Peters Kafka PDF

Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism
Author(s): Paul Peters

Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 401-425
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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Witness to the Execution:
Kafka and ColonialismI
PAUL PETERS
McGill University
Franz Kafkas In der Strafkolonie-"In the Penal Colony"-is a text with-

out a name. All the main characters of the story remain nameless-officer,
prisoner, explorer. Unnameable of course the pain which the prisoner seems
destined to endure, streched out on that "remarkable apparatus" which
forms the centrepiece of the text, and upon which the whole narrative seems
to then rivet its attention rather like the helpless victim upon the predator-
or like the circling hunter upon its prey. Unnameable, or, indeed, ineffable,
that which occurs in the surprising turn of events at the end of Kafka's story,
when the prisoner's apparently inexorable fate is for this one time mercifully
averted. And nameless, finally, the place where all this happens: unless, of
course, one were prepared to accept the title-word of the story-"Straf-
kolonie"-as one such name. For perhaps the single appellation of the title
indeed may be seen to function as a kind of all-encompassing and universal
name, which serves to fix and transfix within their apparent namelessness
not only the place where the story unfolds, not only all the characters within
it, but indeed all that which occurs in the narrative itself.
There is, moreover, strong evidence to suggest that colonialism is
this unspoken and unspeakable "name" which stands veiled at the centre
of Kafka's title and his text, waiting to be unmasked; and which, if spoken,
may trigger a kind of "shock of recognition" in our reading of the story.
For it may serve to render that moment of violent trauma which underlies
Kafka's narrative in some measure historically identifiable, as well as let-
ting many of the story's apparently insignificant or enigmatic details sud-
denly appear in a new light. Then, a rather startling and disconcerting
answer may be offered to a question which, in Kafka's case, might at first
seem hopelessly out of place: for is there, one might ask, an actual his-
torical topography which could ever match the infernal landscape of
Kafka's tale? The answer to that question may well be yes: the landscape
of colonialism.2
Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4, 2001 401

0026-9271/2001/0004/401
c 2001 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System

402 Paul Peters
Admittedly, however, this is Kafka: and this type of absolute disclo-

sure takes place in a concealed, or, if we chose to use the Brechtian term,
"estranged" form. It is an estrangement moreover for which, unlike Brecht,
Kafka, in his characteristic fashion, disdains any explicit resolution. The
critic Gtinther Anders once elucidated this emphatically didactic use of
Verfremdungin Kafka, with, in the present context, instructive reference to
the particular uses of the effacement or withholding of the name. "Kafka
tauft um," Anders writes, to then ask: "Warum vollzieht Kafka diesen, of-
fenbar doch verdunkelnden, Namenstausch?"3
Wiederumaus einem Erkenntnisgrund. Nimlich, um die mit den Namen au-

tomatischverbundenenVorurteilevon vornhereinabzuschneiden;um den
Leser,ja, um sich selber,zu zwingen,dem, was er zu sagen wtinscht,vorur-
teilslos ins Auge zu blicken;also in einer Einstellung,die der Findung,Dar-
stellung,Vermittlungund Akzeptierungder Wahrheitso wenig wie mioglich
abtraglichist.
This tension of disclosure and concealment in Kafka's work has been
further likened to the logic of dreams, which, as Freud has shown, loves the
transposition, reversal and inversion of words, to then associatively reveal
the hidden chasms of meaning which lurk behind them.4And there is reason
to believe that, by understanding these logics of disclosure and concealment,
Kafka's title and his text may be similarly decoded to reveal their hidden
chasms of unexpected meaning, a potential for signification still for the most
part buried and locked away in the half-forgotten recesses of Europe's im-
perial past and "political unconscious."'5For not a "Strafkolonie"-a penal
colony in the habitual sense-may be understood as Kafka's object in this
celebrated tale;6but Kolonie als Strafe, colony as punishment, the depiction
of the whole process of European colonialism as one vast procedure of ex-
termination, the colonial world as that political and geographic realm con-
stantly exposed to unbounded and horrific "punishments," that is to say,
occupied, dominated, "colonized" as it were by the "procedures" and "ap-
paratuses" of oppression and control, of punishment itself.7
For Kafka's "penal" or "punishment colony," his Strafkolonie, is, upon
closer examination, in fact quite unlike any penal colony ever known-
including Devil's Island, with which, because of the historical background
of the Dreyfus case, it has understandably been associated.8 It does, how-
ever, bear an astonishingly close resemblance to the actual historic practices
of colonialism. And it is precisely in the confrontation with the literary,
historical, and documentary record of colonialism itself that this Korre-
spondenzverhiiltnis may perhaps be brought most tellingly to light.
One privileged element of this relation of correspondence are texts
which may themselves, along with Kafka, lay claim to the rank of literary
masterpieces, as well to being indispensable reading for the understanding

Witness to the Execution 403
of the century: the anticolonialist classics of Frantz Fanon, Aim6 C6saire,

and Albert Memmi.9 For over all the gulfs of space, time, and cultural
difference which would seem to separate them from fin-de-sidcle Prague,
the central motifs of their analyses often mesh with those of Kafka's story
with a surprising ease and tightness. Another key element of this mutual
commentary can, however, be gleaned directly from the actual history and
discourse of colonialism itself; of the British, French, and North American,
but in this particular instance, above all the German and Belgian imper-
iums, as the two colonialisms closest to Kafka's own biographical and cul-
tural experience.
For, since Anthony Northey's chronicle of Kafka's Mischpoche, we
know that one of Kafka's favorite uncles, Joseph, from the maternal, story-
telling L6wy side, was involved sur place in the opening up of the later
Belgian Congo, perhaps the most convulsive event to ever take place in
African colonial history, and certainly one of the most devastating inter-
ventions against a human population on the historic record. Joseph Loewy
figures on a celebratory group portrait commemorating the founding of the
Congo railway, one of King Leopold's many fateful business ventures in the
region.'0 And despite Wilhelmine Germany's comparatively meagre colo-
nial holdings (which in any event amounted to over the fivefold territory
of the Reich), colonialism, as a question of world-political importance, as
well as a premier issue of national self-definition and great power prestige,
often played a dominant role in the German-speaking public sphere of the
period, not only in political debates and journalism, but also in intellectual
and artistic circles, as in the culture generally."
It is in this way that a type of tripartite intertextuality, a threefold
parallel reading of the Kafka, the anticolonialist, and the actual imperial
"texts" may serve to demonstrate how they all may well spring from a
common historical point of genesis or Ursprung; how they all, as it were,
bear a "familial" or genetic resemblance, a similarity stemming from this
shared point of origin. Indeed, Kafka's story can be plausibly understood
as a type of noumenon, Urbild, a hyperreal or mythic concentrate, a bold
quintessence and depiction not simply of this or that particular colonial
adventure, but of the inmost nature of all "colonizing" experience. For not
only does Kafka's narrative show itself, upon closer and informed exami-
nation, to be replete and dense, to be marked and saturated with telltale
colonial motifs; it may indeed ultimately and appropriately be read as a
kind of master narrative of the "primal scene" of colonialism itself.'2
This scene unfolds, in Kafka's narrative, before the "remarkable ap-
paratus"; and it is indeed remarkable in a number of ways: not least in its
encapsulement of some of the most fearsome, yet also insidious aspects of
colonial power. In the first instance, it is-exactly like colonialism-the
explosion of an overwhelming, terrifying, extraneous power into an indige-

404 Paul Peters
nous space. And it is this, again much like colonialism itself, in two ways:
as discourse-the rapturous account given of it in the never-ending mono-
logue of the officer; and as material force. For, in Kafka's narrative, the
"apparatus" is progressively revealed to us as both: as material reality, and
as speech.
As speech, the very logic of this panegyric narrative of "apparatus"
and Old Commander mirrors colonial historiography, in creating the type
of "founding myth" so beloved of pioneer history. It too makes tabula rasa
of the all previous history of the space it occupies; a creation ex nihilo,
out of nothing, which is also the transposition ad nihilum, into nothingness,
of all indigenous history and presence before the advent of the colonizer.
Thus, King Leopold, as colonial Selbstherrscher, declared one of the most
populated regions of Africa to be "vacant lands" and his very own domaine
privd. Indeed, like Leopold's, the officer's imperial narrative itself is power.
It "explodes" and threatens to occupy and monopolize, as unquestioned
monologue, the entire space of the story, much as colonialism "explodes"
into and utterly occupies and dominates its targeted geopolitical space.13
The juxtaposition of Kafka and Fanon is in this instance particularly in-
structive: "The colonialist makes history; his life is an epic, an Odyssey. He
is the absolute beginning [...]," writes Fanon.14Thus Kafka's officer posits
the grand narrative, the epic of the Old Commander as this mythic arche,
this absolute beginning in illo tempore of the history of the land he occupies.
"And because he constantly refers to the history of the mother country, he
clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country."
This is also the answer given, when Kafka's explorer-scholar, in initially
speaking with the officer, broaches a topic beloved of colonial small talk-
the Toilettenfrage, the question of what to wear: "Diese Uniformen sind
doch fiurdie Tropen viel zu schwer," he suggests to the officer, and gets as
a response: "Aber sie bedeuten die Heimat; wir wollen die Heimat nicht
verlieren.-Nun sehen Sie aber diesen Apparat [.. .]"15In this way, the
uniform and "apparatus" themselves are signaled as the new proxies and
extensions of the metropolitan homeland.
For, as Fanon points out, the history which the colonialist writes is
"not the history of the country which he plunders, but the history of his
own nation in regards to all that it skims off, all that it violates and plun-
ders."16The apparatus, and the story of the apparatus, together form this
history. How deeply this history is one of Landnahme, the taking of the
land, can be seen in a motif which has been rather neglected in the discus-
sion of this story: for an integral part of the refined and intricate construc-
tion of the apparatus is to ensure that the blood of the executed flows into
the ground, fructifying it as "Blutwasser" (215); for only when the blood of
the indigenous has run into the soil, has it become truly fertile for the
colonizer.

As material force, the "apparatus" of the story fuses a classical colo-

nial with a classical Kafka trope. In the context of Kafka's ouvre, it is a
prime example of the materialization of the metaphor.17Through it, the
"Herrschaftsapparat"-the apparatus of power-appears before our very
eyes. Yet this apparatus is also a colonial trope. "Die Verwaltung in der
Kolonie soll nichts sein als ein Apparat, um es m6glich zu machen, ge-
winnbringende Unternehmungen ftirs Mutterland durchzuftihren"; so the
words of Carl Peters, the most notorious of German jingoists.'8 And indeed,
the word "apparatus" for the system of colonial power and administration
is one which recurs with chilling regularity throughout the literature, be it
in the mouths of advocates and apologists, of historians and economists, or
of the critics of colonialism. In the perhaps most thorough single contem-
porary critique of the political history of German colonialism, a work which
appeared in 1914, the same year as the writing of In der Strafkolonie, the
social-democratic author speaks of colonialism as a process of "Zermal-
mung" of the indigenous populations, to then significantly add: "man
spannte sie in einen Schreckapparat."'19Similarly, decades later, Jean-Paul
Sartre, in his introduction to Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Col-
onized, speaks of "colonizer and his victim both being throttled by the
colonial apparatus, that cumbersome machine [.. ,] that now, after giving
the colonizers every satisfaction, turns against them and threatens to crush
them."20"Apparatus," "victim," "crush," "machine": the whole vocabulary
signals the close motivic interface of the Kafka and the colonialist "texts."
Indeed, in a remarkable instance of that power of compression or telescop-
ing characteristic of symbols and of dreams, Kafka's image of the "appa-
ratus," in its agglomeration of technology, violent power and instrumental
rationality, used to dominate an occupied "foreign" space, is like the very
embodiment of the whole "machinery of oppression" of colonial power.21
If to symbolize-Greek sym-ballein-is to "throw together," Kafka's ap-
paratus is also remarkable for its "throwing-together," its melding of all the
disparate elements of colonial domination into one "fearful symmetry."
For this colonial machinery was indeed an ensemble of a "fearful
symmetry": the high degree of rational, administrative, military, and social
organization of modern industrial states, coupled with all the awesome
means of organization and destruction which industry and technology had
now placed at their disposal. It is this complex symmetry, then instantane-
ously brought to bear on the colonial world as one single, unified force,
which is so memorably embodied by Kafka's "apparatus." In his recent
account of King Leopold's Congo, Adam Hochschild has, working with a
concrete historical example, summarized the overall, combined effect and
impact of these disparate elements, and shown how each was necessary to
ensure the success of such a vast and far-flung undertaking. For each con-
tributed its part to what was then a much larger, overreaching process of

406 Paul Peters
colonial conquest: from rivergoing steamboat to oceangoing steamship,

from medical knowledge to surveying and cartographic capacity, from the
financial and social skills necessary to organize the financing of a railway in
Brussels, to the know-how and wherewithal to then put it into place "on
the ground" in the Congolese rain forest.22
And above all: the weaponry. For violence, as Fanon, Memmi, and
C6saire all duly emphasize-and even Western historians reluctantly
concede-is the very basis of the colonial relationship.23This violence is,
moreover, of a particular kind: for it was firstly one of, in current military
parlance, "overwhelming force," based on sheer technical superiority. It
guaranteed the Europeans victory even when their strategic and fighting
skills would not have been sufficient by themselves to do so; and secondly,
it was sustained and continuous, thus lying not only at the origin of the
colonial relationship, as one of conquest, but also constituting the ever re-
newed basis of all subsequent social relations in the colonial setting. For as
one of the great contemporary critics of Leopold's Congo, E. D. Morel, put
it, the Europeans in Africa now regarded the "Negro as their lawful prey-
thanks to the perfection which modern engines of destruction have now
attained."24
It is just this relationship of predation and perfection which charac-
terizes both the Kafka and the colonial texts. Too often, the critical litera-
ture on this story has ignored this fundamental paradox: the apparently
"archaic" nature of the savage punishment which Kafka's machine metes
out, and the fact that it is such a high-precision instrument, a "smart
weapon," and product of the most modern, up-to-date technology.25But
decisive, indeed paramount in the colonial relationship was this crushing
technical superiority in weaponry, in the means of violence and destruction:
the repeating rifle, the mitrailleuse, the Gatling gun, the proverbial gunboat.
As the Victorian British poet Hillaire Belloc put it, in fitting doggerel
verse:26
Whateverhappens,we have got

The Maximgun, and they have not.
Or as Albert Memmi writes of the colonizers: "all the resources of tech-
nology.., would be placed at their disposal and, within minutes, terrible
weapons of defense and destruction..,. the experience has been repeated
too often for the colonized not to be convinced of the inevitable and horrific
punishment."27And Kafka's "remarkable apparatus" incarnates all of this:
the annihilatory practices of the colonizer, the constant exposure of the
colonized to the random and massive use of force, as well as the technical
means which make such force possible. "The excessiveness of the the pun-
ishment in relationship to the crime, the ritualized form of execution, the
ceremony of pain and death-these are the colonial strategies of counter-

insurgency designed to 'strike terror' in the rebellious native."28Indeed,

even the need of the colonizer to compulsively and publicly demonstrate
his power-not least of all to himself-is present in Kafka's text.29
Along with a sense of speechless horror: and to have conveyed this is
perhaps the greatest single accomplishment of Kafka's "apparatus." Lo-
keli-the "overwhelming"-this was the word of the Mongo language used
to describe the experience of Leopold's depredations of the Congo and its
peoples.30 Later, Albert Memmi would use the term &crasement-"smash-
ing"-to describe the fundamental impetus of colonial power vis-a-vis its
subject populations.31In its extremes of violence, of sustained and manifold
violations of the person, colonialism also brings language and depiction to
the brink. In a private letter, Frantz Fanon once wrote of his need, in writing
about his subject, to find words which were not just words: but which would
bear a "charge," leap out off the page, have tangible, physical presence,
seize and shake the reader, and cause a shivering of the skin.32There can
be little doubt that, in his image of the apparatus, Franz Kafka has found
such words: for he too is an arch-transgressor, a bringer of language and
depiction to the brink, and as such a creator both of virginality and its loss,
of violate and inviolate spaces. The country "that hath her maidenhead
yet"-all such countries, be they in the geographic or in the reader's inner
realm, are placed at risk by Kafka and colonialism.33
This can be seen, for example, if one reflects a moment on the event
which might perhaps best encapsulate the history of colonialism in the two
Americas: the moment when the first musket shots were fired. That instant
summed up an inviolateness, a kind of unwitting world-historical innocence,
which both continents had until that moment been unaware that they in fact
possessed, to then, in the same instant, forever destroy and shatter them. The
indigenous peoples who first heard that shot flung themselves on the ground
in the belief that they had all perished, and that their world had now come
to an end. As indeed, it had. And something of this same sense of nameless
horror and almost physical foreboding, the violation of something hitherto
inviolate in the reader and the text, occurs in the confrontation with Kafka's
"apparatus."34It has the same dread presence as that first musket shot; as
the first sighting of a gunboat, ploughing up the Congo. It is &crasement;it is
lokeli. It strikes us with the "hyperreality"of something which surpasses and
overwhelms the senses, not because of its character as virtuality or simula-
crum-it is all too real-but because it lies beyond all established bounds of
experience and understanding. In the perception of the Indios, the conquis-
tadors and their terrifying firearms and horses-both unknown in the Amer-
icas up until that time-were as one being; and in a similar sense, Kafka's
officer too is one and inseparable with his "apparatus."35
Indeed, this officer, in his undying attachment to the apparatus, to
uniform and Old Commander, seems like the would-be incarnation of

408 Paul Peters
Ernest Renan's imperial vision of Europeans as "a race of masters and

soldiers," a colonial pastiche and provincial mimicry of the heroic and
"Great Man" version of history.36In colonial narrative, in scores of mem-
oirs, wireless reports, or boys' adventure novels, the mowing-down of hope-
lessly outgunned native populations by well-armed errant clerks, junior of-
ficers and gescheiterte Existenzen from Europe was celebrated as somehow
grandly coeval with Cannae and Thermopylae. And it is undoubtedly as
descended from such epic heroes that the officer, in his discourse of the Old
Commander, wishes to regard himself. "Er hilt das historische Geschehen
in der Hand wie ein Szepter," writes Walter Benjamin of the Baroque king.37
The medium of colonial history, however, is not the sceptre, but the uni-
form, in which, as Memmi writes, "all history today is clad."38And resplen-
dent in his military dress and helmet, proudly equipped with his apparatus,
and supremely confident of the blessing of Old Commander, Kafka's officer
would seem to feel himself, as far as his own particular sphere of power
goes, similarly and gloriously in charge.
But on another, more fundamental level, he is merely the embodiment
of what Memmi has acerbically termed the "colonial mediocrity;" the petty
bureaucrat puffed up by his new position of power, and driven by a patho-
logical need to assert it, a mysterious physiological and pyschological af-
fliction that in German colonial literature was termed the "Tropenkoller."
This was, as one leading imperial apologist wrote, a kind of "Hypertrophie
des Selbstbewugtseins," and "Erkrankungsform des sozialen Instinkts," a
"selbstquailerische Hypnose," which occured due to the "plitzliche Losge-
bundenheit von allen... Rticksichten auf Sitte und Sittlichkeit, das Fehlen
der gesellschaftlichen Kontrolle und das Gefiuhlder Uberlegenheit tiber die
niedere Rasse."39
It is, in other words, the explosive mix, the characteristic colonial
blend of the authoritarian personality, rather limited mental and emotional
capacities, and the intoxicating, corrupting possiblity of power which
Kafka's officer too embodies. Or as Hannah Arendt, discussing the example
of Cecil Rhodes, once wrote of the "imperialist character," the character of
the imperial founder and commander, bureaucrat and administrator:40
once he has enteredthe maelstromof an unendingprocessof expansion,he
will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process,
identifyhimselfwith anonymousforces that he is supposedto serve in order
to keep the whole processin motion;he will thinkof himselfas merefunction,
andeventuallyconsidersuchfunctionality,suchan incarnationof the dynamic
trend,his highestpossibleachievement.Then, as Rhodes was insaneenough
to say,he could indeed "do nothingwrong,what he did becameright.It was
his duty to do what he wanted.He felt himselfa god-nothing less.
This is the very psychic stuff of Kafka's officer. "Hat er alles in sich verei-
nigt? War er Soldat, Richter, Konstrukteur, Chemiker, Zeichner?" asks the

explorer-scholar about the Old Commander. "Jawohl," comes the officer's

emphatic, positive reply. (210)
This type of omniscience has led many commentators to believe that
Kafka's formidable Old Commander must be some allegorical reference to
Yahweh, as the Judaic one and all-knowing, but also supposedly all-
punishing God.41But in a colonial context, quite ordinary, mortal European
males could also aspire to similar all-knowing and omnipotent status. "Vive
le Congo!," as one young Belgian officer enthusiastically wrote home: "here
one is everything! Warrior,diplomat, trader!" It is the exhilirating status of
this "alles," of this "everything," which is also lived by Kafka's officer and
Old Commander-the chance of simultaneously being "builder" and "en-
gineer" as well as "soldier" and "administrator,"as one chronicler admiringly
wrote of a German colonial commander in Africa.42The vista of unlimited
possibilities open to the European who would have been confined to a
humdrum clerical or petty-bourgois existence at home is a common theme
of colonial literature. This imperial unboundedness typically included not
only the boundlessness of the possibilities of economic exploitation, but
also those of sexual depredation, as well as of the sheer exercise of power.43
Perhaps one of the most tantalizing of these possibilities was that of
playing God. Thus it is Kafka's officer who will himself usurp, in his un-
swerving devotion to the sanctified system of the "apparatus" and the Old
Commander, a god-like status, towering despotically over his victims, sub-
lime, incomprehensible, and unreachable, and dizzingly self-empowered to
decide instantly and unilaterally both over justice and injustice, as over life
and death. "All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely";
at a political level, Kafka's colonial officer seems like the paradigm of Lord
Acton's celebrated maxim. Levered, through the medium of his apparatus,
into such a position of absolute power, the officer has long since, as a "Lord
of Humankind," unwittingly succumbed to its seduction.44
If Kafka's officer and Old Commander thus fulfill the career and per-
sonality profile-as well as dress code-of the paradigmatic colonial ad-
ministrator, the status of the prisoner or condemned man in his narrative
is similarly "marked" to subliminally, but unmistakeably designate the mar-
ginalized and subhuman status of the subject races in colonial mythology.
For if the racial identity of soldier and prisoner is nowhere explicitly men-
tioned in Kafka's story, they are nonetheless characterized in such a way as
to place them firmly beyond the pale of all contemporary codes of the
"European"-in other words, of that which would be customarily regarded
as civilized, rational, adult, and fully human comportment.45The world of
the Strafkolonie is as "coup6 en deux," as cut in two, as is, in Fanon's anal-
ysis, the colonial situation;46and in this sense, the indigenous odd couple of
soldier and prisoner is the mirror of the strange European pairing of officer
and explorer-scholar. In other words, without being so named, this odd

410 Paul Peters
couple fulfills many of the stereotypes of alterity, of a merely proto- or

crypto-human status, typically associated, in the European imagination,
with the indigenous or colonial subject.
Thus, soldier and prisoner are both fundamentally lacking in that
quality which most clearly distinguishes the human from the animal, just as
were, in the imperial imagination, the non-Caucasian populations. For they
seem bereft of all intellectual and reasoning capacity, and even ultimately,
in the fullest sense, of thought and speech. Indeed, the linguistic situation
of the two, soldier and condemned man, also reflects the classic colonial
situation: they do not speak the French which is here, as in the conversation
of officer and explorer-scholar, the medium both of serious and cultivated
discourse, as of the exercise of power; and from which they both seem
definitively separated as by some ontologically unbridgeable rift.47Instead,
they would appear to communicate with each other more by gesture, and
in a tongue which is, from the European perspective, not only incompre-
hensible, but unrecognizable. At the same time, they have that other char-
acteristic of the subject populations so beloved in "colonial mythology;"
they act like children, they laugh and gesticulate, instead of engaging in
earnest discourse, they react with pleasure or disturbance to immediate
sensual stimuli, without seeming to have any sense of the more mediated,
abstract processes of administration, science or technology.48 This makes
itself particularly felt in a context where the prisoner himself seems only
intermittently aware of the gravity of his own predicament, and that his
own life is in fact at stake: "Mit einer Art schlafriger Beharrlichkeit richtete
er die Blicke immer dorthin, wohin der Offizier gerade zeigte, und als dieser
jetzt vom Reisenden mit einer Frage unterbrochen wurde, sah auch er,
ebenso wie der Reisende, den Reisenden an." (207)
Indeed, with regards to the prisoner, the imagery also quickly reaches
to, not only the "benign" or picturesque, but also the most unsavoury and
sinister sides of colonial characterization. For the terminology used with
regard to him belongs from the outset, as Fanon would have put it, to the
"zoological" sphere.49 His appearance is brutish-"ein stumpfsinnniger,
breitmauliger Mensch mit verwahrlostem Haar und Gesicht" (203),-a de-
scription which cites, in both its adjectives, two of the most widespread
contemporary clich6s of the Negroid and the African, an impression only
reinforced by the later vignette: "Aber die Bewegungen seiner wulstig
aneinander gedrtickten Lippen zeigten offenbar, daB er nichts verstehen
konnte." (210)50Indeed, the prisoner is immediately, upon his first appear-
ance in the text, associated with the bestial: "Ubrigens sah der Verurteilte
so htindisch ergeben aus, daB es den Anschein hatte, als k6nnte man ihn
frei auf den Abhangen herumlaufen lassen und miisse [. . .] nur pfeifen, damit
er kame." (203) Ultimately, as in C6saire's terminology, he is to be reduced
to a "thing," the pure object and material of the "procedure" whose purpose

it is to eradicate him.51For the colonized-and this in a matter touching

on his own survival-is, in Memmi's words, historically, politically, and per-
ceptually "out of the game": "He is in no way a subject of history any more.
Of course, he carries its burden, often more cruelly than others, but always
as an object."52And so it is with Kafka's prisoner. He is to be punished-
by death-and without trial or hearing, for the "crime" of indolence and
insubordination, thus citing the colonial "myth of the lazy native," and forc-
ibly reminding us that in entering Kafka's Strafkolonie we are entering a
territory, where, in Fanon's terms, the Declaration of the Rights of Man has
yet to be pronounced. And if, as Fanon states, the life of the colonized
unfolds under the "sign of violence," it may also be said to unfold under
the sign of Kafka's "apparatus."53
This may all be reinforced by the briefest glimpse into contemporary
colonial Realgeschichte. That the intricate system of chains-"die schwere
Kette [. . .] in welche die kleinen Ketten ausliefen, mit denen der Verurteilte
an den FuB- und Handknocheln sowie am Hals gefesselt war und die auch
untereinander durch Verbindungsketten zusammenhingen" (203)-which
binds the "prisoner" in Kafka's narrative is not simply macabre invention,
but historical quote, can be readily confirmed by any look at the photo-
graphic record of European colonialism in Africa, where such chains were
regularly used to keep enforced labourers and whole captive populations
at their task.54In the October 1907 edition of the popular German satirical
magazine Simplicissimus, we can see a caricature showing a colonial "ap-
paratus" much like the one in Kafka's "Penal Colony;" while a missionary
reads from a Bible, a British officer feeds an African into a giant vice, which
squeezes gold out of him. Bula mitundi-the mill-stones which ground
stone to dust-was indeed the wry Bantu expression for the Belgian ad-
ministration of the Congo; those being ground to dust being of course the
indigenous peoples themselves, out of whose enforced labour was squeezed
the "stream of virginal products and raw material," as one colonial apologist
expressed it, which are the very "life" of Europe; those who did not comply
were mutilated-their hands were severed-or killed. The "death" of the
colonized as the "life" of the colonizer-this is the very dialectic of Kafka's
apparatus.55Through it, the sublime script of Western civilization, its epic
grand ricit of conquest is etched into the rent body of the subject nations;
the deadly "judgement" which is passed upon them, in the name of the
grand design, the sacred legacy of the Old Commander. Or as the officer
explains: (217)
dort im Zeichner ist das R~iderwerk,welches die Bewegung der Egge be-
stimmt,und dieses Riderwerkwirdnach der Zeichnung,auf welche das Ur-
teil lautet, angeordnet.Ich verwende noch die Zeichnungendes frtiheren
Kommandanten.Hier sind sie [...] ich kannsie Ihnenaberleidernichtin die
Hand geben, sie sind das Teuerste,was ich habe [...].

412 Paul Peters
Indeed, the magical and ineffable, the esoteric and yet so existentially com-
pelling qualities of this script, its echoes of the sacred, have inspired and
seduced more than one commentator, who, in its auratic presence, feel
themselves reminded of something holy, of hieroglyphics, if not indeed of
Thora and Talmud.56
However that may be, let us listen to the officer once more as he
elucidates these very mystic properties of script and inscription, as realized
by the apparatus: (217-18)
'Lesen Sie,' sagte der Offizier.'Ich kann nicht,' sagte der Reisende. 'Es ist
doch deutlich,'sagte der Offizier.'Es ist sehr kunstvoll,'sagte der Reisende
ausweichend,'aberich kannes nichtentziffern.''Ja,'sagte der Offizier,'es ist
keine Schinschriftftr Schulkinder.Man muB lange darin lesen. Auch Sie
wiirdenes schlieBlichgewiBerkennen.Es darfnattirlichkeineeinfacheSchrift
sein;sie soll ja nichtsoforttbten, sonderndurchschnittlich erst in einemZeit-
raum von zwOlfStunden;fiurdie sechste Stunde ist der Wendepunktbe-
rechnet.Es mtissenalso viele, viele Zieratendie eigentlicheSchriftumgeben;
die wirklicheSchriftumzieht den Leib nur in einem schmalenGtirtel;der
tibrigeKOrperist ftr Verzierungenbestimmt.'
Thus, the writing of the "apparatus" indeed appears as the letters of some
numinous alphabet, on some ancient mystic scroll or manuscript. Yet how-
ever mystical, ineffable, sublime, this esoteric script may at first glance ap-
pear, we might also ask ourselves if Kafka will here not yet in fact subject
it to a vast and withering operation of debunking. For decisive here is the
very paradox of the clarity and indecipherability of this writing, which it
would seem to share with Revelation. But indecipherability, though it be
an ancient mystic quality, is also, at a more profane and earthly level, a
time-honoured ruse of mystification and deceit; and clarity may be similarly
associated, not simply with the ultimate transparency of illumination, but
with the rough and rude awakenings of de-mystification, as of de-masking.
The colonized are well familiar with such rude awakenings. For many
indigenous tribes of Africa, who still lived fundamentally in an oral culture,
the script of the Europeans certainly possessed a magic quality, as writing
continued to do even in the societies of early literacy, as the arcane and
secret knowledge of the ruling and religious elites. And certainly, the script
of Kafka's "apparatus" has all these properties of mystery. But notoriously
indecipherable are not only the preserved or recovered lost scrolls and tab-
lets of ancient mystical or imperial traditions, but-the treaties which Af-
ricans and Amerindians were blandished into signing in their early contacts
with the Europeans. Thus, Bismarck, an initially reluctant colonizer, com-
plained constantly of the sheer illegibility of the documents presented to
him by his African traders, to legitimize and legalize their territorial ac-
quisitions; Leopold, a more zealous colonialist, on the other hand, in the
case of the even more grandiose acquisition of the Congo, may in fact him-

self have been involved in guilefully prearranging it.?7This, clearly, is in-

decipherability of a different order; but it would also seem to have its role
to play in Kafka's text. As the indecipherability of the many ruses of sym-
bolic expropriation and exploitation; as the "ideological" indecipherability
of a truth too stark and dreadful to ever name or contemplate, and which
therefore must needs always remain esoteric, transfigured, and unintelligi-
ble, inaccessibly veiled and masked.
In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin de-
tected the intimate, hidden union of the most refined and spiritual expres-
sions of civilization, and the crass, material fact of exploitation and op-
pression-of the close, indissoluble overlay of "culture" and "barbarism."58
In its paradoxical split and fusion of the corporeal and the spiritual, the
writing of Kafka's "apparatus" is perhaps the ultimate depiction of this
nexus. For what appears intellectually and spiritually from "above," from
the perspective of the ruler and the colonizer, as a wealth of infinitesimally
fine, mysterious, and ornamental figures, as a kind of inexpressible, beau-
teous secret master code of justice and transfiguration, is successfully de-
ciphered and revealed from "below," in the corporeal and material world
of the oppressed, as physical dismemberment, agony and subjugation.59And
does Kafka's own text not fundamentally privilege this latter process? Its
own wording is in any case at pains to emphasize that it is not the explorer-
scholar, for whom it remains unintelligible, nor the officer, who himself may
be able to "read" its words, but in no wise claims to realize its full import,
but rather the condemned man who is in real, and as it were physical pos-
session of the full meaning of the script. For "unser Mann," as Kafka's
officer explains, imperially and regally taking possession of his human ob-
ject, "entziffert sie [...] mit seinen Wunden." (220) And Kafka's narrative,
like his officer, leaves no doubt that this is indeed the authentic reading,
the genuine decoding of the sublime writing of the "apparatus."
It is known that Kafka once imagined his ideal readers as being in the
German colonial towns of Windhoek or Dar-es-Salaam.60And his story may
also be read as the "telescopage" and exponential "compression" of certain
historical experiences to be garnered there. If the spectacular workings of
the "apparatus," the bringing to bear of its overwhelming force, its "fearful
symmetry" upon the native incarnates a type of primal scene of colonialism,
so too does the scene of the prisoner's transgression and arrest encapsulate
an archetypal colonial mini-drama: the constant, daily rituals of subservi-
ence and control, disrupted and sabotaged by the passive resistance of in-
digenous indolence and "laziness."61There is, in other words, not only a
crass, physical dimension, but also a more refined symbolic aspect to the
whipping, which Kafka, in his acute attentiveness to such matters, here is
also careful to reveal. For the beating, too, is a highly communicative cer-
emony, a type of colonial ritual and etiquette; and for this reason, with its

414 Paul Peters
acceptance or non-acceptance, the affirmation or negation of the entire

system is potentially at stake. More than one colonial rebellion was initially
sparked by the refusal to accept such beatings.62Thus, even simple acts of
disobedience and insubordination could quickly become pre-emptively re-
garded as outbreaks of treason, insurrection, and subversion, which were
then to be appropriately dealt with. Or as the officer explains:
Sie wollten diesen Fall erklarthaben;er ist so einfach,wie alle. Ein Haupt-
mannhat heute morgensdie Anzeige erstattet,daBdieserMann,der ihm als
Diener zugeteiltist und vor seiner Tire schlift, den Dienst verschlafenhat.
Er hat namlichdie Pflicht,bei jedem Stundenschlagaufzustehenund vor der
Tir des Hauptmannszu salutieren.GewiB keine schwere Pflichtund eine
notwendige,denner soll sowohlzurBewachungals auchzurBedienungfrisch
bleiben. Der Hauptmannwollte in der gestrigenNacht nachsehen,ob der
Diener seine Pflicht erfille. Er offnete Schlag zwei die Tir und fand ihn
zusammengekriimmt schlafen.Er holte die Reitpeitscheund schlugihn iber
das Gesicht. Statt nun aufzustehenund um Verzeihungzu bitten, faBte der
Mannseinen Herrnbei den Beinen, schtittelteihn und rief:'Wirfdie Peitsche
weg, oder ich fresse dich.' (212)
For if the colonized are indolent -incurably, infuriatingly indolent-they
are also, as Fanon and Memmi point out, "always guilty."63This basic as-
sumption of the colonizer is also shared by Kafka's officer: "Der Grundsatz,
nach dem ich entscheide, ist: die Schuld ist immer zweifellos." (212) And if
punishments for the colonized are massive, lethal, instantaneous, and out
of all proportion to the supposed "crime," so too in Kafka's Strafkolonie.
The whip is thus, historically speaking, itself an archetypal colonial
motif. It played, in fact, a particularly prominent role in German colonial
history, both because of the Prussianfaible for the "karperlicheZtichtigung,"
and because of the opposition and criticism this provoked in Germany it-
self.64German Cameroon was sardonically known along the West Coast of
Africa as the "twenty-five country," because of the quickness of the local
rulers in administering the corresponding number of lashes. In 1894, at the
outset of the innumerable German Kolonialskandale, August Bebel elec-
trified the German Reichstag by producing, for the edification of that as-
sembly, several fearsome exemplars of the Nilpferdpeitsche, whose exis-
tence had up to that point been steadfastly denied.65And in a secret report
of the Dernburg commission to the German colonial office, it was reported
that in Dar-es-Salaam no European went walking without a whip; that on
the desks of the government offices, the whip was prominently placed be-
side the ink-well as part of the iconography of the colonial administration.66
Not only the presence of the whip; but this intimate connection of torture
and script breathes the very stuff of Kafka's story. Throughout the colonial
world Grundpeitschen-a cultural borrowing from the American South,
where the delinquent Black was stripped down, stretched out on his stom-

ach, and fastened to staves in the ground, and then beaten in often life-
threatening ways for such offenses as tardiness, absenteeism, or insurbor-
dination-was a standard procedure.67In the archives of Reichskolonialamt
endless, meticulous records have been kept of the vigorous beatings meted
out for these and similar offences. And indeed, a heated Kafkaesque debate
ensued within the German colonial office on the cuttane and subcuttane,
on chucotte and kiboko, on Schambock and Tauende, on the whip which
rent the skin, and the whip which caused, in the incomparable German
phrase, "Verletzungen in der Tiefe," and struck at the inner, vital organs.68
Kafka's "apparatus"reads like the successful resolution of this controversy:
an instrument which, as Memmi puts it, "inscribes" the colonial system of
obedience both upon the outer surface of the colonized, as upon her inmost
being.69
The need for such inscription, not only for individuals, but for entire
peoples, was meanwhile a matter of much discussion at Windhoek, in
Deutschsiidwest, in German Southwest Africa.70 In a declaration "des
groBen Generals des michtigen deutschen Kaisers" to the Herero people
after the crushing of their uprising, General von Trotha, author of the no-
torious Vernichtungsbefehl against the Herero, and in the best manner of
the colonial bwana, Baaf3, and sahib, made himself, like Kafka's officer, the
lord of life and death, not only over a delinqent native servant, but over an
entire people.71 In his declaration to the Herero he stated that the whole
nation, through its rebellion, had forfeited its right to exist; and "sie haben
ihr Leben verwirkt" was also the judgement of the High Command in Ber-
lin.72In his official correspondence with the capital, Trotha made no bones
of the fact that in his view, "the nation as such must be annihilated."73At
the same time, he and the whole German administration were now caught
in the typical colonial double bind; "der Rassenkampf ist nur durch Ver-
nichtung oder vollige Knechtung der einen Partei abzuschlielen."74 But
which option-"Vernichtung" or "Knechtung"-was the one to choose?
On the one hand, the typical colonialist phantasy-and Kafka's story is
perhaps the greatest single poetic record of this deep historic urge of the
"colonial unconscious"-that the best thing would be for the colonized to
simply disappear from the face of the earth.75On the other, the halting
recognition, that, as one leading German colonial apologist put it, the co-
lonial enterprise-and here we are reminded of the "Harrow" of Kafka's
tale-required both "Bodennutzung und Eingeborenennutzung," the use
both of the land and of the natives, of human and of raw material; a German
latecomer's version of the "We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his
limbs" of the classic imperial formula.76
This insight also stood behind Trotha's grudging and reluctant admis-
sion that even the insolent Herero were perhaps necessary as "Arbeits-
material" for the future use of the land. There was a way out of this dilemma

416 Paul Peters
however: to combine the exterminatory with the educative, and use that
"rigorous treatment of all parts of the nation"-"rigorose Behandlung aller
Teile der Nation"-which Trotha advocated, as a pedagogical tool to mould
the Herero into the pliant and compliant stuff of the colonial will.77And
indeed this was the "procedure"-the Verfahren, in the terminology both
of Kafka and of the German colonial office-which was ultimately
adopted.78 The nation was, in Governor Leutwein's phrase, if not to be
made physically, than to be rendered politically "dead."79It was to be col-
lectively "put on the chain,s8and made to experience "am eigenen Leibe"
what it meant to revolt against the occupying power. More important even
than its military defeat (only through the good graces of German howitzers
and machine-guns), was the fact that the entire people was now fated to go
through a protracted "Leidenszeit" in forced labour and detention camps,
as a kind of educational device, so that it would, as it were, metabolically
imbibe the principle of "heilsame Unterordnung" to the colonizer "with its
mother's milk":81
Je mehrdas Hererovolkam eigenen Leibe nunmehrerst die Folgendes Auf-
standes empfindet,desto weniger wird ihm nach Generationennach einer
Wiederholungdes Aufstandes geltisten. Unsere eigentlichenkriegerischen
Erfolge haben geringerenEindruckauf sie gemacht.NachhaltigereWirkung
versprecheich mir von der Leidenszeit,die sie jetzt durchmachen[...] und
die ktinftige Generation wird [...] die heilsame Unterordnungunter die
weisse Rasse mit der Muttermilcheingesogenhaben.
So too of course Kafka's prisoner. Like the "milk" offered the Herero,
he is given rice throughout the ordeal of his own martyrdom and extirpa-
tion: (219)
Hier in diesen elektrischgeheizten Napf wird warmerReisbrei gelegt, aus
dem der Mann,wenn er Lust hat, nehmen kann, was er mit der Zunge er-
hascht.Keinerverstiumtdie Gelegenheit.Ich weiBkeinen,und meine Erfah-
rungist groB.Erstum die sechsteStundeverlierter dasVergntigenam Essen.
This motif might at first seem puzzling, a particularly absurd Kafka twist
on the custom of the "last meal" granted the condemned man, here taking
on a new degree of absurdity by being offered during the actual process of
the execution itself. It assumes a rather different aspect, however, in the
context of colonial rule. For it signals the absolute degree of control of the
occupier; his power extends not only to the sphere of military supremacy-
the power to kill-but in fact entails the mastery over the sources of both
life and death. In short, the colonizer holds sway over all the existential
and, as it were, metabolic depths of the colonized; "nourishing" him with
the very process of his own punishment, re-creating, regenerating him in the
image of his own annihilation and demise. For Kafka's prisoner, like the
Herero, is slated to metabolically imbibe-"auf seinem Leib"-the prini-

ciple of "heilsame Unterordnung" to the colonizer-"Ehre deinen Vorge-

setzten"-through a "rigorose Behandlung aller seiner Teile" in the "re-
markable apparatus," a procedure whose gruelling rigour might even meet
the exacting standards of a Freiherr von Trotha. Or as Paul Rohrbach, the
leading contemporary German apologist of imperialism, stated: "ein nach-
drtickliches Strafgericht wegen vorgefallener Widersetzlichkeiten" was at
the very heart of the success of any colonial project. Only in this way, Rohr-
bach said, would the natives "learn."82
It is in the metabolic depths of this learning process that a further
Korrespondenzverhiltnis of the Kafka and colonial "scripts" can be uncov-
ered: in the need for, as the officer expresses it, "die Vertiefung der Schrift":
(218-19)
Die Egge fingt zu schreibenan;ist sie mit der ersten Anlage der Schriftauf
dem Rtickendes Mannesfertig,rollt die Watteschichtund wilzt den Korper
langsamauf die Seite, um der Egge neuen Raumzu bieten. Inzwischenlegen
sich die wundbeschriebenenStellen auf die Watte,welche infolge der beson-
deren Priparierungsofort die Blutung stillt und zu neuer Vertiefungder
Schriftvorbereitet.Hier die Zacken am Rande der Egge reigen dann beim
weiterenUmwilzen des Kdrpersdie Wattevon den Wunden,schleudernsie
in die Grube, und die Egge hat wieder Arbeit. So schreibtsie immertiefer
die zwilf Stundenlang.
This unceasing act of inscription closely matches the particularly unrelent-

ing nature of colonial conquest.83It can be attributed to the need not only
to uphold a power and a sway once established over the subject populations,
but in fact to continually deepen and expand it. For in the typical colonial
relationship, the indigenous populations-should they survive-do not
simply exchange one set of masters for another, their traditional elites for
the Europeans, remaining otherwise intact, as might be the case in a more
conventional form of conquest. Rather, their whole previous way of life
itself is ended, their existing cultures and traditions effaced, the very fabric
of their social and pyschological existence forever rent; indeed, their very
sense of time and space is altered.84As is the case for Kafka's prisoner, the
demands of the colonial masters are such that, for the colonized, night be-
comes day, and sleeping becomes waking. They are made landless and
homeless in the territories they once inhabited, are forcibly "proletarian-
ized," and have, reduced to mere sources of physical toil, their life-energies
sucked from them in labour processes which are often bewildering, endan-
gering, and unfamiliar, and at rates of exploitation which-perhaps the
most dark, enticing secret of the colonies for the new industrial and profit-
driven dynamos of Europe-do not even allow for the physical reproduc-
tion of their labour power. In many colonial occupations-porter, planta-
tion, mine and railway worker-the levels of mortality for the work force

418 Paul Peters
were typically between 10 and 20, at times even as high as 50 and 75%; as
high or higher than would be usual for soldiers in a wartime combat zone,
and this, it should be emphasized, not only under the harrowing circum-
stances of Leopold's plundering and waste-laying forays into the Congo
basin, but under so-called "normal" conditions of work and exploitation."85
In this sense too, the colonized live under that "state of exception"
which Benjamin stated to be the norm of history.86And if Kafka is noted
for his literalization and materialization of the metaphor, his probing of the
chasmatic recesses of words, then one might be tempted to identify, as the
unspoken linguistic background of the "procedure" in his story, the German
verb schinden. For it encompasses the metaphoric sense of the misuse and
abuse of human beings, as well as the original literal sense of the skinning
and slaughter of an animal, to make use of its flesh and hide:87"Es war ein
grol3er Aufbau" (208), it is said of the apparatus, in words reminiscent of a
construction project, a "great work": for the "great work" of colonialism,
whether of exploration and "discovery," or in the subsequent construction
of railways, mines, harbours, and plantations, was above all a "labour" of
compulsion and nameless toil. Revealingly, the "wichtige Arbeit," at which
Kafka's hapless prisoner has so grievously failed, is the work of unques-
tioning obedience. And the fate he is scheduled to endure, the endless
laceration of the skin, resembles the effects both of the typical colonial
"punishment" and of the typical colonial "labour," toil. For under colonial
conditions-Strafarbeit is a frequently used term-the boundaries between
"work" and "punishment" themselves are fluid: work was punishment, and
punishment was work. In this way, the condemned man in Kafka's story
gives up his life energies to sustain the proud "Bau" of the apparatus, as so
many did to sustain the splendid plantations, railways, and mines of empire.
Or as Adam Hochschild quotes the description of a typical Congo scene:88
A file of poor devils, chainedby the neck, carriedmy trunksand boxes to-
wardsthe dock,"a Congo state officialnotes matter-of-factlyin his memoirs.
At the next stop on his journeymore porterswere needed for an overland
trip:"Therewere about a hundredof them, tremblingand fearfulbefore the
overseer,who strolledby whirlinga whip.For each stockyand broad-backed
fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies,their skin worn
out [.. .] seamed with deep scars,covered with suppuratingwounds[...] No
matter,they were all up to the job.
Thus, work and punishment alike rendered the skin of the colonial popu-
lations, in a contemporary critic's phrase, to "Hackfleisch."89
For it lies in the nature of colonialism, as of power itself, to know no
limit: either in the "overwhelming force" of its external, or its internal grip.90
In this "totalitarian" extreme of control and intervention into flesh and
pysche, in this willingness and capacity to reduce its human objects to pure

defencelesscorporealexposure,and finally,in its sustainedand unrelenting

crushingof their previouslife-worlds,colonialismwas a form of conquest
in need of constantre-enactment.Much like Kafka'sapparatus,before its
functioningis finally disruptedby the unexpected "no" of the explorer-
scholar,colonialismtoo is a perpetuummobile,whose work can never rest.
In this way,the colonized may be fairlysaid to experience"death"in life,
and "life"as death; and, in fact, to die not once, but many times, as indi-
viduals and collectivities,as cultural,historical,and politicalsubjects.It is
part of the genius of Kafka as a writer to have given us the unthinkable
image of that manifolddeath. "Nurso kann geschriebenwerden [...] mit
solcher vollstaindigenOffnungdes Leibes und der Seele."91In this quality,
indeed, the colonial and the Kafka "texts"are one.
1The author would like to express his gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD),
and the Faculty of Arts of McGill University, particularly its Dean, Carman Miller, for travel
stipends which made possible the archival research which went into the preparation of this
article. It forms part of an ongoing program of research on Kafka and colonialism which I
hope to present in book form soon.
2In this light, is interesting to read the following assertion in one of the most emphatic
traditional theological and allegorical interpretations of In der Strafkolonie: that Kafka's story
"nichts mit irgendwelchen konkreten Vorgingen zu tun hat," "denn ein System wie das in der
Strafkolonie gab es zu seiner Zeit nicht." This casual liquidation of the historical world then
opens the way for the allegoricist and transcendentalist interpretation of the narrative. It is
indeed doubtful whether such an interpretation can be sustained in the face of the concrete
historical background which can be elucidated for Kafka's story. Ingeborg Henel, "Kafkas In
der Strafkolonie," in V. J. Gtinther et al.(ed.), Untersuchungen zur Literatur als Geschichte
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973) 480-503, 480 and 493.
3Giinther Anders Kafka-pro und contra (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1951) 10.
4Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Gesammelte Werke II/III (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1973) 284-85.
5The repressed history of Europe and North America's colonial past is thus in the truest
sense a "skeleton closet" of the political unconscious. It is in this sense not surprising that
Kafka should open it, as he does all such forbidden chambers. As Benjamin wrote of Kafka's
world: "Die Gerichte sind auf den Dachboden. Vielleicht nihert man sich ihrem Verstindnis,
erinnert man sich, dab Boden der Ort der ganzlich ausrangierten, vergessnen Effekten sind.
Vielleicht ruft die Notwendigkeit, sich diesen Gerichten stellen zu miissen, ihnliche Geftihle
hervor, wie der Zwang an jahrelang verschlossene Truhen oder Koffer mit Effekten heran zu
gehen." Walter Benjamin, Benjamin uiberKafka (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 128.
6On this see Walter Mtiller-Seidel's invaluable and pathbreaking study, Die Deportation
des Menschen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), which provides much of the contemporary historical
and cultural background to Kafka's readings and awareness, not only on the question of penal
colonies, but of the colonial world generally. Klaus Wagenbach's two 'contextualizing' editions
of In der Strafkolonie. Eine Geschichte aus dem Jahre 1914 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1975 and
1995) also provide a wealth of useful contemporary background and source material, without
actually broaching the issues discussed here.
7Within Kafka's own text, a displacement occurs which would seem to illustrate that
peculiar relationship of disclosure and concealment through the name which is so often op-
erational within his narrative: eight times, the word "Kolonie" is used as the appellation for
the politity in question, the word "Strafkolonie" occuring by comparison on only six occasions.
Thus, one could say that "colonialism" is constantly being named as the referent of the text,

420 Paul Peters
but in such a way as to remain subliminal and suggestive, and not be consciously registered
by the reader (or perhaps even by the author himself). As we shall see below, Albert Memmi
once defined the fundamental experiential content of colonialism as a system of Draconian
punishments; this is perhaps particularly noticeable in German language usage, with the com-
pounds "Strafzug," "Strafgeld," "Straflieferung," "Strafexpedition," "Strafarbeit,""Strafzahl-
ung," "Strafgericht" occuring with regularity in the routine narrative of colonial documents,
quite apart from the thorny juridicial question of colonial "Strafen" which played a large,
perhaps even the pre-eminent role in the contemporary German debate on colonialism. As
he had once entertained the notion of compiling an anthology of his stories with the title
"S6hne," Kafka had also contemplated a similar anthology with the title "Strafen." For an
author of such interests, the colonial world was indeed a natural object of study.
8It is Sander Gilman, along with Mtiller-Seidel, who has perhaps most persuasively
argued this case in his study Franz Kafka: the Jewish Patient (London: Routledge, 1995) 81-
83. For the purposes of the present study, the key differences of Kafka's Strafkolonie from an
historical penal colony-particularly from Devil's Island-are the following. Firstly, both the
soldier and prisoner in Kafka's story are of a clearly different cultural and linguistic background
to that of the officer-his French, which he shares with the explorer-scholar, is unfamiliar to
them, the classic linguistic situation of a colony, but not a penal colony; secondly, it is not the
case that the prisoner was first sentenced and then deported to the Strafkolonie; his sentencing
and punishment only take place within the colony itself-he himself was a "servant" and
"soldier" who instantaneously became a "prisoner," a logic strange to a penal colony, but
profoundly characteristic of the status of the "captive" populations, the subject peoples of
colonialism.
9Aim6 C6saire, Discours sur le colonialisme. (Paris: Pr6sence Africaine, 1955); Frantz
Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs. (Paris: Seuil, 1952); Les damnis de la terre (Paris: Maspero,
1961); Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonist, pricidd du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: J.J.
Pauvert, 1966 [1957]); references are to the French editions; where directly cited, a standard
English translation has been used. I have myself attempted an initial parallel reading of Kafka
and the anticolonialist texts in my paper "Zeremoniell der Gewalt: Kolonialismusdarstellung
bei Kafka und Albert Memmi," World Congress of the Internationale Vereinigung fir Ger-
manistische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (IVG), Vancouver, August 1995.
Anthony Northey, Kafkas Mischpoche (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988) 19-30.
"
Two recent articles have made important tentative links of Kafka, and this particular
Kafka text, to colonialism: Karen Piper: "Kafka and the Machine: A Post-Colonial Reading
of Kafka, Journal of the Kafka Society of America 20 (1996). 42-54; John Zilcosky: "Of Sugar
Barons and Banana Kings: Kafka, Imperialism, and Schaffstein's Grtine Blindchen," Journal
of the Kafka Society of America 20 (1996). 63-75. See as well Elisabeth Boas, Kafka: Gender,
Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 146-47. On the
"textual traveler" Kafka in a more classically Orientalist, far Eastern context see also Rolf J.
Goebel, Constructing China. Kafka's Orientalist Discourse (Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1997).
12What is perhaps particularly noteworthy is that Kafka should have encompassed in
his narrative both dimensions of colonial domination: the highly subtle and suggestive discur-
sive aspects and the raw brute force, the sheer materiality of colonial violence. Indeed, we
may say that a particular quality of Kafka's text is that it encompasses not only violence and
discourse, but their many points of synergy: the violence done by discourse, the subtle and
insidious effects of violence. In its concern for discourses, postcolonial theory, be it through
Edward Said's pathbreaking book on Orientalism, or in the later work of Homi Bhabah and
Gattary Spivak, initially tended to neglect this defining moment of colonialism, and its classic
analysis in the work of Memmi, Fanon, and C6saire; they are perhaps only now being fully
rediscovered and recognized in postcolonial criticism. On this compare two recent reliable and
instructive surveys: Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998) 53
and 179; and Bart Gilbert-Moore, Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1997) 63 and 160. If,
as Loomba states (p. 2), colonialism represents one of "the most complex and traumatic re-
lationships in human history," then Kafka's Strafkolonie is a text to plumb the depths of that
relationship.
13 On colonial narrative see Fanon, Damnis, 18; also Edward Said, Culture and Impe-

rialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) 131 and passim; on colonialism as geographic
explosion see Said, 8-10 and 221-224. Fanon is quoted from The Wretchedof the Earth (New
York: Grove Press, 1966) 41; here as elsewhere I have on occasion slightly modified the English
translations from the French.
14Fanon, Earth, 41.
15In der Strafkolonie is quoted from the volume Drucke zu Lebzeiten in the critical
edition Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebiicher Briefe Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe (KA), Hans-Gerd
Fischer, Michael Miuller,Malcolm Pasley (eds.) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982-) 204. All
Kafka quotes are taken from this edition; In der Strafkolonie is henceforth cited with the
relevant page number in parentheses in the main body of the text.
16Fanon, Earth, 41.
17Anders 40-41.
18CarlPeters, Magazin fir Litteratur, January 24, 1891; the clipping of the relevant
newspaper article can be found in the archives of the Reichskolonialamt, Bundesarchiv Berlin,
R 1001/763, 116-17. Henceforth cited as Reichskolonialamt, with the relevant file and docu-
ment number.
19GustavNoske, Kolonialpolitik und Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1914) 158-59.
20Memmi, Colonist, 34; quoted according to the English edition of Memmi's work, The
Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965) xxiii.
21Fanon, Damnis, 40.
22Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1998) 89-90.
23"European conquest and governance entailed a great deal of violence"-this is also
the conclusion in a standard work of two Western historians not without sympathy for the
colonial administrations. L. H. Gann/Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa 1884-1914
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977) 242.
24E. D. Morel, The Congo Slave State (Liverpool: Routledge, 1903) 8.
25 See in this light, representative for many, the discussion of the text in what used to
be the standard work, Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka (Bonn: Athenaeum, 1958) 220-226; in
this discussion, the transfiguring discourse of the officer is also taken for the reality of the
story. In contradistinction to this, the Ivory Coast Germanist David Simo has recently insisted
on the character of the "apparatus" as characteristic of the workings of an invasive European
technology in a colonial setting: "Interkulturalitatitund Asymmetrie: Koloniale Situation und
Kommunikationsprobleme bei Franz Kafka." World Congress of the Internationale Vereini-
gung ftir Germanistische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Vancouver, August 1995. (Manu-
script) The dilapidation of the machine is not itself an argument against its technical prowess;
the imposing logistical problem of the supply of replacement parts to keep the Europeans'
fearsome technology running is itself a characteristic colonial motif.
26Hilaire Belloc, quoted in Hochschild 90.
27Memmi, Colonisi, 130; Colonized, 93.
28JennySharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text(Min-
neapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 79.
29Memmi, Colonist, 96 and 99.
30Hochschild 300.
31Memmi, Colonis&,21.
32In his original preface to Peau noire, masques blancs, Frangois Jeanson quotes from
this letter (Fanon, Peau noire, 12): "Cette phrase est inexplicable. Je cherche, quand j'6cris de
telles choses, Atoucher affectivement mon lecteur [...] c'est-8-dire irrationellemnt, presque
sensuellement [...] Les mots ont pour moi une charge. Je me sens incapable d'6chapper Ala
morsure d'un mot [...]" And later on, Fanon expressed his wish to make "couler [.. .] s'il le
fallait, sous la lave ahurissante des mots couleur de chair tr6pidante." It is exactly this which
Kafka's unsettling imagery here too accomplishes.
33 Sir Walter Raleigh, quoted in Loomba 78.
34This is not to assert that indigenous peoples otherwise live in a state of paradisiac or
primeval innocence. For the category of "virginality" is historically a category of the trans-
gressor, not of the transgressed: it is the symbolic importance attached to "deflowering" which
creates virginity and not vice versa, be it in the relationship between the continents, or between

422 Paul Peters
the sexes. The colonized do not regard the territories they inhabit as "virgin lands"; they are
regarded as such by the colonizer, who will indeed then touch them as they have never before
been touched. A medium of such touching is Kafka's apparatus.
35Thus, at the end of the story, the officer will disrobe and die with the machine, in this
way, through a type of imperial Giotterdiimmerungcum Liebestod, finally realizing that longing
for corporeal union manifest in all his loving attentions and ministrations from the beginning
of the narrative. "Wenn es schon frtiher deutlich gewesen war, daB er die Maschine gut
verstand, so konnte es jetzt einen fast bestirzt machen, wie er mit ihr umging und wie sie
gehorchte. Er hatte die Hand der Egge nur gentihert, und sie hob und senkte sich mehrmals,
bis sie die richtige Lage erreicht hatte um ihn zu empfangen; er fasste das Bett nur am Rande,
und es fing schon zu zittern an..." (241-42)
36Cisaire 14.
37Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (GS) I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-1989)
245.
38Memmi, Colonist, 132; Colonized, 95.
39PaulRohrbach, Die Kolonie (Frankfurt am Main: Rtitten und Loening, 1907) 82. See
also Memmi, Colonise, 86-92.
40Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt,
Brace Jovanovich, 1973 [1951]) 215.
41The motif of the all-punishing Old Testament and Jewish God is beloved of a partic-
ular sort of Kafka commentary; see Ingeborg Henel 482, who sees in the Old Commander a
kind of Moses figure; while for Erwin R. Steinberg, he is nothing less than Yahweh himself:
"Die zwei Kommandanten in der 'Strafkolonie'," in Marie-Luise Caputo-Mayr (ed.), Franz
Kafka: Eine Aufsatzsammlung (Berlin: Agora, 1978) 144-153, 150. With regards to classical
Judaism and its attitudes to human sacrifice, such assertions are nothing short of scandalous:
fundamental to Judaism and Judaic Law since the Akedah-the refusal of the sacrifice of
Isaac-is the strict interdiction of any form of human sacrifice. In Judaistic terms, the "ap-
paratus," far from being a medium of divine will, is thus, like Moloch, a medium of the sys-
tematic violation of divine Law, not the least of whose articles is the Fifth Commandment-
bequeathed the Jews by Moses himself. Among Kafka commentators favoring a religious
interpretation, Heinz Politzer is one of the very few to have pointed out this elementary fact:
Heinz Politizer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963)
106. There is every reason to believe, however, that this is just how it is perceived by the Jewish
sensibility of Kafka in his story. On the constitutive significance of the Akedah for Judaism
see Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969).
42Hochschild 136; Gann/Duignan 109.
43On colonial boundlessness see C6saire 18; in the specific case of German colonial
history, the innumerable scandals involving the excess of power typically centered on summary
execution for minor acts of disobedience, torture, prolonged exposure to the elements, and
sexual abuse. A good overview is given by Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (New
York: Avon, 1991) 623-25.
44"At the zenith of its physical power in the world, Europe was at the nadir of its moral
capacity to lead it, or even to reform itself." V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind (Boston
and Toronto: Little Brown, 1969) 29. Kafka's officer is perhaps the most telling literary portrait
of this zenith of power and nadir of morality.
45 On the logic of implicit, as well as explicit racial "marking" see the essays in Henry
Louis Gates Jr. (ed.), Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1986), particularly that of Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of the Mani-
chean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature, 78-106. On the
particular marking of the prisoner in Kafka see also Piper 47.
46"Fanon,Damnns, 7; Earth, 32.
47The classic accounts of the "speechlessness" of the colonized and their linguistic bi-
furcation are Fanon, Peau noire, 33-52, and Memmi, Colonist, 143-148. On the linguistic
situation of the colonized and its mirroring in Kafka's narrative see also Piper 47. The French
of the Strafkolonie, as the language of two great overseas colonial empires of the period, may
be seen, in terms of the historical context, as the language of "Dreyfus"-of racialist victim-
ization and exclusion-as well as of "Leopold," of the boundless exterminatory pillage of the
Congo.

48 Compare particularly the descriptions of their speech and behavior on pages 236 and
239.
49 On the "zoological" and dehumanized status of the colonized see Fanon, Damnis, 11;
Memmi, Colonist, 121.
5Thus, in Richard Kandt's popular African travelogue of the period, which Kafka will
have been familiar with, the author devotes much time and energy to a discussion of "Ras-
sezeichen," of "die allzu vollen Lippen und die etwas zu breit geratene Nase des Negers." A
document of the Reichskolonialamt typically characterizes the indigenous population as living
in "Faulheit" and "Stumpfsinn." Richard Kandt, Caput Nili (Berlin: Reimer, 1919 [1905]) 209;
Reichskolonialamt R 5378/53-55.
51Fanon, Damn/s, 11; C6saire, 19.
52Memmi, Colonist, 130; Colonized, 92.
53Fanon, Damnks, 6.
54This photographic record has been assembled for German colonial history in an ex-
emplary fashion by Uwe Timm, Deutschlands Kolonien (Munich: Verlag der Autoren, 1981).
55The Simplicissimus cartoon is reproduced in Pakenham 315. On the expression "bula
mitundi" see E. D. Morel, Red Rubber (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920) 92. On the
"stream of virginal products" see Heinrich Schnee, Die koloniale Schuldliige (Munich: Buch-
verlag der Stiddeutschen Monatshefte, 1927) 53; also Rohrbach 50-51.
56On the script as holy, see Henel 487; on the script as hieroglyphic and as Writ, see
Politzer, 105-6; on the script as Thora and Talmud, see Steinberg 146-47.
57Noske 19; Hochschild 71-2.
58Benjamin, GS I, 696.
59In an authoritative modern study of slavery, one of its defining features is listed as
being corporeal punishment, as the slave's being "answerable with the body for all offences";
the same applies to the colonized. Victor Schoelcher, an abolitionist crusader against colonial
slavery in France, similarly discussed the institution as being fundamentally defined by the
procedure of corporeal punishment. The susceptiblity to corporeal punishment is indeed one
of the most time-honored and wide-spread distinctions of the "high" and the "low" in human
society. Kafka's text is also very much about this distinction. The quick and ready application
of corporeal punishment to the indigenous populations, irrespective of social rank, was, in
addition to being one of the most brutal, one of the most culturally disorienting features of
colonialism. See on slavery and corporeal punishment M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern
Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1980) 93; also Victor Schoelcher, Eslavage et colonialisation
(Paris: PUF, 1948) 49; on corporeal punishment in colonies generally see also Loomba 53.
6Letter to Max Brod of 12.2.1907, Briefe, (KA), 50. See also Zilcosky 63. The vision
of colonial towns as centers of his future fame was perhaps prophetic in a deeper sense than
the young Kafka could have realized.
61Said, 203; see also 167. On the "laziness" of the native see also Fanon, Damnes, 11,
and Memmi, Colonist, 117, Colonized, 79: "Nothing could better justify the colonizers' privi-
leged position than his industry, and nothing could better justify the colonizeds' destitution
than his indolence. The mythical portrait of the colonized therefore includes an unbelievable
laziness, and that of the colonizer, a virtuous taste for action."
62 Hochschild 127.
63Fanon, Damnis, 19, Memmi, Colonisi, 127.
64 See Fritz Ferdinand Miller, Kolonien unter der Peitsche (Berlin: Riuttenund Loening,
1962) which provides an exhaustive and reliable documentation on the basis of the original
archival documents, to which the following is much indebted. For an example of the contem-
porary-and highly critical-German discussion of Priigelstafe in the colonies see also Franz
Giesebrecht, Die Behandlung der Eingeborenen in den deutschen Kolonien (Berlin: Reimer,
1897).
65Noske 181-85; Adolf Riiger, "Der Aufstand der Polizeisoldaten," in Hellmuth
St6cker (ed.) Kamerun unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin: Rtitten und Loening, 1960)
141.
66Dernburg Commission, Bericht, Reichskolonialamt 300/35-53.
67 Mtiller 98; the procedure may be viewed in Hochschild, in the section of illustrations
following 116.

424 Paul Peters
68 Reichskolonialamt 5379/29. The discussion the Priigelfrage occasioned in colonial cir-
cles is reproduced from the archival documents in Miller 75, 98, 99-111. As a novelist, Uwe
Timm has also featured this discussion in the chapter "Von der milderen, menschlicheren und
doch pidagogisch nachhaltigeren Wirkung des Tauendes" from his own anticolonialist classic,
Morenga. Uwe Timm, Morenga (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1983) 151-157.
69Memmi, Colonist, 34 and 90.
70On the history of Deutschsiidwest see two standard accounts: Helmut Bley: Koloni-
alherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Siidwestafrika (Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968); Horst
Drechsler, Siidwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968).
Also useful is Drechsler's Aufstinde in Siidwestafrika (Berlin: Dietz, 1984). A recent instruc-
tive article on German colonial fiction centering on Southwest Africa, with many parallels to
the questions at issue here, is David Kenosian, "The Colonial Body Politic: Desire and Vio-
lence in the Works of Gustav Frenssen and Hans Grimm," Monatshefte 89/3, 1997, 182-195.
71In his declaration to the Herero people, Trotha, in addition to repeatedly proclaiming
his own greatness-"Ich der grol3e General," "Der grof3e General des mhchtigen deutschen
Kaisers"-stated that "die Herero sind nicht mehr Deutsche Untertanen." This statement
might seem odd in the mouth of a German supreme commander, whose job it after all was to
return insurgent natives to the metropolitan fold. In fact, it amounted to nothing less than a
sentence of death-by immediate execution, or, even more savagely, by starvation and des-
sication in the desert. For the Herero were now made outlaws in their own country. Not only
in his megalomania and unrelenting faith in the patriarchal chain of command does Trotha
curiously ressemble Kafka's officer. For him too there could be no "life" for the colonized
outside of subservience, and the very attempt to step outside of this subservience, outside of
the chain of obedience and command, meant death-the identical political situation to that
of Kafka's Strafkolonie. Von Trotha, Reichskolonialamt 2089/7. Reproduced in Drechsler
(1984) 80.
72Field Marshal von Schlieffen to Reichskanzler Bernhard von Btilow. Reichskoloni-
alamt 2089/3-4. The documents of this and the ensuing discussion are reproduced in Drechsler
(1984) 86-87.
73VonTrotha, Reichskolonialamt 2089/5-6.
74Von Schlieffen, Reichskolonialamt 2089/3-4.
75Memmi, Colonist, 91.
76 Rohrbach 95; Loomba 125. On page 53 Rohrbach clamors for "Menschen, Menschen,
immer wieder Menschen," so that these can then produce "Massenrohstoffe fiurdie europiiische
Industrie"; this consumption of "Menschen" for the sake of "Massenrohstoffe" has a particu-
larly ominous ring in the light of the practices in Leopold's Congo, or those in Deutschsiidwest.
In Kafka's Strafkolonie, a "Mensch" himself is reduced to such a "Rohstoff" not simply for,
but by a product of European industry.
77VonTrotha, Reichskolonialamt 2089/4-5.
78The term occurs for the first time at 214 in Kafka; compare Von Schlieffen, Reichs-
kolonialamt 2089/3-4.
79 Leutwein, Reichskolonialamt 2113/89-90.
80oNoteonce more the similarity in terminology: Kafka 213, "dem Mann die Kette an-
legen," and Von Trotha, Reichskolonialamt 2089/138-39, who wants the surviving Herero "an
die Kette gelegt."
s1Von Tecklenburg, Reichskolonialamt 2118/ 153-54. See also Drechsler (1984) 131.
82Rohrbach 64.
83The "marking" taking place in Kafka's Strafkolonie has been linked to Nietzsche's
discussion of punishments in the Genealogie der Moral. It also has its direct equivalencies in
the history of colonialism. After the crushing of the rebellion in Southwest Africa, one colonial
bureaucrat advocated the practice of issuing each native with a so-called "Merk des Kaisers,"
with more than one Kafka resonance: "Die Freizuigigkeit wird aufgehoben und Passpflicht
eingeftihrt [...]. Der Eingeborene erhalt als Legitimation eine Blechmarke mit eingepresster
Nummer, Bezirksbezeichnung und Kaiserkrone [.. .]. Allmihlich wird man dazu gelangen, die
so numerierten Eingeborenen [...] zu registrieren und ihren Aufenthalt ihr Tun und Treiben
genauer zu tiberwachen." The colonial phantasy is one of total control, as of total "marking"
of the indigenous subject. On Kafka and Nietzsche, see Richie Robertson, Kafka:Judaism, Poli-

tics, and Literature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985); on "Merk des Kaisers," Von Teck-
lenburg, Reichskolonialamt 1220/28-35. See also Drechsler (1968) 146.
84Compare Gann/Duingan, 127-28, 152; Hella Winkler, "Das Kameruner Proletariat
1906-1914, in Stacker 243-86, particularly 269-279; Loomba 81.
85Winkler,275; 280-86; Hochschild 279-80. For the French Congo, a direct statistical
correlation has been established between the troops' expenditure of cartridge shells and the
productivity of local rubber extraction, a telling commentary on the nature of the colonial
relationship. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grandes concessionaires
(Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972) 181.
86Benjamin GS I, 697.
87Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch IX (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1899) 190-
196, lists among others the following possible meanings of the verb schinden, all with relevance
to the present context: "die haut abziehen, plagen, bedrticken, aussaugen, eine grausame art
der hinrichtung, die haut durch rohe bertihrung verletzen, pliindern, berauben, tibervorteilen."
88Hochschild 119.
89Debate in the German Reichstag, quoted in Rtiger 144.
90This led Hannah Arendt in her study to regard European colonialism in Africa as
one of the direct predecessors and paradigms of the "totalitarian" regime. Helmut Bley later
convincingly applied this thesis to the history of German Southwest-Africa. Bley 206 and 261.
Diary entry of 23. September 1912; Tagebiicher (KA), 467.


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Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism

Author(s): Paul Peters

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Franz Kafkas In der Strafkolonie-"In the Penal Colony"-is a text with-

Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4, 2001 401

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Admittedly, however, this is Kafka: and this type of absolute disclo-

Wiederumaus einem Erkenntnisgrund. Nimlich, um die mit den Namen au-

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of the century: the anticolonialist classics of Frantz Fanon, Aim6 C6saire,

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As material force, the "apparatus" of the story fuses a classical colo-

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colonial conquest: from rivergoing steamboat to oceangoing steamship,

Whateverhappens,we have got

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insurgency designed to 'strike terror' in the rebellious native."28Indeed,

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Ernest Renan's imperial vision of Europeans as "a race of masters and

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explorer-scholar about the Old Commander. "Jawohl," comes the officer's

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couple fulfills many of the stereotypes of alterity, of a merely proto- or

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it is to eradicate him.51For the colonized-and this in a matter touching

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self have been involved in guilefully prearranging it.?7This, clearly, is in-

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acceptance or non-acceptance, the affirmation or negation of the entire

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ciple of "heilsame Unterordnung" to the colonizer-"Ehre deinen Vorge-

This unceasing act of inscription closely matches the particularly unrelent-

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defencelesscorporealexposure,and finally,in its sustainedand unrelenting

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