The knock on the yard gate

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The Schlag ans Hoftor is a parable-like prose piece by Franz Kafka that was composed in April 1917 and published in 1931. A "process of entering a mysterious spatial arrangement as an act of unauthorized transgression" is described, "which is ultimately punished."

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The first-person narrator passes a gate on a summer day with his sister. In retrospect, he doesn't know whether she hit the gate or just threatened with her fist. They come to a nearby village and the people there speak to them at once and warn them that the landlord will sue them. Horsemen appear who first visit the farm and then approach the village. At first the narrator thinks she is harmless, but then urges the sister to leave, saying that she should at least put on better clothes at home. The narrator stands alone against the arriving judge and his assistants, who seem to be waiting for him. Nevertheless, he still believes that the outcome will be harmless. The narrator is brought before the judge into a farmhouse room, which he describes as oppressive and prison-like. While he previously believed that he could clarify the situation, it becomes clear to him, among other things, through the judge's statement "I am sorry for this man" that he has already been (pre) sentenced.

From the last sentences of the parable, the reader learns that the narrator told his story in this very prison from which there is no escape.

shape

The dynamic of the linguistic sequence follows the tension sequence. First, the rural and mythical world is described calmly. With the appearance of the farmers, unrest comes into the language through deferred participles . The narrator calms down for a moment, only to get caught up in the dull suction of expectation of the common people, out of which he urges his sister to leave. After that, it is continued as a matter of course, but not out of inner calm, but in fearful anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.

With the last two - now quite pathetic - sentences, the narrative perspective changes. In the main part of the parable, the narrator and the reader were only apparently on the same level of knowledge. At the end the reader suddenly learns that this is a report from prison and that the narrator with the multiple self-appeasements not only reveals his earlier misjudgment, but has also misled the reader.

References to other works by Kafka

In this parable a number of themes can be identified that appear several times in Kafka. The positive beginning, which ends in death and ruin, is encountered e.g. B. in The Judgment or The Building . The frightened villagers and an initially self-assured protagonist who later becomes desperate make one think of the novel Das Schloss . The cell furnishings, half cot, half operating table, are reminiscent of what happened in the penal colony . The symbol of the ominous gate, which must not be passed through and not even touched here, is reminiscent of Before the Law .

The prose piece Kinder auf der Landstrasse from 1903 can be seen as a positive counterpart to the present parable. There children are out and about in a summer evening scene full of enthusiasm and high spirits. The narrator breaks away from the group and at night strives for the city where the fools live. Only there is no notice or punishment for violating the rules.

In the years between 1903 and 1917, Kafka's view of this had changed significantly into the negative. Kafka experienced the First World War. His health was increasingly badly affected. Four months after the parable was completed, his lung disease broke out in August 1917.

Interpretative approaches

A youthful, high-spirited gesture, the criminality of which is evident neither to the narrator nor to the reader, touches a strange, dark order with an incomprehensible, threatening legal system. It is one of Kafka's threat scenarios with a legal background, which find their most haunting expression in the novel The Trial . The parable could be seen as a short version of this novel.

On the other hand, a sibling constellation is portrayed here, which probably has its origin in Kafka's relationship to his three younger sisters. The sisters easily gained a more stable status in the family than he, who saw himself as a lone fighter. He especially admired his favorite sister Ottla , who strongly opposed his father. The sister in the parable obviously resembles her in her boyish manner. He wants to protect her in the manner of his big, superior brother, so she walks home through the summer evening while he sacrifices himself.

reception

  • Stach (p. 110 f.) Explains that the image of the gate (the door) in Kafka's work can express near and far at the same time (including in Before the Law ).
  • Alt (p. 503) writes that topographies of the hidden (entering into forbidden, mysterious orders) “belong to Kafka's models of thought that keep the imaginary present in everyday life”.
  • According to Sudau (p. 103) "the parable shows the accidental and yet seemingly fateful falling out of a certain order of people". "... a quick and final process leads from the self-confident and unsuspecting existence into a brief irritation and insecurity, which passes even more quickly into a stage of certainty of doom".

Quotes

  • [...] right from the first house people came out and waved to us, amicably but warningly, even frightened, stooped with terror.
  • She probably hadn't done the blow at all, and if she had done it, nowhere in the world will there be a lawsuit about it.
  • The room looked more like a prison cell than a farmhouse room. Large stone tiles, a dark gray bare wall, an iron ring walled in somewhere, in the middle something that was half cot, half operating table.

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Edited by Paul Raabe . Frankfurt am Main 1970. ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: Nachgelassene Schriften und Frage 1. Ed. By Malcolm Pasley, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-038148-3 , pp. 361-363.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: The blow to the yard gate  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Kafka Complete Stories S. Fischer 580, ISBN 3-596-21078-X , p. 404
  2. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 . P. 503
  3. ^ Franz Kafka Complete Stories, p. 393
  4. ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 503
  5. ↑ Sudau p. 101
  6. ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 55 ff.
  7. ↑ Stach 2004. p. 21