The German Genius

with a hint of the dandy about him, he had trained in law and worked successfully in insurance. The only clue to his inner unconventionality lay in the fact that he had three unsuccessful engagements, two of them to the same woman.
    Kafka is best known for three works of fiction, Die Verwandlung ( Metamorphosis ; 1916) , Der Prozess ( The Trial ; 1925; posthumous), and Das Schloss ( The Castle ; 1926; also posthumous). But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; he wrote ninety letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several of between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him.
    Although Kafka’s novels are ostensibly about very different subjects, they have some striking similarities, so much so that the cumulative effect of Kafka’s work is much more than the sum of its parts. Metamorphosis begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” If a man is turned into an insect, does this help him/us understand what it means to be human? In The Trial, Joseph K. (we never know his last name) is arrested and put on trial. Neither he nor the reader ever knows the nature of his offense, or by what authority the court is constituted, and therefore he and we cannot know if the death sentence is warranted. Finally, in The Castle K. (again, all we are told) arrives in a village to take up an appointment as land surveyor at the castle that towers above the village and whose owner owns all the houses there. However, K. finds that the castle authorities deny all knowledge of him, at least to begin with, and say he cannot even stay at the inn in the village. Characters contradict themselves, vary unpredictably in their attitudes to K., or lie. He never reaches the castle.
    An added difficulty with interpreting Kafka’s work is that he never completed any of his three major novels, though we know from his notebooks what he intended. He also told his friend Max Brod what he planned for The Castle, his most realized work. All three stories show a man not in control of himself, or of his life. In each case he is swept along, caught up in forces on which he cannot impose his will, where those forces—biological, psychological, logical—lead blindly. There is no development, no progress, as conventionally understood, and no optimism. It is bleak and chilling. W. H. Auden once said, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Eerily, he also prefigured the specific worlds that were soon to arrive: Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Reich.
    So too did Lion Feuchtwanger. It is a pity that he is less well known now than Mann, Kafka, Hesse, or even Musil. Quite apart from his books, his life was in some ways exemplary: he escaped twice , in two separate wars, as a POW.
    Born in Munich in 1884, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, and a frequent traveler, Feuchtwanger found himself in 1914, at the outbreak of war, in Tunisia, then a French possession. He was imprisoned as an enemy alien but escaped, returned to Germany, and enlisted. His first real success was Jud Süss (translated as Power ), an exploration of anti-Semitism. Written in 1921, it wasn’t published until 1925 because he couldn’t find a publisher, though it became an immediate success.
    His masterpiece was Erfolg ( Success ), 1930, a roman à clef about Weimar Germany, where Johanna Krain, a young woman, seeks to secure the release of her lover, Krüger, from prison. He is a museum curator who has offended the Bavarian authorities by showing two controversial paintings, one of which is a nude. Krüger is tried for adultery with the woman who posed for the painting and for breach of public morality. Several well-known figures and institutions are identifiable in the book (Hitler, Brecht, IG Farben). Krüger dies in prison but not before Feuchtwanger exposes and predicts all the corruptions and specious