Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts:

Studies in Language and Literature

Marek Nekula

Published by Charles University in Prague,

Karolinum Press

www.karolinum.cz

ebooks@karolinum.cz

Translation by Robert Russell, Carly McLaughlin

Cover and layout by Jan Šerých

Copyediting by Martin Janeček

Typesetting by Karolinum Press

First English edition

© Charles University in Prague, 2016

© Marek Nekula, 2016

ISBN 978-80-246- 2935-3

ISBN 978-80-246-2992-6 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3400-5 (ePub)

ISBN 978-80-246-3401-2 (Kindle)

CONTENTS

Foreword

Suppression and distortion: Franz Kafka ‘from the Prague perspective’

The ‘being’ of Odradek: Franz Kafka in his Jewish context

Franz Kafka’s languages

Kafka’s ‘organic’ language: Language as a weapon

Franz Kafka at school: Kafka’s education in Czech language and literature

Kafka’s Czech reading in context

Divided city: Franz Kafka’s readings of Prague

Bibliography

Editorial note

FOREWORD

It is now taken for granted that Franz Kafka has become one of the most published German-language writers, that he is a world literary figure, that his fragmentary texts with their polyphony and rich ambiguity exemplify the procedures of literary modernism, and that his writings address the key questions of the modern age. There are several editions of his complete works in German alone, while the critical edition strives to reconstruct faithfully the genesis of his texts and their variants, elucidating the contexts from which they emerged in exhaustive commentaries. Besides Kafka’s literary works, diaries and letters, the critical edition also includes the letters he received. Even the correspondence and official reports he wrote or may have written at work, whether alone or as co-author, have been published and annotated. And alongside the constant flow of new studies analysing his literary works from various angles, there has been (and continues to be) a plethora of specialized studies and monographs concerning the books Kafka possessed or read, the films he saw, the family he was born into, the women he knew, the sanatoria he was treated in, the pubs he frequented, and the factories he had dealings with in his work.

Yet paradoxically, given this flood of secondary literature relating to Kafka’s life and work, authors seeking a new perspective increasingly do not take for granted that he can be written about. The question: What should a new study of Kafka be about? thus becomes: Can it in fact say anything new about him? Does it serve any purpose? Moreover, by devoting so much attention to Kafka do we not displace other writers to the periphery and distort our perception of the literary field of the time? These questions are of particular relevance for this collection of Kafka studies initiated by the Karolinum Press, which I have called Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts.

After all, ‘Kafka and Prague’ is hardly an original subject. Indeed, the conjunction is so obvious that it has prompted many efforts to ‘ground’ the writer in his home city and interpret him ‘from the Prague perspective’. After the years of Czechoslovak socialist realism in the 1950s, when the supposedly ‘decadent’ Kafka had been considered taboo, Germanists in Czechoslovakia began to appropriate him on the evidence of his family background and topographical links with Prague.

What is new in my book, I believe, is its critical view of the apparent self-evidence of such appropriation. That is why it opens with the essay ‘Suppression and distortion: Franz Kafka “from the Prague perspective”’, which challenges the self-evidence of the biography- and sociology-based view of Kafka associated with the Liblice conference which, with its over-simplified data, research interests and interpretations of Kafka’s texts, persists in some studies of Kafka to this day. As the 2008 conference Kafka and Power 1963 – 1968 – 2008 and studies by Vladimir V. Kusin and Michal Reiman have reminded us, the Liblice conference was more significant from the point of view of cultural policy than of literary studies. The part played by Liblice in shaping ‘readings’ of Kafka in the wider context of his reception has been examined by Veronika Tuckerová. In this regard, my study focuses on the role of Kafka’s family language in interpretations of his work ‘from the Prague perspective’ and on the resulting distortion of authentic readings of Kafka’s Czech texts that helped sustain the ‘Prague interpretation’. This view relied less on his texts and more on external sources, including the testimony, not always genuine, of contemporaries who knew him or met him. At the time of the Liblice conference Kafka still was a part of communicative memory and thus fell victim to the self-interest of story-tellers such as Gustav Janouch and Michal Mareš.

The opening study in the present volume, first published in 2014 in Franz Kafka – Wirkung, Wirkungsverhinderung (Franz Kafka – Reception and Reception Blocks), has two aims. The first is to demonstrate how an ideology-driven approach to Kafka led to the distorting of the authentic shape of Kafka’s language in his texts and thus to the reinforcing of a particular interpretation of his literary works. The second is to exemplify the approach I have adopted in the other studies in this collection and which gives the book its unity – although these are concerned with linguistic as well as literary issues. The other studies, too, address questions that may be considered self-evident or already settled, challenging, for instance, the widely accepted myth of ‘Prague German’ and its supposed influence on Kafka’s literary style, or revisiting the seemingly obvious question of Kafka’s natural (‘organic’) language – to which the answer is in fact far from obvious. Studies of the form of language used in Kafka’s texts go back wherever possible to the authentic versions of his texts with their unretouched idiosyncrasies, mutations and multiple corrections and variants. The present studies contextualize these idiosyncrasies, whereby their author is the first to admit that their sources and interpretations, given Kafka’s social milieu and the linguistic situation in his day, may be multifarious. The studies of the literary texts, in turn, go back to a ‘close reading’ of the actual text – not in an attempt to imprison it in one of its possible readings, as was proposed by Marxist scholars with their ‘Prague perspective’, but to uncover in a ‘wide reading’ the polysemy of Kafka’s texts and the plurality of their readings, out of and into which lead ‘textual threads’ that connect them with the literary and public discourse of the period. While the opening chapter offers an external outline of Kafka’s identity in German Studies, the essays that follow look at the discursive negotiation of that identity (or identities) from within his literary and non-literary texts. These are read, in the modus of New Historicism, in contrast not only with each other but, in the context of contemporary discourses, with other, non-literary texts. Overall, my intention in these studies is to extricate Kafka from the one-sidedness of partisan interpretations, which tended from the outset to marginalize other perspectives and approaches to Kafka within German Studies and ignore the relevance of other literary and public discourses that he – if we are to believe Julie Kristeva’s dictum that writing is a re-reading of other texts – assimilated both as reader and author. Such narrowness distorted not only the polyphony of Kafka’s texts but the way we view the literary field in which he was active.

Thematically, this collection of my studies is devoted to the actual language of Kafka’s texts as well as the fictive languages we encounter within his literary works – such as those spoken by the builders of the Tower of Babel, or by the nomads who chatter like jackdaws – taking into account the prevalent language situation, the function of language(s) in the public space, and contemporary discourse on the language question. I have adapted these studies so that they form chapters of a book that I hope is coherent in both form and content. Partly, I take up themes discussed in my 2003 monograph Franz Kafkas Sprachen: ‘. . .in einem Stockwerk des innern babylonischen Turmes. . .’ (Franz Kafka’s Languages: ‘. . .on a Floor of the Inner Tower of Babel. . .’), which was published in both German and Czech. There I examined Kafka’s written language in both his Czech and German texts, taking into account his language biography as well as the status of the two languages in public institutions and, in general, the role of language in the formation of collective identity and the way it is negotiated in Kafka’s texts. The form of both languages found in his texts was reconstructed and viewed in the context of the linguistic usage of his day. Similarly, Kafka’s acquisition of each language and its use in his family was contextualized with regard to the prevailing language situation. Notwithstanding certain idiosyncratic features that Kafka’s German undoubtedly displays, I confined myself in that work to a critical interpretation of empirical material, taking issue with Eisner’s ‘triple ghetto’ thesis and its more recent variants, and with the attribution of Kafka’s literary language and style to the ‘poverty’ (Armut) of ‘Prague German’, a consequence of its supposed isolation.

In Franz Kafkas Sprachen I drew on textual and archival material as well as biographical works by Klaus Wagenbach, Anthony D. Northey, and Alena Wagnerová, but also on specialized studies by Pavel Trost, Kurt Krolop, Josef Čermák, Jürgen Born and Hartmut Binder. For my analysis of the historical status of languages and ethnicities and the language situation in Prague, I was indebted to the work of the historians Hannelore Burger, Gary B. Cohen, Jaroslav Kučera, Robert Luft and Jiří Pešek; and with special reference to the Jewish context to Andreas Kilcher and Hillel J. Kieval. I was also able, thanks to my collaboration in the course of preparing the Czech complete edition of Kafka’s works and the German critical edition with Hans-Gerd Koch, Benno Wagner, Kafka archivists and his surviving relatives, to present a more precise picture of the language of Kafka’s Czech texts, as well as providing new or newly contextualized material and, by drawing attention to the specific character of Kafka’s Czech and German and the function of each language in his family and in the wider social context of the time, identifying a new area of research for Kafka scholarship. By focussing on how Kafka acquired his knowledge of the Czech language and Czech literature at school as well as on the content and context of his Czech reading (bearing in mind the quantitative and qualitative differences between his Czech, German and Jewish reading), my book provided a counterbalance to the simplistic restriction of Kafka to the German linguistic, literary and cultural context and an alternative view of Kafka’s reading of Jewish texts and the Jewish reading of Kafka. The latter is also significant in the light of his ‘Character sketch of small literatures’ and thus of his aesthetic conception and understanding of the function of literature and writing.

I have referred at length to my earlier monograph partly because much of this English edition of my Kafka studies is derived from it, in particular the chapters ‘Franz Kafka at school: Kafka’s education in Czech language and literature’ and ‘Kafka’s Czech reading in context’, which are updated English translations of the corresponding chapters in that book. The chapter ‘The “being” of Odradek: Franz Kafka in his Jewish context’ is a revised and abridged conflation of two chapters from my earlier work that investigates the languages used by Kafka’s parents in the wider context of language assimilation among Bohemian Jews and shows how Kafka’s attitudes to Yiddish and Hebrew evolved over time.

The chapter ‘Franz Kafka’s languages’ is new, although that too draws on material collected and treated in the earlier volume. In addition to a discussion of Kafka’s Czech and German and interference from Yiddish in his idiolect, it also considers his other languages, including Hebrew, referring to the work of Alfred Bodenheimer and others. The sections devoted to Czech, German and Yiddish also contain new material, with a more thorough discussion of those languages in the context of research on language contact and bi- or multilingualism. In these sections Kafka’s multilingualism is discussed in the context of his parents’ bilingualism and multilingualism in the Kafka household. Here I draw not only on my own research, but also on studies and monographs produced by a group of PhD students as part of my project Language and Identity: Franz Kafka in a Central European Linguistic and Cultural Context, which ran from 2004-07 and was financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. To their and my own publications, which were also jointly published as conference proceedings, I refer the reader in notes in the chapter ‘Franz Kafka’s languages’ as well as in the final bibliography.

While working on that project I also began to consider, besides the actual language(s) of Kafka’s texts, the fictive languages contained in some of them, namely that of the builders of the Tower of Babel or the nomads who chatter like jackdaws, relating them to contemporary discourse on the language issue. Here I was able to build on the work of the literary scholars Andreas Kilcher, Axel Gellhaus and Benno Wagner, and of the historian Kateřina Čapková. Kafka’s treatment of the language question within his literary texts is a subject I dealt with in my interpretation of the figure of Odradek in the short story ‘The householder’s concern’, also in my 2003 monograph. The text ‘Kafka’s “organic” language: Language as a weapon’, an abridged version of a paper delivered at the 2010 Oxford conference Kafka, Prague, and the First Word War, considers primarily the stories ‘Report to an Academy’, ‘In the penal colony’ and ‘A page from an old manuscript’. These I read through the prism of New Historicism in the wider context of discourses on language, specifically manifested in texts of the contemporary philosophy of language as well as in antisemitic discourse. The image of an ‘organic’ language, which we find in Kafka’s letter to Brod about the ‘mauscheln’ of German-speaking Jews, takes up the theme of the preceding chapter ‘Franz Kafka’s languages’ while shifting its focus from the way Kafka used language to the way he thought about it, placing it within the debate on collective identity. In their choice of particular language categories, however, Kafka’s literary texts interact with his non-literary texts, thus widening their scope, as noted above, to engage in the language discourse of the day.

‘Divided city: Franz Kafka’s readings of Prague’, the last of the chapters devoted to literature, also addresses the theme of language discourse in its interpretations of the texts ‘The city coat of arms’, ‘The Great Wall of China’, ‘Silence of the Sirens’ and ‘The hunter Gracchus’. By analysing the conceptualization and literarization of Prague public space, it shows how public discourse on language, permeating through its ‘textual threads’ the literary discourse, invaded the public space of the city, and how discursive reality intersected with non-discursive reality. This text dates from 2006, when I spent a sabbatical at the Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and has been abridged and revised for the present volume.

This brings me to the institutions and individuals who have made the publication of these texts and this book possible. My thanks are due to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for their support of the aforementioned project, and to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies for the undisturbed sabbatical I spent there in an inspiring environment. I also wish to thank my publishers Karolinum Press for generously facilitating the translation of my Czech and German texts into English, the translators Robert Russell and Carly McLaughlin for their patience with my reformulations of their work, Robert Russell and Peter Zusi for their careful reading of and comments on the final manuscript, and Veronika Tuckerová and Kateřina Čapková for comments on various parts of the text. I am also deeply indebted to Hans-Gerd Koch for his constant support and generous permission to reprint illustrative material from the archive of the German critical edition of Kafka’s works. Thanks, too, to the various institutions who allowed me to reprint other reproductions and who are credited separately under each one, as well as to the publishers of the journals and anthologies in which my texts first appeared for their kind permission to reuse and translate them.

I should also like to express my gratitude to Franz Kafka’s nieces, not only for the information they imparted to me but also for the meetings we had in the course of my research, which for me were unforgettable experiences. When, a few days after I had submitted the English manuscript, I received notice that Věra Saudková, the last member of Franz Kafka’s family who still personally remembered him, had died on the very day I had submitted, I could not help reflecting that something had come to an irrevocable end, not only on the personal level. Henceforward Kafka will exist only in our cultural memory. This should remind literary scholars of the necessity of concentrating on Kafka’s texts, with the aim not simply of preserving them but of ensuring that their ambiguous and multilayered meaning will never be reduced to a single canonical interpretation or lost in the myth of the ‘Prague perspective’. That is my public wish. On a personal note, I should like to dedicate this book to the memory of Věra Saudková and Marianne Steiner, to whom Fate was kinder than to other members of their family, allowing them to pass on their memories of Franz Kafka, his family and his world to our shared cultural memory.

SUPPRESSION AND DISTORTION:

FRANZ KAFKA ‘FROM THE PRAGUE PERSPECTIVE’

RETURN OF A COUNTRYMAN

A very good overview of Franz Kafka’s reception in Czechoslovakia has been provided by Josef Čermák.[1] His first publications on this topic date back to the 1960s.[2] My study picks up precisely where his study of 2000 left off, namely in 1963, although admittedly I do not get far beyond 1963. It is in this year that Kafka’s Czech-language texts were first published. I am going to focus on the inclusion of these published texts in academic and journalistic discussions, which goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Kafka ‘from the Prague perspective’. The – albeit only fragmentary – publication of Kafka’s unknown Czech texts was, in the context of Kafka’s reception, an entirely new phenomenon;[3] in the Czechoslovak context, however, this was also true to an extent of Kafka himself and his work as a whole. The Czech translations of his works were, after all, banned from 1948 until 1957. From the perspective of socialist realism Kafka’s writings were regarded as formalist and decadent; stigmatised as a representative of the bourgeoisie, Kafka became a taboo author.[4] Even in 1957 the slowly burgeoning reception of Kafka faced strong ideological opposition from those who went on to shape the cultural politics of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which was officially declared in 1960. The social and territorial ‘grounding’ or proletarianisation of Kafka, the process of making Kafka ‘one of us’ and his representation ‘from the Prague perspective’[5] surmounted the ideological barriers of 1963 but not without excluding or overlooking other aspects of the author, such as the Jewish dimension of his work.

Why 1963 is of greater importance than any other year should be obvious. It marks – along with the Liblice conference initiated by Eduard Goldstücker[6] – an important turning point in Kafka’s reception, the implications of which were relevant also outside of Czechoslovakia. Although this phase of his reception also saw him being appropriated by various contemporary discourses, this time it did not result in a ban of his work. Rather, it transformed Kafka – at least in Czechoslovakia – into a cult author of the 1960s. This turning point in Kafka’s reception has, however, less to do with the ‘internal’ (implicit) or ‘external’ (biographical) author and much more with the ‘image of the author’.[7] The 2008 conference Kafka and Power 1963–1968– 2008 focused precisely on the myth surrounding the Liblice conference and the effect it had well into the 1960s, not least on the Prague Spring. Kusin has also looked at the role of the Liblice conference for the reform movement.[8] For the same reason, scholars such as Goldstücker or Kusák, among others, have also looked back on this from their perspective as key participants.[9] To read the contemporary clash over ‘Spring, swallows, and Franz Kafka’ – in which Kurella uses swallows as well as other black bird species with less positive connotations to build up his polemical arguments[10] – is to encounter the imagery and rhetoric of both the Prague Spring and of ‘Normalisation’, making the teleological perspective of the Kafka and Power 1963–1968 [. . .] conference easily understandable. The election of Eduard Goldstücker as Chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Guild seems to complete an arc which began with the Liblice conference and ended with the Prague Spring. In the 1970s the proximity of these two events as well as the accusation of his ‘bourgeois decadence’ from the 1950s proved to be disastrous for Kafka’s reception:

[. . .] it made the civil servant J. furious that the Kafka motto ‘I write differently from how or what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness’[11] had been retained in the translation. And not only because the motto was deceitful, but also because it had been penned by Kafka, the writer who had been condemned and whose name ‘was not to appear anywhere’. [. . .] The point of this story is, however, in true Švejk style utterly stupid: three months later I saw 18 copies of the Kafka book by Brod [. . .] lying on the desk of the antiquarian bookshop in Ječná Street. . . the unsold remains of the print run which had [now] been released for sale.[12]

In order to understand the ethos of the Kafka reception of 1963, we need to go back a few years. Following the advent to power of the communists in 1948 there was a glaring hiatus in the official reception of Kafka which would last until 1957, a much longer hiatus, then, than that between 1939 and 1945. The absence of an official normative reception should, however, not be mistaken for an interruption of the reception in itself, as Jan Zábrana’s diary entry describing the decentralised, individual reception of Kafka makes clear. Nevertheless, it is clear that this reception, too, had an ideological frame and was formulated in reaction to the official ideological discourse on Kafka and the exclusion of his writings from the official literary sphere:

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Foreword

Suppression and distortion: Franz Kafka ‘from the Prague perspective’