ABSTRACT
Given that Kafka was not a religious person, by normal standards, it may seem strange to focus on his ‘theology’. In his classic account Walter Benjamin (1977) warned that one of the most fundamental misreading of Kafka is to reduce his ideas to the ‘supernatural’. However, he also added that a similar misunderstanding would result by completely ignoring such an aspect of his work. The ambivalence of Benjamin largely reflects his own position between Marxist materialism and critical theory on the one hand, and explicit Messianism on the other, particularly evident in his famous ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’; a Messianism that is quite close to Kafka’s, visible in the closeness of Hebrew terms for ‘Messiah’ (moshoakh) and ‘land-surveyor’ (moshiakh), the presumed occupation of K., hero of The Castle (Sebald 1976: 47; Robertson 1985: 228).1
