While there certainly are other tensions which do directly connect to the beliefs and assertions of the two creeds, Kafka’s predicament manifested itself most directly in concrete social situations. Among Kafka’s peers, the two main responses to this tension were either a self-ghettoizing orthodoxy or a modernistic assimilationism.
Like Kafka, author Fritz Mauthner went through the educational system in Prague. Concerning his spiritual formation, Mauthner wrote:
So bestand unser jüdischer Religionsunterricht aus zwei unzusammengehörigen Hälften: aus der moralisierenden Religionslehre, die für die Dümmsten unter uns zu dumm war, und aus einem Praktikum der semitischen Philologie, das manchem gelehrten Orientalisten noch Nüsse aufzuknacken gegeben hätte. Die wir uns längst als jüdische Deutsche fühlten oder als deutsche Juden, gewöhnten uns mit den Jahren daran, an diesem Unterrichte so selten wie möglich teilzunehmen; wir erlangten eine Virtuosität darin, die Religionsstunde zu schwänzen.
While Mauthner accurately describes the situation, his response to it was different than Kafka’s. While Mauthner shrugged it off in favor of agnosticism, Kafka lived in the tension and felt pulled in two directions.
Kafka internalized the conflict. We can see this, e.g., in the text of Die Verwandlung, when three bearded borders rent living space in the Samsa family home.
The long beard is a visual symbol for orthodoxy. The full beard was worn by every, or nearly every, orthodox adult male Jew in Prague, and very few men outside of orthodoxy would have such a full beard in the early 1900s in that city.
The borders are in the same house as Gregor Samsa, just as Kafka lived in the same town with a large orthodox population. But they do not establish any personal relationship with Gregor, and emit an attitude of disapproval toward him, just as Kafka was not included in the orthodox community.
Simultaneously, Kafka felt little kinship with the assimilationists. When his father referred his Bar-Mitzvah as a Confirmation, Kafka was disappointed, as Klaus Wagenbach notes.
The assimilationists sought to minimize any conspicuous visible differences between themselves and the gentile majority in Prague. Assimilationism focused on externals, because externals created the perceptible distinctions between Jews and Gentiles.
Kafka dismissed his father’s assimilationism as purely a business ploy, smoothing relations with Gentile clients, vendors, and coworkers. For Kafka, assimilationism was inauthentic, hypocritical, and insincere.
He therefore found himself in a sort of spiritual “no man’s land.” He belonged neither to orthodoxy nor to assimilationism. He demonstrated some affinity toward Christianity: Christmas is mentioned three times in Die Verwandlung.
But the cultural barriers between Kafka and Christianity were even greater. The actual propositional content of Christianity was less problematic than the cultural trappings in which that content was packaged.
Much of Kafka’s thought was not far from Christian doctrine, as some passages in Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg show. But it was social barriers, not theological ones, which prevented him from exploring these potential connections.
Kafka was thus alienated from the Judaism which should have been his by birth, and alienated from the Christian doctrines with which he sometimes flirted. Alienation led to diminished identity: if he wasn’t a Jew or a Christian, what was he?
He felt therefore like an ungeheueres Ungeziefer - something which doesn’t belong. This phrase is notoriously complex, and many have commented on it, but it will suffice to note that ungeheuer can mean ‘very large’ and geheuer can mean ‘secure’ - Gregor Samsa was too large to belong in his family home, and was not something secure or safe.
