Category: German Literature

The Largely-Forgotten Tragedy of Fontane’s Effi Briest

Introduction – Germany’s contribution to the European realist novel

There are no two ways about it – Effi Briest is a sad and depressing book, and a deeply tragic one too. It tells the story of the marriage of a young girl to a much older man, and that marriage’s inevitable break down. I heard about it, as I imagine a few others may have done, because Samuel Beckett really liked it, and though I don’t like Beckett’s writing much his praise was enough to put Fontane’s novel on my radar. Beckett said of it: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”, and while I can’t imagine reading it four times I do think I’ll come back to it one day, and maybe even be moved once more. It is, all in all, an excellent book.

A painting of Theodor Fontane, author of Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is the most well-known representative of German bourgeois realism. He turned to novel writing late in his life, using works like Effi Briest and Frau Jenny Treibel with their female leads to criticise the social structure and ideals of the newly unified German Reich.

But that’s where its problems begin. Effi Briest is a good book: it is meticulously well put together, pleasantly short for a 19th century realist novel, and has interesting characters whose fates are easy enough to be interested in. But it was published 1895, a few scant years after Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a book which it has a lot in common with, and a book which is Great where Effi Briest is only good. I know the Germanists have tried to make Effi stand among Anna and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as one of the best realist novels of the 19th Century, but I can’t help but feel the comparison just leaves Effi looking silly, a little girl next to these older and more experienced women.

The Daughter of the Air – Effi Briest at home

“Poor Effi”, as the narrator on rare occasions breaks their neutral facade to call her, is seventeen at the story’s beginning, though there’s very little indicate that. The girl is introduced more as a cheeky child than as an almost-adult, with she and her mother doing some handiwork together. Effi soon leaves to be with her friends, though, where they make a mess eating berries and sitting on the swing at Effi’s house. The swing is one of the recurrent leitmotifs of the story, one of those objects connecting Effi and a certain vision of her world. She is given the epithet “Daughter of the air” at one point, and it well describes the carefree attitude that she has at the novel’s outset.

But there are storm clouds ahead, even if Effi can’t see them. While they eat their berries she tells her friends about the guest to the family’s house, Baron Geert von Innstettin, who once was madly in love with Effi’s mother but was unable to marry her due to lack of funds, and who perhaps – we assume – still has some passion left over. He proposes to Effi as soon as she has finished with her friends, in spite of only having had a glimpse of her up till then, and with no small amount of pressure from her parents Effi agrees to let herself be married off.

Very little of this is described, which I suppose is one of my main gripes with Fontane. The wedding is not described, the first real meeting between Effi and Innstetten isn’t described, and the honeymoon trip to Italy is equally sparsely illustrated. You might say that this is impressive stylistic economy – Fontane knows what he doesn’t need to show. Furthermore, it surely adds a sense of mystery to the novel, making us ask ourselves what might have happened and look for clues in the rest of the narrative. Up to a point I’d agree with both of these views. But only up to a point. For I suspect that Fontane’s economy is due to a lack of funds too – I can’t help but feel he just doesn’t have the talent or confidence to attempt certain scenes, such as going inside Effi’s head while she’s giving birth.

Kessin and its ghouls

After some shopping in Berlin, Effi is whisked away to the fictional town of Kessin, out on the Baltic Sea, where Innstettin has his home. It is a quiet, isolated town with an oppressive atmosphere that leaves Effi longing for her own home. One of the best scenes in this section of the novel is one where Effi sees the train heading West and cries – it is excellent precisely because the connection between home and trains is one we have to make for ourselves. Throughout the novel trains are constantly mentioned – they always point to another life that seems to be running away from us.

A picture of the Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea. In Effi Briest the town of Kessin becomes a hugely oppressive place for young Effi, who finds its populace close-minded and hostile, and the sea equally cold.

Even with Innstettin, who Effi does love, or thinks she does, there is difficulty. He goes away regularly for work, leaving her all alone. The townsfolk, bar one, are no company, and the house may have a ghost in the attic who prevents Effi from sleeping well. Another brilliant moment that reveals just how isolated Effi is is when she confesses to the maid about how she didn’t sleep well the first time the ghost appears. This information, given privately, is then immediately passed on to Innstettin by his servant – it shows where the real power in the house lies, and how Effi is completely without anyone to trust.

“An Affair” of sorts

Eventually an old friend of Innstettin’s comes to town to occupy one of the various beaurocratic posts created by the new German Reich. He is, like Effi’s husband, in his forties, but Major Crampas is also a far more youthful man than Innstettin is. Innstettin is a man who is absolutely blinded by various conceptions of duty, order, and what is proper – his career is everything to him, and even though he cares for Effi it’s hard to see much passion in his interaction with her.

Meanwhile, Crampas knows poetry, and dazzles Effi by introducing her to Heine’s works. Even though he has a wife, that doesn’t stop him from seducing her. The consummation of their affair takes place in a carriage, deep in the woods late one night on the way back from a dinner – a thoroughly Romantic location. It lies at the centre of the novel in terms both of structure, and in terms of pages.

But after it, there’s almost no hint that the affair took place. Effi meets him a few more times, and we forget about him. It may be that I didn’t understand the nuances of the German I read the novel in, but that really did seem to be all there was to it. There aren’t any more chapters devoted to him. He just fades out. Effi, for her part, doesn’t really seem to be all that into the affair. Like a leaf floating the air, she just seems content to be blown around by his passions.

Growing up and its Consequences

With the prospect of an imminent promotion Innstettin decides, much to Effi’s relief, to move to Berlin with her. She goes ahead to choose a flat, but deciding she doesn’t want to see Crampas again, she feigns illness until Innstettin himself comes out, a few weeks later, having finished up at home in Kessin. Her illness is a key incident because it shows how Effi has gone from being a carefree dreamer to having something akin to a cunning nature of her own. From being a child who it is easy to like, I found myself turning a little bit against her.

But time passes, and everybody gets on with life. Effi’s daughter, Annie, grows up a little, and Effi herself reaches about twenty-five years old before anything else happens. It is then, quite by chance, that Innstettin discovers Crampas’s old love letters to Effi. Even though the whole thing lies deep in the past he decides that his honour still demands he duel with Crampas, so he arrives in Kessin and kills him in single combat in another sparsely described scene – “The shots came; Crampas fell”. Crampas tries to say something, but dies before he can have any last words. Innstettin goes home, having already sent Effi away, and gets on with his life. Fontane’s realist style does well to take any kind of magic away from the conflict.

The Ending of the Story

Effi can’t go home – her parents forbid it – but she does get a little money from them and rents a small flat, also in Berlin. She has few visitors, except for one of Innstettin’s servants whom she had been responsible for hiring, and who now decides to carry on serving her. Only twice does she see her own child, but the second time, in a meeting organised with Innstettin’s blessing, Annie is completely monotonous and shows no signs of affection towards her mother. Effi sends her away after only a few minutes, and cries. But her inner turmoil is avoided by Fontane – another moment where he seems to have lacked the confidence to go inside her head.

Eventually though, Effi gets to go home after her parents take pity on her. She has some happy moments, then dies of a chill. It is a frustrating ending because there really is no reason for her to die. Both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary had relatively good reasons to justify their tragic fates. But with Effi, I can’t help but feel like Fontane was just shrugging his shoulders and saying “well, I have to finish the novel somehow”. I also am not sure I am a fan of the implications of the end, which seem to suggest that death is inevitable for adulterers. It’s strange to me because Fontane is generally a champion of progressive social changes in the novel. It’s like he can’t bring himself to have an ending that fully goes against convention.

A photo of a girl on a swing.
A little girl on a swing. If only Effi had chosen to stay on her swing instead of marrying at such a young age her life would not have ended in misery and tragedy. But as with both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary social pressures proved greater than Effi’s own resistance. We can only hope that in our own day the situation is no longer so.

The one thing I did like about the ending, though, was the glimpse we get of Innstettin. He now has served a short stint in prison for the duel and is back at work, having also had the promotion he wanted. But all his love for his job has vanished. He is tormented by the feeling that all of his career ambition is actually meaningless, that the duel was a mistake too. I didn’t want to see him have a gruesome comeuppance, but I was glad to see him face the consequences of his own actions. In much the same way Effi’s parents express the beginnings of doubts concerning the whole marriage, once she is back at home and dying. Even though Fontane isn’t willing to keep Effi alive, I suppose he does make the most of her death.

Conclusion

I suppose I can recommend Effi Briest, but only with reservations. If you are going to dip into Fontane, it seems to be an excellent place to start – but given how few of his works are translated, there’s not much choice to begin with. He called Effi his “first real success”, and it is a success. But as much as we often like to read good books, variety also seems to be pretty important in considering what to give our time to. And unfortunately there is another novel which involves trains, adultery, parents and children, and the battle of the individual against social pressures – another novel which is, I think, far better than Effi Briest. That’s the unavoidable problem here. If it weren’t for the book being useful for my German exams next year, I’d be feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t just read Anna Karenina another time through.

Am I completely wrong here? Have you read Effi Briest and did you enjoy it? Comment below!

Picture of the Baltic Sea by Mantas Volungevicius [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] is used without changes.

Conrad Meyer’s The Marriage of the Monk and the Challenge to Truth

I confess I only read The Marriage of the Monk (“Die Hochzeit des Mönchs”) because it was mentioned a few times in the general criticism on German novellas in the 19th century I’d been reading and it sounded like it would be a good fit for my exams at the end of next year. But, all things considered, there’ve been worse reasons I’ve read books. And worse books I’ve read for better reasons. For it actually turns out that The Marriage of the Monk was actually worth reading to begin with, even in the original German as I did. I thought I’d share a few of its interesting features here, since it’s impossible to find a translation online and hard enough in the real world too, and they aren’t worth being lost along with the novella.

A photo of Conrad Meyer
Conrad Meyer (1825 – 1898) is chiefly known outside of the German-speaking lands for nothing, because hardly any translations of his works exist. But The Marriage of the Monk is one of his many well-crafted little historical stories

The Frame Narrative

The story is made up of a frame narrative, the outer layer of which takes place in Verona, where a group of friends are gathered round the fire and telling stories. Their head is Cangrande della Scala, an Italian nobleman best known now for his patronage of the poet, Dante. He summons Dante from the back of the room and asks him to tell the group a story, and the story of The Marriage of the Monk is his choice. How does a monk get married? The title already contains the central tension – a monk is someone who has renounced worldly passions including love and marriage, so it is only by breaking one’s vows of chastity that such a man can return to the world. Dante details the consequences of this.

A painting of Dante, the story's primary narrator
Dante Alighieri, world famous poet. By choosing him as a narrator Meyer already raises questions about what kinds of “truth” he as a writer can represent.

The Marriage of the Monk – Plot Summary

Dante’s tale begins with the sinking of marriage boat as it goes along a river in Padua. The husband and almost every male in his family is on board, in the chaos they all perish. Diana, the wife, is rescued by the monk, Astorre, who appears from one bank of the river just as from the other there comes the famed tyrant, Ezzelino III da Romano. It turns out that the monk is the last male heir of the groom’s family, and the old patriarch, on his deathbed, begs the monk to renounce his vows and return to the world, so that his accumulated worldly wealth will not be wasted. A Papal letter grants permission to return only if Astorre agrees to by his own free will, but he is against it. Only with pressure from the old man does he eventually relent and agree to marry his brother’s widow.

Obviously, love in those days counted for very little. A date is set for the exchange of rings, and the marriage itself. Astorre meets old friends and finds himself more than a little out of his depth in the world of cutthroat tyrants and backstabbing. But he successfully goes and buys a ring for his future wife, only to realise that he doesn’t know her finger size, so he gets two gold rings instead of the one. As he walks home he drops one of these rings, and this finds its way into the hands of a young girl, Antiope, who he had once met at the beheading of her father. Her mother, driven mad by the incident, declares that the monk must wish to marry her daughter, and decides that they must go to his parties to see him.

This happens, and a fight takes place between the three women of the story. As Astorre walks the young girl home, however, it becomes clear that he loves her instead of his betrothed. His friends are against it, especially since the widow’s brother is one of them. But eventually the widow relents, agreeing to give return the old ring to Antiope so that the monk no longer has any divided loyalties. But there is a condition. At the fancy dress party taking place that evening Antiope must come to the widow, Diana, herself and take the ring off, humiliating herself in front of high society. When she comes, however, Diana (who is dressed as her divine namesake) takes an arrow and kills Antiope. The monk, arriving too late to save her, tries to get revenge but is cut down. They die in each other’s arms.

That’s the plot, so now for the cool things about how The Marriage of the Monk is made.

Interpretation: Playing with Truth

Storytelling

Even if you didn’t get that Cangrande was a real figure, it’s hard not to have heard of Dante. Meyer uses real figures in all of his novellas, but we should immediately ask ourselves the question – Why? It is easy enough to answer why Ezzelino is included: he is a splash of local colour, tying the story down to a concrete place and time and thus adding to the verisimilitude of it just as namedropping a few landmarks helps in modern historical novels. But why use Dante and Cangrande?

I think, at least in part, it has to do with a sceptical attitude towards truth that runs through the whole of the story. When I imagine Dante, it’s as a grand poet, dressed in his magnificent red robes, as in the portrait. By having him be a slightly scrawny figure, uncomfortable in the world, Meyer undermines our idea of Dante, leaving our footing uncertain. The same is true of his story – this is a simple tale, hardly comparable in scale or scope to the Divine Comedy. As Dante himself says, “I am developing this story from an inscription on a tombstone”. Is this what Dante would tell? I think we are supposed to be left dissatisfied and questioning.

A woodcut of Ezzelino III da Romano, one of the novella's characters
Ezzelino III da Romano, another one of the historical figures used by Meyer. Is he just a splash of colour or does his inclusion mean something more?

More importantly, there is the question of how Dante would tell a story. I don’t mean in tercets. The Marriage of the Monk does some other cool things that challenge our usual idea of stories and storytelling. For one, Dante often admits that he doesn’t know something or a concrete detail. He challenges his own authority as the teller by drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that his story is only one of many possible interpretations of the event. There are also regular interruptions from other characters in the frame narrative, either to challenge something that Dante said, or even just so that people can shuffle about by the fire. The cumulative effect, though, is to make us aware both that this is really just a story, and that it is being told in a way that is far from any Truth.

There are other contributing factors to this critique of truth. For one, Dante takes the names of the characters around the fire for the characters within the story. Naturally, Ezzelino retains his name, but there is a Germano in both the frame narrative of The Marriage of the Monk and in its main story. The same is true of the women. Though Dante freely admits “I leave your innermost feelings untouched, since I can’t see into them”, the use of names still strikes us as strange. It means that the characters within the story are obviously not entirely the people they are supposed to be, because when we imagine people their names are a big part of their identity. Once again, we’re only getting a half-truth as a story.

Dante also leaves out the moral at the end of the story, a key element of fireside tales. After finishing he just stands up and leaves. This is particularly jarring because he is otherwise a very chatty storyteller, regularly listening to the interruptions and giving his opinion on them. The ending, then, comes as a shock and leaves us alone to decide for ourselves why it is that the monk is punished. Is it just because he removed his cowl? Or because he went against society by abandoning the woman he was supposed to marry?

Authority and Truth, inside and outside of the narrative

This critique of truth, indicated by the various formal features of the narrative, now lets us look at the story in a new light as we try to answer the question of Astorre’s fate. The consciousness of authority’s weak support base in truth is now revealed. In part the story does this by regular use of doublings. To the sinking boat come from one side the monk, representing a pure and Christian world view, and from the other Ezzelino, representing a worldly and scheming world view. There are two women. Antiope is pure and loved while Diana is the daughter of a rich man and so has more worldly value. The two rings bought by Astorre convey a sense of his divided loyalty to both the world and the divine.

When Dante describes Antiope finding the ring, he draws attention to his own sceptical storytelling by asking the listeners why they would believe in the fantastic overturning of the boat, but would not believe that from Antiope’s perspective she was perfectly correct in taking the gold ring as a sign that Astorre loved her and wished to be married. Dante shows that the worldview where we build stories around coincidences often leads us down paths that can be fatal, as in Antiope and Astorre’s case. He seems to suggest that is dangerous to believe too much.

Conclusion

What then kills Astorre? I think it is his divided loyalty between too many different truths. He cannot decide whether to commit to love, or whether to commit to worldly power and his duty as a nobleman. As one of his friends says before the monk dies, “Go back to your cloister, Astorre – you never should have left it”. The man is right – by leaving his cloister Astorre has to make a choice about what truth he believes in, while so long as he stays inside he is safe with only his duty to God. The Marriage of the Monk thus becomes a cautionary tale about the danger of naivety in a world where truth no longer matters. In our own modern world, where considerable scepticism is necessary to survive the modern news landscape, it remains surprisingly relevant in its message. If you can read German, give it a go.

Before the Law by Franz Kafka – Translation and (brief) Analysis

This is my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Vor dem Gesetz”, which also appears towards the end of The Trial. After the text there are some casual comments on the meaning and on reading Kafka generally.

Before the Law

Before the Law there stands a gatekeeper. And to this gatekeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the Law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks for a moment and then asks whether he will be able to enter later on. “This much is possible,” says the gatekeeper. “But not now.” Since the door onto the Law stands open as ever and the gatekeeper stands to one side of it, the man bends forward so as to see through it into what lies within. When the gatekeeper notices it, he laughs, saying: “If you’re so allured by what’s inside, why not try going through in spite of my forbidding it? Be warned, though: I am mighty. And I am but the lowest of the gatekeepers. From each hall to the next there are gatekeepers, each one mightier than before. By the third one I cannot even bear his sight.” Such difficulties the man from the country has not counted on. Surely the Law, he thinks, ought to be accessible to all people and at all times. But as he looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, with his sharp nose and long thin black beard like a Tartar’s, he then decides he had better wait until he received permission to enter. The gatekeeper gives him a little stool and lets him set himself down on the side by the door. He sits there for days and then years. He makes many efforts to be let in and tires the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper every-so-often engages to give him little interrogations, where he asks the man about his homeland and about plenty of other things. But they are lifeless questions, however, of the sort that great men ask, and in the end he tells him once more that he still cannot let him in. The man, who had prepared a great deal for his journey, uses everything he has, whether valuable or not, in order to bribe the gatekeeper. The other man takes everything from him, but says as he does so: “I am only taking these from you so that you don’t think you haven’t tried everything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost without a moment’s pause. He forgets about the other gatekeepers, so that this one seems to him the only obstacle preventing him from entering the Law. He curses his misfortune, at first heedlessly and loudly; then, as he grows older, he just mutters to himself. He grows childish and, since from his years of study of the gatekeeper he has come to recognise the fleas in his felt collar, he asks the fleas to aid him in changing the gatekeeper’s mind too. At last his sight grows weak and he is unable to tell whether it is really getting darker, or if it is just his eyes deceiving him. He does recognise well, however, a radiance shining forth in the dark, one that escapes inextinguishably from the door into the Law. Now he has little time left to live. Before his death all the experiences of the whole time gather themselves inside his head into a single question, which he had hitherto not asked the gatekeeper. He beckons to him, for now he can no longer hold his head up straight. The gatekeeper has to bend himself deeply to lower himself down to him, since the height difference between them has greatly changed to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know?” Asks the gatekeeper, “You are insatiable.” “Look, if every man strives after the Law,” says the man. “How does it happen that in all these years nobody but myself has demanded entry?” The gatekeeper recognises that the man has already reached his end and, so as to reach him through his failing hearing, he shouts to him: “Nobody else could obtain permission here. This entrance was destined only for you. And now I am going to shut it.”

Comments

I’ve never been much of a fan of German, either as a language or as a literature, in comparison with others. I guess I’ve struggled to see the beauty in the words, and for a long time it seemed that German literature was a lesser copy of the Russian version, but without the redemptive hope of national faith. That is, simply a little grim and depressing. But Kafka has always been an favourite exception, in part because he has never fit snugly into the classification of “German literature”, being a Jew in what is now the Czech Republic, which even in the early 20th century was not exactly the centre of German culture. Yet Bohemia produced, in some way or other, Kafka, as it did Rilke. No matter my misgivings about the wider literature, misgivings which truth be told time and experience are quickly changing anyway, it’s hard not to feel grateful for those two.

Picture of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is perhaps the most widely read German language author outside of the German-speaking lands, and just as ambiguous a fellow as is his work.

Even so, “getting” Kafka took a long time. I’ve read The Metamorphoses two or three times now, in both the original and in translation, and have struggled to enjoy it. Only recently, under the full weight of various critics’ opinions, did the work begin to open up to me. But in spite of that misfire, other parts of Kafka’s oeuvre have more easily reached and crashed against the inner shore of my soul: “In the Penal Colony”, “A Hunger Artist”, and both The Trial and The Castle are among them.

It is perhaps foolish to have people in schools read Kafka because often they haven’t themselves lived in any serious way. It was certainly my problem when I started out. Without experience, it’s hard to appreciate the absurdity, because the stories seem simply absurd, as opposed to that Kafkaesque standard – absurd yet constantly revealed in our own lives to be entirely real. Within school and even, to be fair, university, usually we can only look at them clinically, rather than personally – that is, we can only appreciate, rather than truly enjoy them.

Kafka’s Train Ticket

My first experience of Kafka’s world being transported into my own came with receiving a penalty fare while trying to take the train home after having had dinner with a friend. I had bought a return ticket at the same station a few hours earlier, but unfortunately after going through the turnstiles I had thrown away the return ticket rather than the outbound one. When I arrived that evening the ticket office had closed, so there were only machines for buying tickets still operating. But I didn’t have a card on me, so I couldn’t buy a new ticket. I waited on the platform for the train to arrive, hoping to buy a ticket on board. Instead, what happened was that one of the railway workers came up and asked to see my ticket beforehand.

I explained what had happened and why I was unable to buy a replacement ticket, then asked to buy one as I saw that the worker had a ticket dispensing machine on her. I said that I had more than enough money in cash to buy the ticket. She told me to be quiet and asked for my ID. She then began writing me a penalty fare for trying to travel without a ticket. I tried once more to explain, and indeed I asked the worker to go and speak with her co-worker – the exact person I had bought both tickets from only a few hours previously – who I could see a few meters away.

Yet again, though, and against all that could be called reasonable – given that I had plenty of money and my receipts and an eyewitness in addition to everything else – I was told to stop being rude and to write down all of my details. I was then told that I had a month to pay the inflated price of the ticket she was giving me, or else I would be forced to go to court. Unexpected and in part inexplicable exercises of power and an illogical and cruel bureaucracy are all mainstays of Kafka’s world, but here they had been transported into my own. In a particularly sour mood, I eventually got my train back home. The penalty fare had cost about £5. The damage to my pride and dignity had cost considerably more.

There was a silver lining to this tale, though: it was the key to understanding Kafka. This, of course, turned out to be a great overestimation on my part, for as with the many doors of “Before the Law”, there are many different Kafka stories and each of them is be opened up by a different experience or several. But this was the first of many, and over time I’ve begun to enjoy Kafka more and more. What at first was simply a cold academic understanding of possible meanings is now a personal understanding of a few meanings.

Before the Law

“Before the Law” is probably my favourite of Kafka’s parable-like shorter stories. In part this is because it is simple linguistically and, like anyone who reads in a foreign language they are not yet the master of, I much prefer those works I feel I fully understand, even if the works themselves are perhaps on some other scale less great or complex. But the fact that it’s easy to read is not the reason it’s my favourite. No, I love it because it uses its simplicity not to leave its meaning concealed, like some abstract postmodern text, but rather to multiply its potential meanings, so that each new reading and each time it reappears in one’s mind is accompanied by a new thought, a new guess at one of its many possible truths.

Some Interpretations

I mean, in a sense you can list the things it might be about. It may well be about Gnosticism. It may also be about trying to reach God through a faith that never seems sufficient. Here in Cambridge it seems to me to be at least partially about the struggles of learning, how in spite of our best efforts we can waste away on a goal of knowledge that turns out to be entirely illusory, or at best the first door when there are many others left to come. Or maybe it is more broadly about any of those goals or ideals that become so great that we fail to live as a result of our quest to grasp them and even give away all that actually can give our life happiness and meaning instead – the equipment the man from the country has with him.

I mean those are just some ideas. As part of the translation process I had to make decisions that undoubtedly also contribute to the meanings you can locate in the text. Capitalising “Law” is a little controversial because it undoubtedly makes it harder to imagine that the story as simply being about trying to reach a lawyer for some advice. That said, I think by capitalising it I make it more clear that the Law is itself a symbol, and worth substituting if you feel like it. Another thing is the translation of “bestimmt” as “destined” when talking about the door itself. This reinforces the suggestion that perhaps the story as a whole is a way of looking at our relationship to fate. We need to accept it as personal and at the same time immutable. The man is a fool for wanting to change it by entering.

We do talk about the “laws of fate”, after all.

Conclusion

But there are so many meanings that going on would be foolish. What is true without a shadow of a doubt is that this is a wonderful story in the way that Walter Benjamin conceived of the term. I narrated it to a friend as we both went out for a burger and with my own retelling it took on newer meanings while still retaining the heart of Kafka’s work. “Before the Law” is special precisely because its size and interpretative potential mean that wherever it goes it can have its impact, and that repeating it is like simply adding a new flavouring to a dish. That’s the best argument for reading it and retelling it, again and again and again.

What do you think the story is about? Let me know in the comments

Photograph of Franz Kafka taken by Sigismund Jacobi is in the public domain.