UNIVERSITY OF PARDUBICE

KAFKA´S RELATIONS TO CZECH AND GERMAN CULTURE,

AND SPECIALLY HIS ATTITUDE TO NATIONALISM

YOLANDA DELGADO PAREDES

[Essay in Literature]
 In the end of the nineteenth century, in which Franz Kafka was born, Prague was a
city full of conflicts between the Slav and German population. Slavs meant the majority of
the population whilst the Germans were a minority.
Kafka’s family had its origin in different social classes, although their religion beliefs
were identical. Both maternal and paternal ancestors professed the Jewish religion. Herman
Kafka wanted his family to receive mainly a German education. He came from a Slav home
in which Czech was the language in use. On the other hand his wife grew up in a German
speaking family.
Franz Kafka deepened in Jewish religion, language and Yiddish theatre; although he
always sympathized with the socialist ideals, did not participate in the events happening
around him in the beginnings of the 20th century, he wrote escaping from a community from
who felt little attachment. This uprooted position was very important to his psicoemotional
development.
Usual topics in Kafka’s work were loneliness, absurd, vital angst, isolation from the
collective, life meaning and the problem of becoming an individual. These ideas were born
in a consubstantial personality and in a family home influenced by a love-hate relation with
his dominant father.
Kafka was also influenced by other writers and philosophers such as Kierkegaard.
From a religious perspective he is concerned about the meaning of human existence: “what
I need is to be clear with myself, know what I should do. The question is not what should I
know but wanting to understand my destiny and see what divinity expects from me. I need to
find out a positive truth for me, an idea to live or die for”.
He also starts the concept of anxiety, the knowledge which makes the person who suffers it
be able to forget his own egocentrism allowing him to enter in a direct way in the problem
of human existence. Kafka was the precursor of the literary existentialism.

KAFKA: GERMAN AND CZECH CULTURE

Kafka needed to develop an auto sufficient personality because of the lack of support
from his surrounding culture, which was in fact closed and coherent. He was a social
rootless person. Even though he wrote in German, he was unable to combine totally with
German culture. Some writers say this happened because he was a Jew, but others say that
he had a lack of solid Jewish roots. Despite the fact that his parents were Jewish, he was not
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educated by the traditional dogmas. A third group of writers think that Kafka cannot be
classified in a specific category and that it is difficult to say if he was German or Jew,
because, first of all, Kafka was Prague. Being from Prague at his time meant being German,
Jew but also Czech.
This situation has waken a series of discussions, because while the first group
(German and Jews) feel Kafka as someone of their own, Czechs still have not situated him
in a certain group, mainly because he did not write in Czech. In a limited vision of the issue,
some circles sustain the idea that if Kafka wrote in German he could not be part of the
cultural legacy of the country. We should not forget that the Czechs had big fights to achieve
the recognition and implantation of their language and Kafka maintained an eccentric
posture towards Czech nationalist manifestations.
Kafka’s difficult childhood was distinguished by the frequent changes of house inside
the city of Prague, his fears and torments, his father’s severity and the uprootness he
developed made him focus his attention towards the inside. He described the world that
surrounded him but with the aim of describe it to himself and not towards public.
Franz Kafka was born in the house (U veze) at tower number 27, just in the line that
separated the Jewish and German neighbourhoods; this mixture of cultures marked his life
and his work. Along his life, except for his last years when he suffered tuberculosis, he
never moved away from Prague’s old city. It is said that one day he looked from a window
onto the square and said: “There is my school, in that building towards us is my university
and to the left is my office”, he drew a circle and added: “there is contained all of my life”.
His works reflected a unique mix of Czech, Jewish and German culture characteristic
of central Europe at the time. Most Czechs have a keen appreciation for Kafka's literary
style, especially his surrealist works, which turned out to be a fitting description of life in
the communist era. Kafka's opposition to established society became apparent when, as an
adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he
expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists, and in his later years, a sympathy for a
socialized Zionism. Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged.
As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but as a modern
intellectual he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to
Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept

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these sympathies attenuated. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka's
lifelong personal unhappiness.
His condition of Jew also made of him a writer far away from conventionalisms. In
his novel, ‘America’ reflects what this part of society was starting to suffer from other
sectors of society. His writing alluded to a particular phenomenon, during the start of the
20th century the outbreaks of anti-Semitism in Europe provoked a strong immigration to the
U.S.A. Kafka did not need to talk about the European anti-Semitism derived from
illustration in the industrial development, a tendency which as a rational thought played on
favour of disintegration of different cultures, especially Jewish culture.

NATIONALISM

At the end of the nineteenth century the overthrow of the old monarchic order and the
construction of national identities generated for the Jews a new reality.
The end of the Napoleonic domination provoked in Europe a new social and political
configuration which affected directly the rights of the Jewish community. It generated
debates and disturbances orientated to cancel their citizenship and in Germany a nationalist
movement started in the roots of the Volksgeist. This saw Jews as something opposite to it.
Kafka captures the condition of the emigrant in the process of anullation-asimilation
of individuality which affects not only the Jew but all the human condition because of the
destruction of culture in modern societies. The disorientation of an immigrant in a new
country or in a country which does not accept him.
Kafka never showed a desire to be assimilated. He was constantly aware of his race,
of his Jewish nationality. His attitude to Zionism as an expression of radical Jewish
nationalism went through three stages. As a student he was very interested in the Zionist
movement. He took part in the gatherings of the Association of Jewish Students. This was
followed by two or three years when he had no contact with it and felt indifferent to
Zionism. Yet his attitude changed soon after the emergence of anti-Semitism in 1916. He
subscribed to the Zionist magazine ‘Self-Defence’ and started contributing to it. Towards the
end of his life he wrote increasingly for the magazine. The list of books on Jewish subjects
that he had read contains dozens of titles.

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 In Kafka, the attitude toward other and others, including his own nation, is always
shaped primarily through the attitude to his own being. The ethic comes before the ethnic;
the ontological comes before the ethnical. The national precedes the social, the existential
precedes the national. At the same time, it is perfectly clear to Kafka that “literature
belongs to a nation before it can belong to literary history”. As he expressed, “what, in a
major literature, proceeds from below and is lodged in perfectly sound cellar of the
building, occurs here in broad daylight; and whatever breaks out very briefly there is
displayed here as a matter of life and death”.

As we have seen, Kafka is often seen as a Prague Jew assimilated to German culture,
ambivalent to Czech nationalism. In my opinion there are two main facts for this, his own
history and personality and the political and social time he lived in. The way he acted
towards the society he lived in responded mainly to a character modelled during childhood.
His apparent introversion and passivity is a direct consequence of the education he received,
pushed towards professional success by his obsessive father who tried to raise his children
as Germans in a Jewish Prague family. The fact of his religion and his German education
made difficult his integration at first in Czech and German culture, but also in the Jewish
community where he never was totally implicated, especially in his childhood. In addition,
his own way of living turned complicated that Kafka could choose with clearness his own
convictions as he was doubtful man as he described: “I am familiar with indecision, there's
nothing I know so well, but whenever something summons me, I fall flat, worn out by half-
hearted inclinations and hesitations over a thousand earlier trivialities.”.
Finally, we can say that it is difficult to understand Kafka’s relationship with German
and Czech culture without understanding the historical and social events occurred at his
time. Not only because of how Kafka related to society but also by how society reacted to
Kafka’s existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

- KAFKA, FRANK. America.

- TOLLINCHI, ESTEBAN. Romanticismo y Modernidad
- PATOCKA, JAN. Body, community, language, World
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