![]() This total lack of understanding and the absence of any home life worthy the name (young Franz was virtually brought up by a nurse) caused the boy's early seriousness and anxiety. To one extent or another, all of Kafka's works bear the unmistakable imprint of the nerve-wracking struggle between his humility and hypersensitivity (his mother's heritage) and the crudity and superficiality of his father, who looked at his son's writing with indifference and, at times, with contempt. Kafka's only strong, positive ties with his family were with his favorite sister, Ottla, who let him stay at her home and later helped him break off his relationship with Felice Bauer, his first finance. Throughout his lifetime, Franz Kafka could never extricate himself from the terrible friction between his parents, which was caused, for the most part, by his tyrannical father. Kafka's father's whole life was shaped by his desperate and eventually successful attempt to break out of his poor Czech milieu and become accepted in the prestigious environment of German Prague his mother, however, came from a wealthy German-Jewish bourgeois family. The great socio-economic and educational differences between his father, Hermann Kafka, and his mother, Julie Löwy, were at the root of this complex situation. Kafka's family situation was a reflection of his being a German-speaking Jew in a predominantly Slavic environment. This absence of any gap between the spoken and written word in his language is probably the secret behind the enormous appeal of his language, whose deceptive simplicity comes across in every decent translation. The result was that Kafka actually wrote in a language which was on the verge of developing its own characteristics. Prague was a linguistic island as far as German was concerned, and while the Czech population of Prague doubled within the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the percentage of German Jews sank to a mere seven percent. His simple, sober, and yet dense language is traced to the fact that in Prague the German language had been exposed to manifold Slavic influences for centuries and was virtually cut off from the mainstream language as spoken and written in Germany and Austria. The haunting mood of Prague's narrow, cobblestoned streets, its slanted roofs, and its myriad backyards comes alive in the surreal settings of Kafka's stories. To this day, however, Kafka's tiny flat in Alchemists' Lane behind the towering Hradschin Castle is a major attraction for those in search of traces of Kafka. To understand Kafka, it is important to realize that in Prague the atmosphere of medieval mysticism and Jewish orthodoxy lingered until after World War II, when the Communist regime began getting rid of most of its remnants. Apart from that, however, it is about as meaningful as considering Faulkner an English novelist.įor his recurring theme of human alienation, Kafka is deeply indebted to Prague and his situation there as a social outcast, a victim of the friction between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. Kafka's name is also grouped too often with German writers, which is accurate only in the sense that he belongs to the German-speaking world. Prague was the major second capital of the Austrian Empire (after Vienna) since the early sixteenth century, and although Kafka was no friend of Austrian politics, it is important to emphasize this Austrian component of life in Prague because Kafka has too often been called a Czech writer - especially in America. In addition to Kafka's German, Czech, and Jewish heritages, there was also the Austrian element into which Kafka had been born and in which he had been brought up. But even if Kafka had not been Jewish, it is hard to see how his artistic and religious sensitivity could have remained untouched by the ancient Jewish traditions of Prague which reached back to the city's tenth-century origin. His close relationship with Dora Dymant, his steady and understanding companion of his last years, contributed considerably toward this development. Although Kafka became extremely interested in Jewish culture after meeting a troupe of Yiddish actors in 1911, and although he began to study Hebrew shortly after that, it was not until late in his life that he became deeply interested in his heritage. In short, Kafka shared the fate of much of Western Jewry - people who were largely emancipated from their specifically Jewish ways and yet not fully assimilated into the culture of the countries where they lived. ![]() Yet from the Czech point of view, Kafka was German, and from the German point of view he was, above all, Jewish. Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka is today considered the most important prose writer of the so-called Prague Circle, a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague during the 1880s until after World War I.
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