Kafka's strangest story: The Penal Colony

Metamorphosis is Franz Kafka's most famous story but "The Penal Colony" might be his weirdest (which is saying something) or even his best (saying a lot); in fact Shocken chose it, not Metamorphosis, as the title story their Kafka collection back in the '60s or so. It's really a horrifying story, so strange and gruesome and surreal: none of the characters is named, just the Officer, the Explorer, the Soldier, the Commandante, the Prisoner. The Explorer is welcomed as a distinguished guest at the Colony (where is this colony? who knows? - interesting that the character is called the Explorer and not the Traveler, for example); the Officer spends a good deal of time describing to him the horrifying machinery that the colony uses for executions - machine with a "harrow" or system of blades that "writes" the prisoner's sentence on his skin over and over till he bleeds to death. Horrifying just to think of this torture, and what makes the story so strange is the proud, yet matter-of-fact way in which the Officer explains this machine. Equally horrifying, the Explorer just listens, doesn't much react. Gradually, the Explorer becomes more discomfited, and then the story gets even weirder, as the Officer laments that the new Commandante isn't really sold on this execution machine, it's a legacy of the old, much lamented Commandante. OK, so what does all this mean? In part, it's Kafka's meditation on the intrinsic horrors of our social and political systems - not just capital punishment, but imprisonment itself, and even war and combat: if an "explorer" were to come to our planet and we would politely explain that when two nations are in conflict we arm one another and kill on the ground, the sea, from planes and rockets, until one nation submits - how crazy would that sound? It's also, like all of Kafka, some kind of surreal exploration of the psyche, of his own psyche - the sentence inscribed again and again on the body some kind of tortured sexual guilt perhaps? Also, for any one living after Kafka's generation it's an oddly prescient look at the systematic mass executions of Nazi Germany - the harrow-machine a version of the gas chambers, which the Nazis so scrupulously and grimly documented.