In a largely unnoticed prose poem from 1920, which was given the name “Nachts” by Max Brod when he published it in 1946 in Wedding Preparations in the Country with the Schocken publishing house in New York, the lyrical I of the poem appears as a guardian who, in his reflections on the sleeping people he watches and on his guardianship, addresses himself as a you. The loneliness of the guard that causes him to start a soliloquy, is reminiscent of the loneliness of the writer Franz Kafka. A ‘little acting’ of the lyrical I within the scene of the guardianship in the ‘camp in the open’ that helps to imagine the people into “feste[] Betten”, “unter feste[s] Dach”, “auf Matrazen, in Tücher[], unter Decken”, (‘in[to] firm[] beds’, ‘under firm[] roof’, ‘on mattresses, in cloths[], under blankets’), opens a second intradiegetic layer. Before this ‘self-deception’, the people sleeps “wie damals einmal und wie später in wüster Gegend (...) unter kaltem Himmel, auf kalter Erde, hingeworfen wo man früher stand” (‘as once then and as later in a desert region (...) under a cold sky, on cold earth, thrown down where one used to stand’). “Wie damals” (‘As once then’) might refer to the – as the desert region implies – first settlement of Eretz Israel after the Exodus, “wie später” (‘as later’) could refer to an event in Jewish history such as the return from Babylonian Exile, point to modern Zionism, or even see into the future. Since the poem is self-referentially framed by a scene of poetic contemplation – the beginning, “Versunken in die Nacht. So wie man manchmal den Kopf senkt, um nachzudenken. So ganz versunken sein in die Nacht” (‘Sunk in the night. Just as you sometimes lower your head to think. So be completely absorbed in the night’), and the self-address at the end “Warum wachst Du? Einer muss wachen, heißt es. Einer muss dasein” (‘Why are you awake? Someone has to watch, they say. One must be there’), point in this direction –, the character of the guard is not stable. It tilts into the outer frame, the extradiegetic figure of the poet who falls into one with the self-deluding lyrical I from within the second intradiegetic layer. In consequence, the scene of the guardianship appears as the true self-delusion, the Wachen, the watching tilts into mere staying awake, since it is deprived of its object, the people. Even more so, the staying awake is pushed into the direction of waiting, be it a messianic waiting, or a simple delay of the journey, of the nomadic wandering that becomes the intradiegetic scene of the poem. The self-deceit of the guard in the desert, who imagines his people into houses, could be the wish for an established future settlement in Eretz Israel, but at the same time appears to be the reality of the writer Franz Kafka in the diaspora, in the city of Prague. It seems as if the poem itself replaces the people and becomes a consolation for the bourgeois writer, who stays awake without neccessity, since he has nobody to watch, and nevertheless attempts to justify his existence as someone who is awake, ‘so (...) completely absorbed in the night’. In Kafka’s Zionist poem the waking dream of Zionism is exchanged with the bourgeois activity of writing.