Jackals and Arabs

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Jackals and Arabs is a short story by Franz Kafka that was first published in the monthly Der Jude (editor Martin Buber ) in 1917 and then included in the volume Ein Landarzt . It's an animal story about the search for purity, greed and parasitism.

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The narrator, a man from the north, sits with his companions and the Arab escort team in an oasis and tries to fall asleep. Suddenly a pack of jackals appears and one speaks to the narrator. The jackal receives him like a chosen one who has long been hoped for. He was called to free the jackals from the Arabs described as repulsive; disgusting in their appearance, but mostly from killing and bleeding animals. The narrator is supposed to cut the necks of the Arabs with small rusty sewing scissors that another jackal wears on his canine.

The arrival of the Arab caravan leader ends the scene by swinging his huge whip at the jackals. He knows the jackals very well and he tells the narrator that they perform this spectacle for every European. He calls the jackals true fools, but also beautiful dogs. Then a fresh camel carcass is brought here. The jackals greedily pounce on him and tear him apart so that his blood gathers in smoking pools. Even with lashes, they cannot be driven away. In conclusion, the Arab says to the man from the north: “... Wonderful animals, aren't they? And how they hate us! "

Interpretative approaches

Judaism

The present story was reprinted in the monthly magazine Der Jude, along with A Report for an Academy . This suggests that it is related to Jewish life and thought.

To the chagrin of the jackals, the Arabs stab the wethers, which refers to Jewish (but also Muslim) slaughtering .

The jackals symbolize the Jewish people. This connection of thoughts also exists with other writers ( Heine , Döblin ) and especially with anti-Semites such as Oswald Spengler . The jackals live parasitically within a host colony , from which they feed without hunting themselves. Kafka looks at Judaism from the outside and with irony in an almost anti-Jewish manner, in that the Arabs are described as far superior masters and the jackals as cringing. Their high demand for purity breaks and is immediately corrupted by a lure.

The jackals 'waiting for the man from the north is described as the Jews' waiting for the Messiah . This man is in a similar role to the traveler from the story In the Penal Colony ; he experiences the archaic, but without his own evaluation and without consequence.

Stach particularly emphasizes the anti-Jewish element, demonstrated by the use of disparaging animal metaphors for the Jewish people, whose rebellion against the hand that nourishes them should not be taken seriously. The Arabs, on the other hand, appear as the superior race, as host people, who tolerate the jackal only as a garbage collector and clown next to them. Reuss sees that the wording of the first paragraph shows that the narrator is consistently rejecting the messiah role that the jackals hope for him and is indifferent to what is going on.

Biographical background

Kafka himself strived for a life purified of instincts as a condition for his writing. At Milena Jesenská but he wrote in 1920: "Dirty I am endlessly dirty, so I'm doing such a cry with purity." The fact that "dirt" especially - but not only - referred to the Sexual explains why (from the time of displacement and damnation of the sexual). The elementary greed that is portrayed in the story lets everything else be forgotten and turns the call for purity into a hollow attitude . Here, too, one of Kafka's themes emerges, the failure of a self-imposed goal.

Kafka also described the uninhibited bloodlust shown here in the prose piece An old sheet as a characteristic of the uncivilized but powerful and mentally superior nomads.

The editor Martin Buber voted for the present narrative and a report for an academy to be presented under the name Parables , but Kafka refused, for him it was simply two of his animal stories. He did not want to draw the reader's attention too directly to the layer of meaning behind the title and not give a clue as to which way the “desired” interpretation can be found.

expenditure

  • Jackals and Arabs. In: New German storytellers. Edited by J. Sandmeier. Vol. 1. Berlin 1918, 223-240.
  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Edited by Paul Raabe . Frankfurt am Main, 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X
  • Franz Kafka The Stories Original version Fischer Verlag 1997 Roger Herms ISBN 3-596-13270-3
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 270-275.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: Jackals and Arabs - full text of the narrative after the first edition  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alt 2005, p. 518
  2. ↑ sv p. 519
  3. ↑ Stach 2008. p. 198
  4. ↑ Roland Reuss: Kafka's sentences (28): The Messiah of the Jackals . In: FAZ , August 5, 2008. Retrieved June 7, 2013. 
  5. ↑ Stach 2008. p. 197.
  6. ↑ sv p. 521
  7. ^ Sv p. 520
  8. ↑ v. Jagow / Gelber p. 299
  9. ↑ Stach p. 201