The Secrets of Prague: Kafka in a New Perspective

In its current issue, the Edinburgh Review carried a remarkable essay about Prague as “Repression’s Capital” by the English television director James Hawes. (For the full text, click Eurozine.) If Vienna was where the notion of repression was born, he writes, Prague, “just up the main railway line (and in Freud’s day a vital part of the same Empire), is surely where it now most obviously resides. There is no city on earth so tourist-oriented that has so much to be quiet about.”

Hawes described Prague as the focal point of the great fault-lines in European history: Catholicism vs. Protestantism, German vs. Slav, and, most recently, Soviet “socialism” (i.e., the Red Army) vs. Anglo-Saxon “liberty.” From 1618 to 1989, the hopes and fears of Europe, he says, have repeatedly collided here.

“The sense of being watched by suspicious eyes here was not imported by the Soviets or even the Gestapo,” Hawes writes. “The gorgeous Catholic monuments of Prague’s counter-reformation came ready-packed with Vienna-backing priests and prelates. By Franz Kafka’s day (1883–1924, pictured here), any public meeting had to have a police functionary present and observing; any application for a state or semi-state job (like Kafka’s), however minor, had to be supported (as was Kafka’s) by a ‘certificate of good behaviour’ from the police – positive vetting, in other words.”

Hawes mentions the story A Czech Serving Girl, published in 1906. The author was Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and after his death, literary executor. “This story is little known because it appeared in an upmarket, subscribers-only, essentially erotic magazine, one of whose takers (before it was legally banned due to the pictures in it) was Kafka’s millionaire father. In 1908 the editor of this magazine, Franz Blei, became Kafka’s first-ever publisher; in 1915, Blei fixed a half-share of the major Berlin literary prize (and much attendant publicity) for Kafka in a blatant piece of literary insider dealing.

“This story is unknown today largely because, starting with Brod himself, Kafka’s champions would rather it had not been so. To say that the truth has been repressed might sound too strong, but the fact is that of all the 10,000-odd publications now extant about Kafka’s life and work, not a single one has ever pointed out the full connection between Blei and Kafka, nor published the striking pictures – some of which would be top-shelf stuff even today – in the magazine to which Kafka, as his letters reveal, enthusiastically and jollily subscribed.

“It’s this strange state of affairs that makes Kafka the perfect icon for repressed Prague, along with the Black Theatre and its eerie sidestep from reality. For example, the truisms about Kafka – that he was part-Jew, part- Czech, part-German – are factually accurate, just as it is indisputable that Prague is the Czech capital. But such ‘truths’ are only true in 3-D. Add in the fourth dimension which is necessary for all real human life, an awareness of history, and the picture of Prague, and of its literary idol, is very different. The bald fact is that most of the gorgeous old buildings of Prague were universally regarded, before 1918, as part of greater German culture’s architectural patrimony; many of the later examples were indeed deliberate reifications of German-speaking dominance. They are only Czech now because the Czechs (quite understandably) kicked the Germans out. But who wants to know this today? And who wants to be reminded that throughout Kafka’s lifetime, it was the Czechs, not the Germans, who were the anti-Semites in Prague – or that Kafka himself clearly supported, and indeed freely invested large sums of money in, the Austro-German war effort?

“Of all the symbols of this repressed Czech-German-Jewish history, the most memorable is the asylum for mentally-damaged war-wounded, founded largely by Kafka himself in 1916-17 and still extant more or less as he left it, in a place which was, in Kafka’s day, rather wonderfully called Frankenstein. Now, you would imagine, would you not, that Dr Kafka’s Asylum for Mentally-Damaged Soldiers in Frankenstein would be an irresistible magnet for young film-makers? In fact, it is entirely unknown to the tourist trade and scarcely more known to scholars, despite its being the one actual relic of Kafka’s life that would truly support his quasi-saintly image. When I went there last year with the BBC, the doctors had no idea of the Kafka connection at all and told us we were the first film crew ever to visit – this despite its being scarcely two hours drive from any of the mighty universities of Munich, Dresden and Leipzig, never mind only an hour from Prague.

“Why is the place so ignored? I think the answer is simple: because this was a German-speaking area until 1945, and Kafka’s mental hospital was (by his own express avowal) founded exclusively for German-speaking soldiers. The good soldier Schweyk, however shell-shocked, would simply not have made Kafka’s linguistic cut.

“All this is perfectly well known about but never spoken of, either by tourist guides or literary hagiographers. The fate of the truth about Kafka makes it seem, on some dreary, sunless level athwart the glooming flats where psychology and culture interweave ineluctably, vaguely proper, if endlessly sad, that Prague has become what it is: a place of booze, brothels and endless tourist shops selling babushka dolls to overnight trippers unable to distinguish between Czech and Russian culture. The facts will be efficiently repressed in the name of business, locked away in some lumber-room of the mind, like Josef K.’s sado-masochistic vision in The Trial, wiped clean by the kerosene wake of the Ryanair flight home. Maybe, when your history is as damaged as Prague’s, repression is a necessary part of survival. (Freud never said it wasn’t; he only said that if repression starts to cause neurosis, it is best identified.) Certain demonstrable facts – that the photogenic city is really German, that in Kafka’s day the German-speaking police and army repeatedly broke up Czech anti-Jewish riots – are simply no good at all in a place that must look to the future because the past is so tortured.”