My Middle Europe

My Middle Europe Slawomir Mrozek The authordeliveredthis addressinJune 1987 in Vienna, on the occasion of his receipt of the the FranzKafka literaryprize. IT IS AN honor to be chosen the first prizewinner whose works are available to the Austrian audience not in the original, since I write in Polish, but in translation in German. I think that this fact conveys a greater significance than my own satisfaction because it relates to something more important than my literary achievements, that is, to the phenomenon of the natural environment of Franz Kafka: the multi-lingual culture of Central Europe. I was born and brought up within the range of Vienna which was the center of that cultural domain. And although I don't speak German, which unfortunately is quite apparent, I can read the original works of your classic writers, including Kafka's. This may sound strange, but the division between a spoken language and the written language appears as one of the eccentricities of a writer's mind-in this case, of my mind. A culture is expressed not only through language or languages but also through all that creates the web of everyday life: the trades and their products, the conventions of social life, culinary recipes, the patterns and proportions ofwindows and door frames, and also the smell of the hallways in old tenements. All these things contribute to the specificity and the uniqueness of a certain area, and of the cultural "mood" of this area. As a child I played with a stack of old coins found in my grandfather's chest. They were halers, korunas and guldens from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , practically useless at that time, because this monarchy no longer existed. These recollections from my childhood could seem to be meaningless , if it were not for innumerable other experiences, which together 24 caused me to belong to the Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence. Often I ponder the contradiction between universalism and particularism , between national and imperial; a contradiction often dramatic, sometimes catastrophic and tragic for individuals and for whole nations. In my opinion, this contradiction is not always necessary but often unavoidable. To support my reflections on this subject I will refer to my own feature film Die Ruckkehr (The Return), which I myself conceived, wrote the screenplay for and directed, with the participation of two Austrian actors, Mrs. Thimig and Mr. Bissmeier. The action takes place in 1913, in one of the countries belonging to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The problems of nationality and universalism appear as the main theme and motor of this film. Cities and towns, although under different names, live on despite their political history, and everything that existed in the regions between Triest, Linz, Lwow, Debreczyn and Czarnogorska Podgorica lives in me and, consequently , in my writing. Critics have often noticed this. My kinship, my relation to Kafka's world, depends not only on our membership in a common sphere of culture. The aspects of my work resembling the wholeness of Kafka's experience are discernible in my writings, especially the early ones. I am speaking of the elements reminiscent of Kafka's art, which concern the individual world; that which is not a simple function of the collective world but reflects the singularly human characteristics of mind and soul. If the presence of Kafkaesque elements in my writing was the act of an imitator only, and not the result of an authentic, personal affinity, then my work would have been of no merit. But this, as objective critics testify, happily is not the case. Of course, the above statement is only the confirmation of my closeness to Kafka, though not of a direct kinship, and should not be interpreted as an attempt to compare me with Kafka. I would be a laughable megalomaniac if I had tried to place my achievements on the same level of scale and talent as his. I am afraid I would have lost in such a game. I still risk being called a "poor relative." I don't think I would be able to add anything new to the scholarly and undoubtedly very large field of critical work on Kafka. I would only like to...