ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will explore directly Kafka’s own private “kitsch.” By that, I am referring to Kafka’s own personally inflected adaptations of popular, especially Eastern, Jewish culture. These include the adaptation of popularized Kabbalah, especially early Hasidism, as mediated to Kafka by individuals (Jirˇí Langer, Yitzchak Löwy) and through reading (e.g., of Martin Buber as the middlebrow mediator of Hasidic tales). Finally, this middlebrow popularized Kabbalah – Kabbalah itself already marked as heretical and anti-hegemonic – made it possible for Kafka to rework discursively not only his own Judaism (both as culture and religion) but also his (less wellknown) gender ambivalence. In this mode, Kafka’s textual and personal denials of Jewish knowledge
operate according to a logic of dissimulation.4 No doubt, such dissimulation was also capable (paradoxically, perhaps) of resulting in Jewish
“dissimilation,” i.e., anti-assimilationism. The objective of such dissimilation was to achieve a certain authentic Jewishness. At the same time, this dissimilation acknowledged its own inherent rhetoricity, thus enabling Kafka to reinvent Judaic traditions by means of a discursive self-awareness. From his first longer work, “Das Urteil” (The Judgment, 1912) to his final one, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse” (Josefine, the Singer: Or, the Mouse-Folk, 1924), Kafka’s narratives are characterized by a sense of irony and nuance, even comedy. And it is by such means that Kafka came to terms with “his role as a writer in and for the ‘Volk’ of assimilated Jewish Germans.”5
