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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY) where the light from the entrance is no longer visible and the light from the exit is so faint that one must search for it constantly, and it constantly disappears, and where, in addition, even which way is which is uncertain. The passengers experience the resulting situation, however, in many different ways, so that no overall picture develops that would prompt either the group or any individual stuck in the tunnel to action: All around us, however, in the confusion of the senses or in their intensified sensibility, are monstrosities and, depending on the disposition or injuries of the individual, a kaleidoscopic game that is either entrancing or enervating. “Depending,” writes Kafka: people in each other’s proximity, indeed piled up on each other, have lost the ability to join to create a picture of their own situations despite having been dealt blows by the same fate: though the picture fragments wind up adjacent to each other, they can nonetheless form either horrific or beautiful images, bearing no meaning at all, so in consequence, they lead to no relevant action. Kafka is first to recognize and record the dissolution of humanity’s ethical order and the orderly-seeming operation of evil that captivates us all, but the euphoria that this process continually generates renders us, ourselves, also the system’s devoted, even celebratory, supporters. “Honor your superior!” — this is the sentence they sew into the skin of the condemned man of the short story The Penal Colony because fundamentally this is the only law that has remained in effect, and this is the one that supports the system and renders it operational. The horrors that happen (before our eyes and to us) are no accident but normality itself. Amerika, however, devotes itself to the course of the suit against cosmic misfortune. Karl Rossmann, exiled from Prague to America, sees the Statue of Liberty, greeting the immigrants with its torch raised high, as the goddess of the Last Judgment waving her sword, inciting him to the speedy prosecution of his suit. There is scarcely a better stage for the suit’s prosecution than the theater to the extent, of course, that the performance is not in the least “entrancing and enervating,” thus an event that switches off our sensitivity to the world. The theater takes all of us into the Kafkaesque tunnel and certainly repeats the cataclysm that has taken place, unobserved, within us. Its explicit intention is to show that all of us are the devoted, happy captives of our situation, and then it prosecutes the suit with the most precise formulation possible. But we viewers are not seated on the defendant’s bench, not at all: we sit in the judge’s chair. We must pass judgment. Given the artificially created law court of the theater, we must enforce our realizations without delay. * 243 +
