Kafka's other job
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Abstract
Kafka’s work, although it never mentions Job by name, has repeatedly been read in terms of this biblical figure who challenges the claim of divine justice in the face of human suffering. In recent decades, critics have pointed out fairly convincing, concrete and detailed similarities between Kafka’s work and the Book of Job. Most notably, Northrop Frye, in The Great Code, regards the writings of Kafka “as a series of commentaries on the Book of Job” and terms Kafka’s most famous novel, The Trial, “a kind of Midrash” on this biblical book.1 Other critics consider this novel “a conscious parallel of the Book of Job,”2 if not its “true” and even “indispensable translation,”3 argue that “in this novel Kafka pushes the perceptual dilemma of Job’s story to its unrelenting and catastrophic limit”4 and state that “the court in The Trial affirms the same set of moral values found in the Book of Job.”5 Indeed, Harold Fisch, who sees Kafka’s writings as “a profound and sustained attempt to render Job for modern men,” has noted that “the analogy with Job” has become “a commonplace of Kafka criticism.”6 The most radical and daring, but also contentious parallels between Job and Kafka, however, were drawn in the late 1920s and 1930s by a group of German-Jewish thinkers who drew on the Jewish textual tradition in their reflections on the fundamental predicaments of modern existence. These figures engaged and contested each other’s work, often echoing one other. Margarete Susman, in her 1929 essay “The Job Problem in Franz Kafka,” contended that no other modern work “carries as purely and deeply the traits of the age-old confrontation of Job with his God.”7 Likewise, Max Brod, both in his 1931 essay