The Snowy Desert in Kafka’s ‘A Country Doctor’ and Other Non-Places in Modernity

The article discusses Marc Augé’s reservation of the concept of non-places to supermodernity in his seminal work Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. This could imply a striking underestimation of the importance of non-places in modernity and modernism, furthered by a simplified dichotomy between hypermodernity and modernity. Unfolding a number of counter-images, examples of non-places in modernity and modernism, the article focuses on the desert as an important metaphorical non-place. Special attention being given to this (un)topos in the late Kafka and most particularly to a comprehensive reading of “A Country Doctor” (“Ein Landarzt”) in a historical and literary context, the article also points out striking examples of the desert as a non-place in modernity in e.g. Goethe, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Spengler and T. S. Eliot.