On 21st-Century “Dunderheads”: Franz Kafka’s “America”

The Übermeister of alienation and paranoia shows us what it is like to be a man judged by the masses for no discernible reason in the uncompleted last novel America (1927). The novel may contain some of the most farcical passages in Franz Kafka’s entire oeuvre (the scene in Chapter 7 involving Karl being interrogated by a policeman and scrutinised by the entire neighbourhood is an apt example); but the oppressive Kafkaesque elements that have become so familiar to us through The Trial and The Castle can still be detected throughout lurking beneath the surface of the absurd comedy.

America’s protagonist Karl Rossmann is an immigrant left to his own fate. Through happenstance, he manages to secure himself a position as a lift-boy at the Hotel Occidental, where he attends to his duties as he has been instructed – only to be disrupted on one ill-timed occasion as his ruffian acquaintance Robinson drops by to borrow money. Karl leaves his station for a brief moment, and that is the exact fated moment when the Head Waiter tries to summon him and finds him “absent from duty without leave” (152). The discovery leads to a humiliating interrogation by the Head Waiter, who accuses Karl of irresponsible behaviour. This is exacerbated by the additional accusations hurled against him by the Head Porter, who claims that Karl is a moral degenerate because he has been “sneak[ing] off into town every night” (158), and that he is impudent for not greeting him. When Karl protests, the Head Porter says: “You have to greet me every time, every single time … and you must always say “sir” when you are speaking to me” (154).

The case against Karl is so detrimentally solid that he loses his job and is told to leave immediately. What follows next is a surreal passage only Kafka is capable of composing. To spare himself further humiliation, Karl wishes to avoid the hotel crowd. This proves futile as the narrator observes: “But Karl’s hope of getting away unobserved … was a vain one” (170). Karl is seized by the Head Porter and detained in his large office, which has the following curious description:

… the walls of the office consisted entirely of enormous panes of glass, through which you could see the incoming and outgoing streams of guests in the vestibule as clearly as if you were among them. Yes, there seemed to be no nook or corner in the whole office where you could be hidden from their eyes. No matter in how great a hurry the people outside seemed to be … hardly one of them omitted to cast a glance into the porter’s office (171).

Kafka’s detailed description of the lack of privacy in the porter’s office can only have one purpose: to have Karl’s shame on display. His “professional irresponsibility” is a mark of moral decay, and he is being pilloried for it.

Should the reader think that Karl is the only victim of this injustice, he will think again when, immediately after the scene above, we are introduced to a team of under-porters and their messenger boys who perform tasks so mechanical and meaningless that Kafka’s detailed descriptions of them only serve to underline their absurd nature. To add insult to injury, the Head Porter has this to say about them: “Of course this work here is the stupidest in the whole hotel … it’s only a job for dunderheads” (174).

The chapter in which all these passages appear (Chapter 6: The Case of Robinson) is surprisingly relevant to our equally humdrum existence in the 21^st century. Karl Rossmann and his fellow workers are not merely fictional characters; they are Kafka’s statement on the oppressiveness and meaninglessness of modern life. Like Karl, most of us are defined by our jobs and our professional attitude. We are scrutinised and judged by a higher authority, and are sometimes – unjustifiably – deemed guilty of “irresponsible behaviour” despite our best intentions. Our shame, then, is publicly displayed, as a deterrent to others who may be similarly inclined. Reward for a job done well is a rarity, as proved by the passage above. If anything, the common workers – the ones who keep the system from collapsing – are despised and considered “dunderheads” for their herd behaviour and limited intellectual capacity.

America may be Kafka’s “lightest” work, but it contains some dark truths about the modern human condition – truths that have only become darker as we descend into the mass commercialism of the 21^st century.

All page numbers refer to the 2005 Vintage Classics edition.