Your writing took me back to my own visit 6 years ago. As a young man I was entranced by the mood and messages of both Metamorphosis and The Trial but, because my companion was from a culture that doesn’t know the roots of Kafkaesque (although ironically it could describe the direction of travel of their Heimat), our focus was on the music and architecture of the 18th century and the brief blossoming of Hope in the 1960s.
Beautiful essay. I need to go back and re-read some of his work. I read his unfinished book Amerika when I was young and it stayed with me. Less absurdist than his other works.
As an aside, I’m surprised that some have never heard or know little about him.
Great piece, Katja. I first came across Kafka as a 6th former at school studying A-level German, his work introduced to us via Die Verwandlung/Metamorphosis, the grisly tale of a man who woke up one day to discover that he has been turned into a giant bed-bug. A great story to read as a 17 year old, and good preparation for the study of his most famous novel, The Trial. When I visited Prague, as a student in 1975 at the height of the Cold War, and only seven years after the Prague Spring had been so brutally crushed by the Soviets, his work seemed especially prescient. I also visited the Jewish Cemetery and was shocked to see how crowded and neglected it was, gravestones arranged chaotically, set at different angles to the ground, some near to collapse.
I went back there a year ago, to a city with a very different atmosphere, much freer, more ‘bohemian,’ but, as you point out, with a strong sense both of its history and of the ghost of one of its famous sons.
And yes, had he lived that long, they would have killed him.
Katja, once again I admire your time management, working so much and still finding the time to go for a walk through old Prague!
You are, of course, right: they would have killed Kafka – Kafka, who spoke German and wrote all his works in German. May I add a few quotations from chapter 3, “Lost capitals” of Neil MacGregor’s book “Germany – Memories of a Nation” which makes clear that Nazism is not the only historical connection between Prague and Germany. Regarding the question what was the oldest German university, MacGregor wrote:
“For the Germanophone world, it is Prague, where in 1348 the emperor Charles IV founded the first German- speaking university. For centuries Prague, Capital of Bohemia and occasional residence of the Holy Roman Emperors, was at the heart of German cultural and intellectual life. The Karls Uni¬versität, the Charles University, Stands at the head of the great German university tradition. It still exists today, but as a Czech university in a city where German is no longer spoken. Hundreds of miles to the north is another great university city, equally cen¬tral to the intellectual history of Germany, and there too German is no longer heard. This chapter is about Prague and Königsberg now Praha and Kaliningrad - the home of Kafka and the home of Kant, two cities no longer in any sense German but in every sense still part of German cultural and intellectual consciousness.
…
In 1787, while Kant in Königsberg was working on his Critique of Practical Reason with its memorable phrase about ‘the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me’, Mozart was on his way to Prague, where he was hoping for a warm reception from the public for the premiere of Don Giovanni-, and where he was confident of finding a city that was, for most purposes, as German as Königsberg. R. J. W. Evans, a historian of the Holy Roman Empire, explains:
' If you went to Prague in the eighteenth century, you would have a strong sense that the whole of the business of the Bohemian kingdom was something familiar to you in German terms. The outward appearance of it would have been typically German, not very different from the sort of places you would have travelled through from Saxony or Austria to reach it, and the language of a great deal of standard social intercourse was German.’
…
From the beginning, the German community played a leading role in the intellectual and cultural life of the city. When the university was founded in 1348, most of the teachers and students were German-speaking. And when, in the years around 1600, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, established his main residence in Prague, it again became the intellec¬tual capital of the German world, drawing artists and scholars, scientists and astronomers, from the whole of Europe.
For the next 200 years German ascendancy in Prague remained essentially unchallenged - as Mozart would have witnessed - until, like the rest of Europe, Bohemia was stirred by nationalist yearnings in the years of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, things changed very fast indeed. Czech nationalist feeling grew steadily. The orientation of the inhabitants of Prague and Bohemia, after 500 years of cohabitation and intermarriage, shifted firmly away from the German world. Between 1848 and 1880, Prague went from being a majority German-speaking city to a Czech-speaking one. In 1882 the last Germans resigned from the city council in protest at the new mayor’s inaugural address, in which he talked of ‘our hundred-towered, beloved, golden, Slavonic Prague’. The next year, Franz Kafka was born.
…
Modern Germany and its eastern neighbours are now comfortable and secure within their shared borders. But Prague, Imperial capital and home of Kafka, and Königsberg, the city of Kant and the Prussian monarchy, remain in the German consciousness as crucial, quickening memories. The political boundaries of Germany are now fixed. But for the cultural historian, the frontiers still float far to the east.”
I hope that your readers will appreciate these additional historical facts.
When I was a Reuters correspondent in Prague in the 1970s, an old Prague Jew worked part-time as an archivist. František was always on the wrong side of history. As a founding member of the Czech Communist Party he was imprisoned in the 1920s, he and his family escaped to England in the nick of time when the Nazis invaded in 1939, enlisted in the RAF as ground crew, moved from one windswept airfield to another, was sidelined on his return to Czechoslovakia after WWII because he had been in the West, and finally was kicked out of his journalist's job in 1968 for being a supporter of Alexander Dubček. He chuckled about the absurdity of all this, but it was threatening too. Your Kafka article brought this back to me. That's Prague. Many thanks.
Beautifully done, once again. In a few sentences you capture so much of Kafka's world and spirit. I love Prag as well where my father was born in 1917.
Very good Katja. I knew his name and that he was a writer but little else. I thought he was German. It seems that readers and literary history owe his friend Brod an immense debt of gratitude. Despite dying twenty years before the horrors of The Holocaust were visited upon Europe he does seem to have predicted the faceless cruel bureaucracy that entirely confounded the victims; the memorial in Berlin has just popped into my mind. As I often say about The Holocaust, one can get lost in the vast numbers. Focus on Kafka’s three sisters to grasp the wickedness. You don’t say if you enjoyed the film. An enlightening read with my morning coffee. There must be a BBC R4 In Our Time about Kafka or perhaps Past Present Future pod.
Your writing took me back to my own visit 6 years ago. As a young man I was entranced by the mood and messages of both Metamorphosis and The Trial but, because my companion was from a culture that doesn’t know the roots of Kafkaesque (although ironically it could describe the direction of travel of their Heimat), our focus was on the music and architecture of the 18th century and the brief blossoming of Hope in the 1960s.
Beautiful essay. I need to go back and re-read some of his work. I read his unfinished book Amerika when I was young and it stayed with me. Less absurdist than his other works.
As an aside, I’m surprised that some have never heard or know little about him.
What a wonderful piece, really a somber remembrance of Kafka. Time for me to re-read some of his work.
Thank you so much for this beautifully haunting essay.
Great piece, Katja. I first came across Kafka as a 6th former at school studying A-level German, his work introduced to us via Die Verwandlung/Metamorphosis, the grisly tale of a man who woke up one day to discover that he has been turned into a giant bed-bug. A great story to read as a 17 year old, and good preparation for the study of his most famous novel, The Trial. When I visited Prague, as a student in 1975 at the height of the Cold War, and only seven years after the Prague Spring had been so brutally crushed by the Soviets, his work seemed especially prescient. I also visited the Jewish Cemetery and was shocked to see how crowded and neglected it was, gravestones arranged chaotically, set at different angles to the ground, some near to collapse.
I went back there a year ago, to a city with a very different atmosphere, much freer, more ‘bohemian,’ but, as you point out, with a strong sense both of its history and of the ghost of one of its famous sons.
And yes, had he lived that long, they would have killed him.
To be honest , I’ve never heard of him 🤦🏻♂️, but seemed a tortured soul , great city Prague 👏👏
Katja, once again I admire your time management, working so much and still finding the time to go for a walk through old Prague!
You are, of course, right: they would have killed Kafka – Kafka, who spoke German and wrote all his works in German. May I add a few quotations from chapter 3, “Lost capitals” of Neil MacGregor’s book “Germany – Memories of a Nation” which makes clear that Nazism is not the only historical connection between Prague and Germany. Regarding the question what was the oldest German university, MacGregor wrote:
“For the Germanophone world, it is Prague, where in 1348 the emperor Charles IV founded the first German- speaking university. For centuries Prague, Capital of Bohemia and occasional residence of the Holy Roman Emperors, was at the heart of German cultural and intellectual life. The Karls Uni¬versität, the Charles University, Stands at the head of the great German university tradition. It still exists today, but as a Czech university in a city where German is no longer spoken. Hundreds of miles to the north is another great university city, equally cen¬tral to the intellectual history of Germany, and there too German is no longer heard. This chapter is about Prague and Königsberg now Praha and Kaliningrad - the home of Kafka and the home of Kant, two cities no longer in any sense German but in every sense still part of German cultural and intellectual consciousness.
…
In 1787, while Kant in Königsberg was working on his Critique of Practical Reason with its memorable phrase about ‘the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me’, Mozart was on his way to Prague, where he was hoping for a warm reception from the public for the premiere of Don Giovanni-, and where he was confident of finding a city that was, for most purposes, as German as Königsberg. R. J. W. Evans, a historian of the Holy Roman Empire, explains:
' If you went to Prague in the eighteenth century, you would have a strong sense that the whole of the business of the Bohemian kingdom was something familiar to you in German terms. The outward appearance of it would have been typically German, not very different from the sort of places you would have travelled through from Saxony or Austria to reach it, and the language of a great deal of standard social intercourse was German.’
…
From the beginning, the German community played a leading role in the intellectual and cultural life of the city. When the university was founded in 1348, most of the teachers and students were German-speaking. And when, in the years around 1600, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, established his main residence in Prague, it again became the intellec¬tual capital of the German world, drawing artists and scholars, scientists and astronomers, from the whole of Europe.
For the next 200 years German ascendancy in Prague remained essentially unchallenged - as Mozart would have witnessed - until, like the rest of Europe, Bohemia was stirred by nationalist yearnings in the years of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, things changed very fast indeed. Czech nationalist feeling grew steadily. The orientation of the inhabitants of Prague and Bohemia, after 500 years of cohabitation and intermarriage, shifted firmly away from the German world. Between 1848 and 1880, Prague went from being a majority German-speaking city to a Czech-speaking one. In 1882 the last Germans resigned from the city council in protest at the new mayor’s inaugural address, in which he talked of ‘our hundred-towered, beloved, golden, Slavonic Prague’. The next year, Franz Kafka was born.
…
Modern Germany and its eastern neighbours are now comfortable and secure within their shared borders. But Prague, Imperial capital and home of Kafka, and Königsberg, the city of Kant and the Prussian monarchy, remain in the German consciousness as crucial, quickening memories. The political boundaries of Germany are now fixed. But for the cultural historian, the frontiers still float far to the east.”
I hope that your readers will appreciate these additional historical facts.
When I was a Reuters correspondent in Prague in the 1970s, an old Prague Jew worked part-time as an archivist. František was always on the wrong side of history. As a founding member of the Czech Communist Party he was imprisoned in the 1920s, he and his family escaped to England in the nick of time when the Nazis invaded in 1939, enlisted in the RAF as ground crew, moved from one windswept airfield to another, was sidelined on his return to Czechoslovakia after WWII because he had been in the West, and finally was kicked out of his journalist's job in 1968 for being a supporter of Alexander Dubček. He chuckled about the absurdity of all this, but it was threatening too. Your Kafka article brought this back to me. That's Prague. Many thanks.
Beautifully done, once again. In a few sentences you capture so much of Kafka's world and spirit. I love Prag as well where my father was born in 1917.
Very good Katja. I knew his name and that he was a writer but little else. I thought he was German. It seems that readers and literary history owe his friend Brod an immense debt of gratitude. Despite dying twenty years before the horrors of The Holocaust were visited upon Europe he does seem to have predicted the faceless cruel bureaucracy that entirely confounded the victims; the memorial in Berlin has just popped into my mind. As I often say about The Holocaust, one can get lost in the vast numbers. Focus on Kafka’s three sisters to grasp the wickedness. You don’t say if you enjoyed the film. An enlightening read with my morning coffee. There must be a BBC R4 In Our Time about Kafka or perhaps Past Present Future pod.