Alienation, Synchronization, Imitation: Kafka, Then and Now

Abstract

In this article, I have tried to measure the distance that separates us from Kafka by trying to register both the things that we still have in common with him and his time, and the many things that have changed in between. The first section is an analysis of the story “A Visit to a Mine” in terms of the new accident prevention techniques instituted by the welfare state at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. The second section deals with the new concepts of time and space that emerged in the age of electric and electro-magnetic media. And the third section is an attempt to write a short history of imitation from Descartes to Darwin, Kafka, Turing, and, finally, to the Large Language Models that we now call Artificial Intelligence.

• Preamble

Kafka’s “imperial message” never reaches its addressee, “you, the individual, the pitiful subject, the tiny shadow that has fled from the imperial sun into the farthest distance.”1 The distances are too great, there is not enough time. The messenger travels from place to place, “and so on through millennia.” You can “only dream of it when evening comes.” And perhaps the message is just that—a dream: the emperor has never sent a message, and certainly not to you.

Are we then to consider ourselves lucky, because we can read Kafka’s texts whenever we want? Maybe, but maybe not. After all, it is not even clear whether these texts are messages at all. And who knows to whom they are addressed? A large part of them was never meant to be published, in fact, meant to be destroyed. Should we be grateful to Kafka’s friend Max Brod who saved them from destruction, nonetheless? And what do we, what can we expect to find in these texts, when we are trying to sneak into Kafka’s unpublished writings, and even into the intimacy of his letters which were never sent to us? What can we hope to find in these messages “from a dead man”, written in an old-fashioned language, outdated and irrelevant today like the flyer about a rebellion in a neighboring province in Kafka’s fragment on the “Building of the Great Chinese Wall”?2

I see three possibilities: We can try to find ourselves in Kafka’s work by claiming, for instance, that it contains solutions to the problems we are facing today. We can immerse ourselves in Kafka, the man, and the problems of his time without ever thinking about our own problems and our own time. Or we can keep the gap open that separates us from Kafka by trying to register both the things which we still have in common with him and his time and the many things that have changed in between.

Writing this essay, I have chosen the last one of these three options. In its first section, I have tried to read Kafka’s short story “A Visit to a Mine”3 as the description of a worker’s perspective on the complex system of inspections and accident prevention technologies in mining operations that was instituted by welfare states in Kafka’s time. A second section deals with the new concepts of time and space that emerged in the age of electricity and electro-magnetic media. And the third section is an attempt to write a short history of imitation from Descartes to Darwin, Kafka, Turing, and, finally, to the Large Language Models that we now call Artificial Intelligence.

1. Alienation

It is one of the so-called well-established results of Kafka scholarship that the ten engineers described in the short story “A Visit to a Mine” represent some of the fifteen texts or authors featured in an almanac which Kafka’s publisher Kurt Wolff issued under the title Der neue Roman in 1917.4 Malcolm Pasley, the author of this thesis, put it mildly when he noted that such “semi-private games” “seem to be rather unfair.”5 For why would anyone, then and now, want to read a far-fetched enigma about an esoteric literary publication rather than a text about the very concrete event addressed in the story’s title, a text about a group of ten, not fifteen, engineers visiting a mine? Why not take the story literally?

It is true that Kafka’s Official Writings6 had not been published when Pasley’s articles were written, but it was well-known nonetheless that Kafka’s job in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague7 was risk classification8 according to §. 14 of the Law of 28 December 1887, Concerning the Accident Insurance of Workers.9 And one did not have to read Kafka’s “Annual Report” for the year 1910 from the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution, which lists mining operations among a number of high-risk enterprises,10 to know that mines are dangerous places that need to be monitored carefully and regularly. At the “II. International Congress for Rescue Services and Accident Prevention”,11 which was held in Vienna between 9 September and 13 September 1913, which Kafka attended12 and at which his boss, director Dr. Robert Marschner, and one of his colleagues, Chief Inspector Eugen Pfohl, gave talks that were at least partially, and perhaps even entirely, based on Kafka’s work,13 there was also a special section on “Rescue Services in Mines and Related Enterprises.”14 It is possible, in fact quite likely, that Kafka attended some of the presentations given in that section, but he could have also studied them in the congress proceedings that were published one year later, in 1914. And if he did, he would have had ample opportunity to inform himself not only about the history of mining inspections in the imperial–royal Austria–Hungary, but also about the latest scientific and technical advances in mining safety operations, which were and still are much more complex than the simple mechanical problems whose solutions he had described in his expert opinions on safety measures in planers, milling machinery, and quarries.15 The section was chaired by k. k.16 Chief Mountain Council Central Director A. Fillunger; it met on 10–11 September 1913, and it comprised sixteen presentations all in all. There was, first of all, a brief talk on “The Establishment of Institutionalized Mining Inspections in Austria”, by Ministerial Councilor Johann Holobek;17 there were three presentations on the latest state of various kinds of breathing apparatus;18 three on miners’ occupational disease;19 one on safety measures in Sicilian sulfur mines;20 one on experiments with explosives in a test mining gallery;21 two on such a gallery in the coal mine of Liévin, Pas-de-Calais;22 and one on such a test gallery with the special purpose to study “firedamp, coal dust, and combustion gases;”23 and there was, finally, a long keynote address given by A. Fillunger himself on mine fires in hard coal mining and firedamp mines.24

At least three of these talks were directly relevant to Kafka’s expertise in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, and the most important one of these was certainly Johann Holobek’s presentation on “The Establishment of Institutionalized Mining Inspections in Austria”, an institution which, as the speaker emphasized in his concluding paragraph, “represented without any doubt a significant socio-political step forward.”25 Holobek traced the history of this institution from its origins in the Mining Act of 23 May 1854, up to its culmination in the “Decree of the Ministry of Public Works of 12 March 1910, Concerning the Establishment of a Department of Mine Inspection in this Ministry”,26 and the “Service Instruction for the Mining Inspection Department in the Ministry of Public Works”, dated 27 March 1910,27 both reprinted in volume nineteen of the yearly activity reports of Mining Inspections in Austria, whose publication started in 189228 and ended in 1914, at the beginning of World War I. I quote the introductory paragraph of the first of these two documents:

The growing expansion of mining operations and the ever-increasing sources of danger with which mining has to contend as a result of the penetration of ever greater depths, the introduction of new working methods and the increasing use of machinery, and not less the importance of the socio-political tasks that have come to the fore increasingly in recent years, they all mean that the mining authorities, which are responsible for the overall supervision of mining operations in accordance with existing legislation, are confronted with increased demands regarding the supervision of operations in terms of safety, and the monitoring of miners’ conditions.29

The inspections were conducted at regular intervals, but also on the occasion, which is described in Kafka’s story, namely, the opening up and burrowing of new galleries:

Today the top engineers were down with us. Some order came from the management to lay new galleries, and the engineers came to make the very first measurements.

[…]

It is all too tempting to stare after the gentlemen in the darkness of the test gallery.30

Directly related to Kafka’s area of expertise in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution is §. 4 of the “Decree […] Concerning the Establishment of a Department of Mine Inspection”, which stipulates, among other things:

The surveys shall cover the safety of mining operations regarding the life and health of the persons employed, in particular, …, the conditions of the miners and the facilities available for their welfare.

Particular attention must be paid to industrial accidents so that appropriate measures can be taken to prevent accidents on the basis of precise knowledge of their causes.31

The “Service Instruction for the Mining Inspection Department”, which specifies “the course of business of the Mining Inspection Department and the duties of the officials assigned to it”,32 includes the following instruction, §. 2:

To supervise the tasks assigned to it in the decree on mining inspections, the Mine Inspection Department’s Board of Directors must acquire precise knowledge of all important circumstances relating to the operational safety and protection of miners at mining sites under the supervision of the mining authorities and pay full attention to all incidents in mining as well as to all advances in technology that are of importance regarding the sphere of activity of the mining inspection department.33

As the legal expert on risk rank classification, Kafka had to rely on the technical reports of trade inspectors. And in the case of mining operations, it was the task of the Austrian Mine Inspection Department to issue and file these reports. I quote one example from volume 20, 1911, of that Department’s official report, which contains more than forty references to risk classification:

Firedamp34 and coal dust. There has been a change in the status of firedamp mines in as far as a mine in the Komotau district has been ranked as a first risk class firedamp mine, and a mine in the Falkenau district, which was previously ranked in the second risk class, has been ranked in the third. At the end of the year, there were therefore 29 mining operations, of which 15 were ranked as first, 6 as second, and 8 as third risk class firedamp mines in accordance with the applicable regulations.35

Another presentation that must have been of interest to Kafka, the insurance lawyer, was k. k. Mountain Commissioner Karl Stauch’s report on the new research station that was being built in the northwest Bohemian lignite mining area in Brüx. Stauch reported that, among several other facilities, this station would include, first of all, the following one:

[A] laboratory with complete equipment for chemical analyses of mine gases and explosive gases, for testing the dust content of the air and for carrying out coal analyses, for exact gasometrical samples, furthermore for calorimetric tests and physical measurements as well as calibrations of various measuring instruments and apparatus used in the test gallery.36

Finally, there was A. Fillunger’s keynote address, which was focused on the causes and the detection of dangerous fire situations in mines, and which stated explicitly:

The best way of observing such suspicious parts of the mine will be to take brief temperature measurements and gas-analytical studies of the mine gas passing through them.37

Fillunger, who had already published two articles on “Carbon Oxide Determination in Firedamp”, one in 1899 and another one in 1903, which described complex laboratory setups,38 now suggested using the portable “Detector” which Romuald Nowicki, chief chemist at the trade union mining laboratory in Mährisch-Ostrau, had developed for such analyses, and which was constructed in such a way that it could be used, as Fillunger emphasizes, “inside the mine itself.”39 Another instrument mentioned in Fillunger’s article is a simple barometer to measure air pressure in mines.40 And these are but a few examples of measuring instruments used by the Austrian mining inspectors in Kafka’s time. In addition to a wide variety of instruments for gas analyses,41 among them the Raleigh interferometer developed by Carl Zeiss in Jena,42 there were thermometers, hygrometers,43 depression meters, and anemometers44 used for measuring the pressure gradient in mines45, as well as theodolites and leveling instruments for geodesic measurements.46 These precision instruments, which were composed of thin glass tubes and plates, lenses, and complex mechanical gears, were very fragile, and had to be stored, transported, and handled carefully, especially in the close and dimly lit galleries of underground mining.

This brief overview should suffice to dispel any doubts as to what kind of instruments and to what engineering tasks Kafka was referring in the following paragraphs of his story “A Visit to Mine”:

A ninth [engineer] pushes a kind of baby carriage in front of him, in which the measuring apparatus lie. Extremely precious devices, deeply embedded in the most delicate absorbent cotton.47 This carriage should actually be pushed by the servant, but he is not entrusted with it; an engineer has to do it, and he does it with pleasure, as you can see. He is probably the youngest, perhaps he does not yet understand all the apparatus, but his eyes are always on them, and sometimes he is almost in danger of bumping into a wall.

There is, however, another engineer who walks alongside the carriage and prevents it. He obviously understands the devices from the ground up and seems to be their actual custodian. From time to time, without stopping the carriage, he takes out some part of the apparatus, looks through it, unscrews or closes it, shakes and taps it, holds it to his ear and listens; and finally, while the man pushing the instruments is usually standing still, he carefully puts the little thing, which is barely visible from a distance, back into the carriage. This engineer is a little domineering, but only in the name of the apparatus.48

The little hammer carried by the eighth engineer in Kafka’s story is the most basic instrument of the mining inspector, a digging hammer used in the exploration and the study of the mineral and ore deposits in mines.49 And it will certainly be needed when Kafka’s engineers disappear “in the darkness of the probing gallery”50 at the end of their visit to the mine. I quote a few passages from the description of such an exploration from an article published 1893 in the Journal of Practical Geology, parts of which were reprinted in the Austrian Journal for Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, in 1912:

In addition to the general and specialized study of deposits, mining geologists are particularly interested in the prospecting, burrowing, tracing, and opening up51 of deposits of useful minerals, as well as in overexploitation and its prevention, and the opening up of new deposits and thus the safeguarding of mining.52

And more specifically:

Equipped with a digging hammer53 and a hand compass, you move forward and examine the sides, the backs and floors of the galleries and cuts, the shaft and rubble walls,54 etc., step by step and take the most instructive hand specimens possible from places where changes in the dredgy ore or the veinfilling55 occur, format and number them and enter their location on the relevant page of the sketchbook and at the corresponding point of the location depicted there by circling them and adding the corresponding number.56

So much for the technical side of mining inspections in Kafka’s Austria. Guidelines regarding the manner in which the inspectors are to interact with both the entrepreneurs and the workers of the mines are specified in §§. 7 and 8 of the “Service Instruction for the Mining Inspection Department”:

The officials of the Mining Inspection Department must be strictly impartial in all their official acts and always bear in mind the great economic importance of mining and its undisturbed development, but no less the legitimate interests of the workers. They must endeavor to win the trust not only of the employers but also of the workers through the tactful exercise of their official duties, without, however, lacking the necessary energy when it comes to fully enforcing the existing regulations and eliminating any existing shortcomings. They must also endeavor to ensure that tried and tested institutions and innovations in the fields of workplace safety, worker protection and welfare are applied as widely as possible.

When carrying out the inspections of the mining companies, particular emphasis must be placed on discussing the observations made and the means of resolving problems in oral communication with the entrepreneurs and company managers as well as on questioning the workers; the latter must be given the opportunity, if necessary without witnesses, to provide the inspecting officials with information about safety and worker conditions and to express wishes and complaints.57

If Kafka was familiar with these guidelines, which I think is almost certain because they are directly related to accident prevention and risk classification, then his story “A Visit to a Mine” is a bitter commentary on the reality of such a mining inspection. There is no discussion, no oral communication, between the inspectors and the workers, not to mention questioning or listening to wishes and complaints, with or without witnesses. This is, however, not the case because the inspectors are tactless or arrogant, but rather because there is an unbridgeable abyss between their expertise and the knowledge of the workers, although, and this is the irony of the situation, the work of the inspectors is all about the safety of the workers. With great sensibility, Kafka pinpoints a disturbing new form of alienation. At a time when the technical conditions of industrial production became ever more sophisticated, necessitating ever more scientific methods to monitor and control these conditions, the workers are not only dispossessed of the value they produce, as Marx had claimed, but they are ignorant of the risks they incur, unable to analyze the safety of their working environment, unable to take care of their own sheer health and life. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to speculate that “A Visit to a Mine” is Kafka’s skeptical reply to the optimism which Chief Mountain Council Fillunger expressed in the discussion that followed his talk on mine fires at the International Congress for Rescue Service Institutions and Accident Prevention:

In my humble opinion, the “Operations Managers Act” of December 31, 1893,58 according to which only academically trained mining technicians are permitted to manage mining operations, may not have been without influence on the safety conditions in mining operations in the Austrian mining industry, and I would finally like to emphasize that we, in our district, have long since had advanced training schools for our teams, in which younger miners in particular are taught practically and theoretically in all those disciplines that, as the examination results show, with very good success, enable them to recognize and avoid the problems involved in mining and the dangers that occur particularly in firedamp pits.59

I should add that Kafka neither belonged to the class of the mining inspectors nor to that of the workers, and certainly not to that of entrepreneurs. It was his duty to mediate between the diverging economic, political, and social interests of these groups. As a white-collar worker, he was on the side of the entrepreneurs and the inspectors, but as someone who had studied law, but not geology, chemistry, or mine surveying, he was in all likelihood not much more knowledgeable about the technical and scientific side of mining inspections than the workers themselves. On the other hand, however, he was also not particularly familiar with the arcane terminology of mining. This may be the reason why he seems to confuse the term “Probestollen”, probing gallery, which, as far as I can tell, was exclusively used with respect to tunnel constructions for railway lines,60 or hydroelectric power stations,61 with the term “Querschlag”, “crosscut”,62 which, in the miners’ idiolect, refers to a probing or exploration gallery that branches out from a regular shaft for the purpose of exploring, studying, and exposing new layers of the mineral deposit.

As an insurance lawyer in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, Kafka had to perform a balancing act in a highly conflictual situation. He had to consider the side of the workers, whose interests he had to defend. He had to consider the side of the inspectors, on whose expertise he had to rely when classifying the risks in and of the mines. And he had to consider the side of the entrepreneurs, who were eager to lower their contributions to the Workers’ Insurance Institution by having their operation ranked at the lowest possible risk. And if there was a conflict, he had to come to an informed judgment based on these various considerations, even though he was an outsider in all these various fields of expertise. As the author of the story “A Visit to a Mine”, however, Kafka sided with only one of these groups, that of the miners, to whose position he was closest because he certainly did not know much more about the most advanced science and technology of mining than the miners themselves. And thus, he understood that one of the consequences of the so-called Industrial Revolution was a new form of alienation, in which a whole class of workers could not rely on their own most basic instinct of self-preservation anymore for their wellbeing and sheer life, because the safety of their working environment was now based on the inscrutably complex and incommunicable erudition of a small class of experts in more and more fields of industrial production.

Based on extensive archival research or rather data mining, I have tried to show that Kafka’s story “A Visit to a Mine” is exactly what its title says, namely one of the state-mandated inspections of a mine by a group of expert engineers, possibly accompanied by a representative of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution specializing in risk classification like Kafka, for instance. And if that is the case, then the story cannot be reduced to a purely literary reference, as scholars like to claim who derive their questions from their own narrow area of expertise, in this case, Kafka’s relation to his publisher Kurt Wolff, and not from the complex world in which Kafka lived and wrote. But we should also not be blinded by yet another identification, namely that of his world with our world. Kafka was not a prophet; he did not predict, or, to quote one of the words that my teachers in the 1960s liked to use, “anticipate” any future times, and certainly not our time. Like all the other apparatuses used by engineers and scientists in Kafka’s time, the “self-writing” velocity and depression meters63 were analog, not digital instruments. Most of these devices had already been invented in the mid-nineteenth century, many of them are still being used today, even if in different forms, and most importantly, all of them are now connected to digital registering, transmission, and storage systems, where the data they collect can be analyzed by means of statistical methods and artificial intelligence.

With the digital turn, the alienation of all humans from their machines has reached a completely new level. In his first letter to his later fiancée, Felice Bauer, dated September 20, 1912, Kafka could still write:

My name is Franz Kafka and I am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at Director Brod’s in Prague, who then handed you photographs from a trip to Thalia, one after the other, across the table, and who finally held your hand in the hand with which he is now hitting the keys, your hand with which you confirmed your promise to go on a trip to Palestine with him next year.

[…]

I must admit one thing, however bad it sounds and however badly it fits in with what I said above: I am an unpunctual letter writer. In fact, it would be even worse than it is if I did not have a typewriter; for even if my moods should not be sufficient for a letter, I still have the fingertips to write.64

Addressed, as it is, to a stenographer and typist, this letter seems to testify to an obsession with the typewriter. But, in fact, it is the only typescript in Kafka’s long and extensive correspondence with Felice Bauer. All of the abundance of subsequent letters was written by hand. Karl Roßmann’s confession in the novel The Man Who Disappeared, “For example, I can’t even write on a typewriter”,65 could have well been written in Kafka’s own name. If my hand now “hits the keys”, as I write these words, the arrangement of the letters on the keyboard is still the same, but the keys themselves, and above all the process by means of which the text itself is being produced, are not. What is going on when I write is not visible and, therefore, also not understandable to me, and I dare say, to most of my contemporaries anymore. Only a few specialists know what is going on in the machines we use to produce our scholarly work. And I should add that this was not yet the case when I studied literature in the 1960s. In those days, I could still relate to Kafka’s jokes about the typewriter because I wrote my papers in the same medium that he used for his stories, namely by hand. Only when I was done would I retype them to improve their readability, just as he had his manuscripts typed before publication. On the other hand, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to conduct all the archival research on which this current study is based. I would have had to travel at least to Vienna and Prague, and possibly to many other places, to consult the texts I quoted above. Now, I can find all these various documents online. Kafka did not anticipate that. Thus, when thinking about his work then and now, we should be aware not only of the common ground between his and our world, but also of the fact that we are living in a very different time.

2. Synchronization

If the storage medium of the typewriter took center stage in Kafka’s first letter to Felice Bauer, then the flood of letters that followed are obsessed with all the various transmission media available in Kafka’s time: the “damn mail”,66 including the mailman and the employees in charge of distributing the mail to his office, as well as the telegraph and the telephone, fast media which can be used judiciously to catch up with letters, overtake them on their way, and deliver a new message that takes back an older one before it even reaches its destination. By playing the pace of these different media against each other, Kafka accomplishes, as it were, the impossible: namely, to exchange the latest, much delayed anterior future of the letter against the anterior future of the telegram which, against all phantasies, does not coincide with the present, because there is no message without delay, even if that delay is too small to be perceptible to human senses, so small that it may seem as if it were possible to invert the irreversible course of time. I quote but a few examples:

If I only were the postman in the Immanuelkirchstrasse, who would bring this letter to your apartment, not having himself stopped by any surprised family member from walking through all the rooms to you and placing the letter in your hand; or even better, I would be in front of the apartment door myself, ringing the doorbell for an endless amount of time for my enjoyment, for an enjoyment that would dissolve all tension!67

Sunday, 17 November [1912] delivered by messenger.

Pathetic attempt to follow up on criminal words with innocent roses.68

Another letter, too long to be quoted here, but at least worth mentioning starts with a lament that, on this day, no letter from Felice Bauer has arrived, and ends with a long description of the three employees, with whom the joy of receiving such a letter as well as the disappointment of not receiving it is associated because it is their job to distribute the incoming mail to the individual offices of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution.69 Testimony to the fact that the mailman in Kafka’s time did not just come once, but twice a day are the following two sentences:70

By the way, today I can’t complain at all because your last two letters reached me only two hours apart, and I naturally did curse the messiness of the mail for yesterday just as much as I praise it for today.71

And to justify the shift from the more formal address “gracious lady” to the more intimate “dear lady”, Kafka writes on 3 November 1912:

Now, as I couldn’t have expected otherwise, I haven’t received a letter from you, since your letters always come in the second post, which is no longer delivered on Sundays, so at best I won’t get it until tomorrow morning after the long night,—in such circumstances I cannot prevent myself from addressing you as I did above as a small compensation.72

Referring to a letter already on its way to Berlin, Kafka announces:

By the way, I will probably ask you for forgiveness by telegraph today.73

And finally, about the newest telecommunication medium:

I lose my laughter just thinking about the telephone. The very thought of the telephone makes me forget laughter. What would stop me from running to the post office and wishing you a good evening? … what is your phone number, I’m afraid Max has forgotten it.74

At a time when only very few private households had a telephone connection, businesses could not do without them anymore, which is the reason why, less than three weeks after the beginning of his correspondence with Felice Bauer, in a letter presumably dated 8 October 1912, Kafka addressed the following urgent business request to his friend Max Brod, who after receiving his LLD, in 1907, was employed at the Postal Directorate in Prague, the state-operated institution that was in charge of licensing and distributing telephone connections:

I completely forgot about one main thing yesterday: our telephone. You can’t imagine how urgently we need it, at least how urgently we needed it two weeks ago when I was in the factory for the last time. (I am more often in the office)75

The reference is to the First Prague Asbestos Factory, which had been founded by Kafka’s brother-in-law, Karl Hermann, in December 1911, and of which Kafka, at the urging of his family, had become a partner. In a letter written the previous day, 7–8 October 1912, to Max Brod, Kafka had complained bitterly that, since his brother-in-law was on a fortnightly business trip, he would be forced to stop work on his novel and help supervise the workers in that factory. It was a very unwelcome interruption of a highly productive phase in Kafka’s writing that started with and was arguably triggered by the typed letter to Felice Bauer quoted above.

All the, by now famous, texts written in the fall of 1912 are more or less openly centered on problems with telecommunication. “The Judgment” starts out with a letter that is never dispatched to its receiver, Georg Bendemann’s friend in Saint Petersburg. “The Metamorphosis” concludes with the bitter irony that all the three members of Gregor Samsa’s family, his father, mother, and sister, write letters to their respective employers asking for a favor which Gregor himself, after his metamorphosis, would have very much needed as well, but, due to his new condition, was unable to request verbally or in writing, namely, the favor of being allowed a day’s leave from work.76 But—and that is one of the most remarkable aspects of this famous story—at the deepest level of the manuscript, even Gregor gets to write a letter in the end. Describing how Gregor, on the eve of his death and in the process of crawling back into his room, turns around one last time, Kafka had first written, “His last letter”, but then, obviously noticing the lapsus, he crossed out the word “Brief”, “letter”, and inserted the correct, and slightly homophonous word “Blick”, “glance”, so that the sentence now reads: “His last letter glance touched his mother, who was now completely asleep.”77 And when Karl Roßmann, the hero of “The Stoker”, arrives in New York harbor, his hopes for a new beginning in the New World are crushed because, while crossing the Atlantic, he has been overtaken by a letter.78 The letter was written by Johanna Brummer, the maid servant, who, to use his uncle Jakob’s, not Karl’s own, language, had “seduced him”, given birth to his child, and, thereby, caused his expulsion from his parental home, and it is addressed to Karl’s uncle in America. The story is conspicuously similar to the cause célèbre of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, who after his wife, Corinne “Cora “Turner, a music hall singer who performed under the name Belle Elmore, disappeared on January 31, 1910, was investigated about this matter by Investigator Walter Drew, and subsequently tried to escape to America, together with his mistress, Ethel le Neve, aboard the ocean steamer “Montrose”. There is no doubt that Kafka was familiar with this case because, during the more than two weeks, between 15 July and 1 August 1910, that elapsed between the two fugitive lovers’ disappearance and their landing on the American continent, the Prager Tagblatt, Kafka’s regular newspaper, kept its readers abreast of every new twist and revelation of what it called the “Hunt for Dr. Crippen.”79 In a series of articles published daily, and oftentimes twice in the morning and evening editions,80 readers could inform themselves about the following facts:

○

15 July: that after the mysterious disappearance of his wife Belle Elmore, Dr. Crippen had placed an obituary notice claiming that she had died in a small seaside resort on the European continent, that he himself had mysteriously disappeared when doubts were raised about his wife demise, that the police had searched his house and found remains of a decomposed human body, and that Scotland Yard had issued a wanted poster for Dr. Crippen and Ethel Neve, his female companion, a pretty 27-year old typist, disguised as a man;81

○

16 July: that the person, now correctly identified as Miss Le Neve, was a stenographer and typist like Kafka’s later fiancée Felice Bauer;82

○

25 July: that Crippen and his lover had boarded the steamer Montrose on its way to Quebec, Canada; that “[t]hey [i.e., Scotland Yard] even want to hunt him on the ocean, and therefore the ocean liner ‘Laurentie,’ which is much faster than the ‘Montrose,’ will be used to catch up with him;”83

○

26 July: that Crippen had boarded the steamer “Sardinian” [sic!] under the pseudonym “Reverend Robinson”, and that “at his side is Miss Le Neve, dressed as a boy” pretending to be his son;84

○

29 July: that the steamer “Laurentie”, with Inspector Dew onboard, had already overtaken the “Montrose”;85

○

1 August: that “The Wife Murderer Crippen Has Been Arrested”, together with his mistress Le Neve, at Father Point, province Quebec;86

○

23 November: and finally, that Crippen was to be executed.87

Part of the long newspaper article on the arrest of Dr. Crippen and Miss Le Neve was the following subsection:

The Success of Wireless Telegraphy.

The Times reports on the arrest: The hunt for Crippen and his companion was rightly accompanied by the lively interest of the public. Wireless telegraphy has played a role like never before. If it had not been available, the refugees could have landed in Canada under much more favorable conditions. Wireless telegraphy, which is still in its infancy, has given such proof of its importance to justice that more use will be made of it in the future. All the other English newspapers also spoke enthusiastically about the success of wireless telegraphy and its importance for the future of the judiciary.88

The role played by wireless telegraphy in the capture of Dr. Crippen is spelled out explicitly in a parenthesis to the testimony that Chief Inspector Walter Dew gave at Crippen’s trial before Britain’s Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, on 19 October 1910:

On July 16 a warrant was issued for prisoner’s arrest, and was entrusted to me for execution. Having received certain information, I proceeded to Canada, [It should be recorded that the “certain information” was conveyed to the authorities by wireless telegraphy from the captain of the “Montrose”, at sea, enabling the officer to proceed to Canada by a faster vessel, and meet the “Montrose” on its arrival in the St. Lawrence.]89 On 31 July I boarded the “Montrose” (the vessel in which prisoner and Le Neve had travelled from Antwerp) on her arrival at Father Point.90

Of course, Karl Roßmann is not a suspected murderer, but a teenage boy expelled from his family; Johanna Brummer, the mother of his child, is not accompanying him on his forced voyage to America; and she writes a letter, not a telegram, addressed to his uncle in America. Nonetheless, the similarities between Kafka’s story and the “hunt for Dr. Crippen” are blatantly obvious: a letter, which must have been dispatched at around the time when Karl Roßmann boarded a steamer to America, overtakes his ship and arrives at its destination well before he lands in New York harbor. And not only the captain of this steamer, but also the recipient of the letter, are equipped with state-of-the-art telecommunication systems. There are, first of all, the “wires of electrical lines”91 running along the corridors of the ocean liner that takes Karl to America, and the “far too many push buttons of the electrical lines” on the captain’s desk, by means of which “a single hand could make the whole ship rebellious”,92 and there is, above all, the stunning description of the telegraph and telephone exchange from which the commission and forwarding business of Senator Edward Jakob, the fabled uncle in America, are controlled:

The telegraph hall was not smaller, but larger than the telegraph office in his hometown, through which Karl had once walked at the hand of a classmate who was known there. In the Hall of Telephones, the doors to the telephone booths opened and closed wherever you looked, and the ringing was confusing. The uncle opened the next one of these doors and there, in the sparkling electric light, you could see an employee indifferent to every noise from the door, his head clamped into a steel band that pressed the earpieces to his ears. The right arm lay on a small table as if it were particularly heavy and only the fingers that held the pencil twitched inhumanly evenly and quickly. He was very economical in the words he said into the mouthpiece, and often you could even see that he might have had something to say against the speaker and wanted to ask him a little more detail, but, before he was able to carry out this intention, certain words he heard compelled him to lower his eyes and write.93

And there is, finally, the remarkable fact that one of the two homeless vagabonds whom Karl meets after having been kicked out of his uncle’s house is named Robinson, obviously not after the hero of Defoe’s novel,94 which Kafka knew and admired, but after the pseudonym under which Dr. Crippen had traveled on board the steamer “Montrose”. Within this context, one might even speculate that the name of the other one of the two tramps Karl Roßmann meets after having been kicked out by his uncle, is a hidden reference to the construction of yet another new medium of telecommunication, namely to the laying of the transatlantic cables. The name Delamarche is quite unusual within the context of a novel in the German language, but during Kafka’s time, Alexandre Delamarche’s book Elements of Submarine Telegraphy, 1959,95 was still widely quoted in the technical literature on electrotechnics.

The process that leads to Karl Roßmann’s expulsion from his home is reiterated three times in the first chapters of Kafka’s novel The Man Who Disappeared. And each time, this process is a “Prozeß” in the sense in which Kafka uses this term in the title of his famous second novel, namely a trial. In a process, about which only a few details are revealed, he is kicked out by his parents and sent to America. He is kicked out of his uncle’s household by Mr. Green, because he has stayed too long in Mr. Pollunder’s house and, above all, in the bedroom of Mr. Pollunder’s daughter Klara. And, finally, he is kicked out, yet again, from his job as a liftboy in the “Hotel Occidental.” Of all these three trials, the last one is the most explicit and extensive. Instead of the quadruple composed of father, mother, maid servant, and son, the number of characters is multiplied. The figure of the father is split into two: the Head Waiter, as the investigating judge, and the Head Porter, as the executioner. The figure of the maid-servant Johanna Brummer is also split up into two different characters: the homeless drunkard Robinson, with whom to be friends is as shameful for a middle-class teenager like Karl as it is to have child with the maid, and Therese Berchtold, the innocent tender lover; only the mother, who returns as fifty-year old Head Cook Grete Mitzelbach, and the figure of the son, Karl Roßmann, remain one and the same. And although the action takes place in the large and labyrinthine space of the Hotel Occidental, and not in the cramped apartment of Karl Roßmann’s parents, everything happens as if it were in close quarters, because all the information is traveling fast along the lines of the hotel’s state-of-the-art telephone system,96 whose various components Kafka describes expertly and in great detail. There are, in fact, two types of telephones, one for communication along the short wires with little resistance inside the hotel, and another type for communications via the longer wires connecting the hotel with the outside world. About this second type of telephone, Kafka states:

These were the newest telephones for which no telephone booths were necessary, because the ringing of the bell was no louder than a chirp, you could speak into the telephone in a whisper and yet, thanks to special amplification devices, the words reached their destination with a thunderous voice.97

These devices are, of course, not vacuum tube amplifiers, the first one of which was developed by Western Electrics in 1913,98 but rather telephones that are inductively coupled to the line,99 a wiring scheme, which, as Samuel McMeen and Kempster B. Miller write in their book on Telephony, “serves the double purpose of a step-up transformer to limit line losses, and a device for vastly increasing the range of change in the [local, battery-powered] transmitter circuit.”100^.Telephones of this type were equipped with an extra switch at the receiver to turn the secondary winding of the microphone induction coil on for long-distance calls, or off for calls on short-distance lines.101 Karl Roßmann notices these phones only shortly before his exit from the Hotel Occidental, because, inside of it, he only has to deal with the local system. Before going to bed in the apartment of the Head Cook, his new protector, he notices the telephone box on the desk102 and immediately tries to make good use of it:

“It is possible that tomorrow, perhaps very early, my former comrades will bring me a photograph that I urgently need. Would you be so kind, and would you telephone the porter and ask him to send the people to me or have them fetch me?”103

This is the photograph of Karl’s parents that was lost for some unknown reason when these two comrades, Delamarche and Robinson, searched and plundered his suitcase while he himself was on his way to get food for all three of them at the Hotel Occidental. Yet, the photograph, Karl’s last souvenir of and connection to his home in Europe, will never be retrieved. Instead, Robinson, drunk as hell, comes to visit Karl during the latter’s shift as a liftboy in the hotel. This unexpected and not-so-welcome visit unleashes a frantic storm of phone calls which will move human bodies, initiate oral testimonies, and culminate in Karl’s dismissal from his job and his expulsion from the hotel. In a parody of a criminal case, it all starts with a misconduct at Karl’s job, and it ends with expedited proceedings in the Head Waiter’s office:

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After having begged Karl for money, Robinson vomits down the elevator shaft.

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To get at least temporarily rid of his annoying and embarrassing guest, Karl decides to take him down to the dormitory of the liftboys and have him sleep off his intoxication in his own bed.

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He asks another liftboy to step in for him, in the meantime.

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Having been lucky enough “to push Robinson ahead and reaching a corner from which a dimly lit corridor led to that dormitory”, he sees “a liftboy running towards them and past them, at full speed.”104 On his return to his post, he finds that this same liftboy has just been appointed to take over his, Karl’s job.

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To his great surprise, Karl learns that, in the brief moment of his absence, while his substitute had been occupied elsewhere, the Head Waiter stopped by at the lifts, noticed Karl’s absence, and immediately phoned the dormitory to order a replacement for Karl. This explains the speed at which the liftboy had raced past Karl and Robinson, as they were moving in the opposite direction on their way to the dormitory.

Inquiring about the reason for this unexpected firing from his job, the colleague who had given, but not kept, his promise to step in for him reminds him of the relevant paragraph in the liftboys’ service regulations, which Karl was supposed to know and should have known all too well:

“[…] Don’t you know that even the shortest absence while on duty must be reported to the Head Waiter’s office? That’s why you have the telephone there. […].”105

Thus, a phone call, which Karl did not make, costs him his job, and with another phone call, which the Head Waiter does make, the vacancy can be filled immediately with another liftboy in Karl’s stead. But Karl’s plight is not over yet. The liftboys tell him that the Head Waiter has ordered him to come to his office immediately. After having been berated there by both the Head Waiter and the Head Doorman, Karl witnesses yet another phone call, as the Head Waiter, who, as Therese discloses later, is in love with the Head Cook,106 tries to involve the latter in Karl’s case:

Finally, the Head Waiter put the newspaper down with a yawn, looked at Karl to make sure he was still there and turned the handle to ring the bell of the table telephone. He called hallo several times, but no one answered. “No one is answering”, he said to the head porter. The latter, who seemed to be watching the telephone call with particular interest, said: “It’s already a quarter past six. Just ring the bell louder.” At that moment the telephone countersign came without any further prompting.107

The vocabulary, which is hard to translate into today’s language, is clear: the Head Waiter is turning the handle of a “Magneto Generator”,108 “Induktor”,109 that will produce a ring in the “Polarized Ringer”,110 “Wechselstromwecker”,111 of the Head Cook. In other words, the telephone system in Kafka’s Hotel Occidental consists of two circuits powered by two different sources: local batteries for the transmission of sound, and a hand-operated generator for the actual telephone ring. As the public company Mix & Genest explains,

Inductor call is used for systems with larger distances where relatively large element batteries would have to be set up to overcome the line resistances; of course, the same can also be used in house systems etc.112

A phone call is all too familiar to us today, but in Kafka’s time, it was a new, strange, and equally exciting and disturbing experience, and both the construction and operation of telephones was very different at that time. These historical differences should be kept in mind when reading Kafka’s “minute”, and thus “comical”113, description of the Head Waiter’s long telephone conversation with the Head Cook, the first part of which is very short because, as we learn from the Head Waiter’s explanations, the phone call has reached her while she still is in bed, in her nightgown, and looking for the little typist whose job it is to wake her up in the morning. This means, as we already know from a previous chapter, that Therese has failed to fulfill her duty, and soon we will learn that this is because she has gotten wind of Karl’s predicament, very likely by phone, and is racing down to the Head Waiter’s office in the hope of being able to help her friend.

When the Head Cook picks up the phone again, a complex situation unfolds that is all too familiar to us now but must have seemed grotesque in Kafka’s time. Someone is on the phone and a few others are not simply listening in, trying to infer what the person at the other end of the line is saying, they are also trying to interfere with that conversation, and even conducting their own conversation amongst themselves. And thus, the calling party is forced to lead, as it were, two conversations, one with the person on the other end of the line, and one with the people on his or her side. For Karl, the object of all these conversations, the situation is fatal. Here is a list of its twists and turns:

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Speaking into the telephone horn, and thus not to Karl, the Head Waiter accuses him of having relinquished his duties as a liftboy. But before he can even start to do that, he must turn to Karl asking him to name his name.114

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The Head Porter whispers something into the Head Waiter’s ear, whereupon the latter speaks “so quickly into the telephone” that Karl does not quite understand him and takes “two steps closer on tiptoe.”115

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When Karl, finally, manages to figure out what the Head Waiter is telling the Head Cook, he understands that the Head Porter—either mistaking him for the notorious liftboy Renell, or mischievously identifying him with that person—is accusing him of having spent all his nights in the nearby city.

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To defend himself against this accusation, Karl directs a torrent of excuses at the Head Waiter who does not and cannot answer because he is still on the phone.

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In his stead, the Head Doorman turns to Karl and repeats the accusation.

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The Head Waiter’s conversation with the Head Cook suddenly breaks off for reasons that are not immediately clear but will become obvious soon enough: the Head Cook has decided that she needs to talk to Karl himself; however, not over the phone, but in person.

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As the Head Waiter proceeds to write a cash receipt for Karl’s outstanding wages, it seems as if the matter were finally settled for good, when yet another phone call comes in.

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Neither the Head Doorman nor Karl can hear the first part of what the caller has to say, but based on the Head Waiter’s response they can, yet again, infer the gist of it: the caller is a liftboy. The message is about something “outrageous.”

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As the Head Waiter interrupts his conversation with the caller and asks the Head Doorman directly to “please, hold this guy for a moment, we’ll have to talk to him some more”,116 it is all too clear that the new phone call is about none other than Karl, yet again.

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The Head Waiter orders the caller: “Come up here immediately now!” That is, here, to my office.117 This command marks a turning point, the turn from the telephone to the spoken word.

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Because of all the phone conversations, three people are now on their way, rushing to the Head Waiter’s office: the liftboy, a certain Bess; Therese, who has been on her way for quite a while now; and even the Head Cook.

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Only a few more pieces of information are missing to seal Karl’s fate.

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The liftboy Bess repeats what he has just told the Haid Waiter over the phone: He testifies that Robinson has gotten into a fight with the liftboys, that he needs medical attention, and that he is waiting to receive money from Karl.118

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Shifting sides the Head Cook, Karl’s advocate, concludes that he is guilty.

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At the end of these expedited proceedings, at the moment when there is nothing left to lose, Giacomo, yet another liftboy, and a friend of Karl’s, delivers the final blow by testifying that Robinson expects Karl to pay for an automobile that will take him home.119

As the reader knows all too well, all these accusations are either wrong or exaggerated. Unlike many of his colleagues, Karl has left his post at the lift only once and for a very short time; unlike his colleague Rennel, he has never spent his nights in the city; the money he has promised to give to Robinson has not been embezzled but consists of the tips he has honestly earned during his nightshift. And, thus, Karl is right when he states:

“Ms. Head Cook, […] I don’t think I have disgraced you in any way and after careful investigation, everyone else should find that too.”120

But—and this is the whole point of this long story—a careful investigation takes time, and neither the Head Waiter, whose phone calls have gathered so much information in such a short time, nor the Head Cook, who is on Karl’s side, can afford to spend any more time on his case. And thus, instead of insisting on a careful investigation, the Head Cook, too, gives up on Karl:

As she stood there, weakly rocking the chair in front of her, one could easily have expected her to say in the next moment: “Well, Karl, when I think about it, the matter is not yet quite clear and needs a careful investigation, as you stated so correctly yourself. And we want to conduct such an investigation now, regardless of the question whether anyone else agrees with it or not, because justice has to be done.”

But instead, the Head Cook said after a short pause, which no one dared to interrupt—only the clock struck half past six in confirmation of the head waiter’s words and, as everyone knew, all the clocks in the entire hotel struck at the same time, it rang in one’s ears and in the foreboding like the double twitch of a single great impatience: “No Karl, no! We don’t want to tell ourselves that. Things which are just also have a special appearance, and I must admit that your case does not have that. I am entitled to say that, and I have to say it too, because I’m the one who came here with the best prejudice for you. You see, Therese is silent as well.” (But she wasn’t silent, she cried.)121

Kafka’s Hotel Occidental is, as we now would say, high-tech. All the rooms are connected by the wires of a sophisticated telephone system, and even the clocks are chiming in sync, because they all are synchronized by means of a telegraphic time coordination system.122 What is, however, truly remarkable is the fact that Kafka links this particular technology with the age-old concept of justice whose ethical, legal, and social connotations are hard to define. And the message is clear: in the age of electrical and electromagnetic telecommunication media, there is no such thing as justice, because in a world in which everything is connected by fast-traveling signals, there is no time to conduct careful and deep investigations into the motives and circumstances of people’s actions. Too much information about the most distant places of the universe is coming in at any single moment. Justice, as it was known for thousands of years, is inseparable from the patient and time-consuming work of writing, inseparable from the delay between the registration of the facts and the delivery of the verdict. It cannot be performed over the telegraph or the telephone. And thus, the long discussion between the Head Waiter and the Head Cook, who is trying to bring justice to her protégé, is simply a waste of time, and Karl Roßmann already knew it even before the discussion started:

Karl realized that he had actually already lost his job, because the Head Waiter had already said it, the Head Doorman had repeated it as a fact, and because of an elevator boy, confirmation of his dismissal from the hotel management probably wasn’t necessary. However, it had happened faster than he had thought, because after all he had served well for two months as best he could and certainly better than any other boy. But at the decisive moment, such things are apparently not taken into account in any part of the world, neither in Europe nor in America, but decisions are made the way the judgment comes out of one’s mouth in the first anger.123

Or, to quote a sentence from another one of Kafka’s stories, “In the Penal Colony”, in which the phonograph, another new medium of his time, heralds the end of justice: “Guilt is always beyond doubt.”124 This is the reason why the verdict, “Be just!”,125 results not only in the execution of the condemned man, but also in the destruction of the legal system that is supposed to execute that verdict.

In 1916/1917, Kafka took up the problem of telecommunication again, but on a much larger scale, not within the limited space of a hotel, but within the wide expanse of an entire empire, the empire of China.126 But at a time when the First World War, in which telecommunication played a decisive role, was raging, he places the story in the preindustrial age. There is no telegraphy, no telephony, not even Kublai Khan’s sophisticated postal system described by Marco Polo. Messengers travel on foot, not even on horseback.

The narrative is structured like the story “A Visit to a Mine”, but, again, expanded to a much larger scale. A simple worker reports in the name of a multitude of equally simple workers, or more exactly, in the first-person plural on the huge construction project of the Great Chinese Wall, on which they are working, and about whose engineering and planning they can only speculate. And they have many questions: What is the purpose of that wall? To keep out the nomads, or rather to keep in the citizens? To create a truly consistent and homogeneous community? Why is it being built in individual sections rather than as a continuous whole? Who designed it? Who ordered its construction, the emperor, or “the leadership”,127 a group of unknown experts of an almost mythical nature? How was it possible that so many people obeyed the order, moved to the remotest places of the empire, and started working, and were even ready to move on to a different construction site on the same wall, every once in a while? How was it possible to unite and integrate the people’s power so tightly? And in order to answer all of these questions, the narrator tries to do what no one in the Hotel Occidental took the time to do for Karl Roßmann: he engages in a careful ethnographic and historical investigation going back as far as the building of the Tower of Babel, the counterpart of the Chinese Wall, one marking the center of a community, the other one its periphery. As he digs deeper and deeper into the origins of the work that he has been performing all his life, problems of signal speed keep popping up. In the narrator’s province, which is located in the south of the vast empire, far away from the capital Peking, the people have no idea of what is going on in the imperial palace or of the emperor’s actions and decisions:

How would we know about this, thousands of miles to the south, as we almost border on the Tibetan highlands. In addition, every message, even if it reached us, would come far too late, and would be long out of date.128

And with the sentence “There is legend that expresses this relationship well”, Kafka introduces the one and only paragraph from this long manuscript that he deemed worth publishing, together with the story “A Visit to the Mine”, in his book A Country Doctor in 1919:

The Emperor—so it is said—has sent a message to you, the individual, the pitiful subject, the tiny shadow that has fled from the imperial sun into the farthest distance; to you of all people the Emperor has sent a message from his deathbed. He made the messenger kneel down by the bed and whisper the message in his ear; he cared about it so much that he had him repeat it in his ear. By nodding his head, he confirmed the correctness of what he had said. And in front of the entire audience of his death, all the hindering walls are broken down, and on the wide and high swinging steps stand the greats of the empire in the ring—he dispatched the messenger in front of all of them. The messenger immediately set off; a strong, tireless man; now stretching out this arm and now the other, he makes his way through the crowd; if he finds resistance, he points to the chest, where the sign of the sun is; he also moves forward easily like no other. But the crowd is so big; their dwellings have no end. If an open field opened up, how would he fly, and soon you would hear the wonderful beating of his fists at your door. But instead, how uselessly he struggles; he still squeezes his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; he will never overcome them; and if he succeeded in this, nothing would be gained; he would have to fight his way down the stairs; and if he succeeded in this, nothing would be gained; the courtyards would have to be measured; and after the courts, the second enclosing palace; and again stairs and courtyards; and again a palace; and so on through millennia; and if he finally fell out of the outermost gate—but never, never can it happen—only the royal city would lie before him, the center of the world, heaped up full of its dregs. Nobody gets through here, especially with the message of a dead person.—But you sit at your window, and dream of it when the evening comes.129

The story contains the description of a whole communication system in a nutshell, and nothing but that. For it should be noted, above all, that the “content” of this message is never disclosed. Is it an offer for a diplomatic or administrative position at the imperial court? The announcement of an order or a merit award? A summons to appear before the emperor for whatever reason? A final insight worth passing on to future generations? A declaration of love? Or else, a verdict, a death sentence? We do not know. And thus, the famous statement in Claude E. Shannon’s introduction to his essay “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, could well be applied to Kafka’s story :

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.130

As in Shannon’s essay, the focus is on the information channel, which, in Kafka’s story, is reduced to its most basic elements. First of all, there has to be secrecy, which is why the message must be transmitted whispering. Second, it must be exact, which is why the emperor has it whispered back to him. And third, it must travel from the sender and to the receiver, whoin this case is never reached because the distance between them is too great. And in describing this distance, Kafka breaks one of the oldest and basic rules of Western European style, the rule which states that variation is always better than monotonous repetition, and so over 60% of the story is about nothing other than the long and tedious journey of the messenger, described repetitively and tediously. Like the transmission of the message, the reading is delayed. And the parallel between these two processes is further emphasized by the ambivalent phrase “et cetera through millennia”,131 which could refer to the endless journey of the messenger, to the endlessness of its description, or to both. Shifting, thus, from space to time, the narrative returns from the third-person of the messenger to “you”, the humble subject, an ambivalent address which could refer to either or both of you, the addressee of the imperial message in Kafka’s fictional China and/or you, the reader of the story: “But you sit at your window and dream of it when the evening comes.”

As it, thus, loops back to the initial “you”, the story of the imperial message itself is called into question. For if it turns out, in the end, that this message takes millennia to reach its destination, then this is as good as if it had never been sent, and it might as well be a figment of “your” dreams.

But why even tell a story about an endlessly delayed message? Why did the emperor not simply pick up the phone? Via this medium, he could have talked to “you” in what we now call “real time.” As his novel The Man Who Disappeared shows, Kafka was well aware of that option. He knew what he was doing when he invented the “Imperial Message”, because he knew that a mounted courier is faster than a messenger on foot, that a letter transported by train is faster than by such a courier, and that a telegram is faster than such a letter, but I would argue, he also knew that there is a limit to this, namely the speed of light, which is finite, and cannot be exceeded. And it is even possible that he had attended one of Einstein’s lectures at the Salon of Berta Fanta in Prague, in which Kafka participated occasionally. Perhaps he knew about Einstein’s reflections on the problem of simultaneity first expressed in his famous paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, 1905:

If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time.” We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o’clock”, I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”

It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of “time” by substituting “position of the small hand of my watch” for “time.” And in fact such a definition is satisfactory when we are concerned with defining a time exclusively for the place where the watch is located; but it is no longer satisfactory when we have to connect in time series of events occurring at different places, or—what comes to the same thing—to evaluate the times of events occurring at places remote from the watch.132

As Peter Gallison has shown, these simple observations are a critique of the naïve assumption that all the clocks of the time coordination systems, which Einstein had to evaluate as a clerk at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, strike at exactly “the same time”, as Kafka states in his novel The Man Who Disappeared, because the signals that connect the central clock to all the secondary clocks in such a system are traveling over different distances at a finite speed. It is true that, in practice, these time differences can be neglected in a place like Kafka’s Hotel Occidental, and even on the global scale of our little planet earth, because compared to a moving human body the signal speed of electric and electromagnetic media is enormous, but, in theory, they cannot be ignored, and they cannot be ignored in practice either when we observe distant objects in the universe, because, as Michelson and Morley had shown, and as Einstein states in the opening paragraph of his paper, “light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.”133 The light of a star that meets our eyes now does not tell us anything about its current state, but rather about the state in which it was thousands of lightyears ago. We see stars that died a long time ago, like the emperor in Kafka’s story.

Even if he was not familiar with all the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Kafka was certainly aware that people who are corresponding over long distances have to reckon with the fact that they are not living in one and the same moment, but at different times: the time when a letter is written and dispatched, and the time when it is received and read. This difference is determined by two factors: the distance that separates the two correspondents, and the signal speed of the messages they exchange, and it can only be bemoaned, but never bridged:

Written kisses do not reach their destination but are drunk up by the ghosts along the way. Because of this abundant food they multiply so incredibly. Humanity feels this and fights against it. In order to eliminate as much as possible the ghostliness between people and to achieve natural traffic, the peace of souls, they have invented the railway, the car, the aero plane, but it no longer helps, they are apparently inventions that are made in a crash, the other side is so much calmer and stronger, after the post office they invented the telegraph, the telephone, the spark-gap transmitter. The spirits will not starve, but we will perish.134

Because messages from distant places always come with a delay, humans are not living in the same moment, but at different times. Spread all over the globe, they are governed by the decrees and laws of not just one but of many different pasts. But there is a limit to that diversity. When studying the origin of the universe in the light of distant stars, we look at the origin of time.

3. Imitation

In René Descartes’ Meditations, 1641, the difference between the unreliability of our senses and the clarity of our reason is introduced with an uncanny question: looking out my window, “what do I see but hats and clothes, under which automata could hide? But”—so he hastens to assure us—“I judge that they are human.”135 Descartes can leave it at this laconic judgment here, because the reasons on which it is based had already been spelled out in his Discourse on Method, published in 1637, and in which he had demonstrated, first, that there is no difference between automata and living bodies, including the body of the animal which, following Linnaeus, we now call homo sapiens,136 and, second, that there is nonetheless a fundamental difference between animals and machines, on one side, and humans, on the other. He writes:

And here I specially stayed to show that, were there such machines exactly resembling the organs and outward form of an ape or any other irrational animal, we could have no means of knowing that they were in any respect of a different nature from these animals; but if there were machines bearing the image of our bodies, and capable of imitating our actions as far as it is morally possible, there would still remain two most certain tests whereby to know that they were not therefore really men. Of these the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others: […] The second test is, that although such machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in certain others from which it could be discovered that they did not act from knowledge, but solely from the disposition of their organs: for while reason is an universal instrument that is alike available on every occasion, these organs, on the contrary, need a particular arrangement for each particular action; whence it must be morally impossible that there should exist in any machine a diversity of organs sufficient to enable it to act in all the occurrences of life, in the way in which our reason enables us to act. Again, by means of these two tests we may likewise know the difference between men and brutes. […] we observe that magpies and parrots can utter words like ourselves, and are yet unable to speak as we do, that is, by testifying that they think what they say; […] And this proves not only that the brutes have less reason than man, but that they have none at all: […]137

What distinguishes humans not only from both animals and automata, but even from their own body, is the God-given, eternal soul.

Discussing the evolution of man’s “mental faculties” in his book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin quotes a passage from Alexander de Humboldt’s Journey to the Equinoctial Regions:

One can hear the people living in the mountains say: “I will not give you the mule whose walking is the most comfortable, I will give you the mule which reasons the best, la mas racional.” This word from the people, dictated by long experience, combats the system of animated machines, perhaps better than all the arguments of speculative philosophy.138

The Andean muleteers unravel Cartesian speculations: Because animals are endowed with reason, they are close relatives of man. And because of that, they are, as Humboldt, the European, concludes, categorically different from machines. Commenting on this quotation, Darwin writes:

It has, I think, now been shewn that man and the higher animals, especially the Primates, have some few instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuitions and sensations—similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, memory, imagination, and reason, though in very different degrees.139

“By the late 19th century, the distinction between monkey and man had turned from the typological to the genealogical”, as Stefan Willer writes.140As a consequence of this paradigm shift, the term imitation is reevaluated. Traditionally associated with the comic, grotesque, but also uncanny ability of monkeys to mimic the actions of man, and, in the age of automata driven by hydraulic systems and regulated by mechanical clockworks,141 attributed to machines as well, imitation is now ranked first in Darwin’s list of “faculties” that humans and primates have in common. “No doubt … much of intelligent work done by man is due to imitation, and not to reason.”142 Imitation marks the point where the genealogical branch of homo sapiens breaks off from that of the simians, or as Darwin states: “The principle of Imitation is strong in man, and especially in man in a barbarous state.”143 Imitation is the origin of that faculty, which, for Descartes and many others, distinguishes man from animals:

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries.144

If Humboldt and Darwin had banned machines from their proximity to animals and humans, they returned, so to speak, with a vengeance, in 1872, only one year after the publication of Darwin’s book on The Descent of Man. In a fictional book supposedly written in an unknown language, which the fictive author of the utopian novel Erewhon145 finds, translates, and annotates, Samuel Butler draws a radical conclusion from Darwin’s theory of evolution. He tears down all the boundaries which not only thinkers like Descartes and Darwin, but a long tradition of Western European philosophy had erected. For him, there is no difference between animals, humans, and machines, except for one: all these beings evolve over time, but whereas the evolution of all living organisms, from plants up to man, goes back billions of years and is driven by the hazards of natural selection, the evolution of machines has been short and teleologic. Counted from Butler’s time, it started in “the last few hundred years”,146 that is, in the time of Descartes’ automata, and it has not been driven by chance events, but by the conscious and rational decisions of human engineers. In the age of the steam engine and the electrical telegraph, we have reached a point in which machines are ready to enslave their maker, man, and take over the world, a catastrophe, which, according to the fictional author of Butler’s “Book of the Machines”, can only be avoided by nipping “the mischief in the bud.”147

Because, for him, animals, machines, and humans are essentially the same, Butler never uses the term imitation. Machines need to eat, they digest, “they sigh even in their sleep, they weep and yawn”,148 they self-regulate,149 they communicate with each other,150 they have consciousness,151 and they even reproduce; however, not by copulation of a female and a male machine, but by the intermediary of man, like the clover by the intermediary of the bumblebee.152 And the inverse is true as well:

If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation? whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible?153

The last sentence proves that Butler was not only familiar with Darwin’s theory of evolution, but even with thermodynamics, Maxwell’s theory of heat machines.

The history I have traced so far, can be summed up by the following equations:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\mathrm{Descartes}:\hfill & \hfill man\ne animal=machine\\ \mathrm{Darwin}\mathrm{following}\mathrm{Humboldt}:\hfill & \hfill man=animal\ne machine\\ \mathrm{Butler}:\hfill & \hfill man=animal=machine\end{array}$$

Butler’s radical move cannot be undone. Even Kafka’s story “A Report for an Academy”, which takes the theory of evolution to a parodistic extreme,154 is haunted by machines. The story turns the narrative structure of such texts as “A Visit to a Mine” and “Building the Great Wall of China” on its head. Having been invited as an expert witness by a society of experts to report on “the life he formerly led as an ape”,155 the vaudeville artist Rotpeter describes his individual development in the exact same terms which Darwin uses to describe the evolution of man. Locked up in a cage on a ship of the Hagenbeck company on its way to Hamburg, Rotpeter observes what is going on around him. And, soon enough, he realizes: “It was so easy to imitate these people.”156 He learns to spit like the sailors, he enjoys his pipe just like his fellow apes who, according to Darwin, “smoke tobacco with pleasure”,157 and he is, like Brehm’s “babuins”,158 disgusted by the “liquor bottle.” And it is one of Kafka’s great ironies that Rotpeter’s leap from the speechlessness of the simian to the loquacity of homo sapiens is a consequence of his initiation into the all-too-human vice of inebriation:

What a victory it was then both for him [i.e., Rotpeter’s teacher] and for me, when one evening before a large circle of spectators—perhaps there was celebration of some kind, a gramophone was playing, an officer was circulating among the crew—when on this evening, just as no one was looking, I took hold of a schnapps bottle that had been carelessly left standing before my cage, uncorked it in the best style, while the company began to watch me with mounting attention, set it to my lips without hesitation, with no grimace, like a professional drinker, with rolling eyes and full throat, actually and truly drank it empty; then threw the bottle away, not this time in despair but as an artist; forgot, indeed, to rub my belly; but instead of that, because I could not help it, because my senses were reeling, called a brief and unmistakable: “Hallo!” breaking into human speech, and with this outburst broke into the human community, and felt its echo: “Listen, he’s talking!” like a caress over the whole of my sweat-drenched body.159

It is easy to overlook, but Rotpeter’s acquisition of the human language is not only facilitated by alcohol, but also by two new technical media. As he lifts the liquor bottle to his lips, a gramophone is playing, and the first human word he utters is “Hallo!”, the exact same word with which the Head Waiter opens his conversation with the Head Cook in the Hotel Occidental. Kafka does not spell it out, but it is not hard to conclude what he means: Rotpeter is not simply imitating humans speaking, he is imitating machines imitating humans speaking. In other words, if machines can speak, then animals can do it just as well. And, with a sure hand, Kafka chooses the two machines that could do it in his time: the gramophone captures the human voice, and the telephone carries it way beyond its reach. That you can, in fact, send messages to your dog with a gramophone record had been proven for everyone to see in Francis Barraud’s picture of the dog, Nipper, listening to “His Master’s Voice”, which was first used as the trademark of the Edison–Bell cylinder phonograph, and then of the Victor Talking Machine Company and the affiliated Gramophone Company Ltd. The gramophone and the telephone are certainly better parrots and magpies than those of Descartes, but even in their case, there still remains his question of whether they are testifying to be thinking what they are saying.

For Kafka, as for Darwin, imitation is a form of learning,160 and so it is for Alan Turing, whose famous imitation game is arguably based on the two tests which Descartes designed to distinguish humans from animals and machines:161

The imitation game is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A’.

Based on these rules Turing asks a simple question:

What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?162

Turing’s answer is: Not now (in 1950, when the paper was written), but possibly at around the end of the twentieth century. Well past this date, the question is still up for debate. But it is worth noting that the imitation game, as it has captured the popular imagination, is but the introduction to another, much more disturbing conclusion. The reason why it is conceivable that certain machines may one day be able to win the imitation game is, as Turing writes, “This special property of digital computers, that they can mimic any discrete state machine, is described by saying that they are universal machines.”163 To repeat, because digital computers can imitate each other, they can learn not only like Darwin’s animals, but like human children, and what is more, like all animals in the course of their evolution. They are “learning machines.”164 And thus, it is only consequent that the first item on Turing’s bibliography is Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon. With an obvious reference to “The Book of the Machines”, Turing notes:

There is an obvious connection between this process and evolution, by the identifications:

Structure of child machine	= Hereditary Material
Changes	= Mutations
Natural selection	= Judgment of the experimenter165

As we have seen, Butler never uses the term imitation, because he talks about essential similarities, not mere imitations. This may be the reason why Turing exchanges the synonyms “to imitate”, “to mimic”, and “to learn parrot fashion”,166 against the new term “to simulate”, at exactly this point. Introducing the passage quoted above, he writes, “In the process of trying to imitate the adult mind we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in.” And commenting on it, he continues: “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s.”167

Today, Large Language Models and other forms of Artificial Intelligence are getting better and better at playing the imitation game and better and better at simulating what Darwin called the human faculties; however, not in Turing’s way. They are not based on a complete set of logical inference composed of definitions and propositions, but on the vast archive of the Internet. And the process by means of which they operate is mathematical convolution, a much-refined version of Claude E. Shannon’s statistical techniques for the artificial production of ever more correct English texts.168 The grammatical and semantic precision of their outputs is grounded in the blah-blah of humanity’s everyday murmur, the same murmur which Kafka’s last story “Josefine, the Singer or the Mice People” tries to capture.169

The machines that haunt Kafka’s writings are not digital, like Descartes’s and Turing’s parrots; they only repeat the human voice. Large Language Models generate texts, a possibility of which Kafka and his contemporaries could have only dreamed. But if we are still convinced, to quote Descartes, that LLMs “can utter words like us, and yet cannot speak like us, that is to say, by testifying that they think what they say”, we should at least ask ourselves: Do we?