Our town is ...

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Our town lies ... (beginning of the text) is a prose piece by Franz Kafka , which was written in 1920, and which Max Brod gave the title The Rejection . It tells of a very remote town in which the authorities reject any request from subjects. It is one of the less interpreted Kafka works. Also entitled The rejection (but different contents) there is a short story from the published in 1913 anthology consideration .

content

A first-person narrator reports from his town, which is far away from the border on the one hand and the capital on the other and has no connection with the outside world. In the distant capital, dynasties may have been wiped out, even the city itself destroyed, without this having found any echo in the town.

The community is ruled by a civil service, the highest of which is the old chief tax collector, who decides on all matters. Order and intelligence services in the town are guaranteed by soldiers. However, they are actually not to be taken seriously, they do not speak the language of the residents and are more likely to scare children. They are not evil, but they are unbearable.

The narrator remembers how, as a child, he saw the residents, represented by a humble man, submit a petition to the city chief. After a fire in the poor district, tax breaks were hoped for. Not the chief tax collector, but a lower official then decided: “The request has been rejected. Move away. ”And so it was with every request in this city. And the residents are not at all disappointed about this, they can hardly do without this rejection. However, dissatisfaction creeps in among the young boys.

Form, text analysis and classification

The narrator is one of the city dwellers, but he seems to have a greater ability to classify the story in space and time than the others. He also doubts the legitimacy of the top official. But even he - like the other city dwellers - does not revolt against the circumstances.

The language is unspectacular. It is not the sober Kafka style in the face of horror. There is no horror either. The residents and the city council have come to terms with each other, it almost seems like a game from which you go home excited. The residents don't expect anything either, but they're not hopeless either. The dissatisfaction of the boys mentioned at the end could on the one hand give an outlook into changing times, on the other hand the dissatisfaction of young people is nothing spectacular and does not guarantee real change.

Gerhard Rieck sees the rejection as a central motif of Franz Kafka, which can be found in the whole work.

"On the abstract level, the rejection takes place particularly drastically in the castle , where the castle bureaucracy and the villagers deny the surveyor K. access to their area and community throughout the entire novel."

With regard to the narrative, Rieck points out how often, in detail and precisely how the rejection is described, while the subject of the request is only vaguely and unclearly mentioned:

"Finally he formulated the request, I think he only asked for tax exemption for one year, but maybe for cheaper lumber from the imperial forests."

Rieck, the motive of the dismissal of a number of other stories Kafka after about Give it up , The Bucket Rider , Testing , advocate , In the Penal Colony , Josefine and in all novels. In this context, Rieck quotes Günther Anders , for whom Kafka feels “not locked in, but locked out”. Rieck considers the motives of rejection, being excluded on the balcony and the observation of parental intercourse, the primal scene in Freud's sense, to be the basic elements of Kafka's trauma.

For the authors of the Franz Kafka Encyclopedia , rejection describes a ritual of petition and rejection that stabilizes political rule.

For Wilhelm Emrich, the colonel represents the “law of the world”, which demands “not only the sacrifice of all possessions, but above all the surrender of oneself”. “Therefore, the colonel must 'reject' all requests from the population.” This is why Emrich sees the town's government as outside of any concrete political rule, as “withdrawn from historical change”, as “insurmountable” from the “rest of the world”. Emrich compares the colonel's government with the rule of officials in the novel “Das Schloss”, who would have to refuse any approach “unapproachable” and “impenetrable”.

“Because in the face of this law, this wall of the world, behind which there is nothing more, which closes the whole thing, either only complete surrender or only complete rejection is possible. The debt of existence can either only be paid off entirely by giving up existence or in the tax levies set by the government. ... For every piece of life that is lived, certain debts have to be paid. "

In this metaphysical sense, Emrich interprets the dissatisfaction of the young people at the end of the story as a missed hope for revolutionary changes that do not recognize that “no fulfillment in earthly life is possible”. In view of the “struggle for annihilation (it) of history”, she says, “the terrible truth” of the story is that peace must be paid for with the annihilation of all hope.

Further references to other Kafka factories

According to the Critical Complete Edition, the present piece was written between August and December of that year in 1920; the title "Rejection" comes from Max Brod , who published the text in 1936 in the description of a struggle. In 1937 the story was first translated into Czech by Hanuš Bonn . Similar to On the Question of Laws and The Troop Levy , “The Rejection of 1920” was created under the impression of reading Tibetan travelogues. The topic is the involvement of the individual and his subordination under the dictates of an apparatus of power.

Typical of these and related texts are the narrative "we" and the perspective of a distanced narrator, the chronicler of an unknown realm. There are also clear references to the stories that are three years older and refer to the Chinese Empire. The "Franz Kafka Encyclopedia" also mentions two texts that Kafka read during this time: the translation of a Chinese book of the dead and a report by Bertrand Russell on the political situation in Russia after the October Revolution.

There are also strong echoes of two pieces from the volume Ein Landarzt . An imperial message recalls the description of the vastness in which the town is lost. Likewise an old sheet ; there, too, the inhabitants have nothing to expect from the authorities, while their fate is developing fatefully. When it was turned down in 1920, however, the residents did not seem to have such a difficult fate, but they were also not aware that they could get any help from the authorities.

reception

  • Peter-André Alt (p. 580): "The descriptions of the struggle in the early works have turned into phantasms of a collective world in which Kafka's conception of closed social order systems, which fluctuates between hope and reluctance, is reflected."

Quotes

  • "It has developed since ancient times that the chief tax collector is the first official and the colonel does not follow this tradition any differently than we do."
  • "If the delegation comes before him with a request, he'll stand there like the wall of the world."
  • "It is an old custom that means something like: This is how he supports the law and this is how it supports him."

Web links

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: All the stories . Published by Paul Raabe , Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: Legacy writings and fragments 2 . Edited by Jost Schillemeit, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 261-269 u. 278 f.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rieck 1999. p. 81
  2. ^ Franz Kafka, Die Abweisung, BK 66,7, quoted from Rieck 1999. p. 81
  3. ↑ cf. Rieck 1999. p. 81
  4. ↑ Franz Kafka, Die Abweis, BK 66,7, quoted from Rieck: Kafka. 1999. pp. 82f.
  5. ↑ The ritual of petition and its rejection that is continually choreographed in Kafka's tale thus reveals itself to be an effective mechanism for reaffirming and stabilizing the power hierarchy and its concomitant oppression in the village: while providing the mass of citizens with psychological release, it simultaneously reinforces the absolute nature of the colonel's authority and validates his tyrannie over the village - despite the fact that there are no documents that underwrite or legitimize this authority.Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Rolf J. Goebel, A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia , article "Rejection"
  6. ↑ Emrich 1970 p. 209
  7. ↑ a b Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka, The building law of his poetry, p. 210
  8. ↑ Emrich 1970. p. 211
  9. ↑ Emrich 1970. p. 212.
  10. ^ A b Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Rolf J. Goebel, A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia, article "Rejection"
  11. ↑ cf. Kafka and Prague. November 1992. pp. 231f.
  12. ↑ Alt 2005. S. 579ff.
  13. ^ "During the construction of the Great Wall of China", "An imperial message", "An old leaf"