The Office Series, Day Three: Kafka

In 1887, four years after Kafka's birth, the Empire implemented its policy of workers' accident insurance, and founded its Institutes. Unlike in the Reich, the Empire's insurance was organized according to geographic territories, and not by types of trades. Whereas Germany established a Metalworkers' Trade Association and a Textileworkers' Trade Association, the Empire established Prague's Bohemia branch, which covered all trades throughout Bohemia, and which accepted Kafka for employment after he was finished insuring the best boats, and wealthiest companies, of Trieste (Assicurazioni Generali's was the oldest type of insurance: Modern commercial insurance was founded two centuries earlier in London to indemnify the first private firms interested in international maritime shipping).

Now, however, Kafka worked not for the mutual benefit of large industry and the Crown, but as a mediator between the concerns of the working class and its management, between that management class and the Institute, and, lastly, between the Institute and Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna. Initially, Kafka's Institute job was as a deputy clerk, or assistant secretary, but he was eventually promoted to become Senior Legal Secretary—an Obersekretär —the indispensable righthand man, a sort of Court Jew, to the organization's Director, Doctor Robert Marschner (a note about titles: in the office he was always addressed as "Herr Doktor Kafka"). As Obersekretär, Kafka's responsibilities included risk classification (which involved evaluating the degree of danger of a certain job, and so setting the level of premium to be paid by business owners), and improving the Institute's efforts at accident prevention. The latter duty required Kafka to dabble in public relations, writing informative bulletins and even popular newspaper articles—his chief outlet was the proletarisch, large-circulation Tetschen-Bodenbacher Zeitung—hoping to educate management, labor, and the general public in advances in workplace safety.

“The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800–4000 revolutions per minute.”

While at night Kafka was writing stories about the infinite and eternal construction of The Great Wall of China, and about a Flying Dutchman set adrift on a deathship, floating forever amid ports of call, during the day he was writing interminable pages about the perils of wood-planing machines (“the introduction of the cylindrical safety shafts in wood-planing machines is finally progressing well”), the perils of chimney-sweeping, and brandy consumption in quarries, problems with automobile insurance (as the majority of cars were then driven by chauffeurs, the vehicles themselves had to be classified as businesses), and the risk classification quandaries posed by the recently electrified elevator (Where is the electrical generator stored? Who, exactly, has access to the elevator's switches?).

To read these 18 examples of office writing without the context of Kafka’s other work, without knowing who, in fact, Kafka ever was, is essentially to go to work. Here is a sampling of their titles, some provided by the book’s three editors, and others by Kafka himself, or by his newspaper editors: “Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery”; “On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors”; “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge”; and “Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public." Their style, even more so than the style of Kafka’s stories and novels, is neutral. Their subject matter is expectedly worse: specialist, abstruse, culled from the most humdrum and desiccated of corporate genizahs.

Then again, we should remember that nobody asked us to read them. Sigmund Freud’s laundry lists probably aren’t any better (though they might prove equally as revealing). Indeed, to read the office writings as one is supposed to, like a good student of the Kafkaesque, or a diligent K.-like worker, is instructive: it is to understand Kafka’s art anew, and to be reminded of the discreet, double-life of modern working man, whose true, pleasure-giving interests lie almost entirely outside of the workplace. The Office Writings are the Ur texts to Kafka’s extracurricular fiction, Kafka’s precursors as much as Talmud (which he did not know well), and Hasidic wonder stories, Hamsun and Kierkegaard and von Kleist and Flaubert, Dostoyevsky’s psychological murderers, and Dickens’ urban grotesquerie and grit.

The examples of this connectivity are simple—of how the work-work influences the artwork—but the interpretations, and the ramifications, are not. In the aforementioned “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines” of 1910, Kafka argued that the square shafts that supported the blades used to plane wood were responsible for a regrettable number of accidents and maimings, including the loss of parts of fingers, or, rarer, the severance of entire appendages. Because these shafts were square, gaps would appear between the blades screwed to a turning shaft and the lip of a worktable. A worker’s finger would become stuck in these gaps—four gaps for each single revolution of a square shaft, revolving 3800 to 4000 times per minute—resulting in debilitating injuries. Kafka’s solution was innovative, but seems elementary: He proposed to introduce a newly patented model of cylindrical shaft—a round shaft (with its blades hidden under flaps or between wedges) that obviously lacked sharp quadrilateral corners, and so lacked the gaps that would trap, and — in the days before plastic surgery—irreparably harm. Kafka describes how his solution would benefit workers and management (workers would be healthier, and so more productive; the cylinders were even more “cost-effective”), while emphasizing the carnage of such accidents with what, at the time, was a novelty: images, illustrative plates showing both injured hands, and multiple views of the cylindrical shaft. This commissioning was one of the first uses of illustrations in a business report—Franz Kafka, father of multimedia.

This report can be convincingly linked to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” In that story of inscription as incision, a convicted felon is punished by torture, and death. The vast, unwieldy apparatus that accomplishes this punishment inscribes on the body of this convict the exact nature of his transgression; the sin becomes internalized through the medium of the flesh, in a mark of Cain for the Machine Age. While no introduction of “cylindrical shafts” could overturn such a metaphysical damnation, there is no doubt that the image of a body inscribed by technology springs from Kafka’s arbitrating experience with traumatized workers. Kafka’s deskbound milieux of inscription and accountancy is also where we first hear about the first primitive computer, a variety of calculator known as the Hollerith machine, used for the processing of statistical data using the technology of the “punch card” (the machine’s process was inspired by the practice of punching a railway ticket, and so encoding it with information; the Hollerith’s best success was with the Nazis, in their use of it to schedule the train deportations of European Jewry). In Kafka’s fiction the human body is the Punch Card of Modernity. In modern life, the body has become the storage, “the muscle memory,” and so the casualty, of the workplace—both physiologically, and psychologically.

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