I dedicate this manuscript to my family in Prague, who endured the unbearable, living and dead: Ružena Blechová born. Friedová (1934 -), interned as a girl in Terezin concentration camp; Rudolf Fried (1859 - 1941); Aloís Fried (1893 - 1956), one of the 144.000 victims of Terezin; Božena Friedová (1907 - 1980); Marie Friedová (1910 - 1984); Jaromir Blecha (1929 - 2013).
The linguistic creativity of a specific minority, which I will tentatively call minor, or minority, minority, minority, smallness, microcosm, and which stands upright in front of greatness, majority, macrocosm, is the subject of this discussion, otherwise known to world literature under the name: Prague circle.
I will extend the field of battle to the wider borders of Prague. Microcosm and macrocosm - artistic atmosphere and artistic process, graying, with tensions towards changing their condition permeates my discussion about the micro-macro, that is, the macro-micro reality of Prague's Jewish literary circle.
Micro-worlds are cells, the basic structural and functional units of living organisms - in this work I treat thinking and singing as a living organism - like words and their meanings, wrapped in a membrane of authorship. Minor worlds (cells) contain genetic material and are capable of dividing. New minorities, created from them, do not lose their identity or communication with the particles in which they were born.
I am talking here about eminent Prague Jews, famous in art, science and other fields, and especially about writers, because there are the most of them in Prague's Jewish circle. Their creativity is known under the name of Prague German literature, or Prague literature of the German language, Jewish Prague creativity in German - literature that, although outside the motherland, eventually forced the German language to bow to it.
Prague-German speech
Those who were born in the Czech Republic, as Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) and edmund husserl (1859 - 1938), and they write in German and are of Jewish origin, one way or another they are also from Prague because they are connected there by life, singing and thinking.
Prague Jewish literature spans about fifty years, three literary generations, since the appearance of the Prague-German poet RM Rilke 1894, with the first collection Leben und Lieder, until the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the German army after the Munich Pact in 1938. and war.
There, from the point of view of world literature, stood a minor world - one cell, wrapped in a membrane of completely original authorship, with genetic material divided into many cells, of which in this paper attention will be devoted to those called eminent.
This entire minor world could also be named after the title of a poem by a Prague poet, not without a metaphorical undertone Hugo Salus (1866 - 1929), author of twenty collections of poetry and as many prose, Czech-German legend, and extend the metaphor to the first and last verse:
My dear country of the young mother /
Dear mother of my wonderful country...
- which sound like a ten meter, which it is, both in the original and in the translation, with the difference that the Czech ten meter is a forgotten verse form, an old meter that few people mention or know today - a minor, cellular world sufficient for itself (see Hugo Salus, Výbor z básní, J. Otto, Prague, 1927, 39).
I say, those are three literary careers, as far as Prague-Jewish literary speech extends, if we take the Shakespearean and Kafkaian career standards as a ratio (both of them created only twenty years each). But considering the number of writers, the effect, the circumstances, the exclusivity of the German language in the Jewish ghetto in Prague, the "mother of cities", it is indeed something big and belongs to the world artistic language.
Duke of literary life
German literary life in Prague began in the Concordia society a few years before Rilke's birth (RM Rilke, Prague 1875 - Montreux in Switzerland, 1926), in 1871, and it was led by the duke of literary life, Alfred Klaar (born Alfred Karpeles, Prague, 1848 - Berlin, 1927), contributor to the Prague dailies Tagesbote aus Böhmen, and Bohemia, and Montagsrevue aus Böhmen, historian and theorist, "the pope of literary Prague".
He was succeeded at the helm of Concordia by rival poets, Prague physician, writer and poet Hugo Salus (1866 - 1929), author of forty collections of poetry and prose, and Friedrich Adler (1857 - 1938), poet, translator, librettist and lawyer. They were not buried in the Olšane Jewish cemetery in Prague, like so many others - one of the largest cemeteries of German literature in general! - already at the New Jewish Cemetery in the suburb of Smihov.
Prague-German bohemia, like Berlin and Paris, and the circle were born in that climate Young Prague (German Jung Prag), and from there the young Rilke entered the world scene.
The individual, especially in his natural states of apprehension and fear, is a minor phenomenon. The reader will encounter the term minor in this work more than once, and for that the writer apologizes, because I don't have any better ones to describe Kafka's minority and Husserlian phenomenology, to summarize Prague's cultural spirit.
The awareness that there is a majority, a size or largeness, with which the minority, of course, stands in opposition, gives meaning to our minority, all with fear and apprehension and, what is most important for artistic creation, gives it its form.
Minor worlds
The passing of an art form from one hand to another has always been a first-rate intellectual thrill for me. When small worlds, usually on the defensive, take an offensive step, it already means something - a small but great power speaks from them (week messianic power), where I say minor with the evil face of a boy who rushes a rock into the window of the barracks.
Throwing stones is somehow attractive to watch and think about, vita intellectiva, until the stone flies towards the barracks and not towards the church. I do not stand for stoning, nor is this what we are talking about here, but the stone as defiance - the stone as rebellion, the revolutionary tool, the weapon of David - the arm and weapon of the minor David. As St. Augustine says of the word, i. for language, that it has a double role: instructive (to "teach" something) first and, secondly, to call something to mind, "to call it to mind":
"The essentials of Augustin's approach to teach issues are presented in chapter I, he proposes that speaking has a dual purpose, to "teach" something or "to call in mind", either for others' benefit or for one's own (cf. more details: Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader, Harvard University Press, 1998, 148).
Or, how I am Augustin says: Aut ut doceamus aut ut commemoremus uel alios uel nos ispos (De Magistro, I.24 - 25).
Smallness, minority, minority, minoritet, minimality (I am piling up synonyms in order to confront the reader with the fact that I lack precise expressions for this term, as if they disappeared somewhere in the sea of majority) - it is, admittedly, known in linguistic creation since the ancient political elite, but it never flared up with such fervor as on the eve of the severe pogroms of the twentieth century, caused, among other things, by the terrible attitude of the majority towards the minority that the Jews call the Holocaust and the rest fascism.
It is naive to believe that the old writers, ancient and baroque, did not have the opportunity to express their dilemmas and pain - a response to injustices in the relationship between the minority and the majority. They are, there is evidence wherever you go to Zagreb, according to the early Byzantine novel, with which Russian theoretical thought so meticulously introduced us Mihail Bakhtin i Sergej Averintsev, by the Spanish Golden Age, by the Victorian era (the Victorians cultivate a feeling for justice more and more subtly than their entire nation!), everywhere you tap with a pickaxe, from the Renaissance to the postmodern. The writer always stands somewhere between the minority and the majority, he sharpens and blunts somewhere.
The totalitarian culture of the majority
The novelist is the guarantor of both minor (minimum) and major (maximum) narratives about human destiny. The life of great novelists flows among ideas - through the trough, and he drags the banks with him, on trips, in traffic and in his bed. A novelist always drags something and someone with him, and Prague novelists drag a broad Central European heritage, shores that are not so conjunctural, because they are Slavic on one side, Germanic on the other, and in the middle, in the motherland, Jewish.
That's how their Prague was built, an amalgam, an alloy of three metals, Slavic, Jewish and German, and that's why it's so magnetized - a magnetic field. If we are looking for the answer of the minority to the majority, we will find it precisely among the "minor" authors (week messianic power) in the Prague Jewish circle, in Hasidism, Jewish mysticism, with poisonously subtle Hasids, those forerunners and teachers Franz Kafka.
I won't resist summoning a Judeophile now JL Borgesa: he published, in his magazine Jug, in Buenos Aires, in 1934, an essay with a rather bold title Yo, Jew (I, a Jew), although he had not a drop of Jewish blood. He says that Yiddish is, in fact, "just a dialect of German, stained here and there with the language of the Holy Spirit."
Even before Rilke, his writer entered the Prague German scene Paul Leppin (1878 - 1945), decadent poet, writer and editor, with a collection of poems The door of life, filled with longing for courtesans and demonic sex. Lepin's later works, novels, in first place Severin's path to darkness (what a powerful title, German. Severins Gang in die Finsternis!) - Prague German prose, from its very beginnings and rise, starting somewhere from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is often full of mystery, with dark scenes, like a Gothic novel, "full of dark institutions and hazy psychoses", as Borges aptly says about Kafka.
Lepin's subtitle A horror novel from Prague it calls to mind this climate - a new romance that Czech criticism, later, when the term decadence came into vogue, will call it - decadent. Incidentally, the Gothic novel of horror and horror is a familiar form of German literary speech in Prague, and was held in high esteem by the great novelists, Thomas Mann (1875 - 1953) and Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962), who in their youth looked down on the Prague literary diaspora, and later changed their opinion (Mann lived in Prague for a short time).
The terms totalitarianism and totalitarian - despite the fact that they are not close to the heart of either the reader or me - I partially love, that is, I love under duress and agree to them, at least in one circle of her aura, because platonically I love the truth of great narratives, I stoically agree to her whims and madness, and that circle is the fact that the world itself is totalitarian and that every majority in it would not be what it is if it were not totalitarian mentally and carnally.
It is the last circle in the aura of truth, located in the middle of every major (large, majority) world, within which no other circle can be drawn - it is ironically minor and realistically large, and European poets call it the circle of evil in their metaphors.
Not Hitler nor Stalin were so totalitarian in themselves as citizens of their countries - Mr. Kafka, after all, had never met either of them, nor had he ever heard of them, and he described them so plastically, as I want to describe a dissolute meeting with the comforting neutrality of a novelist - but the totalitarian world around them, over which they seized power and held it in their fist like a gypsy, is obscured in its totalitarian culture of the majority.
For the majority, literature is an ornament, for the minority a dreary duty. It arises from the climate, inspiration grows from the climate, there is no literature without an aura of the climate - and what is interesting, when you look at the literary destinies, there is no literature without an aura either.
A writer without an aura is zero.
Or, to use an expression from the Jewish-German colloquial speech, called Yiddish, that I heard so many times in my Prague family: "meshuga" (a nuisance).
Bonus video:
