His simple, sober, and yet dense language is traced to the fact that in Prague the German language had been exposed to manifold Slavic influences for centuries and was virtually cut off from the mainstream language as spoken and written in Germany and Austria. The haunting mood of Prague's narrow, cobblestoned streets, its slanted roofs, and its myriad backyards comes alive in the surreal settings of Kafka's stories. To this day, however, Kafka's tiny flat in Alchemists' Lane behind the towering Hradschin Castle is a major attraction for those in search of traces of Kafka. To understand Kafka, it is important to realize that in Prague the atmosphere of medieval mysticism and Jewish orthodoxy lingered until after World War II, when the Communist regime began getting rid of most of its remnants. Apart from that, however, it is about as meaningful as considering Faulkner an English novelist.įor his recurring theme of human alienation, Kafka is deeply indebted to Prague and his situation there as a social outcast, a victim of the friction between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. Kafka's name is also grouped too often with German writers, which is accurate only in the sense that he belongs to the German-speaking world. Prague was the major second capital of the Austrian Empire (after Vienna) since the early sixteenth century, and although Kafka was no friend of Austrian politics, it is important to emphasize this Austrian component of life in Prague because Kafka has too often been called a Czech writer - especially in America. In addition to Kafka's German, Czech, and Jewish heritages, there was also the Austrian element into which Kafka had been born and in which he had been brought up. But even if Kafka had not been Jewish, it is hard to see how his artistic and religious sensitivity could have remained untouched by the ancient Jewish traditions of Prague which reached back to the city's tenth-century origin. His close relationship with Dora Dymant, his steady and understanding companion of his last years, contributed considerably toward this development. Although Kafka became extremely interested in Jewish culture after meeting a troupe of Yiddish actors in 1911, and although he began to study Hebrew shortly after that, it was not until late in his life that he became deeply interested in his heritage. In short, Kafka shared the fate of much of Western Jewry - people who were largely emancipated from their specifically Jewish ways and yet not fully assimilated into the culture of the countries where they lived. Yet from the Czech point of view, Kafka was German, and from the German point of view he was, above all, Jewish. Kafka's own narrative techniques aim at precisely such a metamorphosis in the reader.Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka is today considered the most important prose writer of the so-called Prague Circle, a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague during the 1880s until after World War I. The entire parable may be seen as an illustration of the writer's yearning for a language so potent that the reader would experience, "in the flesh," the writer's words. By entering into the machine himself, the Officer undergoes the classic Kafka metamorphosis: he becomes the prisoner, and he thereby suffers knowledge. By writing the crime onto and into the flesh of the criminal, the machine offers a sublime and frightening figure of "visceral knowledge," of the open self as the opened self. All efforts to bridge the distance between people, between matter and spirit, seem to fail, at least insofar as spoken language is concerned the machine's mission is to create physical language, an unmediated script which is the reality of which it speaks. Language is, of course, a primary vehicle for understanding, and Kafka's story dramatizes two radically opposed languages: verbal and physical. The tale itself is little more than the Officer's desperate effort to make the explorer-reader understand the machine itself makes its victim understand the nature of justice. New Law? How does the "liberal" explorer or the "liberal" reader assess the Officer's impassioned pleading for the Machine and the kind of justice it serves? A strange kind of coherence emerges, however, when one focusses on the central unifying motif of the story: understanding. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is a problematic story, largely because of the conflicting interpretations it has received: does its famous machine dispense grace or torture? Is Kafka giving us a parable of Old vs.
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