Kafka and the Ironies of Fate

Another great find in the one dollar bin around the corner from my “south Annex” dwelling place: Introducing Kafka, text by David Zane Mairowitz, illustrations by the great Robert Crumb. Martha Chase Jackson Pagel and I visited Prague at the end of an overly expensive cruise/tour along the Danube from Budapest to just beyond Linz sometime in the late 1990s. The bus which conveyed us from the Danube to Prague necessarily travelled through the outer districts of that sprawling city, revealing in its passage the blight imposed by Soviet era construction projects. The inner city to which we were transported shone by comparison, preserved as were few European locations from the destruction of WWII. For three days we walked its narrow, labyrinthine streets and vast open squares, along the river dividing its districts, and over the Charles bridge, that iconic monument serving now as one of Prague’s most visible foci of tourism. Mementos of Prague’s famous son, Franz Kafka, were ubiquitous.

Reading Mairowitz text, I see the irony of this posthumous claim. Kafka lived his entire life (1883-1924) in Prague, all but the last several months in the Jewish ghetto. Part of the Hapsburg Empire until the Treaty of Versailles created the new entity of Czechoslovakia in 1919, Prague’s state, Bohemia, was composed of the same mix of nationalities, languages, and religions to be found throughout that and other 19^th century European empires. With the dissolution of these mammoth entities, underlying rivalries newly released found their focus in nationalism, setting the stage for the destruction wrought by the second act of world war initiated in 1939.

Kafka, slight and sensitive, was born to a Jewish kosher butcher, large and powerful, a man of decided opinion and little toleration for his retiring, hypochondriac son and his penchant for “scribbling.” Within the household of such a parent, the surrounding ghetto, and the city of Prague, set for his first 36 years in the Hapsburg Empire, coming to a sense of confident self-identity presented grave difficulties for Kafka. He was born a Czech, spoke German as his first language, and though Jewish, was not religiously inclined. In no sense could he fully find himself as Czech, German, or Jew. Still, Mairowitz stresses the profound influence upon him, revealed in his work, of Yiddish storytellers and of the particular fantasy-ridden sensibility, humour, and stoicism that inhered to the ancient ghetto and its denizens. To these influences he brought a unique quality, sometimes transforming his primary characters into animals and insects, expressing in this manner an understanding of his own condition and by extension, that of others.

By the time Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 41, Czech nationalism had already effectively worsened the situation for Jews in Prague. In Germany a similar process eventuated in the rise to power of the National Socialist party by 1933. Several years later Germany successfully annexed much of Czechoslovakia, moving not only to subject and enslave the Czechs, but to isolate and then eradicate their Jewish population. Anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia allowed little resistance to or compassion for their fate. In the post WWII Soviet-dominated state all religions were suspect and essentially forbidden. Mark and I found in our visit to Prague last fall that though services are now permitted, there is little active presence of Judaism in the city. The nearby town of Theresienstadt, once the sight of incarceration of many thousands of Prague Jews, tarted up to impress visiting Red Cross observers with  Germany’s “exemplary” treatment of the Czech Jewish population, is now a tourist destination. From here most who survived disease and starvation were transported to Auschwitz for their own exemplary “final solution.” Kafka’s dystopian stories capture presciently the fate awaiting his co-religionists in the decades following his death. In Prague itself, to find Kafka “revered,” pushed to the foreground of Czech literary significance, and served up for touristic consumption as a saleable icon seems almost a gigantic, bitter joke, one that perhaps might have been enjoyed by the master himself.