Walter Benjamin on Kafka

letter to Gerhard Scholem, 1938


Kafka's work is an ellipse with foci that lie far apart and are determined on the one hand by mystical experience (which is above all the experience of tradition) and on the other by the experience of the modern city dweller.  When I speak of the experience of the city dweller, I subsume a variety of things under this notion.  On the one hand, I speak of modern citizen, who knows he is at the mercy of vast bureaucratic machinery, whose functioning is steered by authorities who remain nebulous even to the executive organs themselves, let alone the people they deal with.  (It is well known that this encompasses one level of meaning in the novels, especially in The Trial.)  On the other hand, by modern city dwellers I am speaking of the contemporary of today's physicist...



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