Franz Kafka Wrote in German : Czechs Pay Scant Homage to Their Greatest Writer

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia —  Franz Kafka, a 20th-Century writer of such force and influence that the word Kafka-esque has entered our language to describe a mood of shadows and anguish, was born in Prague in 1883 and lived all but a few months of his short life there. Czechoslovakia has produced no more important writer.

Yet he is a writer without much honor in his homeland. Only one of his books is now sold in Prague, a collection of stories that includes “The Metamorphosis,” the tale of the commercial traveler Gregor Samsa who awoke one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insect.

The book is published in German, the language in which Kafka wrote. But few Czechoslovaks read German any more. No Czech translations of any of Kafka’s works are now in print in Czechoslovakia. A Czechoslovak can buy William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Daniel Defoe and Honore de Balzac in translation these days, but not Kafka.

Often Ignored

There is some confusion and ambiguity about the official attitude toward Kafka. He is not officially despised in his own country. It is hard to prove that he is suppressed. But, though acknowledged, he is partially hidden and often ignored, as if the government were as confused as the family of Gregor Samsa about what to do with its monstrous offspring.

Dr. Frantisek Kafka, a 77-year-old distant cousin of Kafka who has written much about him, denies that the government of Czechoslovakia, one of the most hard-line in Communist Eastern Europe, neglects his illustrious relative.

“We cannot say he is neglected,” Kafka said in an interview at his Prague apartment. “German literature is not published every day in Czechoslovakia. If he’s neglected, then I’m neglected, too. There is simply not enough paper to publish everything.”

Over the years, the official line on Kafka has changed often. Before World War II, not many Czechoslovaks read his work.

Banned by Nazis

“He was not even known here,” said Kafka. “In 1937, when ‘The Trial’ was published in Czech for the first time, it sold only three copies.”

“The Trial” is Kafka’s most famous novel.

Kafka was banned under the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during the war and the Communists continued to be suspicious of him after the war. But, under pressure of some of the world’s best-known writers, like Jean Paul Sartre, Kafka was “rehabilitated” in Czechoslovakia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“When ‘The Trial’ was published in 1958,” said Yasha David, a Czech exile who put together a huge exhibit on Kafka at the Pompidou Center in Paris three years ago, “it was a shock to us.”

Ambiguous Interest

Young Czech writers had not felt the power of Kafka until then. But the relatively liberal mood that allowed publication of “The Trial” was quashed by Soviet troops in the spring of 1968.

Although the tenor of the government has not changed since then, Czechoslovakia has more recently shown some official, though still ambiguous, interest in Kafka. A packet of nine of his letters and 23 of his postcards was found in an antique book shop in Prague last year and bought by the government for its Museum of Czech Literature. But the letters and cards are still not on exhibit at the museum. And the official government guidebook to Prague still does not mention Kafka at all.

There are a host of reasons why Kafka is not celebrated in Czechoslovakia. The most obvious problem is political: No dictatorial regime can cherish a writer whose most famous novel depicts a labyrinth of injustice and begins, “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

Wrote of Totalitarian Justice

In the novel, a nightmarish description of totalitarian justice that Kafka uncannily produced long before the heyday of totalitarian states, Joseph K is hauled before a court that refuses to tell him what he is accused of or who has accused him.

“The legal records of the case, and above all the actual charge-sheets were inaccessible to the accused and his counsel,” Kafka wrote.

Nor can Joseph K find any hope from what the courts have done before. The courts never record their verdicts. Even judges do not know what other courts have done.

“In such circumstances,” Kafka wrote, “the defense was naturally in a very ticklish and difficult position. Yet that, too, was intentional. For the defense was not actually countenanced by the law, but only tolerated, and there were differences of opinion even on that point, whether the law could be interpreted to admit such tolerance at all.”

Yet this sorry justice does not disturb Joseph K’s defense attorney, who sees nothing wrong with the system. In the end, Joseph K is never found guilty but is punished nevertheless.

Cultural Problem

There is a cultural problem for Czechoslovakia as well. Kafka grew up at a time when Prague, the third-largest city of the Austro-Hungarian empire, had large German and Jewish minorities. Most Jews, like Kafka, studied in German-language schools, and Kafka wrote in a language that is now frowned upon in Prague.

The German Nazis killed almost all the Jews of Prague during World War II; the Czechs drove out almost all the Germans after the war, and Prague is now an almost 100% Czech city.

Many critics put Kafka in a Czech literary tradition.

“I describe him as a representative of a Bohemian literary river,” said his distant cousin, Dr. Kafka.

Great Confusion Over Kafka

Yet most Czechs look on him not as a Czech writer but as a German and, therefore, alien writer. That lessens the pressure to read and praise him.

The final problem is more complicated. There is no feel of Prague in the works of Kafka. A reader has no idea where the stories take place. Kafka transformed Prague into what the exiled Czech poet Jiri Grusa has called “the somewhere and everywhere that was to become the synthetic landscape of the mature Kafka.”

This has led to great confusion. His books were published in France in the early 1930s without any biographical information, and many readers, without any idea about him, simply counted him as some obscure foreign exile allied to surrealists like Salvador Dali. The British Penguin editions of his works still imply in an erroneous biographical note that he did most of his writing in Berlin, not Prague.

A Part of Prague

It is hard for readers to associate Kafka with Prague in the way they associate Dublin with James Joyce or Paris with Marcel Proust. The Czech government feels no pressure from tourists demanding to see sites described in the works of Kafka.

Yet Kafka spent almost all his life in a small and crowded quarter of Prague that looks now almost exactly the way it did then. Prague is still a city of shifting shadows, of spindly, eerie medieval spires and narrow, bustling streets and antique castles on great hills. A visitor can still trace much of Kafka there.

Kafka was the son of a wealthy shopkeeper. He was born July 3, 1883, in an apartment building that still stands just off the Old Town Square in the center of medieval Prague and on the edge of the city’s old Jewish neighborhood. In 1964, a group of foreign writers put up a plaque with a bronze bust of him on the corner of the building. Despite the events of 1968, the bust remains there.

Little Has Changed

Although the oldest buildings of the Jewish neighborhood were torn down at the turn of the century in a massive urban renewal, much of old Prague looks just like it did when Kafka was alive.

A visitor can see the Kinsky Palace that housed the German school and Kafka’s father’s shop; the office building where Kafka worked as an investigator of workmen compensation cases; the various apartment buildings where he lived and wrote; the medieval bridges on the Moldau River that he would cross to reach the hill that he liked to climb up to the antique Castle of Prague; the Hebrew clock on the Jewish town hall and community center in which he once introduced a Yiddish actor from Poland; the neighborhood’s strange medieval Jewish cemetery where lack of space has spawned a profusion of tombstones sprouting from each other like wildflowers in an unkept garden.

There is, in fact, a Kafka-esque quality to the old Jewish neighborhood. Most of the Jews are gone, but the antique synagogues of the area brim with some of the finest ritual art in the world.

Left Prague in 1923

It is there because Adolf Hitler ordered all Jewish religious objects rounded up from the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and brought to Prague. He wanted a museum there for the display of the artwork of an extinct people. After the war, the Czech government, with Jewish support, decided to maintain the museum, housing it in the unused synagogues of the old Jewish neighborhood.

A second plaque honoring Kafka, a bare notice on one of the little houses in the cramped Street of Gold beneath the Castle of Prague, was removed a year or so ago. Kafka’s sister, Ottla, had rented a room in the house for a few months so that he could write there in quiet for a few hours at night. Government officials have said they will put the plaque back after restoration of the street is completed.

Kafka, who published only a few works during his lifetime, never earned enough to give up his job. But he contracted tuberculosis and retired early from his workmen’s compensation job in 1922. This enabled him to leave Prague for Berlin, the center of German language literary life, in 1923. But his health continued to deteriorate, and he died in a sanitarium outside Vienna on June 3, 1924, at the age of 40.

Kafka Grave Easy to Find

After the burial in Prague, his friend Max Brod found a note among Kafka’s papers asking him to burn all his unpublished work. But Brod refused to heed the request. Some of Kafka’s best-known novels, “The Trial” among them, were first published after his death.

Kafka was buried in the Straschnitz Jewish Cemetery far from the old town. It is now at the end of a new subway line that the Soviet Union built for the Czechs after 1968.

Since there are few Jews left in Prague anymore to care for the cemetery, many of the graves in Straschnitz are overgrown and cluttered. But the Kafka grave is swept and cleared of most debris and easy to find. A damaged sign points the way. Rocks and pebbles, in some disorder now, once laid down a geometric pattern over the grave. A few ferns, a few dry, stale flowers, a few foreign coins lie on the rocks and pebbles.

The tombstone carries the names of Kafka; his father, Hermann, who survived his son for seven years; and his mother Julie, who survived her son for 10 years. There are Hebrew prayers chiseled into the stone. A loose slab lies beneath the tombstone, in memory of Kafka’s three younger sisters, Elli, Valli and Ottla. All three died in Nazi extermination camps in either 1942 or 1943.