Investigating Franz Kafka's "Der Bau": Towards an Understanding of His Late Narrative in a Jewish Context by Andrea Newsom Ebarb (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Investigating Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau”: Towards an Understanding of His Late Narrative in a Jewish Context by Andrea Newsom Ebarb
• Pamela S. Saur

Andrea Newsom Ebarb, Investigating Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau”: Towards an Understanding of His Late Narrative in a Jewish Context. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023. 266 pp.

Franz Kafka’s unfinished thirty-nine-page story “Der Bau” (published post-humously in 1931), is one of his “lesser-known” works, but it has elicited a wealth of diverse and illuminating scholarly studies, including the 2023 book at hand, Investigating Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau,” an insightful, thoughtful, and well-researched volume based on a dissertation by Andrea Newsom Ebarb. While focused on a single short story, her volume also includes some background information on Kafka’s life, oeuvre, and significance. The story’s protagonist is a creature of unnamed species, perhaps a badger or mole. Critics have advanced many interpretations of the story; the most common avenue of approach is to see the animal as representing Kafka himself and its lifelong task of building and maintaining a burrow as Kafka’s laborious processes of writing, revising, and editing.

The story belongs to Kafka’s group of literary works featuring fictional animals, most of which challenge critics by displaying varied blends of human and animal attributes. The hero of “Der Bau” is a furry mammal with claws, but he possesses cognitive, emotional, and possibly spiritual abilities that enable his story to be told. He also develops relationships (chiefly involving his assumptions of enmity toward him on the part of other creatures). He builds, repairs, organizes, and decorates his burrow home and its storage areas, conducts hunting expeditions, and manages his food supply. His actions [End Page 119] and reflections display more understanding than the mere instinctual behavior expected of all members of his species.

In a sense “Der Bau” is the simple story of one creature, his home, and his work struggling for food and shelter. Yet as Ebarb’s book and other commentaries tell us, his life, particularly his inner life of emotion and thought, is quite complex. Moreover, Ebarb indicates that her explication does not offer the final word on the story, as we glean from the word “Investigating” in the book’s title, and the phrase “Towards an Understanding of” in its subtitle. Both wordings indicate that study and analysis of the story should and will continue. In the last sentence of the book, Ebarb concludes, “Although I offer a primarily Jewish reading of Kafka’s late narrative, my hope for this work is that it will serve as the passage of something beyond by creating a starting point for future interpretive analysis of the biographical and literary Kafka, which may also include the possibility of a Zionist reading of ‘Der Bau’” (248).

The five main chapter titles all point to perceptions of the burrow, whether on the part of us readers, the author Kafka, or the animal and his obsession with his it; the chapters are titled “Seeing the Burrow,” “Hearing the Burrow,” “Experiencing the Burrow,” “Typifying the Burrow,” and “Understanding the Burrow.” Each chapter has six to twelve specific and intriguing subtitles. The chapter on seeing relates the burrow’s structure to a labyrinth, panopticon, and prison. The chapter on hearing discusses the animal’s love of silence and obsession with identifying and finding the sources of the threatening sounds he hears in his burrow. Scientific information on “the Nature of Sound” is also included. An interesting segment of “Experiencing the Burrow” presents several passages expressing the animal’s fervent interest in owning and benefiting from his burrow home and fear of losing it (deterritorialization).

The main subject of the book’s last two chapters is “a primarily Jewish [and not Zionist] reading” of “Der Bau.” Ebarb offers some explication of Kafka’s own mixed attitudes and beliefs regarding Judaism and brings out relevant passages in the story that support such a reading. She provides some facts about Kafka’s Jewish identity and his family and community ties to the faith and knowledge of its doctrine, while also noting that many scholars have called him a “nihilist” or a “negative” or “reluctant...