Being a huge radio drama buff, I listen to a lot of BBC Radio Drama via the internet. Recently, the BBC did a dramatization of a novel I've always liked but hadn't read in many years,
Amerika, the first novel by the great Franz Kafka.
Kafka never visited America in his lifetime, although he long dreamed of emigrating. His novel was based on lectures he attended and books he read, but as he knew his ideas of America could not possibly match reality, he chose to make this country a dark fantasy of the real thing.
The title, incidentally, was thought up after his death by his friend and editor, Max Brod. Kafka only published a couple of short stories in his lifetime and instructed Brod to burn all of his work after his death. Luckily for us, Brod didn't do so. Instead, he edited the novels, finished them as best he could (all were unfinished except the novella The Metamorphosis), and published them. Kafka's original title was simply The Man Who Disappeared.
Amerika is more comical than Kafka's later and darker works, although there is still plenty of horror and despiration to be found. As I listened to the drama and remembered the book, it amazed me about how much Kafka's Amerika parallels ours...
The novel's protagonist, 15-year-old Karl Rossman, is an unwilling traveler to Amerika, sent away from his beloved Prague by his parents after having been forcibly seduced by a maid. The still-upbeat Rossman arrives in New York Harbor with high hopes, expecting to continue his engineering studies and make a success in the land of plenty. Like many immigrants, the first thing he sees is the Statue of Liberty... but this was Kafka's version.
Kafka's statue did not hold a torch like a beacon of light. It held a sword, thrust high and mightily into the air, representing Amerika's military dominance.
New York's Harbor, and the city itself are both representations of people in endless movement, never stopping to savor beauty or take in the awe of the things around them. While Karl talks of the beauty of Prague after the first snowfall, people tell him to stop being a dreamer and start being productive.
Karl is initially taken in by his uncle Josef, a Senator. When I first read this novel and started reading what others had written about it, Senator Josef was supposed to be a fantasy version of a Senator. 'More like a Baron,' as one essayist described him... and maybe that was true in Kafka's time, but not today.
Uncle Josef is obviously in his position of power as a Senator because he is also a powerful industrialist. He is an absolute capitalist, running a corporation which has an almost total monopoly of all industries on the East Coast. He hates the poor and loves the rich. He has absolutely no interest in the people but does anything he can to aid his corporate buddies. Uncle Josef even changed his name from something that sounded 'too European' because people in Amerika didn't have such names- this was an illusion to Jews changing their names once they came to America to appear to be Christians so they would not face the same persecution they faced in Europe. It was an acknowledgement that those same prejudices thrive in the land of the free.
Initially, Karl does do very well- he studies English and engineering, he lives in luxurious accomodations, he works for his uncle, makes friends- although they all seem very shallow, and even gets set up with a woman... but like all of Amerika's luxuries, for most people they are very temporary.
After a very minor incident, Uncle Josef throws Karl out and he takes up with two con men, although eventually he ends up working at the Hotel Occidental as an elevator boy. He tries to continue his studies while there, but his conditions are very poor and like all low-wage workers, he his so tied down by the rules he must follow that he can do little else but work. After another very minor incident which was not his fault, he is fired without being allowed to defend himself.
The last part of the novel involves his encountering the Circus of Oklahoma, an amazing travelling circus that claims to offer anyone any job they want doing anything they want as long as they just sign these papers. Karl and all of his friends are swept up into this dream. Finally, they have arrived in the land of plenty, the Amerika they dreamed about.
The novel ends as he and his friends, still full of hopes, are loaded like cattle into dirty boxcars. It was written many years before the Holocaust, but even then, the meaning of the ending was fairly clear.
Does this sound like a fantasy to you? Because it doesn't to me. Let's imagine a modern-day Karl Rossman. Instead of coming from Prague, he has been forced through economic circumstances to come from his home in Oaxaca, Mexico, to America. He dreams of continuing his schooling and becoming an engineer.
For a time, he stays with his cousin who is a Republican state representative in a border district and who also happens to own the big factory that employs everyone in his district. Things go okay for a while, but his Republican uncle realizes that this Mexican immigrant makes him look bad, so he throws him out and Karl has to go work fruit-picking jobs which pay only minimum wage... but he stays upbeat. He knows this is the land of the free and if you work hard and study, you can succeed... but times are tough on Karl and he gets laid off from his fruit-picking job when the farm becomes corporate and becomes desperate for work... and suddenly, when he's desperate, here comes a man with a pickup truck offering him a great job working construction! He and his fellow immigrants know they've finally made it and off they go to work as slave labor building houses for the rich which they will never get to set foot in once they're done unless it's to clean it.
Which America do we live in?