guilt - some reflections on Kafka's Judgement

Punishment is a theme frequently reoccurring in Kafka's works from Prozess to In der Strafkolonie, but nowhere is its nature revealed to us so clearly as in his short story Das Urteil. Here it is bound up in a seemingly paradoxical web of guilt and an arbitrary use of force. The first object of guilt for Georg is a friend that has emigrated to Russia. Georg ponders the situation of the friend who appears as his binary opposite: while Georg is taking over his father's business and making enormous profits, about to get married to a woman from wealthy background, his friend in Russia is living in poverty, sickness and social isolation without hope of ever finding a spouse. At this point we find Georg has kept all his success concealed from his friend and limited their correspondence to banalities. When he decides to report his engagement to the friend and goes to tell his father another object of guilt is revealed: Georg finds his fading father, already a bit senile, sitting in his dark room, his breakfast hardly touched and wearing dirty underwear (dirt is something that Kafka frequently associates with authority), so he starts to think that he has been neglecting his father and resolves to take better care of him. When he puts the father to bed, the story takes an abrupt turn. Just when the father seems completely passivized, he rises from his bed with fierce force:

»Nein!« rief der Vater, daß die Antwort an die Frage stieß, warf die Decke zurück mit einer Kraft, daß sie einen Augenblick im Fluge sich ganz entfaltete, und stand aufrecht im Bett. Nur eine Hand hielt er leicht an den Plafond. »Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte Kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich.

The usual situation of succession has been turned on its head: the fading father that is to be succeeded by his son - one might interpret the putting to bed as a symbol of burrial, especially since the father rejects the act with the words: "you wanted to cover me /.../ but I am not yet covered" - suddenly rises while the son fades. The seemingly powerless father becomes ever more energetic as his accusations accumulate, while his son is fading at the same pace. The energies of father and son are bound in a zero-sum game. The father reveals that he has been the informant of the friend and accuses Georg of betrayal. Another point of his accusation is the most paradoxical one, at one point it seems that the very fact of succession (which the father acknowledged as a fact of nature earlier in his seemingly passivized state) is a sin against the father:

Und mein Sohn ging im Jubel durch die Welt, schloß Geschäfte ab, die ich vorbereitet hatte, überpurzelte sich vor Vergnügen und ging vor seinem Vater mit dem verschlossenen Gesicht eines Ehrenmannes davon!

The verdict the father delivers at the end of his accusations is damning - death by drowning:

Und lauter: »Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch! – Und darum wisse: Ich verurteile dich jetzt zum Tode des Ertrinkens!«

Georg rushes out of the room to fulfill his sentence - he runs to a busy bridge and throws himself into the water, his last words being: "Liebe Eltern, ich habe euch doch immer geliebt"

The first question that merits an answer is what is the nature of the fathers' authority. The father has no means to force Georg to fulfill the verdict, certainly he can not use physical force, the most likely explanation seems that there is an agreement on guilt between them - the guilt Georg felt weekly when composing the letter to his friend and one that the father attached his judgement to. Yet when we judge this by conventional moral codes there is no real cause for guilt, rather for compassion: nothing in the story suggests that the friends miserable state is Georg's fault. The other sin, the sin of succession, is likewise not one of his own, if anything it is a sin of the father. The first sin, the one of doing well, is a consequence of Georg succeeding his father in business - again it seems the sin is on the side of the father. The only moral transgression Georg is objectively guilty of is his existence, for which the father acts at once as the actual perpetrator, judge and jury. The moment the father mounts the accusation is at the point when Georg is about to enter maturity (financial independence, marriage) and at which point he has become distinguishable from his heritage - hence only now the judgement can be spoken by the father without being spoken against himself. The judgement is a representative one - in it the son takes the role of the sacrificial animal, being slaughtered in place of the father.

The notion of guilt Kafka portrays is one that is perfectly in accord with the one Walter Benjamin attributes to capitalism in Capitalism as religion: "A situation that is so inextricable creates guilt." Benjamin's formulation is at least as puzzling as Kafka's. How can something that is inextricable - hence beyond responsibility of any and all involved actors - produce guilt, which feeds on responsibility. But this paradoxical situation is one that all Kafka's characters have to deal with when they face the law, be it Georg, Joseph K. or the man from the countryside. As Benjamin elucidates: "This cult [of capitalism] is thirdly culpabilizing. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a religion that does not atone but produces guilt. In so doing, this system of religion stands in the wake of an enormous movement. An enormously guilty conscience, which does not know how to atone, seizes on the cult, in order not to atone for its guilt but to make it universal, hammering it into consciousness until finally and above all God himself is included in this guilt, so as finally to interest him in atonement." This is exactly the world Kafka's story paints: a world in which individual actions are sundered from the moral framework, from guilt and atonement, and the law does not sanction individual actions but sanctions in spite of them. Guilt is something that has become universal, one is implied in it merely by being. And Kafka makes it absolutely clear that death is not a refuge from guilt. When Joseph K. dies he feels as if shame - but why should he feel ashamed, he always felt he was guilty of no crime - was to outlive him. Similarly the executioner in Strafkolonie is refused a cathartic death because of a malfunction in the machine. His failure is double: firstly he feels that he will not be able to uphold the commandement "be just!" and secondly he is refused to even justly punish himself for failing justice.

Das Urteil is a judgement on a world in which being is a sin. In the purest form it achieves what Brecht presumptuously ascribed to his epic theatre - it poses a moral problem in such a way that it cannot be interpreted away, it can not be reconciled by pure reasoning. It calls for action: only through action can the paradoxical strands of the story be woven into a whole, only social change can achieve what literary criticism must fail to do. The judgement Kafka here speaks is on the world that has made coldness its driving force - as Hannah Arendt noted, evil is banal, and as Adorno rephrased: everything that is banal is evil. We see Georg at the point of awakening from his moral solipsism and that is what the father means by saying that in being an innocent child Georg was an infernal human:

Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!

Georg was guilty of succession, he was guilty of perpetuating the social injustice and living in a moral vacuum - "bisher wußtest du nur von dir" - you knew of nothing but yourself! You have made the bourgeois principle of indifference your own and never questioned it! The world Kafka presents us is one where there is no innocence, or rather: where the greatest innocence is at once the greatest sin. A world in which a rupture has sprung up between success and achievement, a world that has reached its grotesque peak in the form of concentration camps where the only reason one survived was because someone else died. As Brecht had put it in To those who come after us:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance, I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost)