Michael Löwy
[from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 23, Summer 1997]
...In this respect, Amerika (1912-1914) represents an intermediate work. The authoritarian characters are either paternal figures (Karl Rossmann's father or Uncle Jakob) or the top hotel administrators (the head of staff or the chief porter). But even the latter retain an aspect of personal tyranny in combining bureaucratic indifference with a petty and brutal individual despotism. The symbol of this punitive authoritarianism leaps up at you from the first page of the book. Demystifying American democracy represented by the famous Statue of Liberty standing in the entrance to New York harbor, Kafka replaces the torch in her hand with a sword. In a world without justice or freedom, naked force and arbitrary power seem to hold undivided sway. The hero's sympathy goes out to the victims of this society. The driver in the first chapter is an example of "the suffering of a poor man at the hands of the powerful." There is also Thèrèse's mother driven to suicide by hunger and poverty. Karl Rossmann finds his only friends and allies among the poor: Thèrèse herself, the students, the residents of a working class neighborhood who refuse to turn him over to the police because, as Kafka discloses in a revealing aside, "workers are not on the side of the authorities."27
THE MAJOR TURNING POINT IN KAFKA'S WORK IS THE NOVEL, Penal Colony, written shortly after Amerika. There are few texts in universal literature which present authority with such an unjust and murderous face. Authority is not bound up with the power of an individual such as the camp commandant (old and new) who plays only a secondary role in the story. Instead, authority inheres in an impersonal mechanism.
The context of the story is colonialism -- French in this instance. The officers and commandants of the colony are French while the lowly soldiers, dockers, and victims awaiting execution are the people "indigenous" to the country who "do not understand a word of French." A native soldier is sentenced to death by officers for whom juridical doctrine can be summed up in a few words which are the quintessence of the arbitrary: Guilt should never be questioned! The soldier's execution must be carried out by a torture device which slowly carves the words: "Honor thy superiors" into his flesh with needles.
The central character of the novel is not the traveler who watches the events unfold with mute hostility. Neither is it the prisoner who scarcely shows any reaction, the officer who presides over the execution, nor the commandant of the colony. The main character is the machine itself.
The entire story is centered on this sinister apparatus which, more and more in the course of a very detailed explanation given by the officer to the traveler, comes to appear an end-in-itself. The apparatus does not exist to execute the man but rather the victim exists for the sake of the apparatus. The native soldier provides a body upon which the machine can write its aesthetic masterpiece, its bloody inscription illustrated with many "flourishes and embellishments." The officer is only a servant of the machine and is finally sacrificed himself to this insatiable Moloch.28
What concrete "power machine" and "apparatus of Authority" sacrificing human lives did Kafka have in mind? The Penal Colony was written in October 1914, three months after the outbreak of the Great War....
<http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue23/lowy23.htm#n27> *****
Yoshie