N“IETZSCHE AND KAFKA” is a significant but many-sided topic. That Kafka was always a Nietzschean from the beginning is confirmed by Max Brod, when he tells us about their first meeting. They indulged in a philosophical argument, in which Brod took the side of his favorite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, while Kafka took Nietzsche’s side. Kafka was a Nietzschean from way back, and he remained one throughout his work in many differing ways.

Their relationship is by no means simple. Nothing is simple where those two — Friedrich and Franz — are concerned. There are several distinct aspects and areas in which Kafka’s writing relates to Nietzsche’s in a very striking way. I have counted at least five distinct areas where Kafka texts show significant analogies to Nietzschean thought.

I cannot do justice here to more than one of them, but I should at least like to list the others before I deal with one in detail.

The area that is first and foremost fundamental to both authors I should like to term the Dionysian. The most relevant Nietzschean text here is The Birth of Tragedy, but Dionysianism, as I have tried to show elsewhere, remains fundamental to Nietzsche in all phases of his thought. The second area of at times stunning agreement deals with the ironization of asceticism and ascetic values. A third common area links the birth of the continuous individual to the infliction of painful suffering as mnemo-technic instruction. A fourth and fifth area center around a complex and problematic view of “truth” and what Nietzsche termed “the spirit of gravity.”

Having sketched this rough idea of the multiplicity of Kafka’s relationship to Nietzsche, I should now like to concentrate on what I have termed the Dionysian. According to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian orgies of the ancient world celebrated the oneness of being by impersonating it in orgiastic dances. As mentioned before, even though Nietzsche never explicitly returned to the topic in his later work, he remained faithful to the belief in the oneness of being throughout his thinking life. In the four central ideas of his later thought — the Overman, the Eternal Return, the war upon ascetic ideals, and his aesthetic approach to existence — Nietzsche remained a faithful Dionysian. All existence is one, and individuation is ultimately illusionary.