ABSTRACT
Rarely has the representation of violence been more varied, complex, and instructive than in European literary Modernism. Rather than reducing violence to a means justified by its end, be it a classless society or a national community, literary modernists represent the relationship between modernity and violence in the age of two world wars in all of its ambiguity and contradictions. Their writings probe the disorienting experience of violence at home and at war for what it might reveal about social, political, and cultural effects of the process of modernization. A closer look at Franz Kafka’s story In the Penal Colony (1919) in particular demonstrates that modernist literature acknowledges violence as integral part of modernity and modernization without succumbing to the then-popular claim that war and revolution would cleanse and purify the human self and modern society of its decay and distortions. Instead of falling for this promise of violence, modernist texts like Kafka’s story continue to disturb readers by keeping the question of violence in modernity disturbingly open.
