The drafting of troops

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The Troop Enlistment is a fragmentary prose study by Franz Kafka that was written in 1920 and published posthumously in 1931.

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Because of the endless border fighting, troops are often necessary. A young aristocrat goes into every house with some soldiers. All house residents must be present. Sometimes a person is missing “it's always only men”. The man is always found and whipped by the nobleman.

But there is also the case that strange women or girls crowd into other houses to raise troops. They are often encouraged to do so by those around them, but the nobleman never chooses them and with a punch of the soldiers they are chased away and they feel a deep shame.

If a stranger is found in a house, he can of course never expect to be included in the draft.

Text analysis

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Due to the lack of an introduction and the open ending, this prose piece can be described as a short story . The narrative perspective is not personified. The presentation is initially sober and the reader is immediately included in the conditions of the troop raising without further explanation. It is never about the future combat mission.

A nobleman with unlimited power who is described as physically weak selects subordinates, rejects others and punishes transgressions. The aristocrat hardly comes into direct contact with others and is perceived as decadent in his detached manner. The criterion for the selection seems to be exclusively the meeting of the subordinates in the correct, i.e. their own house.

No surreal processes are described in this short story, and yet the processes are cryptic . Instead of the troop members who are properly evacuated and who are not reported, the three categories of persons who interfere with the evacuation are described.

The situation of women is described in more detail, almost imploringly. The foreign conscription gains real power over them, they are enthusiastically received in the strange house, about them it is said: "and if you put your hand on someone's head, it is more than the blessing of your father". It is not discussed what the women in the troop actually expect for themselves. Do you want to join the fighting army, do you want to serve as a sutler ? Since they are rejected, they feel about it "a shame that our women may never feel otherwise". What is the essence of this shame and what does it mean for the further life of women? Does Kafka want to point out the exclusion of women from (then) public life?

The necessary suitability for military service at the border is never discussed during the excavation. Rather, it is a kind of “civil status survey”. A questioning or protest against the decision or against the penalties is not conceivable.

The aloofness of the law is increased to the extreme in the drafting of troops. Not only requests for relief are refused, but also man's greatest sacrifice, self-giving. Expressly: The strange girl does not act in self-love or in the hope of being noticed by the noblewoman, she was pure in every respect. But: The aristocrat does not look at anyone at all, man as a free being does not exist for him at all. Hence the feeling of shame, it is limitless shame that their willingness for nothing was respected. Knowledge of guilt could raise them up again, could make atonement possible. And she is limitlessly ready for atonement. But what is happening here is beyond guilt and atonement: It is not chased away because it has followed a wrong voice, but because there is no voice at all to speak to people. There are only mass levies that turn off every responsible self and even force those affected to hold out the whip to the punisher themselves.

Relation to other works by Kafka

The prose fragment is to be seen in connection with the pieces An Imperial Message , The Building of the Great Wall of China, and The Rejection . It was created under the influence of Kafka's preoccupation with Asian cultural history and Tibetan travelogues. It is about the social integration of the individual and his subordination to the dictates of a power apparatus with a mysterious nobility caste.

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka. All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe , Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka. Postponed writings and fragments 2. Edited by Jost Schillemeit, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, pp. 273–277.

Secondary literature

  • Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005.
  • Manfred Engel : Kafka and the modern world. In: Manfred Engel, Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Stuttgart, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 498-515, esp. 505-507.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 579
  2. ↑ Peter-André Alt pp. 579-580.

Web links

The drafting of troops