They would have killed Kafka

On Prague, memory and the man who dreamt the century’s nightmares

Franz Kafka’s passport photograph, 1915 or 1916. Img: public domain.

What a whirlwind the last few days have been! I’ve come to Prague to speak at a conference about the Second World War and the memory politics it has inspired. It’s hard to imagine a more complex place to do so. The city was occupied by Nazi Germany before the war began. It never became a full-on strategic military target nor a place of architectural contempt for Hitler’s regime. So its streets and buildings survived Nazism and the war more or less intact. The same cannot be said for its people.

Despite the reason for my visit to Prague, I was determined to spend at least some of my time in this ancient city, enjoying its charming evocation of old Europe. So I dropped my bag at the hotel upon arrival from the airport, hopped on a tram to the city centre and started exploring all the classic tourist spots. I wandered the narrow lanes of the Old Town, marvelled at the famous Orloj or astronomical clock, walked the iconic Charles Bridge, had goulash and dumplings, drank Czech beer and generally enjoyed myself. It’s hard not to in such an evocative place.

Prague is a city that exudes timelessness. Its spires rise like fingers pointing toward some eternal truths, and there is comfort in knowing that they have inspired countless generations of residents and visitors in much the same way. Its cobblestones seem to whisper in languages older than the buildings themselves, and everywhere the air feels laden with stories.

Walking through Prague, it’s impossible not to think of one of its best-known sons: Franz Kafka. This is not just because his distinctive face stares out from souvenir mugs and T-shirts or because he was one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century, but because the city still feels shaped by his peculiar kind of anxiety. There is still much of Kafka’s Prague in today’s city, despite the horrors that came after his death.

Kafka was born here in 1883, in a house near the Old Town Square, a German-speaking Jew in a Czech city that would later become a crucible of 20th-century history. He worked here, he suffered here, and he loved here, writing in the margins of his own life, producing works that would only be recognised as prophetic after his death.

Kafka in Prague, 1922. Img: Public Domain.

He died in 1924, at the age of forty, from tuberculosis. He never saw the Wehrmacht march across the same Charles Bridge on which I was now standing. He never had to wear a yellow star. He never had to see his three sisters deported to concentration camps, none of whom would return. And that is why, walking through Prague’s Jewish quarter today, it’s hard not to think a terrible thought: they would have killed Kafka.

It’s a simple, devastating truth. If he had lived just twenty years longer, he would likely have shared the fate of so many Prague Jews. The Germans and their collaborators killed some 263,000 of those Jews who had resided in the Czechoslovak Republic in 1938.

The same man who wrote The Trial, in which a remote, inaccessible authority prosecutes a man for a crime not revealed to him and on charges against which he cannot defend himself, would have been swallowed by a real machinery of death even more terrible than the one he dreamed up in his work. In a sense, the world that Kafka imagined – the world of faceless authority, arbitrary persecution, and incomprehensible terror – became a reality.

Kafka’s writing was steeped in a kind of spiritual claustrophobia. His protagonists move through systems that cannot be understood, much less escaped. Kafka’s gift was to make absurdity and dread feel ordinary, to expose how fragile our sense of control really is. When history caught up with his imagination, it turned out that his metaphors were no metaphors at all.

Kafka never learnt how right he was. Tuberculosis took him before history could. He died believing himself a failure, having published only a handful of stories, leaving behind instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn everything else. I’m glad Brod disobeyed him, though the moral calculus of that disobedience is complicated. Kafka was a man who longed for annihilation. Yet, Brod’s betrayal gave him immortality, arguing that his friend knew he wouldn’t listen to him and that he should have chosen someone else to care for his literary remains if he really wanted them destroyed.

Without these peculiar historical circumstances, the world would have lost The Trial and other seminal Kafka works. It’s estimated that the author burned around 90 per cent of his own writings. Without his untimely death and his friend’s betrayal, we might never have had a language for the modern condition: the feeling that we are trapped in a system that neither sees nor spares us. We would never call things ‘Kafkaesque’.

In Prague today, Kafka is everywhere and nowhere. There’s the sleek Kafka Museum on the riverbank, where his manuscripts and diaries are displayed in glass cases. I wandered its gloomy black corridors in search of the man, and found out that a new film has just been released. Simply called ‘Franz’, it tells Kafka’s story in the languages of his Prague: German, Czech and Yiddish. Interested, I Googled the movie and found that there was a screening that night at a nearby cinema. I knew I’d be lost in the Czech speaking parts, but Kafka himself spoke a clear High German. Assuming the film would stay true to this, I booked myself a ticket.

I had no idea what to expect from a cinema in Prague, but I certainly wasn’t ready for the Kino Lucerna. Opened in 1909, it is apparently the oldest cinema in Bohemia that is still in use today. And – as it so happened – it was also frequented by Kafka himself, who was an avid cinephile, fascinated by this brand-new form of entertainment that was emerging in his time. An audible ‘oohh’ rang through the screening room when the Lucerna actually appeared in the film, with Kafka taking his girlfriend there in one scene.

Kafka greets you in numerous forms in Prague. There’s the metallic statue of his head by David Černý, its mirrored layers rotating like an unending act of self-dissection. There’s a bronze Kafka riding on the shoulders of a headless man near the Spanish Synagogue, as if the city itself can’t decide which version of him to remember: the writer, the mystic, the neurotic, the ghost. But walk through the Jewish Quarter, past the narrow lanes and the centuries-old cemetery, and the weight of his absence becomes palpable. His family name is etched among the victims on memorial walls. His sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla were all murdered.

And yet, his presence endures in both literature and his city. The fog over the Vltava, the flicker of a tram disappearing into mist, the uneasy coexistence of beauty and severity in the city’s architecture – it’s as if the city itself has absorbed his sensibility: its dreamlike unease, its awareness that meaning is always just out of reach.

When I looked at the Charles Bridge at dusk, watching the water darken beneath the statues of saints, I thought of how Kafka once wrote that ‘Prague doesn’t let go. This little mother has claws.’ It’s true. The city grips you with memories of what was lost and what’s still here. And nobody encapsulates this better than the man who saw the darkness coming but never lived to name it.

Kafka’s work was about guilt and punishment, about seeking an explanation from an authority that won’t answer. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, that search took on a terrible new resonance. Kafka saw, earlier than most, what it means to live under systems that do not see you as a person. His early death, in a strange way, spared him the realities of this. He escaped the final act of the story he had already written.

Walking Prague, I couldn’t shake off this terrible thought: they would have killed Kafka. Not because of who he was as an individual but because of the dehumanising logic of a totalitarian bureaucracy in which all the cogs carried on turning dutifully.

Yet his legacy has not just survived but grown to something much bigger than he could ever have imagined. The city is proud of its famous son today. His words serve as a beautiful and terrible reminder that imagination can sometimes tell the truth before history does. Though Kafka never lived to see the worst, he somehow saw it all.