Abstract
Franz Kafka’s wish to destroy his literary estate after his death has been extensively written about, as was the decision of his close friend, Max Brod, not to obey it. By publishing Kafka’s work, Brod brought to light some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated works, among them The Trial, The Castle, and America. Brod’s decision and its consequences were also at the center of a legal dispute in Israeli courts for nearly 40 years. At stake was the question of whether Brod’s personal assistant and her daughters had the right to maintain control over his estate and the unpublished manuscripts written by Kafka, which it contained. In 2016, the Supreme Court ordered to archive the estate in the Israeli National library. Both Brod and, more recently, the Israeli courts ignored Kafka’s central wish—to be forgotten. Indeed, the interactions between memory, remembering, and forgetting have recently become a subject of growing interest in the field of memory studies. In light of these growing interest, this study reexamines Kafka’s last wish, and the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision, from a perspective that perceives forgetting as an integral and sometimes needed part of both individuals’ and society’s memory. It uses Kafka’s interpretations of memory, remembering, and forgetting in order to better evaluate his final wish to be forgotten. By suggesting a new understanding of some of Kafka’s most renowned novels—The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and A Report to an Academy—this study highlights the dialectics of forgetting in Kafka’s writing. For Kafka, this study proposes, forgetting is at the same time both the ultimate sin and a key to true liberation. Understanding Kafka’s forgetting dialectics contributes to the ongoing discussion about remembering and forgetting and will highlight the importance of forgetting as a central phenomenon to be recognized in memory studies.
Introduction
Franz Kafka’s works, written originally in German, are among the most famous literary treasures of modernity and are being read by readers from all over the world. Many scholars consider Kafka a cultural giant whose enigmatic writings explored the bizarre and peculiar human condition, appealing to readers worldwide. Kafka’s desire to conceal and destroy his literary estate after his death, which he met prematurely at the age of 40, has been thoroughly discussed in his biographies (Murray, 2004). In a decision that saved Kafka from oblivion, his close friend, confidante, and dedicated devotee, Max Brod, decided not to obey Kafka’s final request and to publish his yet unpublished materials—among them Kafka’s most celebrated novels: The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Indeed, Brod’s decision to publish his friend’s works and the consequences thereof preoccupied the Israeli legal system for some time. Over a period of nearly 40 years, Israeli courts of various instances debated whether Ilse Hoffe, Brod’s personal assistant—and subsequently her two daughters—had the right to maintain control over Brod’s estate, which included not only his own personal writings but, more importantly, some unpublished materials by Kafka as well. As is often the case, the legal debates were complex, involving a variety of interconnected disputes, including debates over Brod’s own writings and his presumed intentions, as well as austere legal deliberations concerning successors’ rights to the content of materials they inherit.
The final decision in the case, which had been argued in two lower instances, was handed down in 2016 by the Israeli Supreme Court (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2016). 1 The Court ruled that Brod’s estate (including Kafka’s unpublished materials) was to be archived in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. Indeed, several years after the decision was made, the National Library revealed that these materials contained “three different drafts of Kafka’s story Wedding Preparations in the Country, a notebook for his Hebrew study, hundreds of personal letters to Brod and other friends, sketches and drawings, travel journals, thoughts he wrote to himself and more.” 2 Considering the courts’ rulings and the subsequent presentation of the since published texts, both the Supreme Court and the National Library confirmed that Kafka is a “cultural asset belonging to the Jewish People,” in the words of David Blumberg, Chairman of the Library’s Board of Directors (cited in Butler, 2011: 3).
Reference to Franz Kafka’s writings as a cultural resource owned by any group of people, Jewish or otherwise, is a highly controversial act. Judith Butler (2011), for example, claimed that basing this decision on the idea that Israel represents the Jewish People and is consequently in charge of its cultural output, wherever produced and whatever its language, “carries with it extraordinary and contradictory consequences” (p. 3). She notes, for example, that if Israel claims ownership over worldwide Jewish assets, its non-Jewish residents (currently comprising more than 20% of the country’s total population) might justly question whether it can still accord them a sense of fair and equal representation.
In the present instance, the legal issue at hand is not Kafka’s cultural appropriation, but primarily the Israeli courts’ utter disregard of Kafka’s will (demanding destruction of his works) and Brod’s wish to privatize the Kafka creations he owned (Cohen, 2015). Moreover, as I argue in this article, the courts ignored Franz Kafka’s explicit request to be forgotten. While the legal sphere may have disregarded this matter, discussions regarding interactions between memory and remembering/forgetting—and the way they pertain to rights—have recently gained considerable momentum in the memory studies field (see, for example, Connerton, 2008; Mayer-Schönberger, 2009; Reiff, 2016). These discussions intensified as of 2014, when the European Union’s (EU) Court of Justice recognized a new right to which EU citizens are entitled, the Right to be Forgotten, thereby creating a social opportunity for recognition of other, broader memory rights. As such, it would be appropriate to reexamine Kafka’s last wish—and the Israeli Supreme Court’s decisions to keep Kafka’s unpublished materials at the National Library of Israel—from a memory-driven perspective that sees forgetting as an integral part of both individual and collective social memory.
In this study, I explore how Kafka himself understood memory, claiming that his complex and even dialectical interpretations of remembering and forgetting may well clarify why, at the end of his life, he asked to be forgotten. I begin with a brief review of the proceedings culminating in the Supreme Court’s Hoffe v. Cassouto decision, and I focus on the obscured role of memory in this legal process. I then suggest a new interpretation of Kafka’s celebrated novel The Trial and of two additional works The Metamorphosis and A Report to an Academy, demonstrating what I define as the dialectics of forgetting in Kafka’s writings. I posit that Kafka considers forgetting to be both the ultimate sin and the key to true liberation. Understanding Kafka’s dialectics of forgetting might add another explanation to Kafka’s request to be forgotten. In addition, Kafka’s dialectics of forgetting is valuable to all who address questions of memory in relation to remembering and forgetting as it help us in realizing the essence of forgetting as both an individual and social phenomenon.
The legal dispute over Brod’s estate
Max Brod died in 1968 at the age of 84, after fulfilling his life’s mission to introduce the world to Franz Kafka’s talent. He stipulated in an early version of his will that his library, which included some of Kafka’s unpublished manuscripts, was to be given to his personal secretary, Ilse Hoffe. Several later versions of his will stated in addition that on Hoffe’s demise, his literary estate is to be placed “under the guardianship of the Hebrew University Library, the Tel Aviv Municipal Library or a public archive in Israel or abroad, so long as Hoffe made no other arrangement in her lifetime” (cited in Cohen, 2015: 5). In 1970, in turn, Hoffe specified in her will that Brod’s bequest is to be given to her daughters after her death.
In 1974, when the State of Israel tried to prevent Hoffe from selling some of the manuscripts, a local court acknowledged Hoffe’s claims of ownership and stated that she may treat Brod’s estate, including Kafka’s manuscripts, “as her own” (cited in Cohen, 2015: 6). In 2008, one year after Ilse Hoffe died, the State intervened again and tried to prevent her daughters from inheriting their mother’s assets, claiming that it is in the public interest to have these manuscripts, which are a part of Kafka’s estate, available at an Israeli institution. This time, the judiciary agreed with the State’s demands; in 2012, the Tel Aviv Family Court issued an order stating that all Kafka’s writings that were part of Brod’s estate are to be placed in the custody of a public institution in Israel in a manner that conforms with Brod’s original wishes (Cohen, 2015). This decision was highly criticized for its purportedly unsound legal reasoning (Einhorn, 2016). Nevertheless, it was reaffirmed by a District Court in 2015 and by the Supreme Court the following year.
It is perhaps too easy to describe the process as Kafkaesque. Indeed, one may readily imagine dark courtrooms filled with uninterested listeners in which lawyers, judges, and warring parties bore themselves to death with irrelevant interpretations of the law and obscure precedents, only to prove their counterparts’ arguments wrong. And as in a fine Kafkaesque story indeed, all the legal instances that ruled in the Hoffe v. Cassouto case barely addressed Kafka’s original will. Moreover, even when they did so, they justified Max Brod’s decision to disregard it.
In the Supreme Court decision, Brod’s justifications for not adhering to his friend’s will, already published by Brod himself in the aftermath of Kafka’s The Trial (Kafka, 1965), were restated. “Brod decided not to act according to Kafka’s request,” said the Supreme Court, because, He told Kafka that he would not fulfill his wish, so if Kafka really wanted to have his writings burned, he would have chosen another person to do so. Furthermore, Kafka had published several works following his oral instructions to Brod; hence Brod concluded that Kafka did not really want his works destroyed. Finally, Brod perceived Kafka’s estate as containing the most wonderful treasures, even in comparison to Kafka’s other works, so he decided not to obey his request. (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2016: 3)
Similarly, the District Court that ruled on the case a few years before the Supreme Court, cited the same justifications made public by Brod himself, adding that, “Indeed, a significant portion of Kafka’s work, among them the novels The Trial and The Castle, were published by Brod only after Kafka’s death and in contradiction to his expressed will” (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2012: 3).
Brod’s ownership of Kafka’s estate was never questioned by the Israeli courts, even if acquired in a manner directly contradicting Kafka’s requests. While the Supreme Court recognized that Brod never purchased any property rights to Kafka’s estate, nor was he able to do so, it upheld Brod’s de facto ownership because no one ever came forth to claim otherwise. In the opening paragraphs of its verdict, the Supreme Court even states explicitly that the ruling aims at fulfilling Brod’s wishes, not Kafka’s: It is clear to us that Brod did not want his estate and all the contents thereof to be sold to the highest bidder, but rather [that it] find its proper place in the literary and cultural shrine that was his life’s mission. (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2016: 11)
The district court made the sole reference to Kafka’s intentions. The Court claimed that selling the estate to the highest bidder will contradict the intentions of both Brod and Kafka. “Would Kafka think that having his friend’s secretary and her daughters auction his personal writings to the highest bidders is consistent with the letter of the law? The answer appears clear” (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2012: 48). As such, the judges believed that their final decision served the “legal process, the literary world, morality and justice all together” (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2012: 61). By doing so, the Court asserted that Israel’s legal system fulfilled “Kafka’s authentic will” (Hoffe v. Cassouto, 2012).
However, Kafka’s “authentic will” stipulated that he be forgotten. It is this unfulfilled wish that lies at the heart of the conflict addressed by the Israeli court system. Consequently, it appears important to understand this wish from Kafka’s point of view. Scholars have suggested a variety of theories. Murray (2004), for example, claimed that Kafka was never satisfied with what he had written and was constantly in fear that his posthumously published manuscripts would only serve as an indelible reminder of his failures. In my view, however, a genuine comprehension of Kafka’s last request requires discussing his perception of memory, of remembering and of forgetting. Below, I demonstrate Kafka’s relation to questions of memory by offering a new reading of one of his most celebrated novels—The Trial. This, I believe, will support my assertion that Kafka perceived forgetting also as a liberating force and might add another explanation to why he eventually wished to be forgotten.
Kafka’s trial—a new reading
Kafka’s prose always sides with the outcasts, says Theodor Adorno (1981), while his world, according to Walter Benjamin, is “the world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms” (Benjamin, 1973: 112). Indeed, it is The Trial that demonstrates these assumptions most vividly. One morning, K. wakes up in his bedroom to realize that he is being arrested and has become a suspect from then on. Neither K. nor his readers know what he is accused of or why he was arrested. We only know that “someone must have traduced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning” (Kafka, 1965: 3).
Beginning with this dire morning, the story describes K.’s futile attempts to come to terms with the mysterious legal process that he is going through. K. seeks the help of his friends and relatives, along with other figures that appear throughout the text, but the legal system accusing K. remains incomprehensible to him. The story ends with the arrival of two ridiculous court representatives (with their “frock coats, pallid and plump, with top hats that were apparently irremovable” (Kafka, 1965: 279) who come to execute him. At the very end, K. wonders “Where was the judge whom he had never seen? Where was the high court, to which he had never penetrated?” (Kafka, 1965: 286). Indeed, K. dies at the age of 31 “like a dog” without realizing what had happened to him.
Kafka never completed writing The Trial. It was Brod, capitalizing on his editorial liberty, who arranged the chapters he found in Kafka’s estate as a coherent story and published it. While a few critics questioned Brod’s narrativization of the novel (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005 [1975]), the story that begins with K.’s arrest and ends with his execution attracted public attention. Many scholars and thinkers tried to find meaning in it. For some, the story was an exploration of the modern city (Gobel, 2002). According to this interpretation, K. is a city dweller and the trial is about K.’s “comical process of observing, deciphering, and journeying through the surrealistic, dreamlike spectacle of the city” (Gobel, 2002: 43). Others assumed that psychoanalysis holds the key to the novel’s mysterious inner logic (Keinan, 1990). According to this perspective, The Trial is a novel about K.’s mental life; as such, all events described therein are K.’s “mental activities that are being expressed by symbols taken from the real world around us” (Keinan, 1990: 10–11).
According to the Italian thinker Pietro Citati’s well-known interpretation, the legal system and courts described in the novel are all instances of God—earthly representations of the deity that cannot be comprehended by mere mortals (Citati, 1987). K.’s sin, according to Citati, is the guilt that burdens us all; the guilt of which we are all accused, not always knowing why. As sinners, claims Citati, we cannot discern either God or the gods; we cannot take in their mysterious totality; any relationship with them, even the most remote and indirect, is impossible; and none of our prayers or imploration reaches the summits of the heavens. (Citati, 1987: 128–129)
This transcendent God is similar to the unreachable court system that K. tries to comprehend.
In Walter Benjamin’s view, however, both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss Kafka’s true messages (Benjamin, 1973). Indeed, some very different interpretations of The Trial focused on the criticism of the indifferent contemporary justice system portrayed therein. According to this perspective, Kafka explored questions about the law and the ways it operates in modern societies. Kafka’s protagonist, Josef K., “became a symbol of a man controlled by unseen forces that judge him in a merciless way” (Leib, 2010). Primo Levi (2004), a renowned thinker and Auschwitz survivor, noted that the court described in the story is a human court (not a divine one) and that the plot demonstrates a situation in which a man can be persecuted for a sin he didn’t commit, an unknown sin that the court will never reveal to us. And nevertheless, we can carry with us the shame of this guilt until our very last day, and maybe afterwards. (p. 217)
The short story Before the Law, written before The Trial and later integrated into the novel, is the most vivid example of Kafka’s criticism of the legal system. Kafka opens the tale with the description of a gatekeeper who sits before the law and denies access thereunto to a rustic man who requests it. While the gatekeeper never really blocks the way in, the man refrains from entering. He just sits in front of the entrance to the law for ages, until he dies. The gateway to the law, assigned only to that particular person, then closes forever. Before the Law is said to describe institutional arbitrariness and demonstrates the dominion served by the law (Almog, 2013). This is part of Kafka’s “dark vision in whose center lies a brutal, threatening and arbitrary legal system that serves an unknown agent, that any individual can feel its harm on his flesh at any moment” (Almog, 2013: 244). Before the Law, as an integral part of The Trial, is perhaps Kafka’s most brutal attack against the notion of law in society and its relation to justice. While a worthy law should be general and applicable to all, Kafka describes a particularly wicked legal system that targets a specific individual who cannot access it in any case. Criticism of the law for targeting an individual instead of setting general standards and for being inaccessible instead of approachable are indeed among the core ideas expressed in The Trial, although they do not constitute the only valid interpretation of this intriguing story.
Relying on Adorno’s claim that any analysis of Kafka’s thinking should be based solely on his writings, without any external influence such as theories of psychoanalysis, religiosity, or legal criticism (Adorno, 1981), I introduce a reading of The Trial based on memory-driven assumptions.
A memory-driven interpretation of the novel
Although many interpretations explain the state of ignorance into which Josef K. awakes as part of Kafka’s attempt to describe his inner world, the world of the divinity or, from a different perspective, the world of an arbitrary and oppressive legal system, I propose that it is a moment of amnesia that causes K.’s ignorance. Josef K. cannot remember what had happened to him that might have led to such deterioration in his life. In other words, K. simply forgot. He forgot his past, his life story. K. forgot who he is and as such, he could not live any more.
This interpretation was also proposed by Kafka’s friend, the playwright Willi Haas, who published one of Kafka’s first literary endeavors in 1912 (Murray, 2004). As early as 1930, Haas claimed that The Trial is a book about forgetting (Haas, 1930). In an insightful interpretation of the novel, Haas writes that “the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself” (English translation taken from Benjamin, 1973: 131). Even while celebrated and cited by Benjamin, Haas’s perspective remained unknown, perhaps forgotten, by most of the people who tried to make sense of Kafka’s writings.
Haas’s intimate familiarity with Kafka enabled him to claim that to his friend, memory meant much more than remembering past events. Haas recalled having met Kafka in late 1919 after not having seen him for 7 long years. To Haas’s banal and friendly question, “What are you reading?” Kafka answered that he is “still reading the book you recommended me last time.” The amazed Haas could not believe that Kafka still remembered what had happened 7 years earlier. “In between, the Great War occurred, [but] he still knew it [Er wußte es noch]” (Haas, 1930: 195). To Haas, it was clear that Kafka’s memory is not only his unusual capability to remember everything. No, for Kafka, memory was “his conscience, his ethics, even his religion [Es war sein Gewissen, seine Ethik, ja seine Religion]” (Haas, 1930).
Memory was Kafka’s ethic, according to Haas, partly because of Kafka’s complex and uneasy relationship with his Jewishness (see Murray, 2004): Memory plays a very mysterious role as piousness. It is not an ordinary, but [. . .] the most profound quality of Jehovah that he remembers, that he retains an infallible memory “to the third and fourth, even to the hundredth generation.” (Haas, 1930, English translation taken from Benjamin, 1973: 131)
As such, by forgetting who he was, Josef K. conducted a severe crime, a sin against God and man.
One need not be an observant Jew to claim that we are mostly inclined to believe that remembering is a virtue and forgetting is a failure (Pereira et al., 2014). As just one example “to remember and never forget” became an emblematic slogan of Israel’s efforts to commemorate the Holocaust. Individuals deal with a variety of mnemonic artifacts to help them remember and signify life events that they seek to cherish. Parents take pictures of their children and store them in numerous repositories, aiming to remember every single moment of their offspring’s lives. Countless additional examples could be cited as well.
Returning to The Trial, it is now much easier to understand why Josef K., in trying to defend himself from what he believes are incomprehensible accusations, decides to write something that we may define as an autobiography. K., according to the story: Often considered whether it would not be better to draw up a written defense and hand it in to the court. In this defense he would give a short account of his life, and when he came to an event of any importance explain for what reasons he acted as he did, intimate whether he approved or condemned his way of action in retrospect, and adduce grounds for the condemnation or approval. (Kafka, 1965: 142)
According to Citati (1987), by writing his autobiography, K. tries to expose the breach from which the accusations against him might have emerged. Marcus (2008) calls on us to realize how lonely K. felt when facing an unjust legal system, favoring his own biography over proper legal protection. Nevertheless, I contend that K.’s attempt to write a biography demonstrates how questions of memory, remembering and forgetting, stand at the heart of the story. K. lost the sense of control over his past; he cannot remember what he might have done to cause all the hardship he faces now. Hence, he must make an effort to narrativize his life and confront his accusers, but more importantly to remind himself of his identity and life story. Unfortunately, K. realizes that detailing his past as a coherent autobiography, whose organized narrative can acquit him, is an impossible task: One did not need to have a timid and fearful nature to be easily persuaded that the completion of this plea was a sheer impossibility. Not because of laziness or obstructive malice [. . .] but because to meet an unknown accusation, not to mention other possible charges arising out of it, the whole of one’s life would have to be recalled to mind, down to the smallest actions and accidents, clearly formulated and examined from every angle. (Kafka, 1965: 161)
Indeed, memorizing every little aspect of one’s life is an impossible task. So, while Kafka himself considered memory the most prominent aspect of his morality (as suggested by Haas), K., The Trial’s protagonist, failed to remember his past and thus himself, nor could he overcome his failure through recitation and commemoration. In many ways, The Trial exemplifies what Yerushalmi (1996) termed the “terror of forgetting”—the fear of oblivion and its influences on humanity. If K. bears the sins of forgetting and self-forgetfulness, it is no wonder that his verdict is so determined. The Trial suggests that if you cannot tell who you are anymore, if you cannot remember your past, there might be no reason for you to stay alive. Hence, if you do stay alive, you are in a constant struggle to overcome this weakness, a constant attempt to remember.
Here, we should stop and wonder how Kafka, the pious advocate of remembrance, could ask his friend Max Brod to take concrete actions that would help us all forget him? Why did he demand that Brod destroy all his writings? If forgetting—and especially forgetting oneself—is such a sin, why did Kafka want to be forgotten, leading his friend Brod and us his future readers to commit this inexcusable crime? Indeed, Brod himself did not believe that Kafka was sincere when he asked him to destroy the manuscripts. Yet, I believe that another plausible explanation to Kafka’s request, beyond those outlined by Brod a few years after Kafka’s death, lies in Kafka’s possible perception of forgetting as both a fleeting lapse and as a moment of liberation, an action that frees individuals from the authoritarian burden of remembrance. This notion will become even clearer as we continue our memory-driven interpretation of The Trial.
Forgetting as a liberating force
Josef K., as already noted, cannot tell why he is a suspect. As he has forgotten his past and cannot write his own autobiography, he is doomed to be trapped in a legal system that persecutes him precisely for his self-forgetfulness. Nevertheless, K. remains certain that he is innocent. The story opens by stating that K. “knew he had done nothing wrong.” K. answers the painter Titorelli’s question “Are you innocent” with a straightforward “Yes,” savoring the joy of his response (Kafka, 1965: 186). Toward the end of the story, when K. meets the prison chaplain in the cathedral, in what can be understood as the ceremony at which K. was declared guilty, K. insists again that he is not guilty and that “it’s a mistake” (Kafka, 1965: 264). At that point, K. continues and says that “if it comes to that, how can any man be called guilty? We are all simply men here, one as much as the other” (Kafka, 1965). Indeed, if K.’s malfeasance is his having forgotten his past, his insistence that he is innocent and that no human being can be guilty when it comes to forgetting is of utmost significance. While K. did forget and is being persecuted for this act of self-forgetting, Kafka’s protagonists insist that forgetting is not necessarily a failure, not a sin of which to be accused. K. did nothing wrong.
Contemporary literature on forgetting has indeed disregarded the belief that to forget something is necessarily a bad thing (Connerton, 2008; Mayer-Schönberger, 2009; Reiff, 2016). Forgetting is as old a phenomenon as memory itself. In one well-known example, the Roman policy of damnatio memoriae considered the “manipulation of memory and posthumous reputation” (Varner, 2001: 41), in which leaders and prominent cultural figures that had now become the opponents and rivals of the current regime leaders were doomed to oblivion. Forgetting served as a crucial factor in the creation of new homogeneous groups since the ninth century, as former conflicts and extreme violence between different rival ethnic groups had to be forgotten (Renan, 1992 [1882]). As such, forgetting is a complex social concept with numerous meanings, purposes, and uses (Connerton, 2008). Often it is forgetting, rather than remembering, that can be crucial to our wellbeing. In many situations, it is the process of forgetting past events that is in the interest of all parties involved in a previous dispute (Connerton, 2008). Assmann (2014) termed these positive aspects of forgetting “constructive forgetting” and “therapeutic forgetting.” As indicated above, the contemporary need to be forgotten from the all-remembering new media was recognized as a right, however limited, by the EU and by many other bodies that followed its lead (Tirosh, 2017).
Returning to Kafka’s novel and realizing that forgetting can be a positive action at times, we still need to ask ourselves why K. was accused of and eventually sentenced to death for self-forgetfulness? I propose that by executing K., the mysterious court system in which he was prosecuted did not assert his guilt. On the contrary, the court system, arbitrary and unjust though it may have been, offered poor K. complete liberation: a moment of freedom, a break from his constant attempts to remember his former life story, an exit ticket from the “terror of remembering” (Reiff, 2016) that made his life so miserable.
In Kafka’s novel, it is Titorelli’s task to explain the possible acquittal paths to K.: “I forgot to ask you first what sort of acquittal you want. There are three possibilities, that is, definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, and indefinite postponement” (Kafka, 1965: 191). Clearly, definite acquittal is based on “the innocence of the accused” (Kafka, 1965). In that case, claims Titorelli, “you would require neither my help nor help from anyone” (Kafka, 1965). Moreover, as the most desirable type of exoneration for every suspect, it is interesting to read Titorelli’s interpretation of “definite acquittal”: “The documents relating to the case are said to be completely annulled, they simply vanish from sight, not only the charge but also records of the case and even the acquittal are destroyed. Everything is destroyed” (Kafka, 1965: 198). Importantly, when it comes to ostensible acquittal, one might think that the court completely dismisses the charges against the suspect. This is not the case, however: A detached observer might sometimes fancy that the whole case had been forgotten, the documents lost, and the acquittal made absolute. No one really acquainted with the Court could think such a thing. No document is ever lost, the Court never forgets anything. (Kafka, 1965: 198)
In other words, the difference between definite and ostensible acquittal lies in forgetting the nature of the legal procedures that led to each: while definite acquittal is the unmistakable forgetfulness of the court and the obliviousness of the no-longer suspect, partial acquittal is always about remembering and being remembered.
In their reading of Kafka’s prose, Deleuze and Guattari (2005 [1975]) claimed that definite acquittal means death. According to them, being totally forgotten is made possible only when one passes away. Going back to the novel itself, this is exactly what happened to K. As such, in line with this interpretation, K.’s execution is not necessarily his punishment, but perhaps his absolute acquittal. I believe it represents the Dialectics of Forgetting in Kafka’s writing. On one hand, Josef K. sinned by forgetting his past, his life story. On the other hand, a complete state of forgetting eventually released K. from the burden of remembering. Everything is by now forgotten. K. is forever free.
We may find a similar attitude toward forgetting in several of Kafka’s other well-known stories. In The Metamorphosis, for example, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning only to realize that he has become a “gigantic insect” (Kafka, 1961: 9). We realize that Samsa’s only relation to his human attributes are his past, represented by a few items of furniture (used as mnemonic artifacts) that he desperately struggles to keep in his room. When his caring sister and mother try to free some space in the room for the newly turned insect, Samsa resists: Did he really want his warm room, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be turned into a naked den in which he would certainly be able to crawl unhampered in all directions but at the price of shedding simultaneously all recollection of his human background? He had indeed been so near the brink of forgetfulness that only the voice of his mother, which he had not heard for so long, had drawn him back from it. Nothing should be taken out of his room; everything must stay as it was . . . (Kafka, 1961: 38)
While his relatives insist on clearing his room, Samsa tries to protect his human belongings because they remind him of how he once was. Samsa is being offered the liberation of forgetfulness. If he would only give up what reminds him of his human past, he might be able to be reborn, just to be, without being obsessed with remembering. But he refuses this solution and fights for his furniture. For Samsa in The Metamorphosis, as for Josef K. in The Trial, the only true liberation is total oblivion.
In A Report to an Academy, another of Kafka’s short stories, forgetting possesses this same liberating force even without demanding the protagonist’s death. Here, Kafka describes an ape that became a human being and was asked by the “esteemed gentlemen of the academy” to submit a report about his previous life as an ape—a task that proves impossible for a creature who has only recently turned human: Almost five years separate me from my existence as an ape, a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done [. . .]. This achievement would have been impossible if I had stubbornly wished to hold onto my origin, onto the memories of my youth. (Kafka, 1917: n.p.)
The ape’s insistence on giving up his origin and memories of youth, that the story calls “obstinacy,” were “the highest command that I gave myself” (Kafka, 1917: n.p.). Indeed, as “a free ape,” he decided to forgo his memories, to forget his past; “in so doing, however, my memories for their part constantly closed themselves off against me” (Kafka, 1917). In this case, the liberating characteristics of forgetting are most vividly demonstrated. To become human, Kafka’s ape had to renounce his simian past. While Gregor Samsa could not give up the artifacts that reminded him of his own human past and thus could only become free when he is no longer around, the ape in the Report realized that his bonds to his past are the obstacles he must overcome if he really wishes to be reborn as a human being. Maybe this perception of forgetting was also the leading force behind Kafka’s last request? Perhaps when Kafka stated his desire to be forgotten, he wished to enjoy the true liberation that only forgetfulness might confer.
Conclusion: Kafka’s dialectics of forgetting
Besides his mostly unpublished literary masterpieces, such as The Trial, Kafka also recorded his epiphanies and personal notes in his diaries. One such diary entry was a brief note: “Vanity, self forgetfulness for some days” (Kafka, 28 January, Third Notebook). It seems that for Kafka, as for a few of his most famous protagonists, self-forgetfulness was a source of vanity that granted him a few moments of relief from the constant struggles waged, primarily with himself. Such battles, I believe, are expressed throughout Kafka’s writings and literary mission. For Kafka, forgetting is a dialectical force that is both oppressive and liberating. Forgetting one’s own past might prove a source of stress and discomfort, as it was for K. On the other hand, one who constantly endeavors to reconstruct the past and regain control over what ought to be remembered may find long-lasting freedom in forgetting, enabling one to become a different person and construct a new identity. In The Trial, forgetting is both a sin for which K. is persecuted and the basis of his eventual and definitive acquittal.
Franz Kafka’s will, his direct request to be forgotten, did not play any role in the Israeli courts’ decisions in the Hoffe case. Although the courts mentioned the will in their verdicts and justified Brod’s disregard thereof, they did not deliberate on whether Kafka’s own wishes should have been taken into consideration. Apparently, the desire to be forgotten was no momentary weakness on Kafka’s part. Understanding the liberating power of forgetting, Kafka asked Brod to destroy all his works. Perhaps this act of oblivion was Kafka’s absolute acquittal. Kafka apparently found comfort in the idea of a world without his own presence, a world that has forgotten him.
As such, it is memory—and the processes of remembering and forgetting that comprise it—that should have played a more central role in the case at hand. Indeed, the Israeli collective memory, it appears, was the only memory-related aspect addressed. The courts acknowledged that Israel is the entity in charge of what the Jewish People know about their collective past, and as such it is to enjoy the control over the right to remember Kafka, as manifested in the permission to archive and grant access to Kafka’s writings. According to Einhorn’s (2016) legal critique, this acknowledgment led the judges to bend both procedural rules and the law itself. Their decision, it seems to me, invites us to imagine what might have happened had the Israeli legal system introduced certain memory rights that it does not guarantee or uphold at present, including the right to be forgotten. Perhaps a well-developed set of memory rights would have served as the basis for protecting Kafka’s wish for freedom from the burdens of remembering and being remembered.
In any case, Kafka’s prose, his will, the cases that discuss them, and their fate in the Israeli legal system invite us to rethink memory, its role in society, and in the life of ordinary individuals and collectives. It calls for a much more nuanced discussion of the role of remembering and forgetting and should help us recognize the creative and liberating forces that might accompany acts of both deliberate and unintended forgetfulness. Kafka’s work highlights the inherent paradoxes that memory may contain. What is remembered is stagnated and frozen in eternity. Forgetting, however, is “not necessarily final” (Assmann, 2014: n.p.). Following Walter Benjamin, we should consider forgetting to be an active, ongoing force. If something is forgotten, it “does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion [that the past is being carried on into the present]” (Benjamin, 1973: 130). The forgotten thus remains alive, open to the process of recreation, reimagination, and reconstruction. From this perspective, Brod’s assumptions regarding Kafka’s insincere request to be forgotten should be questioned. Kafka may have asked to be forgotten because he wished to enter the realm of true creativity. Indeed, it is plausible that Kafka felt that being remembered was true oblivion, that of the known and the obvious.
However, this study is not an attempt at proving why Kafka asked to be forgotten. Rather, I believe that adding a memory-driven interpretation to Kafka’s writings provides an opportunity to think differently of Kafka’s last request. More importantly, it adds a necessary layer to the ongoing discourse regarding memory and forgetting in our world, which is characterized by an unlimited capacity for remembrance. Kafka, almost 100 years ago, may have considered forgetting as a positive moment which carries the opportunity to help someone reemerge as a different person. Maybe we should use Kafka’s writings and final request to embrace this message as well.
