The Czechs in a Nutshell

The strange thing, though, is that the Czech Republic officially behaved for a long time as if this literary genius didn’t have any relation to Prague and the country at all. Just to take one example: almost 10 years passed after the Velvet Revolution until Prague’s magistrate managed to name a square after the famous artist. But rather symptomatically, “Franz Kafka Square” is in reality a paved passage so nondescript and anonymous that most cabbies don’t have the faintest idea where it is located (at the corner of Kaprova and Maiselova streets).

This treatment may seem rather ungenerous. If one also takes Kafka’s deep, personal relation to the city into account, it seems almost incomprehensible. Ernst Pawel, one of Kafka’s most renowned biographers, puts it like this: “There is one all-important and fundamental fact in Kafka’s existence: that he was born in Prague, was buried in Prague, and spent nearly all the 41 years of his life in this citadel of lost causes.”

To be precise, he was born in 1883 in a house situated at the very border between the Jewish ghetto and Old Town. Bar a short stay in Berlin and a year in the countryside spent with his sister Ottla in Northern Bohemia, Kafka never left Prague, where he gradually occupied 10 different flats. A small house in the Golden Lane at Hradčany and two rented rooms in the Schönborn Palace (now the US Embassy) at the Malá Strana were the farthest he came from Old Town. When he died prematurely at a tuberculosis sanatorium outside Vienna in 1924, he was living in a flat in the Oppelt House at Old Town Square number 6.

“Prague is like a little mother with claws,” Kafka himself summed up his love-hate relations to the city, whose dominant Hradčany Castle most probably served as the physical model for his novel Das Schloss, published in 1926. Another famous location, the stone quarry from Der Prozess (1925) to which Josef K. was led by his anonymous capturers and subsequently executed, was at Kafka’s time situated directly to the west of Hradčany. One might even imagine that the sober bureaucrat Josef K. on his way to work passed Jaroslav Hašek’s brilliant idiot Švejk on his way to his favourite hospoda The Chalice.

Although born into a Jewish and German-speaking family, Kafka came into close contact with his Czech surroundings early on through the family’s maid, and the writer’s father, Herrmann the ambitious merchant, even regarded Czech as his first language. Franz, on the contrary, was educated in Prague’s German schools, so there can be no doubts about his mother tongue, but Czech language was an obligatory subject both in grammar school and at the lyceum, and a few Czech-written letters that have been preserved document that he had a very good and lively grasp of colloquial Czech (“... the wind is constantly blowing in our a**es”).

Kafka’s amicable relations with his Slavonic compatriots were clearly demonstrated in 1918, when Czechoslovakia emerged from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the German management of the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Company, where he was employed for most of his life, was fired and replaced by Czechs, Kafka — now a Czechoslovak citizen — was asked to stay and later promoted. Even his surname, although written as it is pronounced in German, is as Czech as it gets (Kavka is the Slavonic term for jackdaw).

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

Nevertheless, the Czechs have never come to perceive Franz Kafka as “their man” for two reasons, one national and one political. Combined, they have caused widespread ignorance about the great writer.

The national explanation is rather obvious. Whereas Kafka’s Jewish origin is no hindrance to being considered a “Czech writer” (there are lots of them — starting with Karel Poláček and ending with Ota Pavel), his mother tongue definitely was. As a member of the German-speaking minority that lived in Prague in the interwar years, he could, at best, be regarded as a representative of Bohemia’s multicultural heritage.

However, after the Jews were murdered in Holocaust, the Germans were kicked out of the country in 1945 and the Slovaks — following the separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993 — finally achieved national independence, the Czechs became masters of an ethnically and culturally homogenous state for the first time in centuries. This atmosphere didn’t exactly offer a superabundance of interest and tolerance towards the country’s multicultural heritage.

Neither is the political reason for disregarding Kafka a mystery. As a prophet of existentialism, describing in details how an inhuman and all-mighty society manipulates the powerless individual, Kafka was seen by the Nazis (unfortunately, correctly) as envisaging the terrible bloodshed soon to be released, and his works were prohibited in Germany in 1933.