On July 30, 1908, Dr. Franz Kafka walked into the building housing the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, located on 7 Na Porici Street in Prague, not far from the city center. The young jurist immediately began working as an assistant in the legal department. After a trial period he became a clerk in the technical department and finally was promoted to secretary in the accidents department. In 1922, he was forced to retire as a result of complications from a lung disease.

Kafka's years of working at the "office" are commonly depicted as a dark, desolate period that - of course - weighed heavily on his literary creation; but these were, in fact, highly productive years. It was during his employment that Kafka learned the secret of the "machine": His job required him to analyze technological work environments, investigate work accidents and identify difficulties and contradictions in the national insurance laws. On his own initiative, he studied at Prague's Technical University, regularly read professional journals, and kept abreast of developments in manufacturing, transportation and safety. As part of his job he traveled to factories and quarries, and attended meetings with industrialists and workers. His office was frequented by people suffering from nervous conditions and various disabilities, victims of workplace accidents and refugees of the Great War.

The Worker's Accident Insurance Institute was established in 1889 and primarily entrusted with implementing the government's policy on mandatory insurance laws in industry and transportation. Evidence of Kafka's areas of expertise can be found in articles that appeared in the institute's yearbook. These are included in a new and comprehensive edition of the "Official Writings" ("Amtliche schriften"), which were published a few years ago by Fischer press in Germany. The edition includes some 30 texts attributed to Kafka, alongside letters, lectures and memos that he wrote.

Kafka's main focus was the work accident. Many of the writings discuss the classification of factory dangers, safety regulations and ways to prevent accidents. Others concern the issue of the "mandatory insurance law" and the fate of disabled war veterans. Texts Kafka left unsigned, but which appeared in the institute's yearbook, examine: "The Extent of Mandatory Insurance at Building Sites" (1908), "Protection Against Industrial Accidents on Wood Processing Machines" (1909), "The Classification of Dangers in Wartime" (1916) and the issue of quarry accidents (1915).

His contributions to essays on traumatic neuroses and on the establishment of the Rumburg Frankenstein Sanatorium (1916) likewise appeared in the German press in Bohemia without mention of his name. The pieces published in the institute yearbook were usually the collaborative effort of clerks, editors and translators. Thus Kafka got to experience collective writing, which is expropriated from individual ownership, stripped of its creator's name and swallowed up by an anonymous corpus.

To this should be added the imprint of bureaucratic discourse: Kafka's office writing had to use objective statements and functional arguments; it relied on technical and legal terms, and only rarely featured free prose. But despite his objections to anonymous institutional texts and his overt reservations concerning the bureaucratic machine that manufactured dreary reports, professional writing provided Kafka with an insight into the literary horizon of alienation. It is a genre that abandons the kingdom of the "I," the space of biographical representation, and surrenders itself to the "he," to the third person which is "anyone" - that is, the signifier of a collective body. Thus professional writing marks the advent of a space of "political concern," which Kafka noted in his diary entry on "minor literatures" (1912). Something of the depth of this writing experience is perhaps reflected in the anonymous characters of his literary works, the heroes of his later novels, who have no surnames.

The technical world opens up before Kafka as a site of dangers, accidents and traumatic neuroses. This experience is evident in the article on "Protection Against Quarry Accidents," which Kafka co-wrote. The discussion begins with a preface concerning the human factor in accidents, and elaborates on the question of how quarry accidents might be prevented. Writing about one of the granite quarries in Bohemia, which he toured while researching the report, Kafka describes it as "an abandoned, desolate field of ruins." He notes the quarry's ramshackle structure, the garbage heaped in the field, the unsecured tracks and trolleys, the boulders threatening to fall, the unmonitored collection of groundwater and other irregularities.

It is no accident then, as some of Kafka's readers have noticed, that the end of "The Trial" is dramatized by the narrator in "a quarry, empty and abandoned." There, in modernity's field of ruins, Joseph K. is murdered by his escorts. The final scene of "The Trial" may attest to the "form and matter" Kafka brought from the Bohemian granite quarry into his literary world. The clerk's hopes of making some improvements in the industrial world are replaced by a literary nightmare of murder in a quarry. Moreover, would we not be justified in seeing the quarry in "The Trial," with its ruins and piles of rubble, as an allegory for Kafka's own literary estate, left behind as a field of fragments, of gaping, imperfect texts?

The workplace accident enters into the realm of literary creation, and appears in the novel "The Man Who Disappeared" (also known as "Amerika"). Karl Rossmann, who works as an elevator operator at the Hotel Occidental, hears from his friend Therese the story of how her mother died in an accident at a building site. The mother, an exhausted worker trying to make a living through odd jobs, stumbles on a pile of bricks on one floor of the unfinished building, falls into a pit and drags a heavy wooden board after her. The accident, which Kafka set in New York, might have originated in his professional notes on the failures, safety hazards and negligence found at construction sites back home.

However, Kafka's literary canvas is devoid of the pedagogical messages and element of hope that can be found in most of his official essays. The accident in America is no longer the product of poor safety procedures or mere negligence; it is an expression of the individual's new state of being. The accident reveals the "secret" of existence in the technical age. Kafka's professional texts explore the catastrophic aspects of the work environment and the destructive effects of machines on the body. To this, his writing adds the debate of the obscure, undeciphered world of law. The insurance laws of the kingdom of Bohemia, Kafka writes in his article on "The Extent of Mandatory Insurance at Building Sites," are abstract, vague, nearly illegible legal formulas with which only a handful of people are well-acquainted; even they are frequently unable to interpret these laws or implement them. The kingdom's laws leave room for contradictory interpretations of the extent of insurance and the boundaries of its validity.

The legal world, Kafka writes, is plagued by inconsistency and a lack of uniformity; it is not "the principle," but "the case" that is the decisive factor. In an article on "The Inclusion of Private Automobiles in the Mandatory Insurance Law" (1908), he comments that the law "lacks precision" and "leaves a broad space for interpretation." Yet, Dr. Kafka, the legal scholar, still believed problems concerning the law could be solved: Expansion of the extent of its application and its consolidation could, in his opinion, resolve the contradictions, conflicts and clashing interests that characterized the law's interpretative space. But this "solution," as we know, was something Kafka the author kept out of his literary work, where the question of the law is transformed into enigmas, such as that of the "gate of the law" before which an ordinary person stands, a gate that keeps opening and shutting.

Something of the complexity of legal discourse is also evident in the short story "In the Penal Colony," which portrays one of the oddest machines in the history of modern German writing. The apparatus of the penal colony works in the service of the law, whose scripts are said to be unreadable, "a labyrinthine series of lines, crisscrossing each other in all sort of ways. These covered the paper so thickly that only with difficulty could one make out the white spaces in between." These sketches, written by the colony's previous governor, are the hieroglyphics containing the sentences of the accused. The penal laws of the colony, like the insurance laws of the Kingdom of Bohemia, are arbitrary: They are binding and valid, but incomprehensible. In both cases, the law is illegible. And this quality of the law is finally revealed in the "workplace accident" of the officer, who makes himself the last victim of the apparatus: After his sentence has been established and he is strapped in, the torture and sentencing machine begins to operate.

Soon, however, the machinery disintegrates with a deafening noise: Its top part flies off, wheels break loose and hurtle in all directions. The machine malfunctions, and instead of inscribing the officer's sentence on his body, it thrusts its needles without any logic. The work accident is what causes the machine to "open up" and reveal itself. Thus does the "soul" of the machine come to light. Accidents, in Kafka's literary world, are a self-reflexive event. The machine ceases to function and looks inward. And so within the world of literature emerges insight into the hidden, destructive element of the technical age.

In 1916, at the height of World War I, Kafka took part in composing a handful of articles about traumatic neuroses and the establishment of a sanitarium for German soldiers in Bohemia. These are not distinctly professional writings, but rather propagandist pieces by the institute - appealing to the "patriotic sentiment" of Bohemia's German citizens and stressing the "national duty" of contributing to the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled veterans. However, the texts clearly attest to the therapeutic discourse in which Kafka was involved at the institute, and to what the war meant for him.

For "the world war is the war of the nerves," and the soldier returning from the front is a neurotic body afflicted with shock, tremors, neural disorders and paralysis. Traumatic neurosis is a generational experience that, according to the article, is shared not only by soldiers, but by a multitude of citizens injured in work accidents and by the mechanical jolts of train rides. Kafka proposes that these diseases and their complications (hysteria, epilepsy, speech disorders) be treated in an institutional setting, at a public facility established in an open area outside the city, near the woods, in proximity to gardens and natural springs. There, in nature, might the neurotic body be healed of the shock inflicted on it by the machine.

In May 1917, the Rumburg Frankenstein Sanitarium was opened in Bohemia; it was defined as a "public treatment facility for the neural illnesses of German warriors." That Kafka, himself a great lover of such facilities, played a part in its establishment is undeniable. Three months later he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, after which sanitariums became his second home. Over the years his work at the institute decreased, and Kafka all but desisted from office writing. His professional essays on legal issues continued, however, to haunt his work. His adventures at work resonate through the endless novel "The Castle" and throughout the rest of his literary estate.

© Copyright 2008 Haaretz. All rights reserved