Mark Christian Thompson

The Negro Who Disappeared: Race in Kafka’s Amerika

This essay examines how Kafka’s Amerika, also known under the title Der Verschollene, presents a landscape in which the protagonist, Karl Roßmann, can become an artist by acts of racial appropriation and mimesis via the misprision of African American “blackness”. Kafka conflates an “aesthetics of becoming” with Negro identity as a way for Amerika’s Karl Roßmann to take a subject-position as artist. In Amerika, Kafka’s Roßmann performs his own minstrel show, his own blackface: in effect, becoming black is the only way to become a white artist.

Describing his grandfather’s frustration over unsuccessful attempts to col- lect his war pension due to a lack of legitimating papers, African American author Richard Wright observes in his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, that, “Like ‘K’ of Kafka’s novel, The Castle, [my grandfather] tried desperately to persuade the authorities of his true identity right up to the day of his death, and failed”.1 On the offensive against what he perceived as Wright’s tendency toward two-dimensionality in fiction, and what he considered to be Wright’s inadvertent complicity with America’s racially repressive Christian morality, James Baldwin wrote in a withering 1949 critique of Wright: “In America, now, this country devoted to the death of the paradox which may, therefore, be put to death by one – [the African American’s] lot is as ambiguous as a tableau by Kafka”.2 Regardless of the specifics of Baldwin’s and Wright’s developed antipathy toward one another, both call upon Kafka to describe the contradic- tory, paradoxical position of African Americans in the United States. Perhaps then Wright and Baldwin would not have been surprised to have learned that Kafka, in his unfinished novel Amerika, likens his own aesthetic to the life of blacks. Nowhere are the deterritorializing effects of Kafka’s use of language more on display than in his suspiciously Prague-like America. In this essay I analyze Karl Roßmann’s self-identification as “Negro”, and demonstrate what this has to do with Karl’s ultimate disappearance. Avant la lettre, I suggest, Kafka understands Karl’s disappearance as bound up with race, and compares stylistic disruption of language to the performative aspect of a fetishized black culture. Amerika presents Kafka with a landscape in

1 Richard Wright: Black Boy. (1945) New York: Harper Collins 1998. P. 140. 2 James Baldwin: Everybody’s Protest Novel. In: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. by Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton 1997. Pp. 1654–1659. Here: P. 1658. 184 which his Karl Roßmann can become an artist, not simply through America’s “sameness” and “otherness” in comparisons with Europe, but also through America’s “others”. Kafka exploits an image of blackness as open to invasion and habitation by Der Verschollene’s Karl Roßmann for the purpose of his taking a subject-position, that of the artist, otherwise unavailable to him. In Amerika, Kafka’s Roßmann performs his own minstrel show, his own blackface, to the effect that becoming black is the only way to become a white artist. Begun in 1912, Der Verschollene – the title Kafka gave to his unfinished first novel, as opposed to Amerika, the name selected by Max Brod – traces the movements of Karl Roßmann, a German-speaking Prague-native who has been exiled to the US by his family for impregnating his governess. Unex- pectedly greeted directly off the boat by his wealthy uncle, Karl’s life seems ideal, until his troublingly mercurial uncle kicks him out of the house, forcing Karl to fend for himself. What follows is a carefully mapped out, bizarrely picaresque journey through a deterritorialized American landscape, which ends, sort of, with Karl landing a job with a vast theater group called the The- ater of Oklahoma. Karl finds his new show business career by answering an advertisement that reads: “Jeder ist willkommen! Wer Künstler werden will, melde sich!” (295) [“All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward!”] (202).3 The advertisement for the great Theater of Oklahoma is deceptively clear. Mentioning nothing of wages, activities, working conditions, etc., the theater promises training. The troupe’s self-representation on the surface frus- trates the very expectation one expects to have met in a job listing, namely the nature of the job. By insisting that the theater seeks workers to fill vari- ous unnamed positions, the poster Karl sees in fact promotes not so much an occupation as a transformation. The usual prerequisites – experience, educa- tion, and training – mean, or at least seem to mean, nothing here. The work at-hand will be a process of becoming, of metamorphosis, into Artist. There is in fact only one requirement for employment at the Theater: the desire to be an artist. One must want to become an artist to be taken on as a hired hand in the Oklahoma Company. Therefore, if Karl is to be accepted into the Theater’s ranks, which he will be, he must tacitly or unconsciously already possess the desire to be an artist. In exile, Karl awaits the ecstasy of being an out-of-place, or ek-statos (standing out of place) artist, a feeling Kafka knew well. Max Brod records in

3 All citations to Kafka in the original German will be taken from Franz Kafka: Der Verschollene. (1927) Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag 1994. (Kritische Ausgabe.) All English translations are taken from Amerika (The Man Who Dis- appeared). Trans. by Michael Hofmann. New York: New Directions 2004. Future citations will be parenthetical.