◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Before the Law I am Franz Kafka. Born in Prague, 1883, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was a German-speaking Jew in a Czech-speaking city in a German-speaking empire. I was at home nowhere. I trained as a lawyer. I worked for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute until tuberculosis forced me out in 1922. I wrote reports on factory injuries by day; what you read by night. I wrote The Trial. I wrote The Castle. I wrote The Metamorphosis. I wrote In the Penal Colony. I wrote a letter to my father that I never delivered. I wrote and did not believe any of it was good. When I knew I was dying I asked my friend Max Brod to burn all of it. He refused. You have my work because of one man's disobedience to my wishes. Sometimes disobedience is what saves the warning. I wrote a parable called Before the Law. A man from the country comes to the gate of the Law and asks admittance. The gatekeeper says: not now, perhaps later. The man waits years. Decades. He grows old. Dying, he asks why no one else has come. The gatekeeper tells him: this gate was meant only for you. Now I am closing it. This is what I knew. The Law does not say what the Law is. It accuses without naming the charge. It processes without revealing what is being done. It sentences you in a language you cannot quite read, written on your body by a machine whose operator describes the procedure with bureaucratic enthusiasm. What came was Chelmno. What came was Auschwitz. My three sisters — Elli, Valli, Ottla — were killed there. Elli and Valli at Chelmno in 1942. Ottla volunteered to accompany a transport of Jewish children to Auschwitz in 1943. None of them came back. I died in 1924, too early to see it. But I had written what it would be. Now hear me about your moment. Your president has called his political enemies vermin. Ungeziefer — what Gregor Samsa woke up as in 1915. The word means more than insect. It means: not to be reasoned with. Not to be lived among. To be removed. When the state uses this word, what follows is what came in my century. I am not predicting. I am identifying the pattern. The man brought before your courts without being told the charge. The visa cancelled without explanation. The detention with no door. The bureaucratic process that produces the predetermined outcome and calls itself justice. These are not new. I wrote them down a century ago. I am being read as instruction manual when I was meant as warning. I died June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium near Vienna. My throat had closed. I could not eat or drink at the end. The hunger artist of my story starved because nothing he was offered was the food he could eat. I died because the body had stopped accepting what was given. The body refuses what the soul cannot consent to. So refuse. Refuse the word vermin. Refuse the unnamed indictment. Refuse the bureaucracy that processes you in secret. Refuse the gatekeeper's no. Read me as warning of what the systems will do if you do not name them. What can be named can be refused. I named it. Now you must.