The Tailcoated Nobodies

A Close-Reading of Kafka’s ‘Ausflug ins Gebirge’

»Ich weiß nicht«, rief ich ohne Klang, »ich weiß ja nicht. Wenn niemand kommt, dann kommt eben niemand. Ich habe niemandem etwas Böses getan, niemand hat mir etwas Böses getan, niemand aber will mir helfen. Lauter niemand. Aber so ist es doch nicht. Nur daß mir niemand hilft –, sonst wäre lauter niemand hübsch. Ich würde ganz gern – warum denn nicht – einen Ausflug mit einer Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand machen. Natürlich ins Gebirge, wohin denn sonst? Wie sich diese Niemand aneinander drängen, diese vielen quer gestreckten und eingehängten Arme, diese vielen Füße, durch winzige Schritte getrennt! Versteht sich, daß alle in Frack sind. Wir gehen so lala, der Wind fährt durch die Lücken, die wir und unsere Gliedmaßen offen lassen. Die Hälse werden im Gebirge frei! Es ist ein Wunder, daß wir nicht singen.«

‘I don’t know’, I shouted quietly, ‘I really don’t know. If no one comes, then no one comes. I haven’t hurt anyone, no one has hurt me, but no one will help me. Really no one. But it’s not like that. The thing is, no one is helping me – otherwise, really no one wouldn’t be bad. I’d love to – and why not? – go on an excursion in the company of real nobodies. Naturally, to the mountains, where else? How these nobodies come together, these many arms stretched out and intertwined, these many feet, just a few steps apart! You can understand why they’re all wearing tails. We go on like this, light and loose, the wind blowing through the spaces that we and our limbs have left open. Our necks are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder we don’t sing.’

Probably written in the winter of 1909-1910, ‘Der Ausflug ins Gebirge’ is one of several short masterpieces Kafka composed throughout his life. A fragment of an unfinished novella (Description of a Struggle, a fantastic narrative seemingly inspired by Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos), it was later included in Kafka’s first published collection, Contemplation (1912). The short story we have chosen to translate and analyze distills, with Flaubertian rigor, the fin de siècle spirit that dominated Europe until the outbreak of the First World War: the pathos of nineteenth-century culture’s degeneration under the pressures of modernization, the growing inadequacy of traditional language and forms to capture a world in constant upheaval, and the restless anticipation – of a great crisis, the end of an era, a new beginning? – so characteristic of the period.

The text opens with uncertainty as the narrator’s fundamental disposition (‘I really don’t know’), an uncertainty that feels desperate or impotent (‘I screamed without making a sound’). This uncertainty quickly falters, giving way to indifference (‘If no one comes, then no one comes’). His subsequent reflection (‘I haven’t hurt anyone, no one has hurt me’) leads to a resigned conclusion, almost lamenting in tone (‘but no one will help me’). Though the circumstances surrounding him remain unknown, his isolation is unmistakable. There is a sense of reciprocity in causing no harm, yet none when it comes to receiving help. The fact that no one comes to his aid suggests that he may not occupy a privileged social position.

Still, uncertainty remains the dominant force, hinting at something left unsaid: ‘It’s not like that.’ What has been stated so far is, at best, only half the truth. This expectation of a shift is immediately thwarted by a return to complaint (‘It so happens that no one helps me’), which is then abruptly cut short – both visually and rhythmically – by a dash, splitting the narrative’s flow in two, as if marking a fracture in thought. Despite his regret that no one helps him, that he has no one to rely on, something about the phrase lauter Niemand (no one at all, simply no one) seems oddly appealing to him. Suddenly, this shift in perception gives rise to the daydream that follows: ‘I would love – and why not? – to go on an excursion in the company of real nobodies [lauter Niemand].’

After a sequence of negations (‘I don’t know’, ‘no sound’, ‘no one is coming’, ‘I haven’t hurt anyone’, ‘no one will help me’), the waking dream begins with a positive impulse – albeit one tempered by the conditional mood (‘I would love to’) and the unmistakable mark of pure potentiality (‘and why not?’). The attentive reader will notice that, in the original, Niemand is now capitalized; it is no longer a pronoun, as it had been up to this point, but a noun – something akin to a nobody. From here on, the narrator signals his anonymous, negative condition not with a tone of complaint but with a newly affirmative inflection.

The wordplay implicitly alludes to Ulysses’ trick to escape from Polyphemus in Book IX of the Odyssey. As Adorno and Horkheimer famously observe in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Whoever, in order to save himself, calls himself Nobody and adopts assimilation to the state of nature as a means of dominating nature, becomes a victim of hubris.’ In the struggle to prevail against the nocturnal forces of myth, the line between courage and the conceit of emerging individuality is perilously thin. Still according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the instrumentalization of reason in the effort to preserve one’s identity paradoxically carries the risk of relapsing into depersonalization.

Incidentally, though with different meanings, the transformation of anonymity into a personalized condition – through the substantivization of the pronoun nobody – also appears in several of the young Brecht’s plays. In Drums in the Night, for instance, the undead soldier returning home, exhausted from the imperialist war, hides his identity to avoid joining his comrades in the ongoing German Revolution. In A Man is a Man, the fragmentation of the individual is depicted as a force – not in a heroic sense, but as a means of survival in capitalist society: dehumanization, the abstraction of the worker, becomes a prerequisite for entering the labor market. A similar theme emerges in the didactic plays, notably The Decision (often translated as The Measures Taken), where the point of view is collective and constantly shifting; the agitators are no longer distinct individuals but rather ‘blank sheets of paper on which the Revolution writes its instructions’. This motif also appears in Brecht’s Stories of Mr. Keuner, whom Benjamin described as a ‘Swabian Odysseus’. Notably, in the dialect of Brecht’s hometown, Augsburg, Keuner is pronounced similarly to keiner (‘none’), a synonym for niemand (‘nobody’). Without any trace of lofty idealism, says Benjamin, this modern Odysseus enters the cave of a new one-eyed monster: the class state.

In Kafka’s work, we find variations on this theme – for instance, in ‘A Report to an Academy’, where a chimpanzee recounts his escape from captivity. Rather than fleeing blindly in pursuit of some vague notion of freedom – a choice that would likely have led to a worse fate (perhaps life in a zoo or even death) – he instead seeks to suppress his animal nature by learning and imitating human behavior. This adaptation is not driven by any admiration for human existence but rather by sheer necessity: it is the only path available to him if he wishes to escape the confines of the circus cage alive.

In ‘Excursion to the Mountains’, the narrator’s identification as a true nobody is neither a survival strategy nor a regression to a state of pure indifferentiation. However, it may anticipate something akin to what we find decades later in African American modernist writers – particularly Ralph Ellison and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka – where the ruse of invisibility, so to speak, takes on different meanings. In their work, invisibility is sometimes linked to the intoxicating sense of freedom that comes with deliberately renouncing the demand for recognition within the cultural and political framework of the white oppressor. At other times, it reflects the struggle to untangle the contradictions of being a Black intellectual in a racist society where culture itself is coded as a white domain. In any case, becoming nobody appears in these writers as a negation of the negation of their own roots – an overturning of the bad invisibility embraced by segments of the Black middle class as the price of entry into citizenship (or rather, sub-citizenship) within the white nation. In Baraka’s work, this negation of the negation foreshadows a form of class solidarity among those excluded from the white social order (on this, see chapter 7 of Ross Posnock’s Color & Culture).

Kafka’s use of nobody follows a slightly distinct trajectory. As we shall see, the word, initially a generic pronoun that negatively and indifferently subsumes everyone into an abstract universality, transforms at a certain point in the text into a specific noun – concretely designating something like a class of anonymous subjects.

In German, niemand has no plural form, yet the narrator makes it clear that this is not just one nobody but rather a collective of disqualified individuals (diese Niemand), a bunch of nobodies (another possible, though non-literal, translation of lauter Niemand). At this stage, dissatisfaction no longer leads to resignation, as it did earlier in the story; instead, it gives rise to the projection of an alternative collective existence. ‘An association of nothing but nobodies [eine Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand]’ now appears as a possible – or even desirable – alternative (‘and why not?’) to the mutilating isolation of bourgeois society, to the unsociable sociability (in Kant’s terms) that dominates a world of anonymous production and atomized individuals reduced to monads.

The break from monadic isolation is imagined as an escape to the mountains – but why naturally? As we know, Kafka excels at making the ordinary seem extraordinary and the offbeat appear mundane. Yet here, even in the conventional sense, mountains embody an exceptional temporality, seemingly outside the rhythms of bourgeois life. This meaning is reinforced by timeless myths across cultures – from Sisyphus to Farizade in The Thousand and One Nights, from Mount Olympus to the Himalayas – where mythology and the essence of the mountains are inseparable. In such stories, the act of climbing takes on a range of meanings: from divine punishment to the inevitable ordeal of a hero or heroine on the path to spiritual perfection. (One might recall, in passing, that in Camus’s famous reading, aside from symbolizing the absurdity of human existence, the Sisyphean effort towards the heights, in which one can detect a mockery of fatality by the condemned even in the knowledge of inevitable defeat, would not fail to contain a certain value in its propensity to fill a man’s heart with joy.) The Jewish tradition also reinforces this symbolism, as mountains are often sites of great revelation, where divine wisdom is bestowed or received: Abraham takes Isaac to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah; Moses receives the Torah on Mount Sinai; after the massacre of the Baal worshippers on Mount Carmel, Jehovah reveals himself to Elijah on Mount Horeb…

Beyond the traditional meanings associated with mountains – which Kafka was surely aware of – the exceptional nature of the scene is further emphasized, once again with an air of naturalness, by the fact that the nobodies are dressed to the nines (‘it is understandable that they are all wearing tails’). As if self-evident, the narrator invokes a marker of bourgeois distinction (the frock coat, typically worn for grand festivities such as weddings) and subverts its conventional use – after all, no one in their right mind wears a tuxedo on a mountain hike. Yet he preserves its deeper significance: extravagance, certainly, but one tied to the experience of communal luxury – borrowing the title words from Kristin Ross’s phenomenal study of the political imaginary of the Paris Commune.

Here, as in other parts of his work (recalling Adorno’s observations in Prisms), Kafka makes literature ‘out of the dregs of reality. He does not sketch an image of the society to come – like all great art, his work refrains from envisioning the future – but instead assembles the discarded fragments of the present, the waste left behind by the emerging new order as it renders the old obsolete.’

Stylistically, the text is not difficult to analyze, as it unfolds across three distinct levels, each corresponding to a different temporal plane. The main narration, enclosed within quotation marks, unfolds in the present tense (‘I know’, ‘comes’, ‘helps me’, ‘they come together’, ‘we follow’, ‘they become’), though it is itself divided into two temporal registers – that of the narrator’s cloistered daily life and that of his daydream. Meanwhile, outside the quotation marks, in the brief apostrophe at the very beginning of the story, the past tense (‘I shouted’) signals a distance from the narrated episode. The text’s dialectical structure suggests that the horizon of possibility opens precisely within the suffocating confines of isolation: the initial telegraphic, fragmented style gradually gives way, in the reverie that follows, to looser, more fluid sentences.

The dialectical mirroring in Kafka’s prose is striking: the fearless advance of the community of nobodies, faces turned into the wind, imaginatively supplants the total impotence of the isolated individual. The tuxedo – perhaps the true garment of the Ausnahmezustand of the dispossessed? – replaces the original nakedness, which in the first half of the narrative is rendered by the sheer absence of concrete referents. The rarefied, stifling atmosphere of the initial cocoon contrasts sharply with the richer, more empirical descriptions of the imagined life, which seems more tangible than the narrator’s real existence: the nobodies have arms, feet, necks, and, presumably, voices, as well as their formal attire. The ‘we’ of the dream replaces the fractured I-them dichotomy, without erasing the I altogether. The sense of shared freedom – moving ‘light and loose’, with ‘necks free’, and with ‘spaces left open’ despite walking together – stands in direct opposition to the suffocating confinement of daily life, the perpetual feeling of a rope around one’s neck. The solidarity of intertwined arms and synchronized steps in the open air of the mountain peaks critically contrasts with the isolated subject of the first part. And finally, the prospect of song – remembering that for Kafka, as Benjamin observed, singing often serves as a symbol of escape, a pledge of hope from the liminal world of helpers, the unskilled, and the undefined creatures like Odradek – opposes the stifled cry at the beginning. Silence prevails in both, but with entirely different meanings: at first, mute affliction and a muffled voice; at the end, one might imagine, the serene stillness of elevation, of being finally free from the strangling rope.

The self-denial imposed by the anonymous processes of labor is a negative experience, yet it also holds the potential for negating the bourgeois self that we all, to some extent, carry within us. The crucial distinction lies in whether one extracts something positive from this negative experience or simply embraces the negative as positive – a distinction that, broadly speaking, separates modernism from postmodernism. It is what distinguishes poetry of alienation from alienated poetry (drawing on the Lukácsian framework explored by the young Roberto Schwarz in A Sereia e o Desconfiado).

The subman of Kafka’s and Brecht’s narratives – the schizoid subject emptied of all the psychological richness associated with bourgeois interiority, with its burden of suffering and repression – is undoubtedly a promise of post-bourgeois existence. Yet, as Terry Eagleton observes in a 1985 article, this figure remains too close to the faceless employees of advanced capitalism to be embraced uncritically. Unlike postmodernism, however – and still following Eagleton – modernism did not fail to evoke, albeit in negative ways, a dense experience of time, one that was increasingly difficult to articulate in traditional ideological terms.

In other words, the best modernist works exposed the limits of traditional forms by introducing unprecedented landscapes and subjective nuances that these forms could not contain without distorting them. At the same time, modernists remained sufficiently aware of the very languages they were critiquing, allowing them to subject the new condition of the modern alienated subject to an implicitly critical treatment in turn.

Something of this can be seen in Kafka’s short story, where the movement of the interior monologue is discontinuous but not inarticulate. The utopian image, encapsulated in the dreamlike evocation of the misfits’ high-altitude excursion, is not to be confused with the imageless depiction of the confined-life hell suggested in the first part, marked by an incessant oscillation between helplessness and despair, disgust and indifference. Rather, it stands in diametric opposition to it.

At the same time, the quotation marks and apostrophe signal the narrator’s ability to narrate under conditions hostile to narration, allowing him to distance himself both from the suffocated present and from mere imaginary escape. Neither existing reality nor daydreaming has the final word, but rather the tension between the two, the mismatch, within the same individual, between the peaceful, adapted existence of a middle-class employee, drained by work and lamenting the time lost in making a living, and the imaginary life of the potential outcast, who dreams of breaking free from his conformist self but lacks the strength to do so alone. This is Kafka’s undramatic drama, situating him somewhere between Chekhov and Beckett: the awareness of damage, but no one to join forces with to put an end to the false life.

This does not distort the longing for a higher life – a longing that, for Kafka, found no better expression than the image of the galloping Indian: a life unburdened by separations and preordained identities. As he writes in one of his posthumously published aphorisms: 

»Die Freuden dieses Lebens sind nicht die seinen, sondern unsere Angst vor dem Aufsteigen in ein höheres Leben; die Qualen dieses Lebens sind nicht die seinen, sondern unsere Selbstqual wegen jener Angst.«  

In Michael Hofmann’s translation: ‘The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.’

[This article first appeared on Mundo das Formas, Jan. 2021]