Amerika by Franz Kafka

First published: 1927 (English translation, 1938)

Type of work: Magical realism

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Chiefly New York City and unspecified environs

Principal Characters:

• Karl Rossmann, the novel’s young hero from Prague, dispossessed by his family and adrift in America
• The Stoker, the first of Karl’s ambiguous friends and guides
• Uncle Jacob, Karl’s well-to-do uncle, owner of the Jacob Dispatch Agency
• Robinson, and
• Delamarche, immigrants (one Irish, the other French) and unemployed mechanics whom Karl meets along his pilgrim’s progress
• Grete Mitzelbach, formerly of Prague, like Karl, and now the manageress of the Hotel Occidental
• Therese Berchtold, the manageress’ secretary
• Brunelda, an enormously fat singer

The Novel

The plot of Amerika is deceptively simple, following a young immigrant’s adventures from his arrival at New York Harbor to his “disappearance” on a journey to Oklahoma. The novel remains unfinished, yet it is paradoxically complete. Karl Rossmann’s adventures—or rather his misadventures—begin even before he steps ashore. After seeing the Statue of Liberty (through Franz Kafka’s surrealistic imagination, Liberty’s torch is supplanted by a sword), Karl goes below decks to retrieve his umbrella. In typically Kafkaesque fashion, this simple act develops into a complex odyssey: He loses his way and, as a result, meets the Stoker, the first of many ambiguous guides and fellow sufferers. After listening to the Stoker’s litany of wrongs suffered, Karl accompanies him to the ship’s office, where the authorities’ indifference prompts Karl to advocate the Stoker’s case. That Karl should speak with such assurance about a man he hardly knows appears entirely natural given the dream logic of Kafka’s seemingly realistic novel. In such a world, where sudden and comically absurd appearances are the norm rather than the exception, it is equally natural that his defense of the Stoker should lead Karl to his wealthy Uncle Jacob (or a man who believes Karl to be his nephew). In Kafka’s fiction, everything is plausible and everything is in doubt.

The nearly penniless immigrant is thus saved—ironically and momentarily, for Uncle Jacob’s protection is a mixed blessing. Even as he shields Karl from all the harshness of the immigrant experience, Uncle Jacob in effect imprisons his nephew in his house. He deprives Karl of any chance of freedom and demands total submission to his authority. When Karl chooses to accept an offer to spend the might with one of his uncle’s business associates, Uncle Jacob banishes him from his house, his protection, and his sight. He watches Karl make his own choice and then suffer the consequences of his own decision, without first warning him of the effects. Driven from his uncle’s house as he had been driven from his parents’, Karl finds himself once again adrift and uncertain. In this state, he is easy prey for the two immigrant tramps, an Irishman called Robinson and a Frenchman called Delamarche. The tramps seem to befriend Karl, only to betray his trust repeatedly as they travel together to Butterford, the land of milk and honey and well-paying jobs that they never reach. Instead, Karl finds temporary refuge at the Hotel Occidental, where he comes under the patronage of Grete Mitzelbach, the hotel’s manageress. Grete, like Karl (and Kafka), is a native of Prague. With her help, he becomes a lift boy, a position that gratifies Karl even as it makes him a virtual slave in the complex organization of the vast hotel.

Clearly, Amerika is not a Horatio Alger story of rags to riches and virtue rewarded. Dismissed for reasons that the head porter says are too serious to be specified, Karl once again takes up with Robinson and Delamarche, whose situations have visibly improved since their chance meeting with a wealthy and enormously fat singer, Brunelda. When he learns that he is destined to be one of Brunelda’s servants, Karl balks. With no better prospects, however, he stays on until he chances upon a placard advertising positions with the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. Karl goes to the Nature Theatre’s temporary recruitment center, accepts a vaguely defined position as “technical worker,” and continues on his way—this time toward Oklahoma, which is less a state of the union than a state of mind or, better, a state of Karl’s and Kafka’s absurdly hopeful imagination.

Amerika does, therefore, have an ending of sorts. Because the novel’s plot is only apparently sequential, however, no conclusion is possible. In fact, the plot is recurrent and endless, the playing of the same basic situation over and over, a comic reenactment of Albert Camus’ existential reading of the myth of Sisyphus. In Kafka’s telling, the boy is banished from his home (and from the certainty and stability his home represents), goes in search of something more certain and more permanent, and, with the help of a benefactor (Uncle Jacob, for example, or the manageress), finds home, only to lose it as before. Traduced and yet again an outcast, Karl searches ahead for what he has lost behind him or perhaps never had—except as a dream or a delusion.

The Characters

The novel’s uncertainty, or doubleness, is implied in Karl’s surname. As Rossmann, he is both horse (in German, Ross) and man (Mann), animal and human, flesh and spirit. Fifteen or sixteen years old (Kafka was inconsistent on this point), Karl is both a child and an adult. He is a sympathetic figure insofar as he seeks to be just and to be treated justly, yet he is comical as well in his naivete and in his pompous, ill-founded certainties. Although banished from his home for having fathered a child by a maidservant, Karl is, in fact, more child than man and less the seducer than the one seduced. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the novel as the ever-hopeful, ever-trustful man-child succumbs to the charms not only of women but of all of his guides and benefactors as well. In a sense, Karl is doomed by his own will to believe, by a religious sensibility that makes him yearn for something more than he has, something finer and more final. Not entirely innocent, he is also not exactly guilty—whether the accusation is that of fathering an illegitimate child or shirking his duties as a lift boy. Ultimately, Karl is an undefinable being, the perfect hero for a novel of comic absurdity, a hero whose quest is less Odyssean than adolescent and whose nature is at once naive and perverse, malleable yet intractable. As the half-maternal, half-sensual manageress tells him, “You’re very obstinate, when people mean well by you and try to do you a good turn, you do your best to hinder them.”

The reader may well agree, but—unlike the manageress—the reader will nevertheless have considerably greater difficulty in defining Karl. The entire novel, and the last two chapters in particular, make clear that Karl is searching not only for a home but for himself as well. He is looking for a role that will make him feel more secure, more at home in the vast and nameless void that Kafka has here chosen to call Amerika. Knowing this, the reader can better understand the appeal of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: not money (wages are never discussed or even mentioned) but, as the placard proclaims, “Employment for everyone, a place for everyone” (with the emphasis on place). The exact role Karl is meant to play in this Nature Theatre is left as vague as the nature of the Theatre itself, which combines aspects of the Christian afterlife, a vast carnival, a settlement company, a confidence game, a volunteer army of the unemployed, a relief agency, a quack religion, and an amateur theater on a national scale.

By the end of the novel, Karl has in a very real sense simply ceased to exist. Following the novel’s relentless dream logic, Karl is too shy to give the recruiters his own name and provides them instead with “the nickname he had had in his last post: ‘Negro.’” (This post and this name are the subjects of a chapter Kafka may have imagined but never actually wrote.) In this way, Karl, still hoping to fulfill “his old daydream” of becoming an engineer, is transformed into “Negro, technical worker,” some hybrid of Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim, of citizen and outcast, free man and slave. It is unclear whether this second issue of illegitimacy engendered by Karl marks the loss of his true self or instead constitutes a way of preserving it by keeping his essential self hidden under this pseudonym. What is less ambiguous is the fact that another of Karl’s desires remains as strong as ever: “Besides, he kept on telling himself, it was not so much a matter of the kind of work as of establishing oneself permanently somewhere.” Karl finds himself—or at least hopes to find himself—by losing himself in the vastness and variety of America itself. In this way, he proves to be just what Kafka called him in the novel’s working title, Der Verschollene: the boy who disappeared. Easily distinguishable from all the novel’s other characters, Karl is also quite like them with his immigrant status and all that it implies. Thus Karl, the only protagonist in a Kafka novel to have a complete name (the others are known simply as “K” and “Joseph K”), becomes an Everyman and, by virtue of his disappearance, a No-man as well—perhaps the only kind of Everyman still possible in these modern times.

Critical Context

Amerika (the title appended by his friend and biographer Max Brod) is Kafka’s least overtly parabolic work and his most realistic fiction. It is, nevertheless, decidedly Kafkaesque in that it portrays a world both comically and tragically absurd, a reality at once solid and dreamlike through which the hero, or more properly the antihero, appears condemned to an endless and probably fruitless search for some stable identity, some final goal, some imperishable meaning that may or may not exist. Kafka’s world is like his fiction: incomplete and labyrinthine, a world and a text in which certainty is what hero and reader desire and ambiguity is what they receive. Above all, Amerika, like all Kafka’s stories and novels, is deeply autobiographical in its origins and implications. Still, the novel easily outstrips the limits of autobiographical and psychoanalytical interpretation. It is a text that does not so much describe and dramatize as evoke and unsettle, leaving the reader in endless confrontation with its enigma.

Bibliography

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography, 1960 (second edition).

Gray, Ronald D. Franz Kafka, 1973.

Hayman, Ronald. Kafka: A Biography, 1982.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, 1984.

Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, 1962.