Someday, I promised myself, I was going to read all of those stories, plus everything else Kafka ever wrote, in the language he wrote in: German. I knew by that point that Kafka had lived his whole life in Prague, which I still thought of as in Czechoslovakia even though it was the newly formed Czech Republic—and I knew they spoke Czech in Prague, but Kafka wrote in German because of something to do with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (I had skipped AP European History.)
“You know, I like other authors, too,” said Dylan Gellner on a glorious late-May afternoon we were spending inside watching Pinky and the Brain. I’d just brought up “The Bridge” again, but Dylan Gellner had moved on to Finnegans Wake, even though James Joyce was Irish and looked nothing like him, and thus held little interest for me. I crossed my arms and stared disconsolately out the window; obviously the subtext here was that if I had a wider array of literary interests, I probably wouldn’t have just gotten rejected from five out of the six elite liberal arts colleges to which I’d applied after Brown spurned me (the sixth having yet to respond). If only I’d read fucking Finnegans Wake of my own volition as a high-school student, I’d probably have gotten into precious CalTech, where Dylan Gellner was headed in the fall.
“I’m late for the newspaper,” I said, rising from his rec-room floor and making sure my jeans were zipped before I traipsed by his mother upstairs.
After graduation, Dylan Gellner—who, since we no longer had to see each other at school every day, had been steadfastly avoiding me under the guise of looking for a summer job—ghosted on a date to go windsurfing with his buddies, which of course is what preppy ski guys do in the summer. When at last I managed to catch him on the phone, he beckoned me over to his house, where for the first time he did not lead me downstairs to his room. Instead, he sat me on the living-room couch, took a deep breath, and said: “Look, we’re leaving for college at the end of the summer anyway, and it’s useless to bide time. I like you fine, but this just isn’t working for me anymore.”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting. We hadn’t had a decent conversation in weeks (well, two weeks; our whole relationship had lasted three months to the day). We’d never discussed a long-distance relationship in college, and I was, to be honest, intrigued by the potential angst-ridden Kafka fans that awaited at Vassar, a.k.a. College #6, the single institution of higher learning that had deigned to accept me into its class of 1998. But I’d pictured a summer of Sisyphus and sex-filled camping trips before a tearful, lovelorn, and mutual farewell sometime in mid-August. Dylan Gellner was still the only person who had ever really understood how I felt about reading and writing, about being different (considerably deeper and more profound, obviously) than my peers—who had actually felt the same way. I was under the impression that even if we stopped seeing each other, we’d always feel that way together, and never really stop loving each other. Instead, Dylan Gellner solemnly informed me that he’d be needing the rest of the summer to himself to practice differential geometry, and so I shouldn’t call him or talk to him (he would allow one farewell meeting in the park, but he’d call me). On the way home, I briefly considered swerving off his winding street into one of the adjacent ravines.
Getting dumped by Dylan Gellner was the literal worst thing that had literally ever happened to me and so there was no hiding it from David and Sharon Schuman. As I sat in the TV room, unable to tear myself away from Animaniacs—I knew Dylan Gellner would be watching it, too, and he wouldn’t be able to stop us from having one last shared experience—with tears splattering onto the lap of my stonewashed jean shorts, I saw my dad’s lithe Semitic form fill the doorway and then shuffle to the couch, where he sat down beside me.
“Hey, Bek,” he said. “I heard you and, um, Dylan? I heard you broke up.”
I sniffled.
“I remember when my girlfriend in college broke up with me.”
Sniffle.
“I got really drunk. God, I was such an asshole.” He patted me three quick times on the thigh and disappeared back into his study.
I moped through days of work at my summer job stuffing envelopes for one of my mom’s friend’s charities, and I moped through composing my final local-newspaper columns before leaving for college (each of which had taken an un-Barryesque melancholy turn and contained at least three veiled references to the demise of my relationship). I moped through every afternoon, sprawled on my back in the middle of my parents’ long carpeted hallway, staring balefully at the ceiling.
One day in mid-July, my mom leaned over me and asked: “If you could be anywhere, anywhere at all, where would you be?”
“Dead.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay, then, camping by myself.”
She bought me a brand-new tent and let me use the car for the weekend. I forgot my Therm-a-Rest pad; my stove leaked and I set a picnic table on fire; I tried to take a hike, but ended up walking down a highway alone under the blazing hot sun, and I got chauffeured back to my campsite by a mom in a minivan who assured me that God had a plan for me. (Her giving a ride to a teenage drifter that day probably counted as her Christian charity for all of 1994.)
The only person I wanted to hang out with in the festering cesspool of my heartbreak was Franz Kafka. And, unsurprisingly, he was an even worse influence than my dad. Case in point #1: I stopped eating, inspired by the title character in the short story “A Hunger Artist,” about a circus performer who sits in a cage and starves himself for sport in front of an audience. I was actually thin for the first time in my life—but, as with the Hunger Artist, it took no effort, so I didn’t care. If only the spectators knew that fasting was the easiest thing in the world, thinks the Hunger Artist, before departing a world that doesn’t appreciate him, only to be replaced after his death by a slavering young panther. The Hunger Artist’s problem, I realized, was not that—in his own unreliable words—he’d never found the food he liked. It was probably just that he’d been dumped.
Case in point #2: Aside from The Metamorphosis, Kafka is primarily known for the strange request he made of his friend Max Brod upon his demise, of tuberculosis, at age forty, that all of his unpublished writing be destroyed. (Brod famously disobeyed.) Not to be outdone, seventy years later almost to the day, I wrote a journal entry that contained only the sentence “Pain is the lasting part of love”—and then I put that journal in the family charcoal barbecue and set it on fire.
As if the shame of it would outlive me.
2.
Sprachgefühl
n. knack for language, from speech and feeling.
ex. When learning German to fluency, Sprachgefühl is a viable substitution for effort.
To be honest, Dylan Gellner shoulders only part of the blame for my poor life choices. (I, of course, continue to be blameless.) The rest goes to my freshman German literature professor at Vassar, James Martin. (Not to me.) I loathed Professor Martin on the first day of class, because his introductory lecture was about the expressive power of human language—and he was teaching a course on modern German literature in translation, which meant Kafka, which meant he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, since everyone knew Kafka’s main problem was that he couldn’t talk about what he needed to talk about.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that I was the one who didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and Professor Martin’s view on the Austrian language crisis was quite a bit more nuanced than mine—truly shocking, given that he had tenure and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and I had a 5 on the AP Literature exam and three months’ worth of twin-bed intercourse with Eugene, Oregon’s foremost underage literary critic. Professor Martin was, it turns out, the best literature professor I have ever had, before or since. It is, in fact, a continuing testament to his exegetic might that he enamored me of Thomas Mann, even though Mann is a Jet to Kafka’s Shark, a Rolling Stone to his Beatle, a stick of deodorant to his patchouli. German literary scholars like either Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka, is what I’m saying, but thanks to Professor Martin’s magisterial ability to pinpoint exactly the most transcendent part of every piece of literature written in the German language between the years of 1890 and 1960, I walked out of his course liking both.
My favorite Mann story was Death in Venice, a novella about a curious fellow named Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer who goes on vacation to Venice during a cholera epidemic. While everyone around Aschenbach is keeling over, he spends his time pitying an old guy who’s done himself up with makeup and hair dye, ostensibly to make himself look younger, but with a markedly grotesque effect instead—and then Aschenbach falls in love with a gorgeous young Polish boy named Tadzio (or Tadeusz in Polish), which is a play on Tod, the German word for “death.”
“Every German understands that Tadzio is Death immediately,” explained Professor Martin in class, as he ran his hand over his stern-looking blond flattop. “Yet another reason to try to read all of this in the German.”
Aschenbach never so much as talks to the boy, but love consumes him—here’s a huge surprise: Thomas Mann was a closeted gay guy—and, fully obsessed with Tadzio’s youth and beauty, he goes to the barbershop and gets himself done up like that pathetic old dude he mocked before. Wouldn’t you know it, now Aschenbach is himself a pathetic old dude—and to seal his fate, so that his metaphorical reality matches his literal one, he succumbs to the sensual deliciousness of a carton of overripe strawberries, which obviously give him cholera.
When I wrote my first essay for Martin’s class I got an A, which back in the dark ages of the mid-1990s was not the baseline grade of acceptability, and actually meant exceptional. (I should know, because I didn’t get many after that.) On the back, Martin wrote that I’d made an “extremely fine” effort, “nuanced and rich,” despite my clear misuse of the word abhor on multiple occasions. On the basis of this alone, I decided to be a German major midway through my first semester—despite knowing exactly that half-semester’s worth of German, courtesy of Frau von der Haide, a wonderful émigré from Leipzig with a Dorothy Hamill bob, who assured us with a flip of her hand on the first day of class that no matter what anyone said, German was leicht (“easy”).
This was an absolutely terrible idea that somebody should have talked me out of. My parents just shrugged (“It’s not like there’s an accounting major at Vassar anyway”), but the rest of my dad’s side of the family—the Jewish side—was duly perplexed.
“A German major, huh?” asked my grandfather, during a winter-break visit to my extended family in Chicago, when I had a hard time concentrating due to the raging discomfort of my very first urinary tract infection, thanks to a stupid vanilla-flavored condom I’d gotten free from the health center and used, before it made us both burn and scream, with the curly-haired boy down the hall. “What made you want to choose that?”
My father’s father had spent the better part of 1945 liberating concentration camps. “Well, it’s just for the literature, Grandpa,” I said. “And, did you know that pretty much every great German writer was a Jew? It’s true. Plus, Kafka was technically Czech. Or Austrian. Or Czechoslovak. Something not German.”
“Well, I hope you enjoy it,” he said. “I didn’t really enjoy college. Mostly just something to get me into law school.”
“What about playing football with President Ford?”
“That was all right, except I broke my nose twenty-seven times.”
Back on campus, Professor Martin had been slightly more enthusiastic to learn about my poorly thought-out scholarly choices. “Hot damn!” he’d cried, and handed me one of his own pens to fill out the paperwork. “Wait,” he said. “How much German have you taken?”
“Just 101,” I said. “But ask Frau von der Haide—I’m the best one in there.”
Martin sent me home with a brochure for the college’s summer program in a German city called Münster, a placid and picturesque university town near the Dutch border, where there were almost as many bicycles as inhabitants. To spend the summer in Germany! To leave the U.S. for the first time, and without the Schumans to cramp my style! Since Oregon was about six thousand miles round-trip out of the way, I’d leave straight from school in late May—to go where the drinking age was eighteen, the very age I happened to be! And most important of all, I’d get some of that “language immersion” I’d been hearing about since I was a kid. “You pretty much can’t learn a second language after about the age of seven,” said Sharon Schuman, whose Ph.D. is not in linguistics. “But immersion is the next best thing.” I was pretty sure immersion was code for magic and involved amassing total fluency in a matter of weeks with zero effort.
