Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer

Kafka wrote Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer in the spring of 1917, during the war, and left it unfinished. His China is imaginary, built from a few books; the story is really about any vast empire — Austria-Hungary, the world, God — and about the impossibility of knowing those who rule us. Kafka published only one passage from it in his lifetime, the parable "A Message from the Emperor." This retelling condenses the story in the narrator's own voice; the parable is given in full. The translation is new.

The Great Wall of China was finished at its most northerly point. The building was carried forward from the south-east and from the south-west, and the two halves joined there. But this system of piecemeal construction was also followed, on a smaller scale, within each of the two great armies of labour, the eastern and the western. It was done like this: gangs of some twenty workers were formed, each of which had to build a stretch of the wall about five hundred yards long, while a neighbouring gang built a stretch of the same length towards it. But when the two stretches met, the wall was not continued from the end of this thousand yards; instead, the two gangs were sent off to build somewhere else, in a quite different region. And so of course many great gaps were left, which were filled in only slowly and bit by bit, and some of them, it is said, only after the building of the wall had been officially declared complete. Indeed, it is said that there are gaps that have never been filled in at all — though this is only one of the many legends that have grown up around the building, and which no single person, at least with his own eyes and by his own measure, can verify, because of the vastness of the work.

One might think at first that it would have been better, in every way, to build continuously, or at least continuously within each of the two halves. The wall, as was commonly proclaimed and known, was meant to protect us against the peoples of the north. How can a wall protect that is not continuous? Not only can it not protect; the building itself is in constant danger. Those parts of it left standing alone in deserted regions could easily be destroyed again and again by the nomads, all the more since those nomads, alarmed by the building, changed their camping-places with incredible speed, like grasshoppers, and so perhaps had a better view of the progress of the work than we, the builders, had ourselves.

And yet the building could not have been done any other way. To understand this one must consider the following. The wall was to be a protection for centuries; the most careful building, the use of the wisdom of all known ages and peoples, and an unbroken sense of personal responsibility in the builders were therefore indispensable. For the rough work, it is true, ignorant day-labourers could be taken from among the people — men, women and children who offered their labour for good wages; but the leadership of every four labourers required a man trained in the art of building, a man capable of feeling, deep in his heart, what was at stake. And the higher the task, the greater the demand. Such men there were — if not as many as the work could have used, still a great number.

They had not taken up the work lightly. Fifty years before the first stone was laid, the art of architecture, and especially of masonry, had been proclaimed throughout the whole of China, the land that was to be walled in, as the most important of the sciences, and everything else was recognised only in so far as it was related to it. I can still remember very well how, as small children, scarcely able to walk, we stood in our teacher's little garden and had to build a kind of wall out of pebbles, and how the teacher, gathering up his robe, ran against the wall, knocked it all down, and scolded us so for the weakness of our building that we ran away howling in every direction to our parents. A tiny incident, but characteristic of the spirit of the time.

I was lucky, inasmuch as when I passed, at twenty, the last examination of the lowest school, the building of the wall was just beginning. I say lucky, because many who had reached the highest learning available to them before that time could find nothing to do with their knowledge for years, and wandered about uselessly with their grand architectural plans in their heads, and went to the dogs by the thousand.

But those who finally came to the building as leaders, even of the lowest rank, were really worthy of their task. They were masons who had thought deeply about the building, and who did not cease to think about it; who felt, with the first stone they laid in the ground, that they were part of the wall. Such masons were of course driven not only by the desire to do the most thorough work, but also by impatience to see the building at last standing complete in its perfection. The day-labourer did not know this impatience; he was driven only by his wages; and the higher leaders, even the middle ones, saw enough of the many-sided growth of the work to keep their spirits strong. But for the lower leaders — men intellectually far above their outward task — other provision had to be made. One could not, for instance, have them laying one stone on another for months or even years on end in some uninhabited mountain region hundreds of miles from their homes; the hopelessness of such diligent work, which even in a long human life would never be complete, would have driven them to despair, and above all made them worthless for the work. That is why the system of piecemeal building was chosen. Five hundred yards could be finished in about five years; by then, of course, the leaders were as a rule quite exhausted, and had lost all faith in themselves, in the building, in the world. So, while they were still exalted by the jubilant feasts for the joining of a thousand yards of wall, they were sent far, far away; on their journey they saw here and there finished pieces of wall rising; they passed the quarters of high leaders, who gave them badges of honour; they heard the cheers of new armies of labour streaming in from the depths of the land; they saw forests being felled to provide scaffolding, mountains being hammered into stones; they heard in the holy places the hymns of the pious praying for the completion of the building. All this calmed their impatience. The quiet life of home, where they stayed for a time, strengthened them; the respect enjoyed by all builders, the humble faith with which their reports were heard, the trust of the simple, silent citizen that the wall would one day be finished — all this tightened the strings of their souls. Like children who hope for something forever, they took leave of their homes; the desire to work again at the people's work grew irresistible. They set off sooner than they needed to; half the village went with them a long way. On all the roads there were groups, pennants, flags; never before had they seen how great and rich and beautiful and lovable their country was. Every fellow-countryman was a brother for whom one was building a protective wall, and who would thank one for it with all he had and was, all his life long. Unity! Unity! Breast to breast, a dance of the people, blood no longer shut up in the meagre circulation of a single body but rolling sweetly, and yet still returning, through the whole infinite breadth of China.