Glossen

Stephan Wackwitz reading Kafka reading Cervantes: “Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa” / (“The Truth about Sancho Panza”)

Gorga Gemma stated about the global literary reception of Miguel de Cervantes’s famous protagonist Don Quixote, “the literary line of Don Quixote is so impressive because of the quantity and quality of its members, as well as because of the inexhaustible capacity to grow and incorporate new offspring” (35).  This is certainly also true for literature written in German; just think about Christoph Martin Wieland’s protagonist Don Sylvio, Johann Carl Wezel’s Ritter Selmann, Jean Paul’s Nikolaus Marggraf, or, to name a 20th century example, Paul Schallück’s Don Tünnes. However, the literary line of Don Quixote’s companion, Sancho Panza, in German literature is also quite noteworthy.  Examples are Margarete Hansmann’s first-person narrator in the narrative Chauffeur bei Don Quijote / (Don Quixote’s Driver) (1977) and Horst Dinter’s recent novel Die Abenteuer der gedankenreichen Donna Quijote de la Mancha / (The Adventures of the Smart Donna Quixote of la Mancha) (2000), in which Sancho Panza, after Quixote’s death, leaves his village for a new sally, together with the Don’s heir, a lady called Donna Quijote.  The most famous Sancho Panza text in German literature is Franz Kafka’s parable “Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa” / (“The Truth about Sancho Panza”) (1917), in which the author provides, as Marthe Robert argues, “an indispensable insight into the way he perceived his own Don Quixote, namely K. and all his avatars” (20).  More than eighty years later, in 1999, the parable has been adapted by Stephan Wackwitz in the form of a remarkable novel that has the same title as Kafka’s text.

Kafka’s short narrative, which according to Walter Benjamin was his “vollendetste” / (“most consummate”) (Benjamin 228) achievement, belongs to the group of over-analyzed texts in German literature.  This study proposes to examine those of its interpretations that might be helpful for interpreting Stephan Wackwitz’s enigmatic novel The Truth about Sancho Panza.

The interpretations of Kafka’s text might be so numerous because, as is well known, the strength of a literary sentence lies less in what is said than in “what is not said” (Urzidil 343).  As will be seen in the following, Kafka’s only two-sentence-long parable is packed with things not said that provoke questions and speculations.  Since “quixotic work has too much modesty – and too much humor,” as Robert stated (7), it does not offer any revelations.  The text, written on October 21, 1917, reads as follows:

Sancho Pansa, der sich übrigens dessen nie gerühmt hat, gelang es im Laufe der Jahre durch Beistellung einer Menge Ritter- und Räuberromane in den Abend- und Nachtstunden seinen Teufel, dem er später den Namen Don Quixote gab, derart von sich abzulenken, daß dieser dann haltlos die verrücktesten Taten aufführte, die aber mangels eines vorbestimmten Gegenstandes, der eben Sancho Pansa hätte sein sollen, niemandem schadeten.  Sancho Pansa, ein freier Mann, folgte gleichmütig, vielleicht aus einem gewissen Verantwortlichkeitsgefühl, dem Don Quixote auf seinen Zügen und hatte davon eine große und nützliche Unterhaltung bis an sein Ende.

(Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody.  A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.) (Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

The sensational title “The Truth about Sancho Panza” that Max Brod gave to Kafka’s text (Robertson 17) announces already that the literary material – Cervantes’s famous figures Quixote and Sancho – will be deconstructed from the distance of a narrator who reproduces it1.  The text consists of two sentences, in both of which Sancho Panza is the subject.  Most importantly, as Richard Thieberger pointed out, he, and not Quixote, is the central figure.  Don Quixote, the grammatical object in both sentences, is called Sancho’s devil.

Hartmut Binder mentioned that Kafka, in a letter to Robert Klopstock written in June 1921, related Abraham to Don Quixote (Thieberger 357).  In another letter, to Oskar Baum, written in fall 1917, Kafka talks about his reading of the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling (1843) in which Abraham plays an important role  (Thieberger 357). Therefore, it can be assumed that Kafka related Cervantes’s figure of Don Quixote to Kierkegaard’s figure of Abraham – a figure he disagreed with (see Binder 20).

According to Werner Kraft’s interpretation, Kafka’s Don Quixote grows “into the spectral” and Sancho Panza “into the real” (146).  However, due to the fact that reality is elusive, we only can strive to emulate Don Quixote. (148) Arno Dusini comes to a similar conclusion, stating that Kafka’s Don Quixote grows into a spectral direction.  The critic goes on to ask: “But, whose ghost, whose specter is haunting this text?” (57) In his opinion, the spectral dimension in Kafka’s figure of Quixote cannot be explained satisfactorily due to the extreme ambiguity of many of the text’s elements.  However, Dusini feels that this dimension has to do with the fact that there is no woman, no Dulcinea, in the constellation of figures of Kafka’s parable although it was written in between the letters to his girl friend, Felice Bauer.  Might the absence of a Dulcinea have anything to do with the fact that Kafka was already spitting blood at this time due to the tuberculosis he suffered from? In a letter to Felice, Kafka wrote: “The blood is not from the lung, but from the (or a) decisive stab of a fighter” (quoted in Dusini 61).  Afterwards, also referring to the act of stabbing, Kafka scribbled the following lines in his notebook:

Eine der wichtigsten Don Quichotischen Taten, aufdringlicher als der Kampf mit Windmühle ist vergessen worden der Selbstmord.  Der tote Don Quichote will den toten Don Quichote töten; um zu töten, […] braucht er aber eine lebendige Stelle, diese sucht er nun mit seinem Schwerte ebenso unaufhörlich wie vergeblich.  Unter dieser Beschäftigung rollen die zwei Toten, in unauflöslichem und förmlich springlebendigem als unaufhörlicher Purzelbaum durch die Zeiten. / (One of the most important actions of Don Quixote, more obtrusive than the struggle with the windmill, has been forgotten, the suicide.  The dead Don Quixote wants to kill the dead Don Quixote.  But, to kill him he needs a spot that is alive; he seeks it with his sword as continuously as in vain.  In this occupation, the two dead men roll through history in an insoluble and bubbly somersault.) (Dusino 61)

This literary statement about Cervantes’s novel seems to be nonsense.  However, as Manuel Durán said wisely, “perhaps the nonsense of a genius is worth more than ten erudite routine articles” (224).  Did Kafka contemplate committing suicide because his illness prevented him from marrying Felice? Being diagnosed with tuberculosis was a death sentence in those days.  Dusino does not draw this conclusion in his interpretation, but rather states more generally that it cannot be decided if there is a conflict between the so-called not-literary and the literary texts in Kafka’s oeuvre.

Also many other critics (as, for instance, Hillman, Kobs, Sokel, and Thieberger) interpreted Kafka’s parable “Die Truth about Sancho Panza” from a biographical point of view.  One of them, W. G. Kudszus, draws attention to the important fact that due to the “extraordinary tolerance for interpretation” (160) of Kafka’s two sentences in this text, it is impossible to construct an absolutely right or wrong meaning around it.  Since Kafka wrote this text during a relatively happy period of his life, the critic tends to identify Kafka with Sancho who, in this text, is an “imaginative man, familiar with romances, and he is quite happy with the entertainment provided him by his devil” (159).  In addition, knowing about his devil, he knows about truth.  Therefore, as Kudszus goes on to say, Sancho’s self-knowledge is sufficiently transparent to him to give him a sense of freedom.  Similarly, Walter Benjamin, whose praise of Kafka’s “The Truth about Sancho Panza” was quoted at the beginning of this study, interprets the parable as a text about relief in the following brief gloss that is as enigmatic as Kafka’s parable itself:

Gesetzter Narr und unbeholfener Gehilfe, hat Sancho Pansa seinen Reiter vorangeschickt.  Bucephalus hat den seinigen überlebt.  Ob Mensch, ob Pferd ist nicht mehr so wichtig, wenn nur die Last vom Rücken genommen ist. (Benjamin 228) / (Sober fool and hapless assistant, Sancho Panza sent his rider before him.  Bucephalus outlived his.  Whether man or horse is no longer so important as long as the burden is lifted from one’s back.) (Weber 230)

Bucephalus was, as is well known, Alexander the Great’s horse that went on living as a lawyer in Kafka’s story “The new Advocate,” published in 1920.  Samuel Weber stated about Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s parable “The Truth about Sancho Panza”: “in interpreting (Auslegung), rereading, and staging one’s own life, a repetition takes place that lifts the burden from the subject who would be sovereign, allows him to divest himself of his rider and simply go along for the ride”  (230).

As most other critics did, also Ritchie Robertson studied the journal entries as well as letters that Kafka wrote around the time when he composed “The Truth about Sancho Panza” as a starting point to examine this text.  However, contrary to most former interpretations that considered Kafka’s story to be a comment about his own life, Robertson sees it as a comment about the relationship between the individual and society and the “problem of responsibility” (18).

By contrast, Gert Mattenklott read Kafka’s text as a parable about “how to deal with evil” (961) – without trying to detect what this evil might have signified for Kafka.  He concluded, “You cannot defeat the negative; but you can turn it aside” (962).  The most important aspect of this strategy of deflecting the evil, according to Mattenklott, is not making any boast of it because who boasted about having defeated it would be hopelessly lost.  In this sense, Kafka’s text is “an allegory about silence” (962).  Only when you are able to keep your mouth shut will you be what Sancho became in the end – a free man.

Manuel Durán in his socio-historic approach to Kafka’s text, does exactly what Mattenklott avoids doing; he attempts to detect the meaning of this evil for Kafka that Sancho finally manages to exorcise by reading novels on knights and robbers and, in this process, creating the figure of Don Quixote.  The most important clue for Durán is the year in which Kafka wrote his famous parable: 1917.  In this year, World War I devastated Europe.  Because Sancho (not Cervantes who is not even mentioned in Kafka’s text) creates the figure of Don Quixote2, Sancho becomes the kind of hero that such times of war require according to our modern understanding: the pacifist.  Cervantes’s Sancho Panza, as is well known, cannot read and write.  However, how can the illiterate Sancho feed Don Quixote those romances of chivalry in Kafka’s story? As Durán points out correctly, Kafka’s Sancho, the reader, cannot be the same one as in Cervantes’s text.  Kafka, according to the critic, allegorically created a new, educated, modern Sancho – a practical man who for the sake of his well-being does not like war.  Therefore, he behaves as he does, freeing himself from his inner violence: “The devil that we carry inside is the violence, the desire for power, the belief that all problems could be resolved by the strength of weapons, the belief that with armies – Charles V and Phillip II believed that, and also the protestant princes – one could change the world” (Durán 228).  What the religious wars were in Cervantes’s times, Durán goes on to say, were the much more devastating World Wars in the twentieth century.  Under such circumstances – Kafka wrote the parable in the fourth year of World War I – Kafka’s sympathy is not with Quixote who tries to use his sword to solve problems, but with Sancho, the hidalgo’s pacifist counterpart.  Having exorcized his inner violence, Sancho, as a consequence, according to Kafka, is a free man.  With the following important statement, Durán closes his interpretation: “Hopefully, the allegory of Kafka’s short Cervantes’s interpretation will become a prophecy” (228). Without doubt, Durán shares Robertson’s belief that Kafka’s text “The Truth about Sancho Panza” comments on the relationship between the individual and society and the problem of responsibility.  This is a huge step away from the interpretations that see the text as a literary discussion of Kafka’s difficult personal life.

For examining Stephan Wackwitz’s use of Kafka’s text in his astonishing novel Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa (1999),Robertson’s and Durán’s interpretations are by far the most helpful, as will be seen. In this novel, the Jewish scholar Heinrich Katz, who as an adolescent had escaped with his parents from Nazi Germany to England, remembers his life.  His most troublesome memory is a devastating mental crisis that he experienced in Germany when he was only twelve years old – the devil had appeared to him!  In the first person, Katz narrates step-by-step how he slid into and finally overcame this “psychotic episode” (45), as the family’s psychiatrist had called it.  However, looking back on his life, this strange episode, for mysterious reasons, has taken center stage in his memory:

Es sind die abseitigen Ereignisse, in denen ich den Schlüssel zu meinem Leben finde.  Was ich erlebt habe, die Figuren und Vorkommnisse der letzten achtzig Jahre: sie bewegen sich wie Figuren einer mittelalterlichen Rathausuhr um ein vergessenes Kinderentsetzen aus den frühen dreißiger Jahren.  Der nur für mich bestimmte Teufel taucht in regelmäßigen Abständen auf in ihrem Tanz.  / (It is in the remote events of my life that I find the key to it.  What I experienced during the last eighty years, those figures and happenings are circling – like figures of the clock of a medieval city hall – around a forgotten horror of a child in the early 1930s.  The devil destined only to me appears in regular distances in their dance.) (1999, 96-7, Transl. G.E.)

Before Katz dies, he says to his son that his whole life appears to him to be a mere commentary to Kafka’s text “The Truth about Sancho Panza,” which Katz knows by heart and recites to him deeply moved.  In fact, the reason for Katz’s comment on his life seems to be quite obvious.  By employing different strategies, Katz, as Kafka’s Sancho did, had succeeded in turning aside his devil – ensuring that the “psychosis” remained a short episode in his youth instead of swallowing up his whole life.  Or, to use some of Kafka’s vocabulary, by exorcising the devil, Heinrich Katz had made sure that this evil in him that crystallized into the form of the devil, whatever it signified, could not harm him.  With this strenuous and stressful work, Katz had behaved responsibly and would have found Sancho’s approval.  The question of whether Katz, as a result, was also entertained by the devil’s adventures (or, to use Wackwitz’s metaphor, whether he was entertained by those figures and happenings that were circling in his memory like figures of the clock of a medieval city around the “horror of a child”) remains open in Wackwitz’s novel.  However, due to my interpretation of what Katz’s devil might signify from a socio-historic point of view similar to that of Durán’s, my answer would be negative.

Robertson, in his interpretation of Kafka’s story, in which Don Quixote provocatively is called a devil, pointed out that Kafka was not only influenced by Kierkegaard’s figure of Abraham, called by the Danish author the “Knight of Faith,” but by similar characters who, according to Kafka’s journal entries and letters, caused a mixture in him of both admiration and skepticism. They were characters such as Jossel from the town of Klezk about whom Kafka read in Salomon Maimon’s autobiography. Kafka commented on such religious fanatics in a letter using descriptions as, for instance, “gespenstisch” / (“specter-like”) or “wahnwitzig” / (“mad”) (Robertson 20). The use of such negative words indicates Kafka’s fear of fanatical behavior. About Jossel, Kafka read in Maimon’s book that during his religious fits he saw ghosts and smashed windows and stoves because he thought they were his enemies and behaved “roughly as his predecessor Don Quixote did” (Robertson 21). Since in both cases their unconditional devotion led to delusions and mad behavior, Jossel and Quixote easily could melt together into one figure in Kafka’s fantasy. Also Georg Langer, a friend of Kafka, was a person who was unconditionally devoted to an ideological cause. Influenced by a famous “Wunderrabbi” / (“a rabbi performing miracles”) (Robertson 21), Langer became such an orthodox Chassid that, to the horror of his family, he started to wear a Caftan and payees and refused to look women, even his own mother, in the face. As Robertson stated, “because of his unwavering obedience faced with the demands of his religion, as bizarre as they might appear to his environment, Langer had a lot with Kierkegaard’s Abraham (and in a way also with Don Quixote) in common” (21). That Abraham’s obedience in the face of God’s demands went so far that he was willing to kill his own son, explains Kafka’s deep skepticism towards this figure. Men devoted to a cause so unconditionally, like Abraham and Quixote, are quite able to commit crimes. When Kafka stated in a letter about Kierkegaard’s Abraham, “he worries that as Abraham he will leave with his son, but turn into Don Quixote on the way” (Robertson 20), it could be interpreted as an indication of Kafka’s hope that men like Abraham would be diverted / tamed on the way by people like Sancho and therefore not be able to commit the crimes they have in mind. In other words, when Kafka wrote “The Truth about Sancho Panza” according to this interpretation, he was thinking wishfully that thanks to Sancho’s (common people’s) sense of responsibility, the “knights of faith” or the men whose devotion to an religious / ideological cause is so unconditional that they are willing to kill could be stopped.

According to Robertson, that Kafka awarded Sancho Panza such a sense of responsibility “can only be meant ironically” (20).  I do not agree with this presumption.  However, my opinion that Kafka was serious in having Sancho save his hide and the world from the knights of faith and their crimes might be influenced by my reading of Stephan Wackwitz’s novel The Truth about Sancho Panza, in which I see a connection between Heinrich Katz’s encounter with the devil and the Holocaust that happened only a few years later.

A protagonist in Martin Kessel’s novel Die Schwester des Don Quijote / (The Sister of Don Quixote) (1984) says about the atmosphere in Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century that “people work too much and don’t live enough” – a situation that puts people under too great a strain and leads to “outbreaks […], spiritually and materially” (58).  Although there is some quixotism to be seen, the speaker goes on to say, it lies only “in doctrinaire behavior” (58)  – not in the enjoyment of life, in the generosity of living and letting it go.  It is impossible not to sense a connection between Kessel’s and Kafka’s descriptions of quixotism towards the end of World War I and during the two World Wars – a time when “isms” were in their heyday, as for instance, nationalism, militarism, communism, Zionism etc.  Both writers tacitly point to the state of mind of a man whom Kierkegaard calls a knight of faith – a man who in the name of a cause is willing to commit crimes – or whom Sancho Panza calls a devil.  It can be assumed that the boy Heinrich Katz from discussions at the family’s dinner table or comments he heard in school received a feeling of the atmosphere of this time, drenched in the ever-shriller partisanship for different ideological causes that produced such a “quixotic” state of mind.  In this situation, he got scared and, in an attack of anxiety, he “saw” the devil.  As Kafka is said to have foreseen the history of the twentieth century in his nightmarish stories, the boy Heinrich Katz, perhaps, “forefelt” Hitler and the fate of the European Jews.  Therefore, this single memory, as if it were too crazy to be dealt with by reason, still troubles him as an old man.  In Kafka’s parable, Sancho Panza, after he turned the devil / Don Quixote aside so that he could not harm him, “philosophically” – which means in an even-tempered mood – followed him on his crusades.  Could it be said that Wackwitz’s protagonist Katz also followed his devil after he defeated him “philosophically”?  Did he watch, from his safe haven of exile in London, the Nazi’s crusades in Europe even-temperedly?  It is unlikely.

Kudszus, in his positive view of Kafka’s text “The Truth about Sancho Panza” as a reflection of a relatively happy man, goes on to mention that, unfortunately, the text also can assert the opposite:

We cannot know for sure that Sancho’s failure is out of the question.  Perhaps the stage he creates for Don Quixote is an empty one, and Sancho, presumably its creator, has to play along, a victim of his own clever scheme, bedeviled by “his” devil, engulfed by the consequences of his externalized power of imagination. (160)

Because such a pessimistic perspective on the text is possible also in Heinrich Katz’s case, it is likely that he did not have “a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.” This might be the reason that Katz’s psychotic episode from his early years when he was a high school student in Germany troubles him so deeply still as an old man.

Wackwitz, born in 1952 in Stuttgart, recently has become quiet famous with the publication of his novel Ein unsichtbares Land / (An Invisible Land) (2003).  Using old photographs and clippings from his grandfather’s journal, the narrator in a Sebaldian3 way reconstructs the life of three generations of his family and engages, as Helmut Schmitz stated, “with aesthetic and ethical questions regarding a post-Holocaust memory” (257).  Interestingly, one chapter of the novel, called “In the Palace of the Emperor,” can be read as an interpretation of Kafka’s short text “An Imperial Message” (1917).  In other chapters, the narrator plays with references to Kafka’s text “Hunter Gracchus” (1917).  Given these frequent examples of Kafka-reception, it can be assumed that Wackwitz’s novel The Truth about Sancho Panza is not only the story of an old Jewish man who narrated his life into the author’s tape recorder, but rather a highly complex literary creation that includes the play with intertextual material.  In the novel An Invisible Land, the narrator asks the important question

ob die sogenannte Wirklichkeit, die uns meistens als etwas unbestreitbar Festes, Undurchdringliches und Körperhaftes erscheint, nicht vielmehr eher ein lockeres und veränderliches Gewebe aus Erinnerungen, Geistern, Stimmungen ist und erst in zweiter Linie aus Tatsachen und Gegenständen besteht. / (if the so-called reality that most of the time appears to us as something firm, impenetrable, and body like, is not rather a loose and changeable fabric made from memories, ghosts, moods and only consists in the second instance of facts and objects.) (2003, 136, Transl. G.E.)

Without doubt, Wackwitz’s novel The Truth about Sancho Panza is adding another ingredient to this “fabric” of which reality is made: literary myths as those of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

To summarize, most interpretations of Kafka’s parable “The Truth about Sancho Panza” were undertaken from an autobiographical point of view.  Some more recent interpretations, however, most importantly Stephan Wackwitz’s novel The Truth about Sancho Panza, that see the text as a discussion of the responsibility of an individual living in society, open a new – political – dimension for interpreting Kafka’s very short and mysterious text.

 

Notes

1 As Dietrich Krusche showed, Kafka’s “The Truth about Sancho Panza” belongs to the few exceptions among Kafka’s texts, in which the narrator is located outside the setting of the story, i.e., in which there is offered more than the “perspective from the inside of a monologizing (reflecting, dreaming) subject” (20).

2 Also Borges, as Durán has stated, scandalously ignores Miguel de Cervantes as the author of Don Quixote in his short story “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.”   Borges tells us in this story in a provocative way that because reading is creatively writing there are as many Quixotes as there are readers of Cervantes’s most famous novel.

3 W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a German writer and scholar who lived most of his life in England.  His most important novels are The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz  (2001).

 

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