I had been driving for a long time when a friend called on my cell-phone. It's illegal to drive in Minnesota while holding a cell-phone to your ear and, so, I looked for a place to pull off the freeway. The highway was divided with a 65 mph speed limit and I knew the area: a couple years earlier I had tried a case involving a car crash at one of the crossroads in this rolling landscape of corn fields and small agricultural villages.
An implement dealership, apparently a purveyor of used farm equipment, occupied the southwest quadrant of the intersection where I turned from the freeway. This road has uncontrolled intersections, places where traffic freely enters and exits the divided highway (or passes across) and the traffic in this area proceeds on auto-pilot, people coming from work and making their customary lane-changes, accelerating and decelerating, without paying any real attention to their surroundings. It's a disposable tract of the country, a throw-away drive even though for someone not wholly familiar with the landscape, it's a pretty place -- wetlands tucked among the gently sloping hillsides blanketed with corn, neat shelter belts meandering between acreages, a far and high horizon that makes the passerby feel as if he or she were navigating a height of land with the limits of vision festooned with the gentle colossi of ceaselessly spinning wind turbines.
The harrows and plows and skeletal-looking planters in the yard by the highway looked much used and could probably be cheaply acquired -- it was low-tech stuff and there was no fence around the site and no shack for transactions. I pulled into the gravel loop curving between the rusting hardware. I had been traveling all day, from warmth in the Dakotas to cold melancholy rain that began a hundred miles earlier. Here, the rain had stopped and the roads were dry and the sky was cleft with places where light fell heavily, beams like colorless lintel stones dropping from the thresholds of the heavens and settling through the air like a rock sinks in water.
After a few minutes of inconsequential chatter, my friend quoted Kafka: "The messiah will come only when he isn't needed, not on the last day but the day after that." It was a startling remark and I wasn't sure that I heard him properly. I asked him to repeat the sentence. Tallow-colored stubble stood between hacked furrows that reached out like fingers to seize the horizon.
I wasn't familiar with the aphorism. As it happened, I had been studying Kafka’s Zurau aphorisms in a new, annotated volume by the writer’s best German biographer, Reiner Stach. (Stach’s Kafka is a comedian, more akin to Charlie Chaplin than Samuel Beckett – although Beckett had affinities with slapstick comedy as well.) I wondered how the aphorism matched those in the Zurau group.
Kafka's words about the messiah are not from the Zurau set (written when K– was recovering from his first serious bout with TB in the Bohemian countryside, that is, about 1917 - 1918). Rather, it was written quite a bit earlier. Here is the aphorism in German:
Der Messias wird erst kommen, wenn er nicht mehr noetig sein wird, er wird erst einen Tag nach seine Ankunft kommen, er wird nicht am letzten Tag kommen, sondern am allerletzen.
Or:
The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed – he will come one day after his arrival; he will come not on the last day, but rather on the day after that (or allerletzen on the ultimate or last day of the last days”).
What does this mean?
I can’t identify when the aphorism was written. It was published by Max Brod as part of something called Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande – that is “Wedding Preparations in the Country”, an unfinished novella that was part of K–‘s Nachlass. (This short incomplete work is important mostly because of one sentence, a precursor to Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which the protagonist of early narrative is imagined lying in bed in die Gestalt eines grossen Kaefers einen Hirschkaefer oder eines Maikaefers –“in the form of a large beetle, like a stag-beetle or a May-bug”.) “Wedding Preparations” was written sometime before 1909 – around Kafka’s 21st birthday, but this doesn’t help us with dating the aphorism, which is characterized as simply Nachlass – that is, something left over when the writer died and not published during his life. Your citation of the aphorism was very accurate as least as far as I can see. It is certainly not one of the Zurau aphorisms, numbered neatly on small sheets of paper and known to have been corrected and revised by the author repeatedly before he put the texts in the final (numbered) form. Nonetheless, several of the Zurau aphorisms have a bearing on the declaration about the messiah and illuminate it. Further, on stylistic and thematic grounds, I regard the “messiah aphorism” as a draft for one of the Zurau Zettel (scraps of paper) and most likely written between September 1917 and mid-year 1920.
The background of the Zurau aphorisms is Kafka’s first serious hemorrhage and his response to the diagnosis of tuberculosis, the disease that later killed him. Kafka had enjoyed good health until August of 1917, that is, until he was about 34.
Kafka, as is well-known, was a successful government lawyer employed by the Bohemian State workers compensation funds. (His first job for less than a year with Assicurazoni Generali, an Italian insurance company headquartered in Trieste, was a bad fit – interestingly, Kafka got this job through contact with the American consul in Prague.) Kafka was highly regarded and, in fact, promoted repeatedly until he was the head of a department by the time that sickness sidelined him 1922. Because he was extremely efficient and an excellent lawyer, the bureau tolerated his extended absences from work due to his tuberculosis. Kafka experienced his legal work as debilitating – that is, it tired him and kept him from his vocation. This is expressed in an amusing way in Zurau 34: His exhaustion is that of a gladiator after the battle; his work was the white-washing of a corner of the office where he worked. (Zurau translations are mine.)
In1916, Kafka’s sister, Ottla, was carrying on a love affair and had rented a tiny apartment on Gold Strasse (Street of the Alchemists) for rendevous with her boyfriend, Joseph David. I’ve seen this miniature house (Stach calls the place ein winziges Haeuschen – that is a “tiny, diminutive house” – winziges and the -chen on Haus form a double diminutive – and this is accurate to the way the place looks, a very cute stone cottage, Gothic, and extremely small.) The place is literally backed-up against the ancient wall surrounding the Prague Castle. Gold Strasse is the modern name for Gold-Macher Strasse – a “gold-maker” is an alchemist and this accounts for the other address sometimes given 22 Alchimistrasse. When Ottla wasn’t using the place for assignations, Kafka (who was paying half the rent) used the apartment as a retreat in which to write. It was at this location that Kafka that Kafka wrote part of The Trial and the short story, “A Country Doctor”. In April 1917, Ottla’s boyfriend , a soldier, was called up to the Front and so, she gave up the place. Kafka moved to the Schoenborn Palace where he rented rooms. Kafka believed that he was invincibly healthy at that time and, because coal was rationed as a result of the war, didn’t really heat his accommodations. (Kafka had told friends that he was immune to the common cold).
Early morning on August 11, 1917, Kafka suffered a near fatal lung hemorrhage in his clammy rooms at the Schoenborn Palace. Upon recovering, he traveled to Zurau, a Bohemian hamlet northwest of Prague. Ottla was living in that place. Kafka didn’t expect to stay there very long (he traveled without luggage) but, in fact, remained in Zurau for 8 months after his arrival on September 12, 1917. Kafka liked Zurau, thought the air was salubrious in that place, and felt that his health would be restored if he spent time in the country. Friends had encouraged him to seek treatment at a Sanitarium, but he resisted that idea, and thought he would do better in the open air of the Bohemian countryside. Stach publishes a picture postcard of Zurau as it looked in 1917 – the place consists of a Catholic church adorned with a typical Austrian bulb-shaped steeple surrounded by about 20 white-washed houses with steeply ridged roofs. Kafka was too young to apply for his pension from the Workers Compensation bureau, but he was granted an extended medical leave. It was in Zurau that he wrote “Report to the Academy” and “Eleven Sons” as well as the 109 aphorisms now named after the hamlet. The Zurau Aphorisms correlate to extensive drafts in a notebook and seem to have been revised over and over again until reaching a final form recorded on small numbered pieces of paper (Zettel, Stach calls them – that is “scraps of paper”). The notebook and the numbered sheets in Kafka’s handwriting are in the possession of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
(As is well-known, Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in 1943, either in the Lodz ghetto or Auschwitz – Ottla was killed in October 1943 after having volunteered to travel to Auschwitz from the KZ at Theresienstadt (Terezin) with a group of children sent there to be exterminated. Ottla’s marriage to Joseph David, a Catholic and the fellow that she used to meet in Goldmacher Strasse, was furiously opposed by Kafka’s father. The marriage turned out to be unhappy and, in 1942, Ottla and Joseph David divorced. The timing was bad: the divorce eliminated Ottla’s legal protection from persecution as a Jew and was, in effect, a sentence of death. By all accounts, Ottla was extremely courageous and admirable in every respect. There are two archives containing Kafka’s writings – one of them, amassed by Max Brod, is now preserved in Israel; Kafka’s surviving collateral relatives ended up in London and, in 1961, they donated the writer’s papers to the Bodleian Library, the place where the Zurau aphorisms are now kept. The Bodleian Library, according to its inventory, owns 6.04 linear meters of Kafka’s writing arranged in numbered boxes – the Zurau aphorisms are 103 leaves located in Kafka 43. Ironically, Kafka himself demanded that Max Brod burn all of his writings. But, in fact, almost nothing was destroyed and, further, almost everything miraculously survived the war – for instance, Kafka’s many letters to Ottla are kept in Israel and have been translated into English in the last decade. The Zurau aphorisms have become well-known in the last twenty years. Roberto Calasso’s book about Kafka K brought the aphorisms to a wider audience when his essay on them was published in Italy in 2002 and in the English-speaking world in 2005. Stach’s facsimile edition of the aphorisms with commentary was published in Germany in 2019 under the title Franz Kafka ‘Du bist die Aufgabe’, Aphorismen.)
Curiously, Franz Kafka turns out to have been a Jewish gnostic. At least, this is the tenor of his thought revealed in the Zurau writings. This is not particularly surprising – gnostic speculative strains of Jewish thought were prevalent in some circles (particularly Zionist) in the twenties; Gershom Scholem began his research into these topics a little after the date of Kafka’s death and both Brod and Walter Benjamin dabbled in the subject. (Scholem was no fan of gnostic Judaism and disliked heartily the Ma’aseh Merhabah - “the work of the chariot” ascetics, a celebrated Jewish gnostic commune roughly contemporaneous with the Nag Hammadi sect; Scholem said that the Chariot group represented the “greatest case of metaphysical anti-Semitism” known to him.) Kafka’s guiding concept is that the physical and material world is Boese – that is, “bad” or “wicked”. His contention was that each human soul contains an indestructible element (unzerstoebar) that is immaterial and that exists outside of time and space. Perhaps, it is not accidental that Kafka, trapped in what he perceived as a decaying body, should have sought refuge in an extreme form of idealism. For Kafka, nothing is real except the spark of the divine harbored in each soul. The objective of human existence is to achieve contemplation of this indestructible element and act in accord with its demands. Kafka had long felt that entanglements with women were destructive to his capacities as a writer. (All of Kafka’s extended narratives, his three unfinished novels, involve scenes in which the hero is beset by emotionally needy and sexually demanding women – that is, seductresses whose blandishments distract the principal character, either Karl Rossmann in Amerika or K in The Trial and The Castle from their missions.) This theme takes on a metaphysical complexion in the Zurau aphorisms – women remain associated with the seductions of the material world of time and space; but these temptations are to be renounced: as in St. Paul (the epistle-writing Christian missionary and not the city), there is “no good thing in (the) flesh” (Romans 7:18).
Kafka associates the Messiah with the divine spark immanent in every soul. Simply stated, the Messiah can’t come, because he is already here, and has always been present. This is an anti-rabbinical strain in Jewish gnosticism. I take the rabbinical concept to be that time and space are what we possess in this world, that the arrival of the Messiah in a literal manner isn’t imminent, and that we had best make good and lawful use of our actual resources in the here and now. (The great Jewish legal scholar Robert Cover, a professor at Yale, used to say that the “law is the bridge to the messiah, but that bridge must not be crossed”; Kafka’s notion is that the bridge, described in the aphorisms as a “tightrope” contrived more to cause us to stumble than fall, must be crossed and is, always, being crossed – cf. Zurau 5: “There’s no more retreat from a certain point along the way – this point is to be reached.” In fact, Kafka wavers on this subject: either the path to the Messiah described as “Ewigkeit” or Eternity is easy and sucks us upward effortlessly as maintained at 38 or, to the contrary, as in 26: Es gibt ein Ziel aber keinen Weg; was wir Weg nennen is Zoegern – “there is a goal but no way to that goal; what we name “the way” is hesitation.”)
Zurau 54 states Kafka’s gnosticism explicitly:
Nothing else exists other than a spiritual world; that which we call the world of the senses is the evil that exists in the spiritual – that which we name as evil is only the necessity of a moment of our eternal development.
This means something to the effect that the only thing that is essentially real is the world of the spirit. The world that we sense with our physical faculties is an aspect of evil, that is, an element that has fallen away from the perfection of the spiritual. We must pass through the physical world on our eternal pilgrimage to the spiritual plane that is our true home. (This sort of stuff sounds like Eckankar with its innumerable levels of spiritual enlightenment and its perfected spiritual Eck masters – when studying these aphorisms, you sometimes feel the need to apologize for Kafka.)
Zurau 62 is similar: The fact that there is nothing other than a spiritual world takes from us our hope, but imparts, as well, certainty. That is, we can’t hope for anything good in the world of time and space, but, at least, our hopelessness is consoled by certainty (that the painful physical world doesn’t really exist).
The spiritual world is indestructible, but, mostly, inaccessible.
At 69: In theory, there is a possibility of perfect happiness: to believe in the indestructible in us, but not to strive for it. Since the indestructible is not in this world – in drafts of this aphorism, Kafka calls it the Goettliche (“the divine”) that can not be possessed, since having and owning are aspects of the material world. Therefore, grace can not be achieved; if you strive for grace, you will be precluded from experiencing it. (These are ideas familiar to me as a Lutheran.)
The indestructible element in all beings is the basis for brotherhood or community: The indestructible is One; each individual human being is it and, at the same time, it is common to all – therefore, the matchless and indivisible connection between human beings. Note that Kafka avoids suggesting “possession” – he doesn’t say that human beings possess the indestructible; rather, he tells us that the essential nature of human beings is the indestructible: jeder einzelne Mensch ist es (“Each individual human being is it” – that is, indestructible or Unzerstoerbare.) Kafka insists throughout his aphorisms that there is no place for “possession” or “ownership” in the spiritual world – there is no “his” or “hers”; you can’t possess something that is wholly immaterial.
If the real world is wholly spiritual, it exists outside of space and time. All eschatological events are eternally existent – they are always happening. The Messiah’s advent and the end of time have already occurred, will always occur, and are always present.
Zurau 6: The decisive moment in human evolution is always underway. All revolutionary spiritual movements, which declare everything preceding them to be nothing, are correct: because nothing has yet occurred.
This means that the revolution is always underway – and, similarly, never complete. It is an eternal present. When the revolutionary declares that the past is futile, a record of injustice and error, he is speaking the truth inadvertently – nothing has ever occurred in a real way in the world of time and space because that world is illusory. There can be no development in history because there is no history: the fundamental facts of existence are unvarying, indestructible, and always present. In a draft for Zurau 6, Kafka writes: The history of mankind is the seconds between the steps of a wanderer.
The Messiah comes to redeem history. But history is a nullity – therefore, there is nothing to redeem. The Messiah’s advent is required by our mistaken notion that we were driven out of paradise as a consequence of our disobedience. But this is an error in thinking.
Zurau 64: The expulsion from paradise, in truth, is eternal. The expulsion from paradise is also conclusive, life in this world is unavoidable, but the eternity of these processes, makes it possible that not only could we remain perpetually in paradise but actually are there continuously whether we know it here or not.
Similarly Zurau 40: Only our concept of time causes us to name it “the last judgement”; actually, it is a tribunal perpetually in session. The word for the last phrase that Kafka uses is Standgericht, a term used for a “Court Martial” or “Drumhead” tribunal. But it would be misleading to use those terms in a translation of the Zurau 40 – Standgericht means, literally, a “standing court”, that is a court that always be convened because it is always in session. (The notion refers to the idea that law courts in the past were only periodically in session – this is different, of course, from our perception that tribunals are always open to litigants.)
These ideas are key to understanding Kafka’s aphorism on the arrival of the Messiah. The Messiah represents the divine and indestructible aspect of the Good in the spiritual world. Since this Good is “divine” and “indestructible”, it neither comes to be, nor does it pass away. The Messiah is always with us. (And, here is the basis of Kafka’s despair: the Messiah is always absent as well.) The Messiah can’t come while our conceptual world is dominated by materialism, that is, by the idea of space and time. We can perceive the abiding presence of the Messiah only when we are beyond the space and time that the Messiah comes to redeem – but since there is no such thing as the material world, since space and time don’t exist, there is nothing for the Messiah to redeem. Hence, he comes only when our thinking has overcome the limitations of space and time – that is, only when he is not needed. This also means that he can not come on the “last day”, because that day is still involved with time, an illusion. He can only come when time is overcome, the “last day” is when there will be no more days, and, therefore, the “day after the last of days”, a paradoxical concept that describes a reality in which time no longer has any meaning.
I can report that the Messiah didn't come while I was parked among the used implements. The Messiah wasn't in evidence when I reached home or, later, when I read Stach's book annotating the Zurau aphorisms. So far as I know the Messiah didn't come during the time that it took for me to write this essay. Hours passed and days.
Among the spikes and lances of the rusting farm implements, I watched the day's destruction, the waning afternoon casting off sparks of light and rain as darkness like a great whetstone polished everything until it was shiny and black.
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