Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany. By Barbara Hales. Oxford/Bern/Berlin/Bruxelles/New York/Wien: Peter Lang, 2021. xii + 206 pages. $62.80 paperback, $61.85 e-book.

Abstract

tion that binds them together with their positive force. It’s a little emblematic of how inessential the words can be, how much they lack of positive conceptual force, when we see how easily they can under certain circumstances vanish. The Muirs don’t find “frei” a distinctive enough reference to render as “free” in their translation of that chapter of Der Proceß. They choose “at ease” for their version (Willa and Edwin Muir translation, page 168 of the 1968 edition). Oschmann builds on the point that what we confront here is the condition of the petit-bourgeois individual under developed capitalism in his relationship to his work. Josef K. goes to his office at the bank to deal with the documents that locate other people’s money and determine the work that goes on in the world beyond. The land surveyor K. goes to the village to measure out other people’s land. He has to leave his home ground because in that profession, you don’t measure your own ground, or have a professional relation to it, any more than a bank official has a professional relationship to his own money. Such people are “free” in an extremely peculiar way, quite hard to penetrate. Critical minds among Kafka’s contemporaries, certainly going back to Georg Simmel, were the first generation to have made it their professional business to penetrate that exterior standpoint from which one might fail to know one’s own being. Kafka’s artistic achievement was not to document how his characters thought about freedom, but how they had lost the ability to do so and how they had lost the last whisper of tragic awareness when ground out of existence by this inability. Simmel appears in several of Oschmann’s footnotes, as in fact do other figures who could have lent a better framework to this enterprise if they had been intimately woven into the discussion. There has been a lot of interest in recent years in exploring the line of division between the being of animals and the being of human individuals in Kafka’s work. He explores the issue of freedom and estrangement most vividly and painfully in “Bericht für eine Akademie” with the case of Rotpeter, an ape who has acquired human speech, and therefore a human conception of freedom applied to the existence of an animal. Clearly, if we say an animal is free we have yet to open the meaning of the word for ourselves. Restricting this study to the three novels, Der Verschollene, Der Proceß, and Das Schloß as a sequential development in the three primary chapters does close out this theme, except for a general setting of the scene in the early pages and an all-too-brief addition entitled “Die Freiheit der Tiere?” (223–30) that brings it back at the end. In that apparent afterthought one can surmise a missed opportunity. Perhaps a second volume might make it up.