Kafka's “A Country Doctor”: Why you have to read this - not just as a doctor

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These days, many in Germany are wondering why tried and tested family doctors are not allowed to give a vaccination, which is often injected in vaccination centers by young doctors who have just finished their studies.

In connection with this, the literarily educated person thinks of the adjective

, which is often used to denote completely inscrutable bureaucracies, as Franz Kafka depicts in his novels "Das Schloß" and "Der Prozess".

Franz Kafka also wrote a unique poetic description of the family doctor profession and its role as an often helpless representative of the rational at a time when religion is fading, but older magical practices live on or even experience a renaissance in godless space.

Much of the ostensibly surreal story "A Country Doctor" from 1918 sounds astonishingly familiar.

It has often been noticed recently that virologists take on the role that theologians used to play.

This fits Kafka's sentence about the villagers: “They have lost their old faith;

the pastor sits at home and tears the vestments, but the doctor should do everything. "

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But in this text, in which the doctor as a breathless “I” lines up sentence by sentence and which has the highest density of apostrophes in world literature, there is also talk of the mistrust that the “agile rabble of patients” brings towards the orthodox medical practitioner.

The country doctor - urged by his parents - has to lie naked in bed with the young patient at whose bedside he was called - a kind of shamanic ritual that would be perceived as abuse today and which the boy made no promises about even then : “Instead of helping, you narrow my deathbed.

I prefer to scratch your eyes out. ”In 2021 he would tweet this, but without the demanding subjunctive II“ scratched ”.

Melody of life

The doctor replies with the expert's self-assurance that suddenly returned: “Young friend, your mistake is: you don't have an overview.

I, who have been to all the hospital rooms far and wide, tell you: your wound is not that bad. ”The wound that is being talked about - the size of a palm and with huge worms in it - is interpreted by literary scholars as a symbol of tuberculosis that pandemic of the time that finally wiped out Kafka.

However, Kafka did not

write

one of the most beautiful sentences

“Ein Landarzt”, but

this story and its role model, his uncle Siegfried Löwy, who worked as a doctor in the village in Moravia: “And he lives in the country, indefatigable, content , just like a quiet, rustling madness that one takes to be the melody of life can make you satisfied. ”Therein lies the whole secret of life, the characters as diverse as identities, half-mad families in lockdown and“ lateral thinkers ”still consolation and today Stability offers: to mistake the quietly rustling madness for the melody of life.