Savage Travel: Sadism and Masochism in Kafka’s Penal Colony

Abstract

Early readers of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”) decried its shocking, perverse explicitness. As Hans Beilhack wrote in the Münchner Zeitung in 1916, Kafka’s story was sadistic; its author was a “libertine of horror.”¹ Otto Erich Hesse, writing in 1921 in the Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde, took Beilhack one step further, claiming that Kafka and his readers were “repulsive” sexual miscreants: “the vileness of the human animal that turns itself on and goes into heat because of such tortures—reported as a matter of course—can only produce disgust.”²

“Yes, and then came the sixth hour! It was impossible to grant all the requests to watch from close up. The commandant in his wisdom decreed that the children should be given priority; I, of course, by virtue of my office, could always be close at hand; often I would be squatting there with a small child in either arm. How we all drank in the look of transfiguration on the tortured face, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance of this justice, finally achieved and already fading! O comrade, what times those were!”

—The officer from “In the Penal Colony”