In this moral form the Jewish question marked, in Kafka’s words, ‘the terrible inner condition of these generations.’15 No matter how insignificant this problem may appear to us in the face of what actually happened later, we cannot disregard it here, for neither Benjamin nor Kafka nor Karl Kraus can be understood without it. For simplicity’s sake I shall state the problem exactly as it was stated and endlessly discussed then – namely, in an article entitled ‘German-Jewish Mt Parnassus’ (‘Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass’) which created a great stir when Moritz Goldstein published it in 1912 in the distinguished journal Der Kunstwart.

According to Goldstein, the problem as it appeared to the Jewish intelligentsia had a dual aspect, the non-Jewish environment and assimilated Jewish society, and in his view the problem was insoluble. With respect to the non-Jewish environment, ‘We Jews administer the intellectual property of a people which denies us the right and the ability to do so.’ And further: ‘It is easy to show the absurdity of our adversaries’ arguments and prove that their enmity is unfounded. What would be gained by this? That their hatred is genuine. When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false judgments about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable. Anyone who does not realize this is beyond help.’ It was the failure to realize this that was felt to be unbearable about Jewish society, whose representatives, on the one hand, wished to remain Jews and, on the other, did not want to acknowledge their Jewishness: ‘We shall openly drum the problem that they are shirking into them. We shall force them to own up to their Jewishness or to have themselves baptized.’ But even if this was successful, even if the mendacity of this milieu could be exposed and escaped – what would be gained by it? A ‘leap into modern Hebrew literature’ was impossible for the current generation. Hence: ‘Our relationship to Germany is one of unrequited love. Let us be manly enough at last to tear the beloved out of our hearts … I have stated what we must want to do; I have also stated why we cannot want it. My intention was to point up the problem. It is not my fault that I know of no solution.’ (For himself, Herr Goldstein solved the problem six years later when he became cultural editor of the Vossische Zeitung. And what else could he have done?)

One could dispose of Moritz Goldstein by saying that he simply reproduced what Benjamin in another context called ‘a major part of the vulgar anti-Semitic as well as the Zionist ideology’ (Briefe I, 152–53), if one did not encounter in Kafka, on a far more serious level, a similar formulation of the problem and the same confession of its insolubility. In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers he said that the Jewish question or ‘the despair over it was their inspiration – an inspiration as respectable as any other but fraught, upon closer examination, with distressing peculiarities. For one thing, what their despair discharged itself in could not be German literature which on the surface it appeared to be,’ because the problem was not really a German one. Thus they lived ‘among three impossibilities …: the impossibility of not writing’ as they could get rid of their inspiration only by writing; ‘the impossibility of writing in German’ – Kafka considered their use of the German language as the ‘overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property, which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out’; and finally, ‘the impossibility of writing differently,’ since no other language was available. ‘One could almost add a fourth impossibility,’ says Kafka in conclusion, ‘the impossibility of writing, for this despair was not something that could be mitigated through writing’ – as is normal for poets, to whom a god has given to say what men suffer and endure. Rather, despair has become here ‘an enemy of life and of writing; writing was here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his last will and testament just before he hangs himself.’16

Nothing could be easier than to demonstrate that Kafka was wrong and that his own work, which speaks the purest German prose of the century, is the best refutation of his views. But such a demonstration, apart from being in bad taste, is all the more superfluous as Kafka himself was so very much aware of it – ‘If I indiscriminately write down a sentence,’ he once noted in his Diaries, ‘it already is perfect’17 – just as he was the only one to know that ‘Mauscheln’ (speaking a Yiddishized German), though despised by all German-speaking people, Jews or non-Jews, did have a legitimate place in the German language, being nothing else but one of the numerous German dialects. And since he rightly thought that ‘within the German language, only the dialects and, besides them, the most personal High German are really alive,’ it naturally was no less legitimate to change from Mauscheln, or from Yiddish, to High German than it was to change from Low German or the Alemannic dialect. If one reads Kafka’s remarks about the Jewish troupe of actors which so fascinated him, it becomes clear that what attracted him were less the specifically Jewish elements than the liveliness of language and gesture.

To be sure, we have some difficulty today in understanding these problems or taking them seriously, especially since it is so tempting to misinterpret and dismiss them as mere reaction to an anti-Semitic milieu and thus as an expression of self-hatred. But nothing could be more misleading when dealing with men of the human stature and intellectual rank of Kafka, Kraus, and Benjamin. What gave their criticism its bitter sharpness was never anti-Semitism as such, but the reaction to it of the Jewish middle class, with which the intellectuals by no means identified. There, too, it was not a matter of the frequently undignified apologetic attitude of official Jewry, with which the intellectuals had hardly any contact, but of the lying denial of the very existence of widespread anti-Semitism, of the isolation from reality staged with all the devices of self-deception by the Jewish bourgeoisie, an isolation which for Kafka, and not only for him, included the often hostile and always haughty separation from the Jewish people, the so-called Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) who were, though one knew better, blamed by them for anti-Semitism. The decisive factor in all this was the loss of reality, aided and abetted by the wealth of these classes. ‘Among poor people,’ wrote Kafka, ‘the world, the bustle of work, so to speak, irresistibly enters the huts … and does not allow the musty, polluted, child-consuming air of a nicely furnished family room to be generated.’18 They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions – thus, for example, to be prepared for the murder of Walther Rathenau (in 1922): to Kafka it was ‘incomprehensible that they should have let him live as long as that.’19 What finally determined the acuteness of the problem was the fact that it did not merely, or even primarily, manifest itself as a break between the generations from which one could have escaped by leaving home and family. To only very few German-Jewish writers did the problem present itself in this way, and these few were surrounded by all those others who are already forgotten but from whom they are clearly distinguishable only today when posterity has settled the question of who is who. (‘Their political function,’ wrote Benjamin, ‘is to establish not parties but cliques, their literary function to produce not schools but fashions, and their economic function to set into the world not producers but agents. Agents or smarties who know how to spend their poverty as if it were riches and who make whoopee out of their yawning vacuity. One could not establish oneself more comfortably in an uncomfortable situation.’20) Kafka, who exemplified this situation in the above-mentioned letter by ‘linguistic impossibilities,’ adding that they could ‘also be called something quite different,’ points to a ‘linguistic middle class’ between, as it were, proletarian dialect and high-class prose; it is ‘nothing but ashes which can be given a semblance of life only by overeager Jewish hands rummaging through them.’ One need hardly add that the overwhelming majority of Jewish intellectuals belonged to this ‘middle class’; according to Kafka, they constituted ‘the hell of German-Jewish letters,’ in which Karl Kraus held sway as ‘the great overseer and taskmaster’ without noticing how much ‘he himself belongs in this hell among those to be chastised.’21 That these things may be seen quite differently from a non-Jewish perspective becomes apparent when one reads in one of Benjamin’s essays what Brecht said about Karl Kraus: ‘When the age died by its own hand, he was that hand’ (Schriften II, 174).

For the Jews of that generation (Kafka and Moritz Goldstein were but ten years older than Benjamin) the available forms of rebellion were Zionism and Communism, and it is noteworthy that their fathers often condemned the Zionist rebellion more bitterly than the Communist. Both were escape routes from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence.