1920 fashion in man

I

In April 1920, Franz Kafka wrote to his Czech translator and lover Milena Jesenska asking her to write to him in Czech rather than German. He was then living in Prague, which had eighteen months earlier become the capital of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic, she in the former Habsburg imperial capital of Vienna. Both were native Praguers. He explained his request to her thus:

Of course I understand Czech. I've meant to ask you several times already

why you never write in Czech. Not to imply that your command of German

leaves anything to be desired . . . I wanted to read you in Czech because,

after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena

be found in her entirety . . . So Czech, please. (1)

Her letters to him have not survived, but she evidently complied. He thanked her the next month, explaining:

I have never lived among Germans. German is my mother-tongue and as such

more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is

why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the

movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a

meeting.(2)

The notion that somebody "belongs to a language", that she "can only be found there in her entirety", is an interesting one. It becomes particularly interesting when that statement is made from Prague, a city where the question of the relation of language to identity has been a fraught one over the last two centuries. And it is still more so, when its author is a man whose own location and belongingness was a source of perpetual uncertainty to him. Kafka felt anything but at home in that mother-tongue of which he is one of this century's undisputed literary masters. Prager Deutsch was not "good" German, being inbred and infected with both Czechisms and Yiddishisms. Kafka spoke German with a Czech accent,(3) which immediately identified him as a Praguer,(4) and described his feel for the language as being that of a "half German".(5) He both admired and resented Goethe for the purity of his linguistic usage.(6) He was no more secure about his Czech, which while more than serviceable was far from "classical".(7) He thought highly of Bozena Nemcova, the author of the most beloved of nineteenth-century Czech novels Babicka (Grandma, 1855);(8) but he was tongue-tied before the Czech director of the insurance office where he worked, from whom he "first learned to admire the vitality of spoken Czech".(9) He joked with Milena about how "the people who understand Czech best (apart from Czech Jews of course) are the gentlemen from Nase rec (Our Language), second best are the readers of that journal, third best the subscribers -- of which I am one".(10) He joked with his sister Ottla about having "launched into the world the lie about my splendid Czech".(11) Beyond this, of course, Franz Kafka was Jewish.

What that meant, in turn-of-the-century Prague, was unclear and contested, both within and outside Jewish circles. But at the least it implied that Kafka could not be wholeheartedly German (or, come to that, Czech), whichever language he spoke. Anti-Semitism was rife in both Bohemia's major ethnic communities -- as, I think, it is valid to describe them by this date, though it would not have been seventy years earlier. At times this made for strange bedfellows, as when we find the eminently patriotic Czech writer Jan Neruda invoking "the great composer and still greater German and liberal Richard Wagner" in support of the view that Bohemian Jews are foreigners.(12) Whether they spoke Czech, German or both, Prague's Jews did not "belong to a language", they could not "be found there in their entirety". The languages of the ghetto had been eroded over the nineteenth century. Joseph II's reforms had opened trade and commerce to Jews, but forbade the further keeping of business and communal records in Yiddish or Hebrew; they resourced Jewish schools, but required the medium of instruction within them to be German. Nearly a century and a half later, Kafka could begin his introduction to an evening of Yiddish poetry in Prague's Jewish Town Hall with the ironic observation: "many of you are so frightened of Yiddish that one can almost see it in your faces".(13)

For Prague Jews of Kafka's generation, language and identity could be painfully dissonant. In Kafka's case, this dissonance reached deep into his own family, conferring an alien quality on the most intimate of human relationships. In his diary for October 1911 we read:

Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she

deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it.

The Jewish mother is no "Mutter", to call her "Mutter" makes her a

little comic (not to herself, because we are in Germany), we give a Jewish

woman the name of a German mother, but forget the contradiction that sinks

into the emotions so much the more heavily. "Mutter" is peculiarly German

for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian

splendour, Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called "Mutter"

therefore becomes not only comic but strange.(14)

When Kafka describes German as his "mother-tongue", he means it quite literally. It was the language that his mother Julie spoke to him from his infancy. Not, however, his father. From the evidence of the few surviving postcards in his hand, Herman Kafka's command of German was poor.

Julie Kafka, nee Lowy, hailed from a prosperous German-speaking family in Podebrady, a small town east of Prague in the Czech heartland of central Bohemia. Julie's father was a dry-goods merchant and owner of a brewery; both her grandfather and her great-grandfather had been respected Talmudic scholars. These were not poor Ostjuden of the sort found in Bukovina or Galicia (and whose Yiddish theatre so captivated Franz), but a comfortable upper-middle-class Bohemian family. Before her marriage, Julie lived on Prague's Old Town Square. Since 1895 it has been known in Czech as Staromestske namesti, before that it was simply Velke namesti (the big square); but Julie would have called it Altstadter Ring. Then as now, it was no mean location. Certainly Julie was socially a cut above her husband Herman, whose father was a kosher butcher in the small Czech-speaking village of Osek (or Wossek, as it is incongruously called, German-fashion, in most of the English-language works on Kafka) near Strakonice in south Bohemia. The 1890 census lists 381 inhabitants for Osek, all of them Czechs.(15) This means only that they listed Czech as their "language of everyday intercourse" on the census return, though Czech nationalists at the time took this as a surrogate declaration of national identity. The village had twenty Jewish families in 1852, with their own synagogue.(16) Herman moved to Prague in 1881, where he established himself as "Herrmann Kafka, linen, fashionable knitted ware, sunshades and umbrellas, walking sticks and cotton goods, sworn consultant to the Commercial Court".(17) He married Julie in 1882, and Franz, their first child, was born the next year. His shop was on Celetna ulice, off Staromestske namesti. In 1912 he moved to the Old Town Square itself, opening up on the ground floor of the baroque Kinsky palace. The sign over the shop read Herman Kafka; the Czech, not the German spelling of his name. Kafka, by the way, is not an uncommon Czech surname, nor an exclusively Jewish one.

Unlike his more genteel wife, Herman always remained happiest in plebeian Czech. Apart from anything else, it helped him in his business. His shop was spared in at least one local Kristallnacht (Prague saw several in these years) as a consequence. The family governess Marie Wernerova (as she signed herself, not Werner, as in most of the Kafka literature), who was also Jewish, spoke only Czech.(18) But like most Jewish children in Prague at the time,(19) Franz was educated entirely in German, beginning in 1889 at the German Boys' Elementary School on the Fleischmarkt (which Marie Wernerova would have called Masna ulice) and moving in 1893 to the Altstadter Gymnasium, which was also in the Kinsky palace. He completed his studies at the Karl-Ferdinand German University of Prague, graduating in law in 1906. Prague's ancient university, founded by Charles IV in 1348, had formally split into separate Czech and German wings in 1882. The ancient Karolinum and Klementinum were severed by dividing walls, and when it was unavoidable, as at convocations, to share facilities, the two institutions used them at different times. At the time Franz studied there, close on a third of the German University's student body was Jewish. A further substantial minority (20 per cent in 1890) was Czech. Even at this date, for some Czechs German still remained a language of social advancement.