make building in sections appear inexpedient: Until it is completely finished, the patchy wall cannot protect and is itself endangered, and it is uncertain whether it was actually ever completed. Only the top leadership could have given the last information, but "where it was and who was sitting there, nobody knew or knew whom I asked". So you tried to understand their arrangements, but only up to a certain point, which you better not go beyond. The leadership seems to be omniscient, the prevailing opinion was that they knew everyone and were wallowing in tremendous worries, yes, they had “probably always existed, and so did the decision to build the wall”.

Then the narrator turns to another topic, remarking that the building of the wall was also significantly affected: He found “that we Chinese have certain popular and state institutions with a unique clarity, others with a unique lack of clarity”. The empire belongs to the "most obscure institutions". Due to the enormous size of the empire, it is so far away that the population of the provinces knows neither the current emperor nor the associated dynasty. Every message arrives far too late and completely out of date, if at all. The uncertainty is so great that the people therefore often consider what is long past to exist, while news is sometimes dismissed as old stories. Here the narrator weaves in the legend of the imperial message , which expresses this relationship well. Basically, he believes, the people have no emperor at all and lead a "free and uncontrolled life, as it were," which is nonetheless characterized by strict loyalty to the emperor and moral purity, even though it "is not subject to any current law and only obeys instructions and warnings, that reaches over to us from ancient times ”.

Text analysis

The unfinished state of the story makes it difficult to assign it to a particular genre . H.-J. Schoeps called it a draft of a novella , other editors classified it as a narrative . Similar to a short story or shortest story lacks both an exposure and a pronounced action . The scenery and the situation are fictional and are described by a first-person narrator who calls his statements a “report” or an “investigation”. However, they are more like an essay , as speculation and personal considerations take up a lot of space. The diction , too, is only factual at first and soon becomes emphatic , sometimes heightened to the point of poetic exaggeration . The frequent use of the pronoun “we” and interspersed anecdotal episodes from the personal experience of the narrator at least allow the conclusion that he is integrated into the narrated world. His personal details remain vague, however, so that it is not clear whether and to what extent he is involved or only an observer of the event.

History has little to do with the real conditions of ancient China. For example, the construction of the wall actually dragged on for centuries, while the narrator has it started and completed within just one generation.

In the Kafka secondary literature there are various text interpretations that view the text as a parable .

Interpretations and comments

  • Hans-Joachim Schoeps sees in the poet's [...] real-symbolic representation the basic theme of Kafka's life and experience echoes: the loneliness of the individual in the world and his longing for integration into a context of meaning through collaboration on a work of the whole. [...]
  • Günther Anders : [...] A considerable part of Kafka's work is about Jews. Like the novel “Das Schloß”, like the mouse story “Josephine”. But the word “Jew” is seldom used. Yes, in the pieces called “Great Wall of China”, the word “Jew” has been replaced by the word “Chinese” throughout. [...]
  • Jost Schillemeit (with reference to similar interpretations by Hartmut Binder and Günther Anders): It [the story] contains in itself, in the medium of a poetically transforming parable language, the reflex of a confrontation with the present and the history of Judaism, just as both were for Kafka back then , [...], represented.
Using further text fragments and details from Kafka's life and experience background, J. Schillemeit also develops the thesis that Kafka was not involved in his own relationship to this postulated topic as that of someone [...] internally, but not externally and practically, not himself in Building of the Wall ”presented by the collaborating reporter .
  • Hideo Nakazawa interprets the text as a discussion of various currents of contemporary Zionism and states that Kafka was skeptical of “cultural Zionism” and its protagonist Martin Buber .
  • Benno Wagner identifies the author of the work with the narrator: His specific observer position, like that of its creator Kafka, is based on the singular combination of expert knowledge for protective devices with dilettante knowledge in the field of "comparative international history" [...].
In a situation that was critical for the existence of the political order, Kafka wrote about the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the sign of the Chinese [...] and thus placed himself in a [...] unquestionably known Bohemian tradition of crypto -State criticism as justified by the later founder of the Czech press, Karel Havlíček Borovský , [...] in fictitious foreign correspondence from Ireland and China.

As in other Kafka texts, a large number of Kafka researchers, biographers and interpreters found intertextual references in this story . On the basis of various examples, B. Wagner summarizes [...] a writing that does not seem to "consist" of anything other than quotations and transcriptions from the media, discourses and texts from tradition and the present. As well as interdiscursiveness, which can be related to [...] vaguely defined quantities of texts, [...] also an intertextuality that is often obviously calculated down to the last detail and based on the dialogue with specific texts.

Reading impression

  • The text moves between narrative, legend , political reflection and fictional memories without it becoming completely clear what the narrator is getting at. Obviously, more than the building of the wall, he is concerned with the function of the emperor, who as a symbol holds together the huge people of the Chinese; Of course, there is no communication between above and below, which does not work even if, for once, it is wanted from "above". (after Reiner Stach )
  • The construction of the wall is a deep, almost addictive endeavor, with ideological background. There are superiors “who were able to sympathize with the hearts of what it was all about.” At the end of a construction phase, site managers had “lost all trust in themselves, in the construction, in the world.” Their reports “were listened to with devout humility. “Later, the desire to continue building became“ indomitable ”. It is the irrational collective striving that speaks from the following sentence: “Unity! Unit! Chest to chest, a dance of the people, blood, no longer locked in the scanty circulation of the body, but rolling sweetly and yet recurring through the infinite China. ”But this people, who feel this way, is cynically referred to as“ human material ”. It is seduced into a project that is hubris and nonsense at the same time. Apparently it is the people's deep need to build the wall. The powerful compulsion that exists from above can only be guessed at.
The "leadership" appears only through its orders. How they are communicated to the people is unknown. One tries to approach their meaning through interpretation. One instinctively thinks of religious or legal interpretation or artistic interpretation. People and leadership are closely linked by the building of the wall, at least that's how the people interpret it. Organization, administration and the legal system, that is, a distant omniscient bureaucracy, emerge in leadership.
The "empire" is the backward-looking, ailing element. It is frozen and even more nebulous than leadership. The emperors are obviously not involved in the building of the wall. It is sealed off in its huge palace and by the endless expanse of the country. The imperial women are degenerate and cruel. The emperor, whoever he is, could never reach his subjects, even if that were his last message from the deathbed.
In this narrative, written in 1917, one can clearly feel the political glow of the weather that the totalitarian systems, left and right, are sending ahead. The great wall is a visionary reference to the gigantic architecture of these systems. What is oppressive in their association is the frequent use of the terms “people” and “leadership” - especially when these are then still connected with “blood” or the expressions “people's work” and “people's strength”.

Contemporary history and biographical background

The hunger wall in Prague

Kafka received the impetus for his story from the hunger wall that Emperor Charles IV had built on Prague's Lesser Town in the 14th century .

At that time Kafka was very concerned with Asian cultural history, but also with Zionist endeavors and the writings of Theodor Herzl ( Der Judenstaat ). China is the code for the representation of the Zionist discussions about the creation of a Jewish nation state and the loss of traditional piety, i.e. the Eastern Jewish roots.

The text about the enormous expansion of the country and the rapt figure of the emperor can be seen as a mirror of the sinking k. u. k. Monarchy can be seen. Emperor Franz Joseph I died a few months before the work was written.

The description of the fragmentary construction of the wall is reminiscent of Kafka's creative process with its many fragments. The novel The Trial in particular was created in a similar way: first the first and the last chapter, later loosely connected other chapters.

reception

  • The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray has been heavily influenced by history. In his short stories there is a similar structure and a Chinese empire far removed from the people.
  • Henry Sussman describes the effect as follows:

“Kafka makes it possible to marvel at the sublime properties of and the mystery surrounding the wall. And in this process he dissolves the protective distance that would otherwise shield us from the violence of the Ch'in dynasty and the forced labor that was necessary to build the wall, from the sheer extent of nameless masses mobilized to build it and the enormous pressure with which the work was coordinated. "

expenditure

  • From the estate of Franz Kafka. A fragment. When building the Great Wall of China. in: The morning. Bimonthly, 6th year, August 1930, 3rd issue, editor Margarete Goldstein, Philo-Verlag Berlin, pp. 219–230. Digitized version (University Library of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main)
  • Paul Raabe : Franz Kafka: Complete stories. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version. Published by Roger Herms, Fischer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Franz Kafka: Legacy writings and fragments 1. Edited by Malcolm Pasley. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, ISBN 3-10-038148-3 , pp. 337-357.
  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Anaconda-Verlag, 2007, pp. 448-463, ISBN 3-86647-170-X .

Secondary literature

  • Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 .
  • Reiner Stach : Kafka. The years of knowledge S. Fischer Verlag 2008 ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5 .
  • Manfred Engel : Kafka and the modern world. In: Manfred Engel, Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 498-515, especially pp. 505-507.
  • Manfred Engel: Drafts of symbolic world orders: China and China Revisited. To the China complex in Kafka's factory 1917-1920 . In: Manfred Engel, Ritchie Robertson (eds.): Kafka, Prague and the First World War / Kafka, Prague and the First World War . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2012 (Oxford Kafka Studies 2), pp. 221–236. ISBN 978-3-8260-4849-4 .
  • Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus : Kafka manual. Life-work-effect. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 .
  • Ulrich Stadler: The key as a lock and the system of the partial building. Kafka's little prose pieces “During the Building of the Great Wall of China” and “An Imperial Message”. In: Little prose: Theory and history of a text field in the literary system of the modern age. Edited by Thomas Althaus, Wolfgang Bunzel and Dirk Göttsche, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 2007, ISBN 978-3-484-10902-5 , pp. 157-171 ( excerpt from books.google.de).
  • Weijian Liu: Cultural Exclusion and the Delimitation of Identity. To represent China in German literature 1870 - 1930. Peter Lang, Bern etc. 2007, ISBN 978-3-03911-264-7 , Chapter: Kafka's reconstruction of the Great Wall of China , pp 356-388 ( excerpt in books.google. de).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ v.Jagow / Jahrhaus p. 93
  2. ^ Max Brod: Epilogue to Max Brod and Hans-Joachim Schoeps (eds.): Franz Kafka. When building the Great Wall of China . Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin, 1931, quoted in: Klaus Hermsdorf (Ed.): Franz Kafka. The narrative work I. Rütten & Loening, Berlin, 1983, p. 632
  3. ^ A b Hans-Joachim Schoeps: Epilogue to From Franz Kafka's estate. A fragment. When building the Great Wall of China. in the morning. Bimonthly, Volume 6, No. 3, Philo Verlag Berlin, August 1930, p. 230 ( scan )
  4. ↑ Günther Anders: Man without a world. Writings on art and literature . Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 2nd edition 1993, ISBN 3406374018 , p. 48
  5. ^ Jost Schillemeit: Kafka studies . published by Rosemarie Schillemeit, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2004, ISBN 3892447748 , p. 248
  6. ↑ Hideo Nakazawa: About the Great Wall of China . Lecture at the Japanese-Chinese German Studies Meeting Beijing 1990 ( lecture script )
  7. ↑ Benno Wagner: Kafka's "comparative history of nations". A sketch on the relationship between literature and cultural knowledge. in: Aussiger contributions 2 (2008). ISBN 978-3-7069-0525-1 , ISSN 1802-6419, pp. 89-99, ( link to full text download at uni-frankfurt.de)
  8. ↑ Wagner p. 95
  9. ↑ Wagner p. 96
  10. ↑ Stach p. 495
  11. ↑ Alt p. 580
  12. ↑ Alt p. 583
  13. ↑ Stach, p. 496.
  14. ^ Article on p. 360 in von Jagow / Jahraus

Web links

Wikisource: Building the Great Wall of China  - Sources and full texts