SOURCE: Vaughan, Larry. “Franz Kafka's ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’ through an Hasidic Prism.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 51, no. 2 (2001): 151-58.

In the following essay, Vaughan employs Hasidic tales to come to an understanding of Kafka's parable “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft.”

Das stärkste Mittel, auf die himmlischen

Sphären einzuwirken, ist das Gebet.

Alexander Eliasberg¹

Schreiben als Form des Gebets

Franz Kafka²

Faith was fire [for the Ba'al Shem Tov], not sediment.

Abraham Joshua Heschel³

I am undertaking the illumination of Kafka's “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft,”⁴ suggesting shared elements with the Hasidic tales of Alexander Eliasberg's collection, Sagen polnischer Juden,⁵ that Kafka held in his library and that evinced “Gebrauchsspuren,”⁶; and also particularly elements shared with and disparate to a parable and tales from Martine Buber's two collections, Die Legende des Baalschem and Die Geschichte des Rabbi Nachman, ihm nacherzählt,⁷ indicated critically, hence knowledgeably, in a letter by Kafka, four years before he...