An imperial message
An imperial message is a short parable by Franz Kafka that was written in 1917. It was published in advance in the Jewish weekly Selbstwehr on September 24, 1919 , 1920 in the anthology Ein Landarzt . The text is part of the posthumously published work on building the Great Wall of China .
content
The reader sees himself personally addressed as a single "pathetic subject". The emperor sent a message to him from his deathbed, whereby he had himself confirmed that the messenger reproduced it correctly. But this will never reach the addressee. He will not even get to the exit of the huge imperial palace, and certainly not be able to cross the gigantic empire. The parable ends with the reader turned to: "But you sit at your window and dream it up when the evening comes".
shape
The sentence structure of the parable is not shaped by the simple sobriety of other Kafka prose, but is elaborate and artificial. After a dramatic movement, with which the obstacles to conveying the message are performed, calm and thoughtfulness follow at the end. The aim of the text is to a certain extent the opposite of that of the parable Before the Law : the country man wants to get inside the law, while the emperor wants to send a message out from his palace.
Text analysis and interpretation
The parable contains the metaphor about the hierarchy of instances, which pushes itself as an impenetrable obstacle between people and their destiny. The meandering path that the messenger traverses points to the intricate channels of bureaucratic systems that Kafka was very familiar with from his profession as an insurance lawyer.
The addressee and the reader do not learn the content of the message. In the end, both of them only know that it is a dead man's message. A reference to the situation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at that time appears here. The parable was written four months after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Furthermore, the parable is a statement about problems of communication under the conditions of a labyrinthine world, whereby the failure of communication is shown. Their failure was also a frequent topic of war reports from the front during the time of the First World War .
The short prose piece can also be understood as a statement about Kafka's own writing. There is the writer who seeks success in the confusing, often faltering order of his manuscripts.
The last sentence is an enthusiastic, wistful paraphrase that does not seem entirely adequate to the emotion in connection with this message . He associates the image of a back figure of Caspar David Friedrich standing at the window - or the Kafka reader who waits in vain for the text message to be deciphered.
But the addressee also signals a wish and a betrayed expectation of a certain chosenness with regard to the message. The parable, dressed in a speech, aims at the reader's own area of life, at the truth that he is exaggerating his, as a rule, meaningless existence in his desires, in his imagination: the shine of the great one will one day cast a glimmer of his existence and rub off on it; he will gain wealth, prestige, fame; he will be noticed, envied, admired, and all the more because happiness has increased him of all people, the inconspicuous.
Quotes
- [...] how uselessly he struggles; he still squeezes through the apartments of the innermost palace; he will never overcome it; and if he succeeded in this, nothing would be gained; he would have to fight his way down the stairs; and if he succeeded in this, nothing would be gained; the courtyards would have to be measured; [...]
- Nobody gets through here, let alone with a dead man's message.
reception
Sudau (p. 118) emphasizes that the voice addressing the reader is loud scorn. The crazy hopes are reduced to absurdity by repeatedly using discouraging formulas. The futility of hope is made directly tangible.
expenditure
- Franz Kafka: All the stories. Paul Raabe Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
- Franz Kafka: The stories. Original version, edited by Roger Herms, Fischer Verlag, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
- Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag 1996, ISBN 3-10-038155-6 , pp. 280-282.
Secondary literature
- Cerstin Urban: Franz Kafka: Stories I. King's explanations and materials (Bd. 279). Bange Verlag, Hollfeld 2005, ISBN 978-3-8044-1726-7 .
- Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography . Munich: 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
- Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short prose / stories. 2007 ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 .
- Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. 1990, ISBN 3-463-43009-6 .
- Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus Kafka Handbook Life-Work-Effect. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sudau, p. 121.
- ↑ Stach p. 495
- ↑ Alt p. 516
- ↑ see vg p. 517
- ↑ Reiner Stach p. 496
- ↑ Peter-André Alt p. 516
- ↑ Sudau p. 119
Web links
- An imperial message in the Gutenberg-DE project
- An imperial message - text of the story spoken by Hans-Jörg Große
