KAFKA’S “A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” 1919) has often been read as a parody of Jewish assimilation into German culture, in part because it was first published in Martin Buber’s acclaimed Jewish monthly Der Jude. In this reading, the text would suggest a problematic convergence between racial antisemitism and a Zionist-inspired critique of assimilation. The parable of the African ape that becomes an almost-human European intimates that biological differences set the Jews apart despite all their efforts at acculturation. The fact that “A Report” ends by describing the ape’s nightly encounters with a creature of his own kind, a half-tamed female chimpanzee, underscores this parallelism. In the antisemitic imagination of the time, interracial marriage and procreation set the limit to Jewish assimilation or reveal that assimilation has been a sham to begin with. Symptomatic of this trend is Oskar Panizza’s Der operirte Jud’, in which a Jew undergoes a series of grotesque medical operations to acquire a perfectly Germanic body and soul, only to see his fabricated identity unravel on the night of his wedding to a Gentile woman. Does Kafka endorse this kind of racial thought? Ritchie Robertson suggests that Kafka’s reflections on intermarriage in a letter to Milena Jesenská indeed put him in proximity to such racial antisemites: “There is a disturbing resemblance to the contemporary novels of Bahr, Bartsch, and even Dinter which likewise warned against marriages between Gentiles and Jews.”

In this essay I suggest an alternative interpretation of Kafka’s ambiguous participation in racial discourses that sanction “intra-racial” love and reject “interracial love.” Allusions to racial mixing and non-mixing appear not only in “A Report” but also in some of Kafka’s programmatic writings that present modern Jewish culture as an emanation of the Jewish “blood community.” I discuss several in detail in the latter part of this paper. My central argument is that all of these texts are an expression of racial melancholy rather than racial ideology. The term racial melancholy, which expands on Judith Butler’s concept of gender melancholy, sheds light on the peculiar erotic dimension of “A Report.” As I will show, the ape’s transformation is fueled by his foreclosed desire for the human: he attempts to become what he must not desire. I also suggest a critical potential of melancholy that is alluded to but never fully elaborated by Butler.