The battlefield is a room, an office, a street, a square

In September 1984, I enrolled at the Department of Ancient Greek Language and Literature at Charles University. That was my early contact with Prague German literature, though second-rate, of course, snuggled up behind the curtain of antiquity and Greek writers, placed in the foreground.

The professors were famous before as classicists, especially Borivoj Borecký, perhaps the most distinguished classicist in ancient European chairs. All the more so that the enthusiasm for him grew, since his health was restored, like the old days, after years spent in quarantine due to a head injury.

All in all, Prague German literature, both because it was created in the diaspora, the largest of which was Jewish, and because it naturally tends to the wide field left behind by German classical philology, effortlessly slipped behind the drapery of antiquity. It was as if she had been there forever, not just a century.

The following year, I transferred to the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. However, the lectures at the chair in Celetna Street, as well as those in the historic building, on Jan Palach Square - then Red Army Square - remained not only in my memory, but in my blood. Until the end of the eighties, when I ended up studying in Berlin.

Diaspora

The semester at the Berliner Ensemble was led by a professor Rudolf Penka, a friend of my teachers, Jan Císar i Jaroslava Vostrict, and the last living Brecht's student, so it got lucky again. That's when the early cultural optimism of the German (Prague) poets, as well as the late pessimism of the prose writers, faced with the Holocaust, went through me once again, like a shudder, that I clearly saw the limits of this literary ghetto, and I still see it today, since it merges with its own during the great, pan-Germanic tradition.

Later, in his doctoral dissertation, Fr To Miguel de Cervantes, and the influence of Don Quixote on South Slavic, let's say Slavic cultures as a whole, Russian, Polish, Czech, there was some space left for eminent Prague Jews. I expanded it in the literary version of the dissertation (Windmills of Europe, Novi Sad, 2011). They are among the largest literary diasporas in history, such as, for example, Magna Grecia, on the soil of southern Italy, in antiquity, and they will never lack interest.

Believe it or not, this is the first complete study of them as a whole - where they all are. At least, as far as I managed to run through the Czech, German and English sources. The destinies of literary diasporas can be like that.

And the manuscript, to conclude, is my humble mail to the Jews of Prague, condemned to the dispersion of German literature, a mail to the diaspora of the text: to poets, screenwriters, novelists, librettists, Hasidim, Kabbalists, dramatists who dreamed in Yiddish, used Czech and wrote in German .

Franz Kafka

I browsed recently Kafkin Czech bibliography from the sixties, and my attention was drawn to the proceedings of the conference in Liblice, held in 1963, not far from the Terezin concentration camp, where my mother-in-law, then a girl, and her father were interned, Aloís Fried, who died in the camp. And there, an article by a Slovenian writer Dušan Ludvik: Kafka among the Yugoslavs, among 35 Eastern European writers (scientific collection: Franz Kafka, Liblická konference, Nakladatelství Československé akademie ved, Prague, 1963, 219).

I did not dwell long on these lines, written out of ideological loyalty, as for example that, Ludvik says, we Yugoslavs "are not against the publication of Kafka's work, and there is little demand that Kafka be read 'carefully'". Furthermore, that (we, the Yugoslavs) are "far from metaphysical abstractivism, we interpret Kafka with healthy strength from the position of scientific Marxism-Leninism", although, as Ludvik adds, "an extensive discussion of Kafka on a Marxist basis has not yet been written, and it is Marxist Kafkology is just in its infancy here"; etc. etc.

The entire collection, almost 300 pages, I repeat, is imbued with the spirit of loyalty of all authors to their communist parties, with corresponding shades of the official party colors of Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria and, of course, the USSR.

These countries are naturally close to Kafka, in the sense that they are filled with the Jewish people and their familiar troubles. He was interested in Eastern Jewry, and loved the Hasids, and Hasidism (Hebrew Hasidim: pious) - a mystical movement, focused on folk tradition and scrupulous about folklore. As a citizen of Austria-Hungary, he was, of course, no stranger to the Eastern European world.

Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian...

A phenomenological dash caught my attention, to help myself Husserl's optics, colored not without Prague's philological view of the world. By the way, Jews are always and everywhere in the minority, except in the minority of opinion, which its spirit does not know (they say: "Two Jews - three opinions!"). He persistently cultivates his gift for a philological view of the world. In that they are world champions, inconsolably in the minority.

Namely, Ludvik enumerates the Yugoslav editions of Kafka, numerous and diverse in translation, to a large extent, in which Yugoslavia enabled the translation diversity of world literature, accurately and nuanced. "Everybody in our country understands or speaks two national languages," says Ludvik, and continues:

"The stepping stone of scientific Kafka research in Serbo-Croats is 1952, in Slovenes 1954, (At the gallery, Before the law, Starving artist, Village doctor"... (...) A great admirer and connoisseur of Kafka's work, it was tragic in our country Playwright and translator who died in 1961. Mr. Herbert Grün, from which many Slovenian translations of Kafka originate" (...) "A cheap edition of Kafkin The process with us, it is possible to get it at a newsstand in every major city, and translations into vernacular languages, if they have not been plundered, are available everywhere."

Kafka is a mandatory author at Yugoslav universities, Ludvik concludes, but I will not end my study of him before I point out to the reader a slightly hidden place in the middle of his text. This very place is indicative, the most Kafkaesque, closer to Kafka as a Prague resident and a Jew, more than all the globalist and geopolitical places in Ludvik's and other contributions. It is a place where translations into the languages ​​of Yugoslav minorities are listed.

Minorities

Minority, minoritet, small in the big, minority perspective, minority phenomenology in the world, which quickly gets tired of bigness and bigness... What else was the son of a Jewish underwear merchant, from a shop on the corner of Kaprova and Dlouha streets, a "religious humorist", named Franz , and surnames that mean jackdaw in Czech, Kafka?

"Kafka was also translated into the languages ​​of Yugoslav minorities. The short story has been translated into Italian here Coal bucket rider (1953). At least two of Kafka's prose have been translated into Hungarian: Village doctor (1958) and Before the law (1963). Hungarian journalism in Yugoslavia spoke about Kafka and his work relatively early (...) At least two short stories were published in Albanian."

You will easily recognize the artist of the minority among the artists of the majority, especially the writer. He does not go much further than the ambition to represent himself and not someone else, and this distinguishes him from those breeding artists, greedy for the representation of political currents, cultural systems, nations.

The minor creator is well aware of the individual, phenomenological - he was the first to use the word phenomenology Kant's contemporary, JH Lambert (1728 – 1777), my stepfather Hegel used for a metaphysical representation of consciousness in motion. Edmund Husserl, the Czech-German philosopher, perfected phenomenology as the reduction of the world to subjective perception (thus the reduction of majority to minority), as a return to the source of things through observation - and the minor creator has an extraordinarily familiar relationship to the purified world, with inner beauty, but without power .

Username

I have been dealing with minor worlds since my early novel Username (1994), which talks about a terrible majority, Byzantium, the likes of which the world has never seen (1.000 years in duration, and in space - together with influenza - from Mexico to Palestine). More precisely, it talks about the minorities of Byzantium (that's why I baptized it so vengefully and insanely: Username), among which the Balkan cultural tradition is one.

I called diasporic writers minor in my other works as well (Baroque of Montenegro I-III, Cetinje - Podgorica, 2016; Literature and literacy from Crnojević to Petrović I-II, Cetinje, 2017) Not by its artistic strength, but by the worlds it represents. They bought me. They took me under their wing.

I'm the one too. At first I wasn't. But since I have seen with my own eyes, a million times, the minorization of Europe and Europeanness, as a bloodthirsty process of the major worlds, to which I see no end, a process against the birth mother, an Oedipal process, anti-maternity - what else is left? Europe, which gave birth to the West and designed it as a dialectic of virtues and weaknesses, is slipping into an inconsolable minority.

The law, which promotes the obedient to actors, and sanctions the minority as subjects, is most represented in Kafka's narrative work. The titles of grand narratives are just that: Process, Castle (novels), In the penal colony, Transfiguration, Judgment, Before the law, or carry an ominous tone of sanction: Description of one fight, for example; and so Letters to father, or Diary, as if they belong to some terrible literature of punishment, oppression and suffering. He said, Theodor Adorno, that his works resemble crime stories that lack a perpetrator (Notes on Kafka, Prisms collection, Cambridge, 1967, 265).

But even if the perpetrator of the crime is missing, it is enough that the law is there. In that case, nothing is missing, everything is duly fulfilled. It's good that the law is present, even if it doesn't explicitly say what is good and what is not - it's good that the law is there, because the police is there, so there is no shortage. Absence and lack, in Kafka, to draw attention to a purely linguistic problem - means the absence and lack of distant topos: the battlefield is a room, an office, a street, a square, ultimately a synagogue, or some Hasidic aphorism - nothing from the white world, nothing from historical perspectives of humanity.

He builds his language by narrowing it down, the frequency of one and the same circumstances of life, in the machine of language with a limited centrifuge, reduction to topics, apparently banal, but language gives them supreme truth. Kafka's language, by being minor in the process, by constantly narrowing and narrowing, actually celebrates the facts. All the better for the facts.

Cafe Argo

Great German writers looked Kafka in the eye.

Hermann Hesse he despised him at first. Thomas Mann he ridiculed him as a diasporic, mostly non-German writer.

And not only German. Vladimir Nabokov shrugged his shoulders at the mention of Kafka's prose, as if he were a creator The process some intruder in classical European prose. It's like some kind of noise. They underestimated the poetic, the stylistic, without which Kafka would not be Kafka. Later they recoiled, when German spoke from him with a hitherto unknown, diasporic force. Docked.

Kafka became the main troublemaker and madman of world literature. Such a black sheep, in a Jewish family, which has preserved at least a little Yiddish, is called: Meshuga, a madman.

During my studies, I met an old architect from Prague, and he told how, as a young man, he watched Kafka in the Argo tavern.

This is where all the eminent Prague Jews used to hang out: Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, Gustav Meyrink, Milena Jesenska, Ernst Weiss, Franz Werfel. Bohemians, emancipated women. It is still like that today, full of eccentric women. They restored it last year. I recommend it to everyone: beer just like that, poisonously spicy and sour mezetluk, in the center of Prague, not even a hundred meters from Masaryk Station.

"Who is that little man in the corner, who looks like a greyhound?", the young architect asks the waiter, pointing to Kafka. "Looks like the whole world rests on his weak shoulders?"

"Some Jew from the neighborhood. It hangs there all the time. Something scribbled, in German, and nobody alive has a clue what it is!”