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  • Kafka und Prag. Literatur-, kultur-, sozial- und sprachhistorische Kontexte ed. by Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne and Marek Nekula
  • Kata Gellen
Kafka und Prag. Literatur-, kultur-, sozial- und sprachhistorische Kontexte. Herausgegeben von Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne und Marek Nekula. Köln: Böhlau, 2012. 364 Seiten + 4 s/w Abbildungen. €49,90.

The introduction to a new edited volume, Kafka und Prague, scarcely more than a page long, informs the reader that the book is based on a 2010 conference held at the Goethe-Institut Prague in honor of Kurt Krolop’s eightieth birthday. The book makes little mention of Krolop, a Czech-German Germanist who specialized in the works of Karl Kraus, but whose personal biography seems to fit neatly with the topic of the conference and publication. In addition to nineteen articles of varying lengths, the volume includes a bibliography of Krolop’s academic writings and a 1963 letter to him from Felix Weltsch on the topic of Ludwig Winder, a contemporary and friend of Weltsch, Oskar Baum, and Max Brod. Apparently Krolop was working on a study of Winder, but we are told nothing more about this figure (there is only a fleeting mention of him in one of the essays in the volume), or about the reasons for Krolop’s [End Page 151] interest in him. In the absence of contextualization, these references are rather puzzling. They might be an attempt to beef up the early twentieth-century Czech-German milieu that the book seeks to foreground.

The book is divided into three sections, which represent a gradual “Annäherung” to Kafka’s writing, as if the volume wants to slowly zero in on Kafka himself: “Franz Kafkas böhmische Kontexte,” “Franz Kafkas Lebenswelten,” and “Verortungen Franz Kafkas.” This principle of spatial organization is coherent and generally supported by the essays in the different sections. That being said, the essays in the first section establish almost no link to Kafka’s life or work. Context that makes no effort to situate a specific phenomenon within a broader framework is not really context, but history. Three out of four of the essays in the first part fall into this category. Accounts of Josef Wenzig, a nineteenth-century education and language reformer (Václav Petrbok), of Czech “Weiblichkeit” and German masculinity as expressed in Pavel Eisner’s Milenky (Ludger Udolph), and of the philosopher Max Steiner and early twentieth-century Kant reception (Jörg Krappmann) might tell us about other people present in Kafka’s world, but they do not tell us about their relevance for Kafka. One essay in this section, however, Steffen Höhne’s “Nachdenken über kulturelle Zugehörigkeit. Neobohemistische Traditionen und nationale Desintegration in der Kafka-Zeit,” offers a true context by introducing theories of nation and ethnicity advanced by Kafka’s contemporaries August Sauer, Franz Spina, Max Brod, and Johannes Urzidil. While it is not Höhne’s aim to delineate the precise relationship of these theories to Kafka’s work, he is able to reflect a varied discourse of Czech-German-Austrian-Jewish national identity and culture whose relevance for Kafka is apparent. In fact, this essay, in slightly modified form, would have made an appropriate introduction to the volume.

The second section is, generally speaking, the strongest in the book. First there are essays on Kafka and Zionism (Kateřina Čapková), on Max Brod and Felix Weltsch (Carsten Schmidt), on the sexual politics surrounding Kafka’s “Brief an den Vater” (Karl Braun), and a touching portrait of Kafka’s death (Josef Čermák). These essays all strike a good balance between biographical content, historical context, and some textual detail. They seek not to offer new readings of specific works, but instead to enrich our understanding of certain topics and problems in Kafka’s writings. One notable example is the essay on Kafka and the varieties of Zionism current in early twentieth-century Prague. After providing a solid review of the research on this topic, Čapková proceeds to argue that debates about Zionism and Czech national identity both contribute to Kafka’s critique of nationalism and his “Anerkennung von Pluralität und Komplexität nationaler Identitäten” (83). Another...

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