Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Act One: Berlin and Prague Immanuelkirchstrasse 29 is a short walk from my house in Berlin. The five-story corner apartment went up in the early years of the twentieth century, when Prenzlauer Berg was a mixed-class district of workers and upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, the façade suffered damage in the Second World War and was neglected during the four decades it stood in the capital of the German Democratic Republic. It has since been immaculately restored, with a fresh coat of cream paint and a new set of angel-faced mascarons above the turquoise window sills. There is a decent trattoria on the ground floor as well as a wine bar with outside seating where it is pleasant to sip Silvaner and wile away an endless July afternoon, yet there is no plaque near the entrance that would inform passersby that the building was once the site of one of the more remarkable episodes in the history of the German postal service. It was here that Fraulein Felice Bauer, a valued employee of Carl Lindström Inc., received or read hundreds of letters, postcards, and telegrams sent to her by Dr. Franz Kafka, a civil servant at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia and a partner in the asbestos factory owned by his family. The two met on August 13, 1912 at the home of their mutual acquaintance, the novelist Max Brod. Bauer was on the first leg of a vacation through the Austro-Hungarian empire, and decided to pay a call on her distant relative in Prague. An anxious and vacillating Kafka was there to get some advice from his successful literary friend about the selection and arrangement of short stories for his debut collection, Meditation. That evening Kafka and Bauer spoke about their mutual interest in Yiddish theater, looked at photos of the trip that he and Brod had taken to Goethe’s house in Weimar a few months before, and shook hands on an audacious plan, never to be realized, to visit Palestine together. When it came to an end, Kafka volunteered to walk the visitor from Berlin back to her hotel. The next morning, she continued on to Budapest and Meditation went off to the Rowohlt publishing house in Lepizig. The first snowflake of what Kafka’s biographer Rainer Stach calls a “paper avalanche,” written with a typewriter on Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute letterhead, arrived at Bauer’s office on September 20. Two days later, lightning struck. Over the course of a single evening at his desk in the tiny, cold bedroom of his family home, Kafka produced “The Judgment.” Georg Bendemann, the protagonist of “The Judgment,” is a young businessman who would like to write a letter to his old friend in St. Petersburg announcing his wedding to Frieda Brandenfeld — note the initials — but is foiled by the unexpected outburst of the grotesque and soiled patriarch he keeps locked away in a dank adjoining room. The story, which later appeared with the dedication “For F,” bears, for the first time, many of the disquieting elements of the sensibility we now call “Kafkaesque.” Its author, who was almost never satisfied with his work, was pleased with the result, and considered the ecstatic process that had given birth to it to be the epitome of the writing experience. Within a week, he had the vision of the sword-wielding Statue of Liberty that would open “The Stoker” — the first chapter of The Man Who Disappeared — and had tracked down Bauer’s home address. During their doomed five-year-long courtship, in which they met in person only a handful of times and were engaged twice, Kafka wrote the majority of the fiction for which he is now famous: further chapters of The Man Who Disappeared, “The Metamorphosis,” the unfinished novel The Trial, the first draft of “In the Penal Colony,” and other stories such as “The Hunter Gracchus,” “The Great Wall of China,” “A Report to the Academy,” and “A Country Doctor.” In maintaining a romantic correspondence that intersected with his literary activities, he was far from unique. (Like many writers, he also kept a diary.) What distinguishes the five hundred and eleven pieces of mail that would one day be collected under the title Letters to Felice — the longest book he ever wrote — was, as media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert have argued, his peculiar relationship to the postal service. In the century before the House of Thurn and Taxis decided to grant the celebrity author of the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and his adoring fans free use of their postal system as a promotional strategy, letters were primarily tools for communicating information across greater or lesser distances. Guidebooks offered templates that letter-writers could consult for the proper formulae for every sentence from a salutation to a valediction, for every situation to addressees of every social status. As literacy increased, as carriage routes were replaced by railway lines, and as postcards and telegrams were introduced into circulation, the volume of written communication skyrocketed. Parallel to these developments, letter-writers began to adopt an individualized and creative attitude toward the practice; epistolary exchange regularly came to include introspection and self-fashioning alongside the conduct of business and the transfer of intimate sentiments. Siegert quotes Clemens Brentano’s letter to his sister, Bettina von Arnim, one of Goethe’s correspondents, to this effect: “The writer must at the same time write to himself, since he must become acquainted with himself through the letter…in letters you look into the mirror of your soul…”  For male authors of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods, female correspondents — figured as some combination of Mother, Lover, and Nature — were the preferred relay points for making their own acquaintances. And writer or not, what man, in this new mass-republic of letters, didn’t secretly fancy himself, as Siegert puts it, a “miniature Goethe”? No doubt a similar notion was rippling through Kafka’s unconscious when, pondering his