Beyond the Uncanny: Weiner’s War and Kafka’s Message
Beyond the Uncanny: Weiner’s War and Kafka’s Message

Summary/Abstract: This article presents a close reading of Richard Weiner’s story “Kostajnik” (1916), which portrays a Czech officer’s emotional tumult as his Austrian unit approaches Serbian forces on the mountain of Kostajnik. This mountain functions in the story as a symbol of the uncanny that, to an extraordinary degree, anticipates Freud’s famous essay “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny 1919). Yet Weiner transforms this symbol in a way that goes beyond the Freudian uncanny. A comparable shift is discernible within Kafka’s short text “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft” (An Imperial Message, 1919). This article proposes that such a move beyond the interpretive categories one might expect to structure these texts constitutes a shared feature of Kafka’s and Weiner’s modernism.

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