Kafkas Zeiten ed. by Alexander Kling and Johannes F. Lehmann (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Kafkas Zeiten ed. by Alexander Kling and Johannes F. Lehmann
• Ruth V. Gross

Alexander Kling and Johannes F. Lehmann, eds., Kafkas Zeiten. Forschungen der Deutschen Kafka-Gesellschaft 7. Edited by Agnes Bidmon und Harald Neumeyer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2023. 378 pp.

The edited volume Kafkas Zeiten, a compilation of the papers presented at the eighth meeting of the Deutsche Kafka-Gesellschaft that took place, partially at the University of Bonn and partially on Zoom, from September 30 to October 2, 2021, joins the vast number of anthologized studies dealing with Kafka’s texts. It includes seventeen papers and ends with reviews of eight books dealing with Kafka that appeared between 2020 and 2022. The subject of the conference, and thus the title of the volume, points in two distinct directions: (1) to the times in which Kafka lived and wrote; and (2) to the way we experience time as an irregular and imprecise concept in many of Kafka’s texts. In other words, the subject of this book conjoins examinations of time in Kafka’s texts with the culture of modernism and its perspectives on time. The powerful new technologies that transformed the way people thought [End Page 121] about time and space and created much of the disorientation in modernism and its art forms have been a recurring subject in Kafka studies. This volume foregrounds that theme.

Alexander Kling and Johannes F. Lehmann, the co-editors, co-authored the first chapter explaining their intention for the volume. Titled “Aus den Fugen,” it reminds us that time in Kafka’s texts is not a reliable measurement but is instead often an impediment to action. Comparing the concepts of space and time as mutually relevant conditions of modernist texts, especially Kafkan texts, the authors present examples to demonstrate how they work together, how accelerated time necessarily brings about a shrinkage in space. They also point out that in Kafka’s world structural elements that we associate with time, like routine or repetition, are often brought to a “standstill” by an important but often ordinary event, like Gregor’s awakening out of “restless” dreams in Die Verwandlung.

A volume like this offers commentary on various texts, and readers will most likely not read the book from cover to cover but rather approach the volume by selecting certain essays that might appeal to their own interests in one or several particular works of Kafka. In my own case, I was drawn to the essays on works that I often teach or have written about, such as Anne Fuchs on “Posthumane Figurationen von Beschleunigung: Tempo und Bewegungseuphorie in Kafkas ‘Betrachtung’”; Rolf J. Goebel’s “Zeit und Klang: Kafkas auditive Atmosphären”; Lea Liese’s “Philiströses Zeitempfinden und Raubtier-Kapitalismus: Kafkas Arbeitstiere (‘Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,’ ‘Der Bau’)”; David Fuchs on “Hungerkunst als Zeitkunst: Zur Darstellungsproblematik ästhetischer Performanz in Franz Kafkas ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’”; and Kyung-Ho Cha’s “Die Zeit als medialer Aktant in Franz Kafkas ‘Eine alltägliche Verwirrung.’” Only the last was a disappointment and failed to provide new insights. The author’s lack of research into key investigations of that specific posthumous Kafkan text—among them my own—might have helped him to extend the discourse rather than repeat it.

I had just finished reading Rolf Goebel’s contribution, in which, among other Kafkan texts, he discusses “Bericht für eine Akademie,” when I happened to read David Brooks’s column in The New York Times of July 14, 2023, expressing his views on the progress and threat to humankind that artificial intelligence now poses. The idea that a machine has an intelligence that operates “vastly faster and superior to our own” disturbs Brooks. That notion brought me back to Goebel’s essay in which, at one point, he focuses [End Page 122] on the moment when Rotpeter, the ape, swigs down, against his better nature, a bottle of schnapps and as a result ultimately can emulate the sounds he has heard for many weeks from the sailors around him, by coming out with a human word: “Hallo!” Goebel reminds us of Kafka’s take on the advent of acoustical media like the telephone...