The Animal Theme and Totemism in Franz Kafka

We are still a long way from understanding and appreciating Franz Kafka. The conclusive book on him has not yet been written and will not be written until all of his work has been published. Despite the great mass of essays on the author, (1) most of them very vague in nature, and Max Brod's reminiscences and interpretations, his world is thickly veiled. There is in particular one theme which has so far escaped accurate and detailed analysis: the animal theme. There are in his writings countless references to animals, human-animal comparisons, allusions to animal life, fables, and animal motifs; there are important works in which the human person has been transformed into an animal, or vice versa. There are hardly any stories in which Kafka did not include at least one significant reference to creatures of the animal kingdom. And we constantly wonder about their meaning and place in the writer's cosmos. What is, for example, the significance of such a story as “Die Verwand-lung,” (2) in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a vermin? And if we think we may perhaps have the meaning — why did Kafka choose an animal in order to express it? What was his relation to the animal kingdom?

At first, quite weighty indication of the import of the animal theme in Kafka's works we find in his diaries. One June 2, 1916, Kafka notes: “Aus ‘Das Werden des Gottes-glaubens’ von N. Söderblom, Erzbischof von Upsala, ganz wissenschaftlich, ohne persönliche oder religiöse Teilnahme.” (3) The Swedish cleric and anthropologist Nathan Söderblom