"Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" (German: "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse") is the last short story written by Franz Kafka.
The story was included in the collection A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler) published by Verlag Die Schmiede soon after Kafka's death.
They value these gatherings the most when times are the hardest, and Josephine remains influential in the community even though her performances sometimes attract the attention of the many enemies of the mouse people and lead to an attack from which she is always rushed to safety.
She is initially missed and looked for, but the narrator comments that, in the end, she has only hurt herself by running away, since the mouse people were able to survive before she was alive and will now go on without her, at first with only their memories of her songs, and later without even those.So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while Josephine, for her part, delivered from earthly afflictions, which however to her mind are the privilege of chosen spirits, will happily lose herself in the countless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we pursue no history, be accorded the heightened relief of being forgotten along with all her brethren.
The artist demands too much, failing to recognize the asceticism or extra burden that has to be placed somewhere, simply by her having her role and investing time and energy into it.
[4][5] In Raunig's book, the relationship between Josephine's singing and the daily life of the mouse folk entails both deterritorialization and reterritorialization, concepts found in the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari.
Specifically, the allure of Josephine's song is a concentrating, reterritorializing force, while the daily life of the mouse folk involves constant movement or deterritorialization.