REAL PRAG, an essay:
During the time Franz Kafka was writing, every part of life seemed to be in a tumultuous phase. Politics, race, nationality, economy, population, religion, civic structure, etc., all were unstable for Kafka. It is this unique level of threat to identity which lends itself to the "Kafkaesque" in literature, making Kafka one of the first major progenitors of modernism.
Though Prague was the center of Kafka's universe--the place where he was born and spent nearly his entire life-- it never figures in his works as itself. He never names or describes it, though his writings are surely in reaction to his life in this special period in Prague. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Prague was the third largest city of the Habsburg Empire. Prague's population was growing at a frantic pace as the turn of the century approached. A census taken in 1910 showed it with 600,000 inhabitants. This is almost twice as many as there were in 1883, the year of Kafka's birth. Within this small space of time, a generation, a crowding number of people flocked to the city.
"Prague Austrians" is the term Max Brod once used to define himself and Kafka. The city they lived in, Prague, was at the very heart of the Habsburg Empire. Its citizens were of various ethnic and cultural types. The largest groups which inhabited Prague were the Czechs, the Germans, the Jews, and the Austrians. Johannes Urzidil, a poet, novelist, and journal editor who occasionally had contact with Kafka's circle, maintains that the German writers of their time:
..."had access to at least four ethnic sources at once: the German, of course, to which they belonged culturally and linguistically; the Czech, which surrounded them everywhere as an element of life; the Jewish--even if they themselves were not Jewish--since it formed an historic, ubiquitously palpable factor of the city, and the Austrian, within which they were all born and raised and which also fatefully influenced them, whether they merely affirmed it or found fault with this or that in it" (Urzidil 65)
A census taken after 1911 showed that 90.7% of the city's inhabitants considered themselves Czech and only a few, 9.3%, considered themselves German. The small German percentage in Prague made up an elite and important part of the populace. The Germans owned many of the shops and textile industries in and around the city. E.E. Kisch, a journalist living at the turn of the century in Prague, described the Germans as
..."owners of the brown coal pits, administrative officials of the Montan Enterprises and the Skoda weapons factory, hops traders who traveled back and forth between Saaz and North America, sugar, textile and paper manufacturers as well as bank directors. Their circles were frequented by professors, high officers and government employees." (Northey 78)
Such a description leaves the Germans at the upper rungs of the education and authority ladder. The Germans were almost all upper-middle-class; while such a thing as a German proletariat hardly existed, the Czech population was mainly composed of working class citizens.
The prominence of the Germans could be seen in all the cultural institutions in the city. They owned two theatres, several gymnasiums, a university, a college of technology, a concert hall, half a dozen secondary schools and several daily newspapers. More than 200 clubs of German cultural inspiration nurtured an active social life in the German home.Close to half of the German-speaking Prague citizens were of Jewish descent. The Jewish denizens of the ancient ghettos had been Germanized during the era of Emperor Joseph II, as Judaism had become more tolerated. At the time of the Germanization of Prague, Jewish families were given German surnames. An act in 1787 intended to force Jews to assimilate, and most had to adopt German surnames. Of the small number of German inhabitants in 1890 ( about 65,000) just under half--26,000-- were of Jewish ancestry (Salfellner 54). The Jewish tradition in Prague goes back more than a millennium. In 1880 there were twenty thousand Jews in Prague, over 20 % of the Jews in all of Bohemia. In the following twenty years the number would rise to 30%, and in 1921 40% (Soltzl, 75).
In 1781 Emperor Joseph II had issued his Tolerance Edict, loosening the bonds under which the Jews had been obliged to live. This allowed for the Jews to become more comfortable as Prague citizens, and lifted the coercion to live separately in the ghetto. This caused a great opportunity for assimilation for Jews who wished to leave the ghetto (in Prague the ghetto was an area of the city called Josefov). Many moved out with the hope of assimilating into the Prague upper-middle-class. The Jews were allowed to dwell beyond the walls of the ghetto, and gradually with time the number of affluent, industrious Jews who moved into other city districts was great. This outpouring of its best citizens left the ghetto with poor and desperate inhabitants. Soon the Jewish district was occupied by criminals and the poor, not even all of whom were Jewish. The number of Jews living there had dropped from the former 80% in 1850 to 20% in 1890 (Urzidil, 26). This separated assimilated Jews from non-assimilated.
The anti-German movement also bore anti-Semitism. At the time of Kafka, 40% of the German population in Prague were Jewish. Prague's Jews, representing a strong economic and intellectual potential, mostly spoke German and avowed German nationality. The Jews, successful in business, became an object of hatred for the poorer classes. Stotzl describes the attitude that the working class had as a "Kampf gegen den "judischen" Kapitalismus die Weihe eines nur in geschichtstheologischen Formeln fassbaren ewigen Kampfes des Guten gegen das Boese zukam." (a strongly historical fight against Jewish capitalism that will become an eternal fight of good against evil). Czech nationalists were traditionally anti-Semitic, and they associated the Jews--especially the German speaking ones-- with the Hapsburgs. Violence directed at affluent Jews erupted in the streets of Prague in 1897, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency. Shop windows were smashed and buildings burned. Kafka certainly picked up the vibe of this antagonism.
The atmosphere remained increasingly un-restful and repeatedly the highest official intervention was necessary. Most of the new pro-Czech political parties were anti-Semitic. An unfortunate incident that inflamed the already hostile environment happened in April of 1899 (Kafka was 16). Just when anti-Semitism was on everyone's mind, the body of a murdered young Christian girl was found. Suspicion was pointed to a Jewish footwear journeyman named Leopold Hilsner. Since the murder was at the same time as the Jewish holiday Passover, medieval legends which connected the holiday with the use of ritualistic murders flooded popular talk. Anti Jewish hunts and attacks broke out throughout the whole country. Many of the Jewish-owned shops in Prague were boycotted (Salfellner, 77). An old hatred of Jews was kindled anew, and both Germans and Czechs, though antagonistic toward one another, were united in their wish to avoid association with the Jews. Though Kafka himself was never harassed because he was Jewish, his "internal emigration" as he called his writing, could not distance himself enough from this outside hostility. It is this air of general enmity that created an internal terror in Kafka which expressed itself in his stories.
During the reign of Franz Joseph (1848-1914), the Czech language spread to a greater extent through both primary and secondary education, strengthening the cause of Czech nationalism. Despite this higher education was taught in German. The Czech nationalists pushed for more language rights bringing much strife to the civic and social atmosphere. In response, the monarch brought about in 1890 negotiations regarding the so-called Punctuation Articles. These articles were based on efforts to achieve Czecho-German settlements in the monarchy's framework. The struggle for language rights in Bohemia roused by these settlements continued until the extinction of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Language was in itself one of the key issues of the conflict. The governor of Galicia enacted language laws for Bohemia in 1897 which produced a violent reaction. These "Badeni Decrees" accorded that the Germans and Czechs had equal footing in official communications in the Bohemian crown lands. This meant that both languages had to be used and understood. Such a decree amounted to havoc, as it required German-speaking officials to know Czech, and Czech-speaking officials to know German. The Czech politicians saw the Badeni Decrees as a first step in the elimination of national identity (German, though used primarily was never declared mandatory until then). The notion that in a land where 92% of the population spoke Czech was to be governed by German-speaking officials was outrageous. Fear of loss of identity led to ethnic conflict. The Czech population of Prague "defended itself by throwing stones at the German theatre and other buildings. Attacks were also made on German shops and coffee-houses" (Salfellner 121). The protests and mass demonstrations shook up the Empire. In a panic Emperor Franz Joseph had to close down parliament on November 28, 1897.
The battle of language and nationality left the orientation of the Jewish people in Prague mixed. Urbanized liberal Jews found themselves more sympathetic with the Germans, but the provincial Jews, fresh in from the countryside, felt themselves to be Czech. Of course many found the process of choosing nationality part of the struggle for social status. Kafka's father, Hermann, for example, chose the German side in the nationalistic conflict as an effort to belong to the small German elite. Many Jews did in fact decide on this path, which amounted to assimilation.
As well as German, Hermann Kafka spoke Czech, "working both sides of the street" (Kafka Letter, 54) . Hermann straddled the volatile political and social situation of Prague by restraining his Jewishness, speaking Czech in his business, and German while trying to move upward socially. He seemed to be moving toward a nullified ethnic and religious identification. His son would later reproach him for this. Kafka the younger suffered much angst because of his lost heritage and the lack of any clear cultural or ethnic identity.
The success of Hermann Kafka can be traced by the changing addresses of his homes and businesses. They changed as quickly as Hermann climbed the social strata. Between the short span of three years (1885-1888) they lived successively on Wenceslas Square, in Dusni street, and in Parizska street. For 6 months they lived on Celetna 2, formerly owned by an aristocratic German family. The moves seem ludicrous, since the distances between the residences were so small, yet it meant a great deal to Mr. Hermann Kafka. This moving about, a desperate attempt at trying to raise himself and his rapidly growing family into respectability, also created an uncertain and unstable home for Franz. Frederick Karl, a notable Kafka scholar maintains that it led to an impression of insecurity and unsureness within the author. Hermann's shop was also just outside of the ghetto precincts, not too far away from Jewish clientele, in a more German neighborhood, but identifiable as a Czech shop. Hermann officially declared his family as Czech in the city records. Kafka witnessed his father's careful stratagem of being successful in all areas and using his ethnicity to his advantage all of his life. This malleable ethnicity was fare for Kafka's writing as being the outsider or observer with narrative irony.
Kafka described his Father as a "giant of a man". He was the authority figure not to be questioned or denied, symbolic of the contradictory, undecipherable rules of life. Kafka's reverence of his father caused feelings of an inaccessibility of justice. Throughout the works, justice is often an impossible pure ideal. Kafka could never justify his existence and knew he caused grave disappointment to his family. His father was to be respected for no other reason than that he was in a position of authority. Unrebellious, Kafka chose self-abasement He was the guilty party. This is also a major situational theme for the protagonists in his works.
Northey states in his book Kafka's Mischpoche that it is Jewish tradition for one family member to somewhat outmaneuver the next, to bring respectability and progress to the family. Making the parents and family proud was expected and a normality. In the Letter to My Father, Kafka lists how Hermann Kafka had reproached him, for lack of "family feeling." "Family feeling was not only love between one's family, but also to behave like a worthy representative of that family" (Northey 96) The pressures Kafka felt restricting him where brought on by the need to bring pride to the mischpoche (family), which certainly Kafka felt he had failed to do, as can be read in the Letter to My Father. His failings were compounded by his father's many reproaches, and must have been amplified by the strong success of the rest of his mischpoche.
Kafka once asked his visiting uncle to "guide him to some place where at last I [he] could start afresh". He wanted his uncle to find him a job abroad and so liberate him from his native Prague, or else prove himself as one of the mischpoche. But alas, the "little mother with claws", as he called Prgue, held Kafka in her tight grip and he remained in the city. Kafka felt he was a disappointment to his family and rather than being victimized, was the victimizer. In The Metamorphosis the point of the fable is not the protagonist's suffering, but the inadvertent suffering he inflicts on his parents and sister.
Prague's notoriety as a city of high style, booming economy, and modern technology, in fact masked a dark reality of misery and poverty, even repression. Most of the repression was directed against the ethnic Czechs, who were the workers of the factories. Prague in the latter half of the 19th century was preoccupied with the reciprocity between "the Czechs and the Germans, and the sharpening of their mutual variances" (Northey 204). This schism of upper-class Germans and lower-class Czechs created much social conflict in Prague. Many Czechs felt that their land was being invaded and that they themselves were being enslaved in their own lands. Mass demonstrations by revolutionary workers were prevalent in the city of Prague. The Russian Revolution of 1905 helped to turn the Russian working classes into radicals. A sympathetic working class in Prague hoped to recreate the victory of the Russian workers. The Czech under-classes began to push harder for political power.
There is much speculation that Kafka participated in anarchistic and socialistic movements. Max Brod claims to have learned that both Kafka and his cousin Robert had taken part in a meeting of the political "Klub mladzch" (club of the Young Ones, a radical revolutionary socialist party). There is further evidence that the author stood in the Czech nationalist camp and supported the cause of Czech independence. These ideological sympathies which Kafka held caused problems with his later efforts at business ownership. His sympathies always lay on the side of his workers. Of the girls working for the asbestos company he had part in, Kafka wrote "they are at the mercy of the pettiest power and haven't enough calm understanding to recognize this power and placate it by a glance, a bow" (Kafka, Letter 45).
Many of Kafka's novels seem to be influenced by the unsafe and unfair working conditions of his time, containing elements of odd factory conditions, a world of demented people working as machines and belonging to part of an inhuman "system". Kafka, an insurance agency employee, was also apparently involved with the creation of an association of officials at the workers accident insurance institute, the closest the white-collar workers could come to forming a union. Kafka stood opposite his father on many issues, and the ideologies of capital and shop was another of these issues. He chided his father for being angry at his sister Ottla "fur den Verkehr mit armen Leuten, das Dich so aergernde Zusammensitzen mit den Dienstmaedchen und dergleichen. (For the interaction with the poor people, sitting together with the serving girls and the like)" (Kafka, Letter 49). Kafka's democratic, anti-capitalistic sympahties toward the working classes was shared by other sons of industries Jewish fathers. "Auf der Suche nach dem "volk" waren noch anderre junge Juden; bei manchen reichte es nur zur sentimentalen Verklarung der Unterschichten. (In the search for the People were also other young Jews; by most it was enough only to sympathize and clarify the lower classes)" (Stolzl 194). As Christoph Stolzl explains in his book Kafkas boeses Bohmen, "Die judischen Burgersohne trieb mehr als wahlpolitische Taktik, sie handelten aus einem diffusen Motivbundel heraus...dabei war sicherlich das schlechte Gewissen uber die mancheterliche Haltung der Vaeter"(The Jewish burger sons carried more than democratic tactics, they were directed by a diffuse bundle of motives…thereby they surely had a bad conscience over the most common stance of the fathers.)
Trade and development were growing at explosive rates; and fashion modes constantly altering. The transformation of the city and its life advanced dramatically and effected all essential spheres of life. Traditions were being replaced and people felt a sense of misplacement. Such was the case for many young Pragers, who, like Kafka, experienced the repercussions of a strong generation gap. Much of this misplacement created anxiety over nationality, religion, and even familial status. Anxiety gave rise to the German and Czech nationalism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, as people tried to find their place in society.
As the building of the city and culture was in progress, trade and industry also experienced a large surge. Prague was one of the most industrialized cities in the monarchy. The Czech lands, outside of Russia, were the only Slavic lands that became industrialized at this time. Many textile factories were in the vicinity of Prague. Just as all major cities at the turn of the century, Prague too partook in the technology boom. Telephones were installed, expanding communication, and trams and automobiles found their way on the streets to replace obsolete transportation technologies. Power stations and electricity replaced old-fashioned means of energy. In 1894, when Kafka was a boy of 11, Prague was illuminated by electric light, and a municipal electric power station was grounded at Zizkov in 1895. The rapid development of train transportation systems made Prague a major railway junction in Bohemia. Technology and its impacts on life feature strongly in Kafka's work. This is doubled within much of his literature. Communications between people without seeing each other, massive transportation of humans by incredible speed, technology that replicated or replaced human activity fascinated Kafka. Machines also invoked the systematic, industrious, we could say industrial processing of human activity to a faceless production.
The changes at the end of the 19th century in Prague also brought fundamental changes in its landscape. New styles of houses were built up over old. The city's own dimensions were opening up and expanding. Already during the reign of Jospeh II the four separate towns--the Old Town, the New Town, the Little Quarter and Hradcany--were merged into one single city. In 1874 the town-wall's demolition started. Of these smaller quarters, the Jewish district got perhaps the most dramatic makeover. The "clean up Bill" of 1855, initiated to rid the ghetto of unhygienic conditions and other problems such as epidemics, called for a tearing down of the ghetto and its opening up to the rest of the city. Most of it wasn't carried out until the major 1906 demolition which Kafka witnessed. Much of Josefov with its ancient winding and twisting streets was torn down, and many historical building were lost during its demolition. Soon modern Art Nouveau palaces of the prosperous bourgeoisie took the place of the dark and twisting streets of the poor Jews. The process of Josefov's transformation is symbolic of the assimilation of Jews into popular society, as many of the owners of the new buildings were assimilated Jews, such as Kafka's father, who rented from one of the most luxurious new apartment buildings in Josefov. Many of Prague's Jews supported the clean up, since the ghetto had become a symbol of centuries of discrimination. The newly united districts had turned Prague into one solid city of the Czech Renaissance; modern Art Nouveau decorative elements, metropolitan boulevards, gables, turrets and other embellishments raised against the Prague skyline.
The heavy building, the trends in fashion, the development of technologies and industry, I am convinced, combined with the political and social turmoil stressed Kafka with the "unendlicher Verkehr" (endless traffic) which the antagonists of so many of his novels futilely defend themselves against. In a letter from 1915 to Felice, Kafka writes "so the impossibility of coming to rest, complete homelessness, breeding ground for all illusions, ever greater weakness and hopelessness. How much more there is to say about it!"
In 1895 the Association of German artists was founded in Prague . The High culture and artistry of the Germans was very prevalent in the city. As being one of the largest cities, Prague took part in the artistic revolutions going on in other cities such as Vienna. There were many German speaking artists living in Prague. There were plenty of well educated German writers, such as Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Egon Kisch, Willy Hass, and of course Franz Kafka. The radical movements of symbolism, expressionism, futurism, tactilism, surrealism, abstractionism, and others found their way into the Prague artist's circles. Friedrich Karl, a leading Kafka scholar, assumes that Kafka responded to several of these developments, although he is "not to be identified with any one or even any overlapping movements" (Karl 203). This originality may be allowed of Kafka, for in his writings he truly does explore the modern form of abstractionism and internalized stream of consciousness, as may be identified with the modern movement in literature. There are "angular approaches to his characters and images" which render a certain sense of cubism. Abstraction, objects which could not be portrayed as they once were, but had to be seen as blending into line, color, place; shapes that were the essence of objects and not the forms are also a theme in Kafka's work. The lack of actual dimensions, such as the sense that the city in The Castle may be Prague in essence but not in hard reality, the "Kafkaesque", is part of the modern style which has been prevalent up until our current time, and an art form which Kafka perfected. Kafka's art and his life, as he admits in a diary entry, are entwined. His writing was his life, and he sacrificed much for it.
Kafka as well took part in the modernist movements of Futurism and of Abstraction. The figures of healthy bodies which decorated the facades of Art Nouveau buildings where characteristic of the health craze which swept Prague (as well as the rest of Europe) in the 20's. Kafka took part in this culture to a small extent, and the imperfections of his and his characters' bodies is a symptom of this way of thinking. Kafka felt alienated and repulsed by his weak and fragile body, and many of his characters were also incongruous with contemporary image of health. Kafka's diet was in reaction to this movement, and there is speculation that raw, unprocessed milk may have been the cause for his tuberculosis which ended his life early.
Kafka had an ominous sense that the dreadful divisive air in Prague would result in frightening brutal reaction. Soon war was breaking out all around him. The Hapsburg Empire would not survive WWI. The pent up hatred between the nationalities came to a head, and Prague would change forever. Kafka could not stand the ugliness exchanged between peoples. In his August 6th diary-entry, he writes:
"Patriotic parade. The major's speech. Then disappearance, then reappearance and the German cry 'Long live our beloved Monarch!' I am standing there wearing a nasty expression. These parades are one of the most disgusting side effects of the war. Coming from the Jewish merchants who are at once German, at once Czech, and actually admit it, but have never allowed themselves to shout it out as loudly as they do now...Well organized it was. It is supposed to be repeated every evening, tomorrow Sunday, twice."In such an atmosphere it is little wonder that his writings emanate such an inimitable angst. His was the generation of the first "modern sons". His writings give us insight to this unique time in history, when traditions were in a state of upheaval and place in society was rendered unrecognizable according to traditions passed on for generations before. Convention altered creating alienation in every sector of life. This effectively produced a struggle to understand existence, the anxiety which plagues modern man, like an unreachable actuality buried under reality's façade. Kafka was keen on his surroundings. His ability to record life in art is astounding. No author in my opinion better exemplifies this special time than Kafka.