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Rossmann and K, the innocent and theguilty, both executed without distinctionin the end, the innocent one with alighter hand, more pushed aside thanstruck down. (Kafka, Diaries of FranzKafka, September 1915)1

One of the many ironies accompanyingthe early reception of Kafka’s writingswas the construction of philosophical

and political interpretations of his novelsbased on a mistaken understanding of theirorder of composition. Max Brod’s decisionposthumously to publish his friend’s novels ina different order from theircomposition—The Trial in 1925, The Castlein 1926 and Amerika in 1927—misled anentire generation of readers into assumingthat they were written in this order and thatthey portrayed a development in Kafka’s lit-erary and political imagination.This develop-ment, abetted by Brod’s comments on the

The Fate of the Pariah:Arendt and Kafka’s “NatureTheatre of Oklahama”

Howard Caygill

Howard Caygill is Professor of

Cultural History at Goldsmiths

College, University of London

and the author of Art of

Judgement, Walter Benjamin:

the Colour of Experience,

The Kant Dictionary, and

Levinas and the Political.

supposed redemptive ending of Amerika, was understood in terms of a pos-sible optimistic, utopian solution to the bureaucratic dystopias of The Castleand The Trial most apparent in the last chapter of Amerika, the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama.”

The distorted order of publication, Brod’s change of title from DerVerschollene [The Lost One] to Amerika, and the correction of the “mis-spelling” of “Oklahama” to “Oklahoma” fatally obscured Kafka’s terminationof the novel.This cluster of, in-themselves, minor editorial interventions hadthe incalculable effect of not only shaping the perception of the developmentof Kafka’s oeuvre but also of adapting it to, and employing it in, the construc-tion of elaborate philosophical and political narratives. In the case ofWalterBenjamin’s powerful and influential interpretation, it led, along with a desireto defend Kafka’s writing against Brecht’s criticisms,2 to moments of almostinexplicable blindness otherwise rare in his criticism. The major blindspotwas Amerika and above all the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama.”Benjamin readthe latter as the culmination of a redemptive history in which the protago-nist “K.” of the “first” novel gradually assumes his full name, becoming JosefK. in The Trial and finally Karl Rossman in Amerika, inexplicably overlook-ing the significance of Karl Rossman’s entry into the ‘Nature Theatre’ underthe assumed name of “Negro.” 3 Arendt, too, accepts Brod’s ordering of thenovels and, following Benjamin, constructs a political narrative of the devel-opment of Kafka’s work in which, too, the “Nature Theatre” is raised to thestatus of a political utopia. Her reading of Kafka is central to her distinctionbetween “pariah” and “parvenu” and serves to justify not only the politicalpossibilities of the “self-conscious” or rebellious pariah but also the utopianrealm of constructed citizenship she sees “tentatively” described “at the end,the happy ending of Amerika”(Arendt 2007, 108).4

Arendt’s reading of Kafka is located in two of her important essays,“TheJew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” (1945) and “Franz Kafka, AppreciatedAnew” (1946) although his work remains a constant point of referencethroughout her authorship. These two essays are crucial not only for herunderstanding of Kafka, but also for the formulation of some central cate-gories of her political philosophy subsequently developed in the writings ofthe 1950s and 1960s. Kafka’s work is central to the formulation of her polit-ical and historical understanding of modernity, and Amerika in particular rep-resents a frail moment of hope for an escape from the grim implications oftotal domination.What allows it to be read in this way is the hope of futurehappiness perceived in “The Nature Theatre of Oklahama”—the supposedlast chapter of the supposed last novel:Kafka’s last word so to speak.The read-ings of the “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” and “Franz Kafka,Appreciated Anew” respect the implicit teleology introduced by Brod, both

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concluding with “The Nature Theatre of Oklahama” as a potential “newworld” or “happy ending” to modernity.

In “The Jew as Pariah:A HiddenTradition,”Arendt constructed an out-line of a “hidden tradition” of cultural exclusion through readings of Heine,Lazare, Chaplin and finally Kafka. Departing from MaxWeber’s highly dis-putable formulation of the characteristics of a pariah status group,Arendt re-valuates the cultural contributions of Jewish writers and thinkers as “socialoutcasts”(Momogliano 1987, 231-37).5 She contrasts the cultural posture ofthe Jewish “pariah” identity with that of the “parvenu”—the conformist,assimilationist response to social exclusion—and finds in the “conscious”adoption of the status of pariah a formula for non-conformist rebelliondirected as much against the immediate Jewish as against the wider Gentilecommunities.While admitting that the pariah is an abject and even danger-ous “human type,” sharing characteristics with the ressentiment of thelumpenproletariat or mass of superfluous peoples, Arendt nevertheless seespolitical hope in the conscious adoption of this status in the figure of thenon-conformist pariah. For Arendt, Kafka is the exemplary writer of thiscondition, anticipating many of the features of the later, influential evaluationof his work as a “minor literature” proposed by Deleuze and Guattari.

In the section of the essay devoted to Kafka—“Franz Kafka:The Man ofGoodwill”—Arendt explores two typifications of the pariah type in Kafka’sDescription of a Struggle and The Castle (both of which she thought of as earlytexts). Arendt situates Kafka’s depiction of the struggle of the pariah in thecontext of the late nineteenth-century choice that faced Western Jews ofretreating into a boheme or society of pariahs or assimilating into the dom-inant community. For Arendt, the figure of the conscious, rebellious pariahannounced in Kafka’s The Description of a Struggle and developed in the char-acters that populate his subsequent writings marks a militant departure forthe pariah type: “Kafka’s heroes face society with an attitude of outspokenaggression, poles apart from the ironic condescension of Heine’s ‘lord ofdreams’ or the innocent cunning of Chaplin’s perpetually harassed little man”(Arendt 2007, 84). This preliminary orientation leads into an outstandingreading of The Castle as a fable of the rebellious pariah, a political reading ofthe novel whose subtlety and indebtedness to Walter Benjamin makes it anapt companion to Sebald’s later political-theological reading of the novel interms of the abject Messiah (Sebald 1991).

Arendt understands the superfluous land surveyor “K.” to be “involved insituations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life”—strung between thedemands of the inaccessible bureaucratic Castle and the village.The choicebetween parvenu accommodation and assimilation or pariah resistance thatis constantly faced by K. assumes an allegorical quality and anticipates

3Howard Caygill

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Arendt’s later historical analysis of the predicament of the Jewish communi-ty in the “Anti-semitism” section of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’sreading of The Castle rests on a distinction between K.’s individualrebellion—the “lonely isolation” of his individual claim for “his minimumhuman rights”—and the dream of a collective struggle for justice supposed-ly embodied in the “Nature Theatre of Oklahama.”This becomes explicit asshe moves towards the end of her essay, when she claims that K.,“unlike thehero of Kafka’s last novel,Amerika . . . does not start dreaming of a new worldand he does not end in a great “Nature Theatre” where “everyone is wel-come,” where “there is a place for everyone” in accordance with his talents,his bent and his will. On the contrary, K.’s idea seems to be that much couldbe accomplished, if only one simple man could achieve to live his own lifelike a normal human being (Sebald 1991, 87).The assumption of a progres-sion from The Castle to Amerika, instead of the other way around, allowsArendt to move, seemingly with Kafka, towards the collective Zionist alter-native to the historical predicament of the Jewish people.The failure of bothindividual pariah resistance and parvenu assimilation in The Castle reveals forArendt “a truth that made Kafka a Zionist.”This truth is

That the man of goodwill is driven today into isolation like the Jew-stranger in the Castle. He gets lost—or dies from exhaustion. For onlywithin the framework of a people can a man live as a man among men,without exhausting himself.And only when a people lives and functions inconsort with other peoples can it contribute to the establishment uponearth of a commonly conditioned and commonly controlled humanity.(Sebald 1991, 90)

With this culminating proposal Arendt points to the political transcendenceof the individual pariah or parvenu in the collective dream and struggle of apeople, a proposal she sees anticipated by Kafka in his move from The Castleto the “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” in Amerika. Except that he moved inthe opposite direction.

The persistence of this interpretative schema in underlined in “FranzKafka,Appreciated Anew,” which develops a subtle critique of necessity andprophesy inspired by Benjamin’s “Angel of History.”The reading of TheTrialin terms of necessity, of the law in terms of necessity, presents a powerful casefor the impasse of individual resistance.The progression from K.’s death byexhaustion to the shame of Josef K.’s macabre execution is explicitly cited, asis the parallel between the story “In the Penal Colony” and the “reality of thegas chambers.”Yet Arendt is careful to separate Kafka from the ranks of theprophets, for she sees catastrophe and ruin as neither necessary nor requiringa prophet’s power of prediction. Once again, in the face of catastrophe,“It isalways salvation which is the miracle, not ruin; only salvation, and not ruin

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depends upon the freedom of man and his capacity to change the world andits natural course.” Kafka’s TheTrial thus becomes an experiment in the con-sequences of the “fatal belief—as prevalent in Kafka’s time as in ours—thatthe task of man is to submit to a process predetermined by some power orother” the process that Arendt will describe as “total domination” in TheOrigins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 2007, 101).

The first appearance of Amerika in the essay is as part of a meditation onthe distinction between the public and private lives of an official.The HeadPorter who mistakes Karl Rossman for one of his more roguish colleaguesworking in the Hotel Occidental cannot admit his error. His function is torecognize people’s identities, and to maintain his position he must maintainthe pretence of infallibly doing so. Here Arendt anticipates for the first timesome of the themes of individual responsibility in the context of bureaucrat-ic domination later raised in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Obedience to a function-al role, regardless of private opinion, “is the hidden motor that drives thedestructive machinery in which Kafka’s protagonists are caught” (2007, 103).Arendt continues by describing “The main theme of Kafka’s novels [as] theconflict between the world depicted in terms of a seamlessly functioningmachinery of this kind, and a protagonist trying to destroy it” (103).With thisshe returns to her readings of the novels begun in The Jew as Pariah in which,as here, the end of Amerika features as a radical departure in Kafka’s work.

Before arriving at her analysis of the NatureTheatre as a “happy ending”Arendt makes a brief but important digression into the character of Kafka’swriting. She distinguishes his “technique” from surrealist “photomontage” bydescribing his writings in terms of constructions of “blueprints”—workingdiagrams according to which his readers can join him in the work of imagi-nation. Arendt directly cites Kant’s concept of the imagination and effective-ly regards Kafka’s writings as schemas, diagrams that enable the free exerciseof imagination in reflective judgement.6 By focusing on the narrative charac-ter of Kafka’s writing and its diagrammatic relationship to narrated material,Arendt underestimates the proximity of Kafka’s work to photomontage.Thisallows her to exaggerate the a priori, constructivist character of Kafka’s tech-nique: for her his writings are constructions that depart from “general factorsand not out of the experience of any specific event” (2007, 106) and in thisway, she claims, reverses “a tradition reaching back thousands of years, thisexceedingly bold reversal of original and imitation suddenly casts what is nar-rated as the original with reality appearing as an imitation called on to defenditself ” (106).This reversal of Platonism in the direction of a Kantian-inspiredaccount of reflective judgment in which reality is judged according to a sen-sus communis of shared narratives is striking, but underestimates Kafka’s tech-nique, which especially in Amerika consists in the kind of imaginative

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response to photographs later analyzed by Benjamin in his Little History ofPhotography. It also uproots Kafka’s work from specific historic events capturedin photographs and crucial for his narrative in Amerika.The underestimationof the role of the photograph in Kafka’s authorship and the move away fromthe photographic to the diagram in understanding it blurs Arendt’s under-standing of Kafka’s writing, and, specifically, the central role played by pho-tography, photomontage and history in Amerika.

Arendt moves from the sharing of a narrative that constructs reality to aview of Kafka’s encrypted utopia as a “possible world that human beingswould construct in which the actions of man depend on nothing but him-self and his spontaneity, and in which human society is governed by laws pre-scribed by man himself rather than by mysterious forces, whether emanatingfrom above or from below” (2007, 108). She concludes with the possibilityof “becoming the fellow citizen of such a world,” and sees Kafka as tenta-tively describing such a possibility “in the end, the happy ending of Amerika”(108). She then makes a direct connection between Kafka and Benjamin’s“angel of history”—both contemplate the ruins and rubble left by thedestruction of a world. But for her, Kafka superimposes on the catastrophiclandscape of history “the image of man as a model of good will.” It is on thebasis of this image or schema that we can narrate and begin spontaneouslyto construct new, more just worlds.

Arendt returns to confirm her view of the “NatureTheatre” in her 1946report on“French Existentialism.” She introduces it in the context of her cri-tique of the “seriousness” of the Hotel Porter in Amerika who identifies him-self with his bureaucratic function.This “ridiculous and dangerous” identifi-cation that anticipates the figure of Eichmann, is contrasted with the “newpossibility of authentic life” that Kafka indicated in “the last chapter ofAmerika.” In the “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” everyone is welcome andeveryone’s unhappiness is resolved in a theatre:“Here everybody is invited tochoose his role, to play at what he is or would like to be.The chosen role isthe solution of the conflict between mere functioning and mere being”(Arendt 2005, 117). In such a theatre, universalized by Kafka into a world,one is able “to guard one’s freedom as a human being from the pretences ofone’s functions; moreover, only by playing at what he really is, is man able toaffirm that he is never identical with himself as a thing is identical with itself ”(118).The introduction of theatrical role, of playing with identity and spec-tatorship disrupts the literality of fixed bureaucratic roles and opens forArendt a space for the spontaneous and collective creation of a shared world.This act of spontaneous creation is for her the meaning of the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama.”

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Yet it is far from Kafka’s own view of the “Nature Theatre,” one locatedwithin the matrix of the racism of the new world and the transportation andimplied extermination of the pariahs. In other words, the “Nature Theatre”is more appropriately described in terms of Arendt’s description of a con-centration camp in the Origins of Totalitarianism than as a democratic utopia.For not only is Amerika or The Lost One the first of Kafka’s novels written in1912, followed by composition of TheTrial in the autumn of 1914, and TheCastle much later, in 1922—making it the point of departure of Kafka’swork—but the final chapter itself was written later than the rest of the novel,as part of the same writing campaign of autumn 1914 that produced TheTrialand In the Penal Colony. It joins those works as a meditation on capital pun-ishment, and the spectatorship of such punishment, adding to the nearpornographic stories of suburban and colonial executions the spectacle ofracist executions in Amerika.

The “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” arrives at the end of a novel repletewith meditations on photography.The opening paragraph of the novel trans-forms the torch of the Statue of Liberty viewed by Karl Rossman during hisapproach to NewYork first into a photographer’s flash gun—Karl Rossmanis photographed on entry—and then into a raised sword of retribution.Theopening harbor scene and the subsequent descriptions of Manhattan may betraced to a photo-narrative by Arthur Holitscher,Amerika Heute und Morgen,first published in 1912. Not only does Kafka rely on Holitscher’s photo-graphs for the topography of his novel, but he makes the photograph itself aprotagonist in the novel’s action.The narration is driven by loss and dispos-session, specifically the repeated loss and restitution of Karl Rossman’s suit-case and the loss of a photograph of his family, his last link with his Europeanidentity.Karl Rossman’s exile toAmerika and then his journey down to pari-ah status, interrupted by short, failed “parvenu” episodes, is marked by thedispossession of his property—his suitcase—and his link to the past throughthe photograph.

When Kafka returned to the abandoned manuscript of The Lost One inthe autumn of 1914 with the seemingly concluding chapter, the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama,” he was very careful to address the main themes of theabandoned narrative. Four elements are of particular importance in the“Nature Theatre” chapter. The first is the choice of the assumed name“Negro” when entering the employment of the “Nature Theatre” at theClayton Racetrack. Karl Rossman did not want his real name written down,“So as no other name occurred to him at the moment, he gave the nicknamehe had in his last post:‘Negro’” (Kafka 2008, 429). Adopting the name givenhim, a name that identifies him with oppressed Black Amerikans, Karl pass-es through the near comic incredulity of the officials of the “NatureTheatre”

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into the theatre itself, but his choice of name has aligned the narrative of the“Nature Theatre” decisively with the most oppressed,“pariah” group of theUnited States.

This alignment is intensified by the second main element in the narra-tive, which is the restitution of a photograph. Karl Rossman arrives at anabundant welcome feast for the new staff of the NatureTheatre to find a pileof photographic “views of the theatre of Oklahama which lay at a pile at oneend of the table and which were supposed to pass from hand to hand” (Kafka2008, 436). Only one reached Karl at the end of the table, and he contem-plated it closely. It replaced the lost photograph of his family and hisEuropean past and pointed to his Amerikan future:

The Picture showed the box reserved in theTheatre for the President of theUnited States.At first glance one might have thought that it was not a stage-box but the stage itself, so far flung was the sweep of its breastwork.Thisbreastwork was made entirely of gold, to the smallest detail.Between its slen-der columns, medallions of former presidents were arrayed side by side; oneof these had a remarkably straight nose, curling lips and a downward look-ing eye hooded beneath a full, rounded eye-lid. Rays of light fell into thebox from all sides and from the roof; the foreground was literally bathed inlight, white but soft, while the recess of the background, behind red damaskcurtains falling in changing folds from roof to floor and looped with cords,appeared like a duskily glowing empty cavern. One could scarcely imaginehuman figures in that box, so royal did it look. (Kafka 2008, 438)

Karl’s rapture at the photograph is interrupted by his seeing an oldfriend, and he is distracted from the photograph.But this view of the“NatureTheatre” is in a very real sense one of a “History Theatre” for it is a view oftheWashingtonTheatre, widely circulated as the scene of the assassination ofAbraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 (Figure 1). The “Nature Theatre” is ascene of execution, but specifically the scene of the execution of thePresident who emancipated the black slaves. Kafka is aligning the “NatureTheatre” with the theatre of an event which debatably set back the progressof Black Americans for almost a century.The view of the “Nature Theatre”also has some peculiar formal properties that rehearse a recurrent tropethroughout the novel: the place from which to view, the theatre box,becomes the stage itself.The one who gazes, as does Karl at the opening ofthe novel and as did Lincoln on the evening of his assassination, becomes theobject of a harsh,murderous gaze.This view of the “NatureTheatre” also sit-uates it as a mausoleum, or empty tomb.The ambivalence of whether this isa tomb whose occupant has been resurrected or whether it is awaiting anoccupant is not settled; it is indeed compounded by the appearance of theportrait of Lincoln among the presidents commemorated in the box, as if this

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image of theWashingtonTheatre came from a world and a history in whichLincoln was not assassinated.

Yet this moment of ambivalence is a rare gesture of alleviation in an oth-erwise bleak scenario, since the gathering of names connected to the histo-ry of racial injustice in the United States—'Negro,” “Lincoln”—is boundtogether with a third element, the name “Oklahama.” For a very specificphotograph provides the scenario of the Nature Theatre. One of the photo-graphs in Holitscher—Kafka’s main photographic source for Amerika—isentitled “Oklahama Idyll” with the misspelling of Oklahoma that Kafkawould carefully preserve in his chapter to alert readers to his source (Figure2). It portrays a racist lynching with the black victims suspended from thebowing branches of a grove of trees surrounded by an indifferently curiouscrowd of white spectators posing for the camera before the victims.The pho-tographic image that inspired “The Nature Theatre of Oklahama” was oneof “strange fruit”—one of the type of images that circulated widely as post-cards in the early twentieth century. The “Nature Theatre ofOklahama”—the “Oklahama idyll”—is inseparable from the “HistoryTheatre of Washington”; it too is a site of execution, the two photographstied to the same history of racial oppression.

Far from being the utopia believed by Brod, Benjamin and Arendt, the“Nature Theatre of Oklahama” begins to appear as a site of execution, oneinextricably tied to the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Inthis light, the interruption of the celebratory meal and the behavior of thenervous official in charge of “transport arrangements” takes on a differentsignificance.This introduces, in the last paragraphs, the fourth element of the“Nature Theatre” chapter carefully prepared throughout the novel.The lossof the suitcase and sense of dispossession provoked by this loss—the failureto achieve parvenu and the threat of descent into pariah status—that is a leit-motif of the novel now returns.The new members of the “Nature Theatre”are forced to run to the train that awaits them—“Still, that was no great hard-ship, for—as Karl only now remarked—no-one carried any luggage . . .”(Kafka 2008, 438). The members of the “Nature Theatre” are the dispos-sessed, “destitute, disreputable characters”—pariahs—who, as their trainleaves the station, wave and provoke the amusement of the spectators in thestation, ‘who nudged each other and laughed” (Gilman 1995, 108).

The “NatureTheatre of Oklahama” joins its contemporary TheTrial andIn the Penal Colony as a scene of execution. Kafka uncannily anticipates theprocess of selection, concentration, and transportation later described inArendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.While the extermination itself is notdescribed by him, it is anticipated in the scenes of violent death that areevoked in the chapter. His view of Amerika or the fate of the pariahs or

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Verschollene, is one of technological progress allied with exterminatory poli-tics.The parallel between the European Jews and theAmerikan Blacks, notedby Sander Gilman (Young-Bruehl 2004, 189), is confirmed by the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama” that can be read as a meditation on a possible out-come to the violent racial history of the United States.Yet this remainedinvisible to generations of readers of Kafka, including Arendt.

Between 1946 and 1948 Arendt worked as an editor with SchockenBooks in NewYork, where her main task was preparing the translation ofKafka’s diaries (Young-Bruehl 2004, 189). From the work on the diaries shewould have learnt of the correct order of composition of Kafka’s works andrealized that this compromised the claims in her 1946 essays for a progres-sion in his writing culminating in the last chapter of Amerika.Although shenever retracted the readings of 1946, her subsequent readings of Kafka aresilent on the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama.”Yet more is at stake in the read-ing of the 1914 “conclusion” to Amerika than Kafka’s supposed pointing tothe possibility of a democratic future for the United States.The novel endsby evoking a violent history of racial injustice, one in which—as In the PenalColony—juridical considerations of guilt or innocence are irrelevant to theexecution of the death penalty. The mistranslation of the passage from thediaries in which Kafka explicitly says that the innocentone—Rossmann—will be executed along with the guilty one K., is indica-tive of an oversight of Kafka’s somber conclusion. By translating the “inno-cent one” [Unschuldige] as the “guilty one,”Greenberg/Arendt not only grantthe guilty one an easier execution, having him pushed aside, but also undoKafka’s insistence that both innocent and guilty are executed.The machineof execution is not organised in terms of a juridical logic of guilt and inno-cence but in terms of the accidents of skin color and status.The mistransla-tion implicitly defends the Western jurisprudential tradition organizedaround guilt and innocence, against Kafka’s insight that in modernity suchtraditional juridical notions no longer apply, even or especially in decisionsof life and death.

The overlooking of the racial history that informs the “Nature Theatreof Oklahama” leads also to a blindspot not only around this dimension ofKafka’s work, but also the specific history of racial injustice in the UnitedStates that it works through. Kafka’s Amerika is one in which this history isprominent; indeed by the end of his novel this history of injustice hasbecome a central theme. It ends less with a diagram of a just society thanwith a response to a photomontage of images of racial injustice. In her“Reflections on Little Rock,”Arendt shows how distant she remained froman appreciation of the significance of this history for theAmerikan Republic.While I don’t wish to review the controversy provoked by this text (Kohn

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2003, 193), there are a number of features that link it to the limits of herreading of Kafka.The first is the striking coincidence that her reflections, likethe “Nature Theatre of Oklahama,” are provoked and driven by an image ofracial injustice in the United States, in her case “a picture in the newspapersshowing a negro girl on her way home from a newly integrated school”(Young-Bruehl 2004, 316).Arendt reads in this image the humiliation of thechild, the cowardice of the parents and the poor political judgement of theSupreme Court ruling which initiated desegregation in the schools.

While Arendt is clear and forthright in her condemnation of segregationlaws in the name of equality before the law, her argument becomes ambigu-ous when she deploys her concepts of pariah and parvenu in the context ofthe categories of the private, social, and political. She sees schools and edu-cation as a function of the social realm, and “integration” as an example of aparvenu policy in her view almost cynically pursued by the parents.Yet hadshe been in a position to situate the Little Rock image in a history of suchimages—in the way that Kafka implicitly juxtaposed images of theWashington Theatre with a racist lynching—then it would have been possi-ble for her to see that a functional political argument according to a dia-gram/schema of private, social and political spheres was an inappropriatemodel of judgement. Kafka’s “photomontage” situated his images of injusticewithin a history, one in which the Little Rock image also finds a place. Butit is an image of stoical heroism, not of a victim to oppression but one ofresistance.While taking its place within the image-history of racial injusticeit also diverted this history away from an inevitable terminus in the “NatureTheatre of Oklahama” and introduced hope and futurity into this history.

Arendt was very disturbed by the representation of the young womanbeing escorted out of the school. She saw this as the introduction of politicsinto the schools, arguing for the protection of children and childhood fromthe onslaught of politics.Yet the power of the Little Rock image lies in thedignity of the young woman adopting the burden of the history in whichshe finds herself, and by doing so changing it. Ralph Ellison’s later criticism(1965) of Arendt’s judgement emphasizes the heroism of the Little Rockchildren and parents:“in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish thatthe problem didn’t exist), the child is expected to face the terror and containhis fear and anger precisely because he is a negro Amerikan.”29 Ellisondescribed the failure of such comportment in terms of “sacrifice”—the his-tory of injustice demanded these sacrifices. But unlike Kafka, he did not seethis history as one of inevitable, interminable sacrifice, but sees a heroismemerging from it. Arendt, while touched by this criticism, neverthelessresponded by affirming the idea of sacrifice, and not seeing Ellison’s recog-nition of heroism in the children and parents of Little Rock.The image on

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which she reflected was potentially one of sacrifice, but also potentially oneof exemplary dignity and heroism. For this to be visible, however, it had tobe set within and against the legacy of images of sacrifice and victimhoodthat document the history of racial injustice in the United States.

It is reported by visitors to her apartment in NewYork that a photographof Kafka was one of the most prominent images on the wall in Arendt’s study,and indeed his writings presided over her historical and conceptual under-standing of modernity.The essays of 1946 were crucial episodes in her devel-oping understanding of the failures and the possibilities of modernity. Herinsight into total domination, her appreciation of the resistance strategies ofembattled minorities, and her judgement of the moral responsibility ofbureaucratic officials was forged in the reading of Kafka. So too was herappreciation of the importance of shared narration and spontaneity. And yether understanding of Kafka, so sensitive in so many ways, remained in otherrespects bound by the limits of its early reception.Kafka’s bleak jurisprudence,beyond guilt and innocence, his anticipation of photomontage and his puttingit to use in the evocation of Amerika’s violent racial history in “The NatureTheatre of Oklahama,” remained beyond these limits. Nevertheless, thestrongest moments of Arendt’s analyses of the pathologies of modernity—TheOrigins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem—are entirely consistentwith the harsh conclusion to Amerika that she could not see.

Arendt shared the common view of Kafka as a diagnostician of moder-nity, one who provided diagrams for interpreting the general characteristicsof the epoch.Yet what is driving the narrative in Amerika is not Amerikanmodernity in general, but a specific aspect of its history.The vision of a pos-sible collective and democratic exit from the violent history of modernitythat Arendt saw in Kafka’s “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” was a mirage. Shesaw in the “happiness” of the last chapter a realization of the broad aspira-tions of the Amerikan Constitution but could not see the specific history ofracial injustice that had from outset betrayed those very aspirations. Herassumptions about Kafka’s technique and his understanding of historyobscured her judgement when confronted by a text indirectly citing a veryspecific image-history. It also blinded her to the advent of a new kind ofimage that challenged the terms of the image-history of racial oppressionthat haunted Kafka, one in which the fate of the innocent was no longer thatof being simply pushed aside as a victim.

Notes1The Diaries of Franz Kafka, (1964). In the Greenberg/Arendt translation “the innocent

one” [der Schuldlose] is mistranslated as “the guilty one”—“the guilty one with a gentler hand,more pushed aside than struck down.”

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2 See the account of their differences on Kafka in Wizisla (2009, 164-68).3 “That Amerika is a very special case is indicated by the name of its hero.While in the

earlier novels the author never addressed himself otherwise than with a mumbled initial, here,on a new continent, he undergoes a rebirth and acquires a full name. He has this experiencein the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Benjamin (1999, 800).

4 Arendt’s first husband, Gunther Stern/Anders, with whom she co-authored an essay onRilke’s Duino Elegies, also referred to the “happy ending” of Amerika in Kafka: Pro e contro thatbegan as a lecture given in 1934 to an audience at the Institut d’Etudes Germaniques thatincluded Benjamin and Arendt. However, in the 1951 extended edition of the lecture Anderswhile barely discussing Amerika, is well aware that it is an early work but incautiously cites itas a rare example of an “happy ending” in Kafka, Anders (1989, 70).

5 For a vigorous critique of Weber’s notion of the Jews as a “pariah people” and its adop-tion by twentieth-century theorists including Arendt see Momogiano (1987, 231-37).

6 For Kant’s descr iption of the schema and its place between category and intuition, see(2003, 180-87).

Works Cited

Anders,Gunther. 1989. Kafka. Pro e contro. Trans. Paola Gnan. Ferrara: Gabriele Corbo.Arendt, Hannah. 2007. “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew.” In Reflections on Art and Literature, ed.

Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.———. 2007. “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” In Reflections on Art and Literature, ed.

Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.———. 2005. “French Existentialism.” In Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile,

and Totalitarianism. New York: Random House.Benjamin,Walter. 1999. “Franz Kafka.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 2. 1927-1934.

Trans. Rodney Livingstone et.al., Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Gilman, Sander. 1995. Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient. London: Routledge.Kafka, Franz. 1964. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Martin Greenberg, New

York: Penguin Books.———. 2008. The Complete Novels. Trans.Willa and Edwin Muir. London:Vintage Books.Kant, Immanuel. 2003. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.Momogliano, Arnaldo. 1987. “A Note on Max Weber’s Definition of Judaism as a Pariah-

Religion.” In On Pagans, Jews and Christian. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press.Sebald, W.G. 1991. “Das Gesetz der Schande—Macht, Messianismus und Exil in Kafka’s

Schloss.” In Uneimliche Heimat. Sankt Pölten: Residenz Verlag.Wizisla, Erdmut. 2009. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship. Trans.

Christine Shuttleworth. London: Libris.Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. 2nd ed. London: Yale

University Press.

Figure 1: President’s Box in Ford’s TheaterWhere LincolnWas Asasinated” (1865).Library of Congress LC-B811-3404.

Figure 2:“Idyll Avs Oklahoma.” In Arthur Holitscher. 1912.Amerika:Heute and Morgen. Berlin: FischerVerlag. p. 367.

14 College Literature 38.1 [Winter 2011]