Kafka's travels: Exoticism, imperialism, modernism

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) lived through an era of unprecedented change in travel culture: literary (by 1910 the exoticist boom had hit the German publishing industry, resulting in a spate of travel writings); imperial (German protectorates were founded in Africa and Asia in 1885 and 1898, respectively); and technological (between 1850 and 1900 the European rail system expanded over ten times). Although Kafka never left Europe, his fascination with travel was reflected in his 1911 plan to "make millions" by writing a series of low-budget travel guides, "On the Cheap," and in his "love" for Hermann Schaffstein's imperial adventure series, the Grune Bandchen (1910-71). I contend that travel, for Kafka, developed from a private passion into a prominent metaphorical system. By examining this critically overlooked trope, I argue that travel presents a uniquely modernist metaphorics of alienation that extends through the kafkan paradigms of exoticism and imperialism--as they traffic in what I term the "economy of self-discovery.".;Drawing on neglected literary and cultural materials including travel diaries, train schedules, and adventure novels, I travel methodologically between two modes of inquiry--psychoanalytical and historical--corresponding to "imaginary" travel on the one hand and "real" travel on the other. My initial chapter examines how fin-de-siecle writers (Hermann Hesse, Norbert Jacques, Bernard Kellermann) tended to undergird their notions of "home" by displacing strangeness onto distant lands. I argue that Kafka, an avid reader of popular travel writings, challenged these contemporaries by bringing the foreign into the heart of the European Heim. Chapters 2 and 3 further trace this process of what I term "internalizing the exotic" through Kafka's major works (Amerika, The Metamorphosis, The Trial). Chapter 4 argues that Kafka's final novel, The Castle, both resists and reproduces popular imperialist ideologies by borrowing the Grune Bandchen's typical narrative of self-discovery (Selbstfindung) and transforming it into a tale of self-dissolution. Chapter 5 demonstrates how modern technologies of travel shaped Kafka's exotic love relationship with the Czech-speaking Gentile, Milena Jesenska. In conclusion, I contend that Kafka's encounter with fin-de-siecle travel culture indelibly transformed the "exotic" from a mappable geographical space into a peculiarly modernist structure of mind.