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Kafka's Uncle Med Humanities: first published as 10.1136/mh.26.2.85 on 1 December 2000. Downloaded from J Med Ethics: Medical Humanities 2000;26:85–91 Kafka’s uncle: scenes from a world of trust infected by suspicion Iain Bamforth General Practitioner, Strasbourg, France Abstract well documented fraught relationship. But the title What happens when we heed a call? Few writers have figure of the collection—the country doctor— been as suspicious of their vocation as Franz Kafka honours a diVerent relative altogether, his uncle. (1883–1924). His story, A Country Doctor, (1919) Siegfried Löwy was born in 1867, elder ostensibly about a night visit to a patient that goes half-brother to Kafka’s mother and, following his badly wrong, suggests a modern writer’s journey to the MD, possessor of the only doctorate in the family heart of his work. There he discovers that trust, like the until his nephew. Significantly, Franz often thought tradition which might sustain him, is blighted. This of himself as a Löwy rather than a Kafka: his diary essay also examines Kafka’s attitude to illness and the entry for 25 December 1911 contains a long list of medical profession, and his close relationship with his colourful matrilineal begats, including a reference uncle, Siegfried Löwy (1867–1942), a country doctor to his maternal great-grandfather, who was a mira- in Moravia. cle rabbi. “In Hebrew my name is Amschel, like my (J Med Ethics: Medical Humanities 2000;26:85–91) mother’s maternal grandfather, whom my mother, Keywords: Franz Kafka; German literature; trust; suspi- who was six years old when he died, can remember cion; doctor-baiting; negotiation as a very pious and learned man with a long, white beard. She remembers how she had to take hold of the toes of his corpse and ask forgiveness for any 1 oVence she might have committed against him. After working for a year as a country doctor in She also remembers his many books which lined Scotland, I came across a slim pale-green hardback, the walls. He bathed in the river every day, even in and read it during my first winter away from home. winter, when he chopped a hole in the ice for his It was a bibliophile edition of Franz Kafka’s Ein bath.”2 Landarzt (A Country Doctor) published by the small Berlin press, Wagenbach to celebrate thirty years in In Letter to His Father he defined himself as “a http://mh.bmj.com/ business.1 Löwy with a certain Kafka component which, how- The history of the book is a striking reminder of ever, is not pushed ahead by the Kafka will to life, Kafka’s almost entirely posthumous fame as a business and conquest, but by a Löwyish spur that writer. Written mostly in his sister Ottla’s apart- works more secretly, more diYdently and in ment in the famous Alchemists’ Lane in Prague as another direction, and which often fails to work “the war to end all wars” turned to disaster for the entirely”.3 One of the Löwyish spurs was his TB, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ein Landarzt appeared which he described as if it were a conspiracy of in January 1920, and received a single notice in the organs: “Sometimes, it seems to me that my brain on September 29, 2021 by guest. Protected copyright. Prager Tagblatt newspaper. It was a flop, as were the and lungs came to an agreement behind my back. other six titles published by Kafka in his lifetime. Things can’t go on this way, said the brain, and after Like the original, this new edition of the stories five years the lungs said they were ready to help.”4 is printed in the large typeface Kafka preferred—so Even the unpleasant transformation of the travel- large in the Walbaum Antiqua typeface of the first ling salesman, Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s most edition that hyphens had to be halved and famous story, Metamorphosis, into a hundred- punctuation marks omitted to fit the line. Kafka’s footed insect covered with “sticky stuV” seems writings, which often expand a single seamless morphologically related to his illness: the repulsive paragraph into an entire story, make the large for- appearance of the insect (which assures his victimi- mat suddenly, obviously necessary: it edges the reader into an assault on the size of thoughts sation) is in fact an inside: an eventrated respiratory themselves. tract replete with cilia and mucus carpet. A doctor of law he might have been in life, but Kafka’s real doctorate was handed down by an 2 imaginary guild, the Faculty of Concepts to Live Kafka dedicated his book to his father. According and Die By. Despite Koch’s demonstration of the to his friend Max Brod, his father is supposed to bacillary nature of tuberculosis in 1882, Kafka have muttered “put it on the table by my bed”; always interpreted his illness as a metaphor: what Hermann Kafka’s refusal to acknowledge his son’s power could a bare fact have against a death literary activities is hardly one of the secrets of a sentence issued at birth? www.medicalhumanities.com Med Humanities: first published as 10.1136/mh.26.2.85 on 1 December 2000. Downloaded from 86 Kafka’s uncle: scenes from a world of trust infected by suspicion 3 in Berlin with a young Jewish girl from the eastern While his nephew was in his last years at school, marches called Dora Dymant (or Diamant, as she Uncle Siegfried took up a post in Triesch, a small called herself after emigrating to Britain before the town of 4,800 inhabitants in a German-speaking war), his uncle visited him and persuaded him to enclave in Moravia called Iglau (Jihlava in Czech), enter a sanatorium. This was the happiest period of about 130 kilometres south-east of Prague. It Kafka’s life, according to Brod. Kafka wrote to boasted several small industries including wool and Dora’s orthodox Yiddish-speaking father, asking spinning factories, and a mine. He was to practise for permission to marry her: the rabbi prudently there for close on forty years. said no. Brod was a tireless friend, arranging for Siegfried Löwy was a liberal and man of his Uncle Siegfried to visit because doctors’ fees were times; open to change and innovation, he created a proving too expensive: Dora mentions having to sensation in the district when he became one of the pay 160 crowns for a house visit whereas Kafka’s first people in what was then an outpost of the invalidity pension amounted to only 1,000 crowns a Austro-Hungarian empire to acquire a motorbike. month. Franz came visiting in his summer holidays, the Siegfried Löwy continued to practise in his house great attractions of staying with Uncle Siegfried in Triesch until his retirement, when he moved to being his horses, the billiard table and the library, Prague and lived in the large house in the Bilkova which contained all the German classics. There left by Hermann, Franz’s father, with his nieces— were also the mechanical appliances—a photo- the Kafka sisters, Elli, Valli and Ottla—and their graph in the book shows his nieces, including Kaf- families. The night before the extended family was ka’s sister Ottla, push-starting Uncle Siegfried on due to be deported to the death camps in 1942, his bike across a forest path. Siegfried Löwy drew up his will and injected According to the head conservationist of the himself with a lethal dose of morphine. motorcycle department of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the tin panniers and distinctive rear shock absorbers identify it as a NSU Cantilever, 5 built in Ulm between 1909 and 1914: NSU (better known as Audi) was one of more than fifty motor- His nephew’s story, A Country Doctor, seems to be cycle manufacturers in the Europe of that time. goaded on by its semicolons. (Schuetze C. Personal communication, According to the literary critic Walter Benjamin, 30.8.1996.) Since the world speed record was set who recorded their conversation in Sweden while on this machine in 1909, it may well be that Kafka’s both were on the run from the Nazis in the 1930s, uncle read about the exploit and ordered a model Bertolt Brecht, famous for his agit-prop theatre, accused Kafka of having the “precision of an for his practice rounds. It would no doubt have 5 served for a little talking behind his back in Triesch. imprecise man: a dreamer” ; it is apparent from A Country Doctor how Brecht could formulate such a dismissive statement, even if he does resort to http://mh.bmj.com/ 4 Kafkaesque method to do so. Kafka uses simple Unlike Kafka’s father, the self-made man, Uncle grammatical markings to establish layers of appar- Siegfried seems to have indulged Franz, and oVered ently banal realism in which bizarre things happen him help and advice at several junctures. He was as matter of fact. “progressive” in his medical thinking too. On his The first sentence announces “I was at my wit’s recommendation Franz became a vegetarian, and end: an urgent journey lay before me”, the colon for a time practised the obscure double-chewing buVers the adjoining sentence, in which five technique recommended by the American physi- semicolons marshall the subordinate clauses into cian Fletcher (1849–1919) along with Müller’s free separate stretches of time and action and necessity. on September 29, 2021 by guest. Protected copyright. air gymnastic techniques (developing the body was The American writer Nicholson Baker has called a cult, of course, long before the Nazis made it a key the semi-colon “that supremely self-possessed valet element of their cultural propaganda).
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