A Circle

Franz Kafka lived in Berlin from September 1923 till March 1924, the twilight of his life; a time of hyperinflation and general upheaval in Germany. Dora Diamant, the young Berlin-based woman he’d met in the summer of 1923 while vacationing on the Baltic, came daily to attend to him — first on Miquelstrasse, then on Grunewaldstrasse in the woody suburb of Berlin-Steglitz. By the end of January 1924, financial constraints and Kafka’s deteriorating health —he’d been diagnosed with TB seven years prior — necessitated their living under one roof. They moved into two rooms on the ground floor of a house at Heidestrasse 25-6, subsisting for the most part on Kafka’s modest pension.  

Kafka had been striving to live out his dream of freedom in the city he’d longed to reach: studying Hebrew, attempting to read a heavy, early modern Hebrew novel by Yosef Haim Brenner, receiving visitors, making the trek from the suburbs by tram to the Academy for the Study of Judaism to take classes in Jewish history and scripture, and also writing — stories and letters. Only a few of these stories have survived. The tone in the letters is largely more hopeful than circumstances warranted. By winter of 1924, his health, already poor, was in rapid decline. 

Early in March Dr. Siegfried Löwy made the trip to Berlin from Triesch in Moravia to check on his nephew’s condition. Franz wrote to his friend Robert Klopstock to say he’d soon be returning to his parents’ apartment in Prague and from there would likely relocate to a sanatorium in the Vienna Woods: “A temperature of 100.4 has become my daily bread and on account of the fever I have not been out of the house for weeks.” Uncle Siegfried advised going directly to a sanatorium in Vienna or Davos. It was Franz who insisted on first going home to his parents, and his closest friend, Max Brod, who brought him from Berlin to Prague, where he stayed for three weeks. 

On April 7 Kafka travelled with Dora to the Wienerwald Sanatorium, 40 km southwest of Vienna, where doctors tentatively diagnosed the spread of tuberculosis to the larynx. Wienerwald was not equipped to treat the condition and he was transferred to the university clinic in Vienna. There the diagnosis of laryngeal tuberculosis was made official. On April 19 he was brought to Hoffmann Sanatorium in Kierling, northwest of the capital, and cared for till the end by Robert Klopstock — who deferred his medical studies for Kafka’s sake, and Dora, in whose arms he succumbed on June 3. On May 11 Max Brod visited his best friend for the last time. Franz discouraged his parents from making the journey: “I am not at all a sight worth seeing,” he wrote to them … “If you count in the fact that I am only allowed to speak in whispers and even that not too often, you will gladly postpone the visit.” That he wrote “postpone” was likely not an indication that he expected to get better.  

During the three-week layover at his parents’ apartment, Kafka wrote his final story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” He asked Max to look into getting the story published. Brod gave the story to their mutual friend Otto Pick who used his influence with the editor-in-chief at Prager Presse, Prague’s German language press, and the piece appeared in the Easter supplement on April 20, 1924. Josephine helped out a little in defraying costs at the Hoffmann Sanatorium.

The story of Josephine features a female protagonist (one of only two Kafka stories to do so) and an unnamed narrator who introduces the singer in the first sentence. Both are members of the mouse folk and although Josephine is the focus of the story, she doesn’t have a speaking part. It is the narrator who speaks and he’s full of contradictions. “Josephine the Singer …” recalls Franz Grillparzer’s 1848 novella The Poor Fiddler — a story that had once meant so much to Kafka, though he also wrote of being “ashamed of it” … for its defects … “as though he had written it [himself].” In “Josephine,” the narrator relates that the singer doesn’t actually sing, but rather pipes or whistles and yet is able to turn this ‘mere’ piping into art through her unwavering faith in her artistry. The mouse singer, like Grillparzer’s poor fiddler, are both defined by unwavering faith and love for their art, though in the assessment of the narrators in both stories their talent is questionable. Both stories also feature doubling: two protagonists who have something in common, like two sides of the same coin. And in both stories the artists are frail: the singer is little and weak; the fiddler old, his instrument broken. He’s also branded with ‘womanish weakness’ by the tough woman he loves; she calls him an “effeminate man.” The poor fiddler and the mouse singer, as well as the narrators in the two stories, all reflect aspects of Franz as he saw himself. 

Kafka’s high standards for art, his ambivalence concerning the merit of much of his own, his professed weaknesses and lack of musicality, are represented in his waffling throughout the mouse story. Josephine is admired by her people, considered a treasure. With her rare singing ability, which no others in her community have displayed, she helps the mouse people tolerate their hard lives. Yet some of her people do not like her, and do not believe she’s truly singing. As for Josephine herself, only a particular kind of audience appreciation is gratifying to her. ‘Mere’ admiration for her artistry is insufficient.  

In “Josephine” Kafka also broaches the issue of the artist’s responsibility for earning a living, a matter he likewise addresses in a short, dense, largely unknown, untitled piece he wrote not long before the mouse story — perhaps in a vein of exploration leading to the longer tale. Both pieces appear at the end of volume two of Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (Writings and Fragments from the Estate) published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1992. The burden of earning a living, which preoccupied Kafka throughout his adult life, was only brought to fictional expression at the end of his life, in the perambulating tale of “Josephine,” which he felt pressured to publish in order to cover costs at the sanatorium.  

Josephine — as Kafka’s mouthpiece — believes that she should not bear any responsibility for earning her keep: as an artist, she should be provided for, supported by her people. The mouse folk, however, think differently, and refuse to exempt her from the work of earning a living; singing doesn’t count. In retaliation for her people’s contraposition, Josephine disappears just when she’s set to perform. And this time, the narrator relates, she disappears for good. 

At the end of the story, we’re told that Josephine will soon be freed of her earthly torments: She will lose herself happily among the numberless host of her people’s heroes, and, in the last line — redeemed and transfigured — will be forgotten, like all her brethren. This seems 

to be Kafka’s pronouncement on the fate of the mouse / artist, himself included, as he lay dying. In the penultimate paragraph, however, the narrator (wishfully or presciently) offers an alternate possibility: Perhaps, the mouse people, in their wisdom, have placed Josephine’s song on such a high pedestal, because in this way it could never be lost; not forgotten. 

In his final story, written when he, like Josephine, could hardly more than whistle or whisper, Kafka presents, in thick dialectical mode, through the dual-voices of Josephine and the narrator, questions about the life and work of the artist. What makes an artist? What constitutes art? Who is it for? How does it serve? What is the relationship of art to audience, art to legacy? What is the role of the nation in art, the relationship of the individual artist to his or her people / folk / nation / brethren? What is indicated by redemption / salvation / transcendent freedom / transfiguration? These words — chosen by different translators for last words (“gersteigerter Erlösung”) in the last lines of Kafka’s last story — sit like gordian knots. 

*** 

The story of Josephine has a personal resonance. In 2012, a year after I presented ‘dead mentor’ Franz Kafka’s life and work for the final assignment in the Biography as Art course I was taking, the instructor, Regine Kurek — artist and teacher par excellence — brought for me a gift from her summer vacation with her husband Jef. She looked slightly sheepish in handing me a thick, circular, gold-foil wrapped piece of chocolate with KAFKA written on it in diagonal block letters — the grave face of the author stamped into a small vesica piscis shape on the side of the wrapper. 

— “This is for you,” she said, “a souvenir from Prague. But somewhere along the way, probably while we were still in Prague, it seems to have been bitten into by a mouse! I only noticed when we got home and unpacked. I was considering not giving it to you — who wants to get a piece of chocolate that’s been bitten into by a mouse?! But then I thought, better to give it anyway. It’s the thought that counts. So here it is, mouse nibble and all.” She laughed, handing me the bitten-into gift; I couldn’t contain my surprise and delight. 

— “Regine,” I exclaimed, “thank you so much! This is amazing. Totally amazing. The last story Kafka wrote, at his parents’ apartment in Prague, only a few months before he died, was “Josefine die Sängerin, oder das Volk die Mäuse” — “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” A mouse story! (Regine was not familiar with the story.) This chocolate, bitten into by a mouse, feels like a gift personalized by Franz!” 

— “Well, so it is then,” said Regine, looking pleased to see me pleased. “It’s an almost perfect circle.” 

I didn’t ask her what she meant by that. Regine, whose mother tongue is German, has a distinctive way of expressing things, and sometimes it’s better to accept what a person says than to ask what is meant by it. I was just happy to have a mouse-nibbled, KAFKA-stamped gift of chocolate. I brought it home and put it in the vitrine in the kitchen: a keepsake, not to be eaten.    The nibble has crumbled a bit over the years, but it’s still there. A blessing for an ongoing quest.

I’ve thought about Regine’s words: “almost perfect circle.” The circle is the perfect figure — seamless — a symbol for total symmetry, the soul, the divine. And if it’s less than seamless, less than wholly circular — as in a round piece of chocolate that’s been nibbled by a mouse, it then becomes a whimsical indication of personalized connection. Perfectly imperfect. Imperfectly perfect. I like to think that that’s what Regine (and Kafka) meant.