Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In Franz Kafka's short story "The Hunter Gracchus [Die Jäger Gracchus]" (1917), the long-dead protagonist Gracchus explains to the burgomaster of the Italian port at which his ship has docked how he came to be killed in what Carolin Duttlinger rightly calls a "workplace accident." 1 To recall his business-like account of his own demise, Gracchus explains that "I fell from a rock in the Black Forest -that is in Germany -when I was hunting a chamois.Since then I have been dead." 2 If the burgomaster suspects the hunter's accident must have been the result of some error on his part -"And you bear no blame for it?" he pointedly asks -Gracchus himself is adamant that he had no responsibility whatsoever for his death: "'None,' said the hunter, "I was a hunter; am I to be blamed for that?I was assigned my place as a hunter in the Black Forest." 3 In Duttlinger's verdict, Gracchus sees his fatal accident as no-one's fault but simply the result of an occupational hazard or professional risk that he was happy to assume: "Everything happened in good order," the hunter concludes, "I gave chase, I fell, bled to death in a ravine, I was dead, and this bark was supposed to convey me to the next world."4 To reconcile what we might call the two Kafkas -the writer and the underwriter, the novelist and the insurer, the author of a series of (once obscure but now celebrated) philosophical fictions and the author of a (once influential but now forgotten) dossier of legal and technical documents on workplace accident insurance --I want to focus on one massively overdetermined yet still curiously empty theme that runs through both his literary and professional writing: Schuld (guilt, fault, blame, debt, liability, culpability or responsibility).For Kafka, of course, what takes place in his fictional universe often seems to be a kind of impossible or unwinnable Schuldspiel (blame game): Gracchus, Josef K. and his other dramatis personae all try and fail to find who is responsibleliable, at fault, culpable ---for the otherwise inexplicable workplace accidents that have befallen them.If this futile pursuit has classically been narrated by Kafka scholarship as a metaphysical, theological or existential condition, I want to argue (and here we will not only be following recent scholars like Michael Löwy, Howard Caygill and Carolin Duttlinger but placing his work into a constellation with that of the contemporary philosopher of the welfare state François Ewald) that it is also a precise historical subject position which appears at a moment when the whole question of the relation between the citizen and the state and, particularly, of what liabilities they owe one another, is in flux.In Kafka's literary and professional writings, we can track not only an ontology of guilt -of being guilty or at fault -but what Werner Hamacher elsewhere calls a modern political Schuldgeschichte -a guilt or fault history.5 If Gracchus was happy to assume the professional risk intrinsic to his career as a hunter, after all, it is presumably because (as Duttlinger rightly observes) 6 he believed he was metaphysically "insured" against that risk and would be reimbursed for any loss he incurred on earth in the afterlife: he sorrowfully informs Salvatore that "this bark was supposed to convey me to the next world," recall, but the ship has evidently failed in its task.It gradually emerges that the metaphysical insurer of the hunter's accident has themselves fallen victim to an accident --leaving Gracchus fatally uninsured.As he goes on to describe, the pilot of the ship of death on which he is being carried has made a mistake: "My death boat went off course; a wrong turn of the wheel, a moment's absence of mind on the part of the helmsman, the distraction of my lovely native country, I cannot tell what it was; I only know this, that I remained on earth."7 For the hunter, the ship pilot's workplace accident cannot be attributed to an unavoidable occupational hazard (like his own) but is the result of a clear, if unprovable, professional fault: "But who, then, is to blame?" the burgomaster asks, to which the hunter categorically replies "The boatman."8 In the story's conclusion, Gracchus finds himself stuck between life and death in a kind of metaphysical equivalent to a null and void insurance contract which leaves him de facto responsible for an accident he never caused without any possibility of legal compensation: "I am here, more than that I do not know, more than that I cannot do.My boat has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the nethermost regions of death."9
Author: Bradley, Arthur
Language: English
Topic: Franz Kafka Literary Studies
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7080693095
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