JOHANNES URZIDIL AND GERTRUDE THEIBERGER
Johannes Urzidil (1896–1970), Prague Jewish writer in German, childhood friend Franz Kafka he wonders how it is possible that the literary activity of Prague Jews developed so strongly in the first twenty years of the last century. Storyteller, essayist, literary and art critic who died not in Prague, but in Rome - what complex of life force was scattered in such a poetically saturated creative climate?
"I should know, says Urzidil, because I was born and raised in Prague, where I witnessed the Prague-German spiritual world of universal ideas, inexhaustible new forms and human inspiration."
And my personal minority, inspired by the poetic energy of the minor (Jewish) in the major (Germanic) world, inspired by the lively steps of simple people in a wide field, such as Germany, has been asking itself that question since the first step I took on the sidewalk in front of Charles University four years ago decades.
Prague philosopher Felix Welsch (1884, Prague - 1964, Jerusalem) who, by the way, studied law and philosophy at this chair, before which my knees buckled from intellectual excitement in front of great (great minor!) authorities, and lived in this city until 1939, when left Czechoslovakia on the last train before the Nazis, together with Max Brod, and worked in Jerusalem for the rest of his life, says that the Jewish writers of Prague experienced their linguistic awareness first-class and even stronger than their gender awareness. And that, in fact, they subordinated the philosophy of their face to the philosophy of language and creativity.
- It was young German literature from the beginning of the century, and it was the best, according to Milena Jesenska who gives this assessment in her obituary to Dr. Franz Kafka on June 6, 1924 Official Gazette. She doesn't want their relationship to be talked about around town, so she sends him an obituary greeting:
"The best German literature today," says about Kafka the young Mrs. Jesenska, the last scion of the Czech nobility who was decapitated by the Swedes. 1621 on the main square in Prague.
PERSONAL SEAL
"This Prague is always a magical city", writes Johannes Urzidil, "here, where many essences are infused, many magical, incomprehensible and unseen things, words, characters and events are born, there is a living land of magical forces and magician's formulas" .
Language breeds irony. (There is no such expressive irony as speech and text, language, everything else, gestural or visual, is a pale edition of the phenomenal human gift to ironically distance itself from things and phenomena.) Yes, language determines irony.
Language experience has always been a strong fact for me, despite the fact that Czech is a small language, even in the Slavic world, which is why I am close to the mood of Jewish writers in Prague, so different from the mood of German writers in Prague, even though both of them write in German. This sounds like Goethe's title Old Bohemian songs (Altböhmische Gedichte), written sometime in the last weeks of 1827, according to his biographer Urzidil, and to the poem Amazons in the Czech Republic which, admittedly, was written in 1829, but was first printed posthumously in 1833 in the legacy of the sublime poet.
One thing about Goethe, that colored personal, not without success in intonation and confidence of expression, such as ours can be Miroslav Krleža - I mean our language: South Slavic, if it's not too personal again - that thing puts poetic taste above nature itself. Yes, taste itself is nature.
Prema Spiridon Vukadinović, to another "our" writer - let me be supercilious to the point of paroxysm, because this Austrian critic and essayist from Prague is only a newspaper by his surname, by nothing else (certainly not by language, he wrote in German), Goethe wrote his famous prose Novela located in Hasinstein, a place near the German border, in the Sudetenland. It was then, in 1813, according to his own words, that he saw nature for the first time in the true sense of the word and for the first time enjoyed it as he would have liked outside of his uniformed aesthetic interests.
Later, in his old age, on January 18, 1, the poet looks back on the days when he wrote A novella and experienced them as a gift from God, while he was grateful for the Czech landscape and surroundings to a certain countess who enabled him to enjoy the West Bohemian scenery, with his existential being, without direct poetic interest:
"I have never observed nature for poetic reasons... I have conquered nature to such an extent that, when I need something as a poet, I have it at hand".
THE LOVE OF MR. GOETHE
Goethe spent in the Czech Republic, as calculated by his biographer Urzidil, exactly 1.114 days - in Italy, for example, 683 days, and most of that in this part of the Czech country, right next to the German border. As a young poet, and to add on this occasion, I translated a poem Mr. Casanova's grave Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert (1901 - 1986), as soon as he received the Nobel Prize, in the fall of 1984, and published it in the Titograd Creation.
I still remember the verses about Goethe's last love, which Seifert deals with in his poem, dedicated to a girl from Karlovy Vary, as if snow is falling on the grave of Casanova from where a mist rises and surrounds the old Mr. Goethe, who is kneeling with love for a younger girl some six decades.
Johannes Urzidil wrote the best monograph on Goethe in the Czech Republic (Goethe in Böhmen, 1962). The poet explored Northern Bohemia, outlined its landscape and got to know it both in his mature and last years, and Vukadinović documents the same in his aforementioned work with Goethe's drawings of the local lake and castle:
"The anniversary of Goethe's death in 1932 was officially celebrated as a landmark day," says Urzidil, "with the participation of all schools and institutions regardless of nationality. A whole series of Czech publications offered a contribution to the knowledge of Goethe. Spiridon Vukadinović then, in his honorary Weimar lecture, marked the Czechs as the most Goethean Slavic nation" (Goethe und die Slawische Welt, Goethe-Jahrbuch XVIII, 1932).
Contemporary Czech critic Václav Petrbok (1972 -) mentions Spiridon Vukadinović as a student of the Austrian philologist and literary historian, August Sauer: 1855, Vienna - 1826, Prague, but in the context of sarcasm towards the current state of Czech German studies. Although Vukadinović called the Czechs "the most Goethean people among the Slavs", he says, "that example is by no means realistic today, because Goethean and Schillerian themes are literally miserably represented in the Czech cultural context in this jubilee year" (Czech Republic in Goethe and Goethe in the Czech Republic, Prague, 2009).
EVENING OF HONOR
Urzidil knew how to look forward, to feel the language that speaks from the future, the language that speaks to us from there with all its power, testing the limits of non-linguistic means. In 1924, when Kafka dies, not even seven days will pass and he will say, at an honorary literary dinner in the deceased's honor, that he is not talking about a little-known Prague writer, who has not yet cooled down in his grave, but about a world literary greatness of non-serial format without predecessors and followers (cf. Pavel Kosatík: Menší kníška o nĕmeckých spisovatelích z Čech a Moravy, Izdavaštvo Franz Kafka, Prague, 2001, 148).
The word, in Europe, means much more than in Asia, than in Africa, America or anywhere else in the world.
Of course, Antika! - someone will exclaim, and rightly so.
Ancient rhetors and philosophers, linguists and poets assigned spoken and textual discourse a decisive role when they founded the civilization of the West, and this word of theirs (speech and textual role in private and social life) will remain so until Western civilization survives as we know it. And it will disappear with us. All that was will disappear as the word disappears. We lie on the speech, and get up from the speech. If we are speechless, we do not exist.
Urzidil died in Rome in 1970 after a long and typically Jewish anabasis - in twenty years he changed numerous professions and countries, what a man fleeing from the Nuremberg racial laws does not change, and he outlived his friend from the Prague Jewish circle by half a century. When he gave his speech over the coffin in 1924, he was a young poet, and in Italy, America, Germany, England, everywhere he went after the war, he became convinced of the messianic fame of his friend. His mother died when he was very young - she was of Jewish origin, from Prague, and he remained forever a Prague Jew at heart, after that mother - although his father married a Czech woman a second time - and, as the Czechs like to say:
"He was a German who felt Czech - the last great German writer from Prague".
He had just started working at the German embassy, and in 1934 he was fired as a Halbjude ("half-Jew", father a Sudeten Czech from Heb on the German border). He found himself first in England, and then further, in terms of geography and literature, wherever the spirit of Ahasuerus led him. From prose The last loved ones, inspired by Prague, through the novel Black Shirt, On the border, and through other prose: The Happiness of the Present, As Far as the Valley Goes, America and the Old World, and others, is known for the American collection of Prague memories under the title That's where Kafka went.
And, finally, according to the meticulous monograph Goethe in the Czech Republic, unique in the Czech cultural space, which has excellent knowledge of German and German language creation. Today, in the very old city center of Prague, a plaque was erected in memory of Urzidil and his wife. Gertrude Theiberger (1898 - Golchov near Yenikov, 1977 - New York), sister of Kafka's Hebrew teacher, Friedrich (Czechs say Bejiha) Theiberger.
SINGER'S PEN
Mr. Urzidil and Mrs. Theiberger, the poet, carried everywhere the arc of old Prague and the minority Prague flame - philological and literary, ethnic and kabbalistic, to the extent that Kabbalah is not what it is, anywhere else, except at its source, like so many other things torn from the mother's womb.
And many other Jewish world writers, and at this moment the greatest storyteller among them comes to mind, Isaac Bashevis Singer, although they come from other environments - Singer from the Polish Jewish milieu (he wrote in Polish until he emigrated to the USA, when he turned his pen forever to Yiddish), they return to the Prague theme.
They refer to old Prague as a kind of Jewish Olympus in Europe - a city of Kabbalah, mysticism and charm. Themes, tension, poetics - it's as if Prague is being asked for advice on what and how to write, how to interpret tradition, at its very source, where it is most similar to the source. Water and bread, soul and heaven. And hell (Greek Geena, Hebrew, from Ge Hinnom - valley of purification from demons).
With Singer, just to remind you briefly, when something needs to be checked in the usual Jewish tradition, one immediately runs from Krakow and Lublin, from Warsaw and Lviv straight to Prague for a rabbinical opinion. Not only because of the most famous rabbi in the world (Yehuda Löw ben Bezalel, 1512/1520/1525. or 1526 - 17. 9. 1609), the legendary creator of the Golem, already thanks to Jewish authors from Prague, writers of a universal and cosmopolitan orientation who brought together the whole of Europe in their works.
Writers like Hugo Salus, Franz Janovic, Oskar Baum, Paul Leppin, Ernst Weiss, Gustav Meyrink, Franz Werfel and so many others represent both in the history of Czech and in the history of German literature - a minority that is a world minority, universal, precious when the world runs out of cosmopolitan strength and energy.
Gertrude Theiberger, a writer from the Prague circle, married Johannes Urzidil in 1922 as the daughter of a rabbi Karla, and the sister of Friedrich Theiberger (Prague, 1908 - Auschwitz concentration camp, 1944), philologist and philosopher. The younger Theiberger was Kafka's Hebrew teacher close to statesmanship Tomáš Masaryk. Ten years later, in 1933, the Gestapo arrested her together with her husband, and finally in 1941 she emigrated with him to New York.
Her husband, whom she outlived by seven years, died suddenly here in Rome, actually, during a literary tour in 1970. And he was buried here, in the Campo Santo Teutonico cemetery. He reminds me of another wandering Jew who also rests in an Italian cemetery (San Michele in Venice) - a poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) - about the death of the Jews, an urban people far from agriculture, oriented towards textuality, banking and trade, he says in a verse like this:
They did not sow grain. simply,
when the sowing time comes,
they would lie underground alone…
Bonus video:
