In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers he said that the Jewish question or “the despair over it was their inspiration—an inspiration as respectable as any other but fraught, upon closer examination, with distressing peculiarities. For one thing, what their despair discharged itself in could not be German literature which on the surface it appeared to be,” because the problem was not really a German one. Thus they lived “among three impossibilities . . .: the impossibility of not writing” as they could get rid of their inspiration only by writing; “the impossibility of writing in German”—Kafka considered their use of the German language as the “overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property, which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out”; and finally, “the impossibility of writing differently,” since no other language was available. “One could almost add a fourth impossibility,” says Kafka in conclusion, “the impossibility of writing, for this despair was not something that could be mitigated through writing”—as is normal for poets, to whom a god has given to say what men suffer and endure. Rather, despair has become here “an enemy of life and of writing; writing was here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his last will and testament just before he hangs himself.” 16