As we walked down the narrow staircase, Cohen told me that Franz Kafka had spent the last months of his life in this house on Grunewaldstrasse. From the space above and heading downward, Cohen said, Kafka had built his final literary structure: a burrow. At the center of the burrow, Cohen told me, is the castle keep, a “vaulted and beautiful chamber” to house the stores. The keep is the fortress within the fortress, the refuge, the place of last resort—that is to say, Cohen said, it’s the symbol of freedom and its opposite: imprisonment, confinement, loss. Beyond the castle keep are the ramparts, constructed with blood and suffering, then the long passageways and ventilation holes, then the labyrinth—built in baroque fashion to confuse and disorient—and finally the doorway of moss leading up to the world above. The system is elaborate, intricate, and as a defensive structure, he said, a gorgeous failure. The first attack, the first breach of even the outermost line of defense, would expose its weakness, the shoddiness of its design, the limits of its builder’s vision. Or perhaps it would simply prove the radical impossibility of the goal, Cohen concluded, absolute security, or a type of selfhood only possible in a dreamless sleep. Cohen, Daniel Cohen, I thought as we descended, if one of us were the inhabitant of the burrow, the other would be the one whose distant sound would give rise to the inhabitant’s panic, the one who would provoke the inhabitant not only to question everything, but to consider fleeing from the burrow into the wild fate of the forest. But who—Cohen or myself—is this second entity, this unseen and inscrutable being who issues a sound like a swarm moving through the earth as it gets closer and closer, closer to overtaking the burrow, to filling its passageways and laying waste to the stores? Who? Who! My god, a bulb flickered, and shadows stretched as we moved down the staircase. We came to a door at the bottom. Cohen knocked.

The Kirschbaum Lectures (pp.8-9)