Essay: Franz Kafka and Otto Gross

Today is December 2023. Currently if you go to the Franz Kafka Wikipedia page there is no mention of Otto Gross [1], and personally I think that oversight is totally unacceptable given the two were would-be collaborators. Gross was Kafka’s professor and the two planned to publish a journal together, “Blätter gegen den Machtwillen” (Journal Against the Will to Power) in 1913 [2]. Kafka was especially active during this time, writing “Amerika” (The Man Who Disappeared) and “The Metamorphosis” in 1912, then later “The Trial” in 1914. One year prior however, in 1913, Gross’ father had Otto arrested as a dangerous anarchist [3], then legally declared to be of diminished responsibility in 1914 and analyzed by Willhelm Stekel. Throughout Kafka’s books legalism is portrayed as a dystopian and oppressive force; it’s common enough knowledge he trained as a lawyer, yet for all his legal education he was unable to save his friend.

The point of this essay is not to answer how it’s possible to overlook this connection for a century, but to illustrate how obvious an influence Gross actually was. To accomplish this I plan to examine the time period from 1844 to 1961, all the while pointing out what is chronologically and territorially possible. For example: In 1844 the German psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing diagnosed case 99 as ‘Metamorphosis sexualis paranoiaca’ [4], which makes it chronologically and territorially possible for Kafka to have picked up this vernacular for his 1912 novel The Metamorphosis. This Metamorphosis sexualis paranoiaca was, for it’s time, one way of many to talk about transsexualism. Hence we can postulate that Kafka, while not expressly trans, may have been “trans-interested” we could say, as it were in his book a man wakes up in the body of the hated cockroach. Should we ask what evidence we have of Kafka being aware of the “cock” in cockroach? Kafka did not leave us any script notes to suggest this; however, it’s true he wrote the novel “Amerika” prior, so it’s temporally plausible he wrote in full consciousness of American slang; also, the claim Kafka laughed uncontrollably while reading his work aloud to friends is not controversial. But since the title of Kafka’s story is “Die Verwandlung” (transformation), so this would not be literal word play on “Metamorphosis” here but associative play in Kafka’s head, I speculate.

Kafka’s relation to Gross and their project puts them at an interesting intersection, one situated somewhere between Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis, as they clearly cared a great deal about sociopolitical struggle, family and patriarchy, and faced real life obstacles with their respective fathers. Both C.G. Jung and Otto Gross were disciples of Sigmund Freud, yet Gross remained obscure despite Jung referring to him once as his twin [5]. The concept of patriarchy refers to a social system where men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. During the second wave of feminism which emerged in the 1960s there was renewed interest in the term which continued into the 1980s, but this still inspired little public interest in interrogating the works of Otto Gross despite his very frequent use of terms such as “patriarchy”, “free matriarchy” and women’s rights. In perhaps no passage is this more self-evident than in his 1919 essay “Protest and Morality in the Unconscious’’ [6]:

“Thus, this stage of our development, through which we have to go, is set. It is the same stage which has brought crisis and catastrophe to every culture. Never before has the fateful challenge of this moment been sufficiently met: the challenge to create and realize in a productive way something completely new, a new institution and new values. Values that, this time, will be more faithful to the human mind for addressing the profound chronic issue at hand: society’s responsibility to address the economic and financial empowerment of women, enabling them to undertake all management tasks related to motherhood. This, indeed, constitutes the authentic social and ethical question—the foremost and most urgent inquiry for society. Ultimately, we must fulfill this as our promise and duty for all posterity. It is a task demanding immense care, down to the last loving touch. It must figure highly in curriculum and education, so that individual minds are open to us. And everywhere this mission should be pursued boldly and unreservedly, in full acceptance of whatever consequences. It must be undertaken with a keen awareness of the absolute and irreconcilable opposition to anything that obstructs this task—whether in the guise of authority, institution, power, or the prevailing morality of humanity.” - Otto Gross

For context we must remember that this essay was published shortly after World War I was concluded in 1918, a little before Otto’s death in 1920. The insistence of reformulating the “values’’ of society bears the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s project: the revaluation of all values. Several events occurred in the 1930s that cause the public to closely associate Nietzsche with Nazism: Elizabeth Nietzsche gave Adolph Hither a walking stick that belonged to her brother in 1934, and the Nazis produced the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will’’, but the historical truth is Hitler likely did not read a word of Nietzsche [11]. In historical reality, it is a less widely recognized fact that Nietzsche was assimilated early into German Zionism within less than a year after the philosopher’s death. Martin Bubler pronounced Nietzsche an “apostle of life” and, in 1901, Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first President of Israel in 1949, sent a box set of Nietzsche’s books to his then sweetheart Vera Khatzman, writing to her “Vera, my joy, I am sending you Nietzsche: learn to read and understand him. This is the best and finest thing I can send you.” Likewise Chaim Weizmann stated that the French are too superficial for a transvaluation of values [7], implying Zionist Jews were more competent and qualified for the self-described immoralist philosopher’s undertaking. This was over 30 years prior to Hitler’s rise to power.

A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire [8]. One possible reason for the above overlooked connections obscurity is the fact that examining the past in this way might lead to the charge that it’s logistically, chronologically, and morally possible for Zionist Jews, impelled by Nietzschean immoralism, to have sacrificed their own people to secure Israel. However, I have no direct evidence. Nevertheless, textual evidence exists that in 1922 Hanz Kohn (still a Zionist) portrayed Nietzsche as the godfather of Zionist nationalism, and it is obvious that any organization armed with Nietzsche’s immoralist philosophy could be capable of carrying out any kind of enormity, no matter the cost. The key difference here is that, unlike the “Grossian” objective to establish a “free matriarchy”, the implementation of a Jewish Zionist nation state would almost certainly be patriarchal in purpose and structure; and, consequently, a project doomed to fail in the eyes of Gross and Kafka.

“What did alarm him as he pulled the wagon into the corridor was the dirt there, although he’d been expecting it too. It wasn’t, when he looked at it more closely, any tangible sort of dirt. The stone flags in the passage had been swept almost clean, the whitewash on the walls wasn’t old, the artificial palms only slightly dusty, and yet everything was greasy and repulsive, it was as if everything had been somehow misused, and no cleaning on earth could ever make it better.” – Franz Kafka: Amerika

Otto Gross was not the only one deemed “dangerous”. Adolf Hitler branded Magnus Hirschfeld as a “gay, Jewish, socialist,” dubbing him “the most dangerous man in Germany.” In 1933, a Nazi student organization orchestrated the burning of the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin. Hirschfeld, who had established the first gay rights organization, the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee,” in 1897, saw his pioneering sexological research nearly reduced to ashes. In 1910 Hirschfeld released a book entitled ‘The Transvestites’ in which he argues the word “metamorphosis” would be a better word to describe the sexual drive to change [9]; in 1912 Franz Kafka writes The Metamorphosis, but Kafka was not a prominent figure in the public eye in that time. In a sense, Kafka’s witnessing of Gross’s forced internship (1911), arrest per his father’s instruction (1913), and psychiatric institutionalization (1917) was a microcosm of the events that followed, inasmuch as millions of people were unceremoniously disposed of legally per the instructions of a patriarchal authority (Hitler). Kafka’s 1914 “Der Proceß” (The Trial), is about a man who, like Gross, is arrested, abducted and prosecuted by an incomprehensible legal authority for some never explained crime.

For one reason or another, the Wikipedia page for “The Trial” does nothing to shed light on the Gross-Kafka relationship. Otto Gross would die in Berlin in 1920 and Kafka would die in 1924 not long after by starvation. Neither lived long enough to see the rise of Nazism. And in 1935 Hirschfeld would die, followed by Sigmund Freud in 1939: both before the 1945 conclusion of World War II. War continues in the Middle East to this day, with people of every heritage shedding oceans of blood for a tiny region that stands no chance of surviving the inevitable death of the sun. One must wonder why, if God has the power of infinite vision, he demands it. Gay and trans rights are still to this day a bargaining chip for politicians. A woman in Missouri still has no bodily autonomy and empowering mothers is a failed and forgotten dream, and much of Kafka and Gross’s writings are untranslated and hidden away [10].