AM I A CIRCUS RIDER ON 2 HORSES?” Kafka concludes a letter to Felice Bauer on 7 October 1916, and adds with regret: “Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.” (“Bin ich ein Cirkusreiter auf 2 Pferden? Leider bin ich kein Reiter, sondern liege am Boden.” [F 720]). The circus seems to defy even the basic rules of balance, while Kafka, trying to establish a precarious equilibrium between his everyday life and his writing, time and again loses his footing.

Kafka regularly patronized the Prague varietés and cabarets (Wagenbach 155) and was an avid reader of two journals on circus culture, Artist: Central-Organ des Circus, der Varietébühnen, reisenden Kapellen und Ensembles, and its Austrian counterpart Proscenium (Bauer-Wabnegg 1986, 10). Well-informed references to the popular art form of the circus and its various types of performances pervade his literary writings, notes, and letters. In the diaries and the Oktavhefte, he mentions aquatic pantomime — which had been introduced by Ernst Renz in 1891 and had also been a great success for the Busch circus — and notes his admiration for the great juggler “K” and for the acrobatic skill of a contortionist. In “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist) and Der Verschollene, he emphasizes the inclusive aspect of the circus institution, which welcomes all kinds of different artistic skills: “Ein großer Zirkus mit seiner Unzahl von einander immer wieder ausgleichenden und ergänzenden Menschen und Tieren und Apparaten kann jeden und zu jeder Zeit gebrauchen” (L 269; “A large circus with its enormous traffic in replacing and recruiting men, animals, and apparatus can always find a use for people at any time,” CollS 228). Kafka’s Hunger Artist is modeled on the human skeletons exhibited in sideshows (Bauer-Wabnegg 1990, 374). The anthropomorphized ape Rotpeter in “Bericht für eine Akademie” (Report to an Academy) recalls the enfreaked bodies and people exhibited before the Berlin Anthropological Society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the case of Krao, a putative ape-girl who was purported to be the missing evolutionary link between nature and culture, was discussed in the popular journal Die Gartenlaube in 1888 and put on show at the Frankfurt Zoological Gardens in 1884 and 1894 (Rothfels).