Published 4.25.2017. London: Pushkin Press, 2017. Translated from German by David Burnett. 189 pages.

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Suppose in the early part of the last century you gave Franz Kafka an extended vacation from his mind-numbing office job at the Bohemian state Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. “Relax Franz,” you say, echoing Canetti, “you have many years ahead of you; there’s no need to kill yourself like this.” And he would say, “You’re right. I need to get out of this hellhole and experience the country, ramble through the forests like Stifter, tramp the Alps with Walser, contemplate death with Kleist, play capers like a character from Hebel.” And he would write in the daytime, free from the grip of tiredness, incompletion, distress. (As Michael Hoffmann explains in the introduction to Investigations of a Dog, Kafka tried to structure his day to allow for both a day job and time to write, a bit of scheduling acrobatics/bodily retraining which had variable success.) With more time and space what his writings lost in urgency, they might have gained in studiousness and polish, the leisure of unbothered autodidacticism. But life didn’t allow this to Kafka–when he wasn’t working, he was fighting with his body, its tiredness, and tuberculosis, which ultimately killed him in 1924.

Among the fellow Prague writers who spoke at Kafka’s funeral was Johannes Urzidil, a younger contemporary, the son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother (which, as we Yidden would have it, automatically makes him a Jew), who had a long career as a poet, historian, and short story writer in German, but whose floruit in fiction came during the three decades he spent in the United States after being forced to flee following the Nazi annexation of his homeland. Urzidil had time not afforded to Kafka, years in which he saw the breakdown of the social and political order in his home country, the struggle between urban and rural, between red armbands and black, the defeat of the former and the triumphant, odious march of the latter. Unlike other German-speaking intellectuals Urzidil did not return to Europe after the war but instead stayed in the United States and achieved literary recognition in German while living abroad. (As Urzidil’s translator David Burnett notes, it is a wonder that his fiction has not appeared in English before.)

This first collection of that fiction in English is, as Burnett admits, a bit of a grab-bag of unmatched pieces; fortunately, the story which opens the book, “The Last Bell” is a masterpiece of Holocaust fiction, a Holocaust tragicomedy (you read that right) which deserves to be anthologized and discussed widely due to its brilliant style and, I submit, transformative treatment of the subject. The narrator is Marška, a Bohemian housekeeper who is told one day by the “Mister and Missus” of the home that they must leave immediately, and they are bequeathing everything—the apartment, the furniture, the fine plate—to her. (Even the rent is paid up for a while.) Whereas some people would be elated to receive such worldly possessions, Marška, whose colorful persona might be described as H.L. Mencken doing a savage rewrite of Downton Abbey, is distraught. She bursts in tears outside the theater:

“Why are you crying, miss?” one of them asks me, “The show was hilarious.”—“Ten years,” I say, “Ten years. The beds in the morning, then the coffee, and every Sunday an egg for the Mister. . . . Ten whole years.”—“Well,” says the man, “that’s a long time. But don’t you think you’ve maybe got a screw loose?”—“No. Because suddenly nothing matters anymore. I can shatter everything, tear it to shreds, dirty it to my heart’s content. ‘Cause it all belongs to me now.”—“Is that so? Well then, you’re awfully lucky.”

Yet if Marška’s sentimental attachment to the class system seems pitifully quaint, it arguably makes her uniquely capable among the people around her of having sympathy for people like her absent employers—Jews. Urzidil studiedly takes his time to foreground the fact that the reason Marška’s Mister and Missus left in such a hurry was because the Nazis have just annexed Czechoslovakia and are rounding up Jews. In the meantime, Marška learns to enjoy her newfound wealth, buying fancy clothing, going out on the town, and being courted by a handsome young Nazi soldier. Maybe these Germans aren’t so bad after all! She invites her sister Joška to come stay with her in the luxurious (but now empty) apartment, a move that backfires due to the fact that Joška is more vapid even than Marška herself, and unlike Marška (as the course of the story will show) Joška is totally lacking in a conscience. There follows a bar scene with some SS officers as hilarious as anything in Inglorious Basterds, and then a sibling rivalry that would be highly amusing if the stakes didn’t suddenly turn deadly serious. The unexpected move from comedy to tragedy gives this story a powerful, unforgettable ending that carries significant weight. But what makes the story transformational is that it makes its Czech characters seem so relatable and normal, then pulls the carpet out from under that normality to reveal the capriciousness beneath.

This is the story that rarely gets discussed in units on the Holocaust taught in high school and college literature classes; why did average people just go along with the Nazi program of exterminating the Jews? Why didn’t more people stand up and oppose them? Too often in trying to counter hatred and bigotry we focus on the victims instead of the perpetrators, dealing with the symptoms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. instead of the underlying sickness. But in recent years the recognition has dawned in various quarters: sexual harassment is an issue with masculine enculteration, not merely a “women’s  issue”. White neo-nazis have as much of a racial identity as anyone else. In order to understand Naziism, we must first examine ourselves—are we just bystanders to hate, or will we lead and speak out and act against it?—and that is the reversal in perspective that this story prompts in the reader.

We get haunting echoes of the present in such exchanges as this one:

That Nazi floozy from the fourth floor, on the other hand, the one with the awful subhuman child, she told me not long ago in the hallway: “The most important thing is to get rid of all the Jews.” So I asked her, “Did one of them do anything to you?”—“God forbid, I’ve never even talked to one. But everyone knows how awful they are.” I said no more.

While the “Nazi floozy” sounds uncomfortably modern, this paragraph shows what a gift Urzidil had for comic dialogue; in this he is a true heir to Kafka, who was a much funnier bugger than his reputation for dark labyrinths of hellish bureaucracy gives him credit for. Nor is it sufficient to define “Kafkaesque” merely as a German corollary to French Surrealism. To my mind, what makes Kafka more distinctive than that is the existence in his stories of characters with strange, almost inscrutable motives, and we see an example of such a character in Urzidil’s story “The Duchess of Albanera.”

The story begins with an amusing sketch of a Prague charcuterie whose exacting refinement, obviously a parody of life under the Austro-Hungarian empire, is perfectly attuned to the heightened aesthetic sensibility of their regular client, Herr Wenzel Schaschek. They cut exactly 15 dekagrams of meat for Herr Schaschek every day, with Monday, Wednesday, and Friday being Hungarian salami days, and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday (like clockwork) being those days when Herr Schaschek orders ham. However, on the day on which the story takes place, Herr Schaschek shocks the clerk in the shop by ordering ham on a day reserved for salami; something in this perfectly-ordered deli universe has been disturbed! In fact, something is different: all the newspapers are reporting on a stolen painting of the “Duchess of Albanera,” and Herr Schaschek is the one who—on a spur of the moment, a yearning of his soul, and succeeding by pure luck—managed to spirit away the painting to his private apartment and pull off a perfect heist.

Yet as he could have learned from Raskolnikov, committing the perfect crime is only the beginning of the criminal’s ordeal. In the world of the story, we have already seen how Herr Schaschek talks to his pickles, and so we cannot be too shocked when the duchess of the painting comes to life and starts remonstrating Herr Schaschek for abducting her and holding her prisoner! The dialogue between Herr Schaschek and the duchess is not just very funny, but is also fascinating for its philosophical and psychological depth, as well as the metafictional fun Urzidil has in drawing contrasts between the life of the real-life 14th century Duchess of Albanera and the painted copy of her. Again Urzidil’s gift for comic dialogue shines in this story, and the ending is once again unexpectedly strong. (I joked on Twitter about this, but these stories do show a level of formal perfection/completion that is hard to accomplish when a story is rushed, which in Kafka’s situation is invariably what you must do.)

The other stories in the collection illustrate Urzidil’s versatility and the ability to write in different genres that comes with years of absorbing the techniques of other writers. “Seigelmann’s Journey,” for example is very much written as a reaction to the travel writing genre in general. The main character is a travel agent who has cultivated an extraordinary amount of picturesque knowledge about every possible travel destination, so much so that this man (who in fact has never gone anywhere) creates the illusion of being well-traveled to the woman who falls in love with him. Meanwhile, “Where the Valley Ends” is the rollicking story of how a small village dispute turned into a hateful vendetta between two village families, a Hatfields and McCoys type situation which stands in for the broader political strife of central Europe after World War I. Adelbert Stifter is name-checked more than once in these stories—I thought the detail where the village Stifters had no idea who their great relative was reminded me of that time I visited a rural town called Milton where nobody knew of or gave a damn about the poet—but I would say Gottfried Keller also wrote stories like these as well, of elaborate jokes gone wrong, of villages descending into chaos, and this shows how skillful Urzidil was at incorporating influences from across the whole history of German literature.

It seems safe to surmise that there is a lot more of Urzidil left to be translated, including a novel, two acclaimed story collections, and several books of essays and histories, and the tone of recent profiles of the writers suggests that the project of bringing more of this writer into English is ongoing. On the evidence of this collection, that is a project likely to yield significant riches to anyone who delves into this author’s work.