KAFKAS MACHTPHANTASIEN
KAFKA’S FANTASY ABOUT POWER

Summary/Abstract: Power has become a far-reaching, structuring theme of thought in the literature of the 20th century. For Kafka the concept of power is “sociologically ambiguous”: among the transitions of the mythenes in the third octave-book, interspersed with aphorisms and epistemological theories, there is an entry from October 20, 1917, which has a fairytale begin “There was once“ and it ends similary: ‘’There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people. They always stood by each other. If, for instance, one of them had made a stranger, someone outside their community, unhappy in some rather scoundrelly way—that is to say, again, nothing scoundrelly, but just what is usual, just the normal sort of thing—and he then confessed to the whole community, they investigated the case, judged [72] it, imposed penances, pardoned, and the like.

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