ABSTRACT
In July of 1923, the tubercular and feverish Franz Kafka found himself in the vacation town of Müritz, observing a group of “Eastern European Jews whom West European Jews are rescuing from the dangers of Berlin. Half the days and nights the house, the woods, and the beach are filled with singing. The children Kafka saw there were “healthy, cheerful, blue-eyed children,” according to a letter to Max Brod, but they were also “Hebrew-speaking, healthy, and cheerful,” according to a simultaneous letter to Robert Klopstock. The countryside is the antithesis of the city. In the dark, cold cities, in Berlin and Vienna and Prague, Jews “to the European have the same Negro face”. In the country, all the Jewish children from the East are suddenly transformed into beautiful, healthy little “blue-eyed” Germans. The patient must become his own jailer; he must acknowledge his own danger to the body politic through his own body.
