DUE TO THE PREVALENCE OF unidentifiable settings and impersonal characters, Franz Kafka's writings have long lent themselves to ahistorical interpretations. In a recent review of new biographies of Kafka, for instance, we read that “it is notable how few critics and commentators have seen Kafka as essentially a product of his time and milieu.” This tendency has led many to interpret his writings as symbolic or allegorical, an association that was initially established by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who often emphasized their theological signification. Successive literary scholars who have sought to break with this metaphysical approach have often inadvertently replaced one set of figures for another. Wilhelm Emrich, for instance, was explicitly critical of interpretative models that emphasized the presence of allegories and symbols, but he himself argued that Kafka's writings continued the tradition of German Idealism and its search for universal truth. While psychoanalysis was fashionable in literary criticism during the 1960s, Walter Sokel proposed that Kafka's works evoke the oedipal father-son conflict, albeit one in which the son has an inferiority complex. Instead of situating Kafka within the cultural and literary history of early twentieth-century Europe, critics like these have been inclined to elucidate the figurative meaning of his works. Although no longer dominant, this interpretative tendency continues to be practiced today, as can be witnessed by the recent claim that “Kafka is the quintessential allegorical poet of prose.”

One early critic of the ahistorical approach was Theodor Adorno, who asserts that “the hermetic character of Kafka's writings offers the temptation not merely to set the idea of his work in abstract opposition to history—as he himself frequently does—but in addition to refine the work itself out of history with ready profundity.” Adorno suggests here that literary scholarship which interprets Kafka's works as a universal commentary on the human condition evades fundamental questions about the way that their formal innovation interacts with the social reality of the time. Due to the intervention of Adorno and others, there has been a gradual revision of the early image of Kafka as a symbolic or allegorical author. In its place is a more nuanced understanding of Kafka's relationship to his time and place. Adorno continues, “Yet it is precisely this hermetic quality that links it to the literary movement of the decade surrounding the First World War.”