Scott Spector. Prague Territories: National Confict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000. xiv + 331 pp. $25.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-520-23692-9.

Reviewed by Hillel Kieval

Published on HABSBURG (October, 2002)

Literature, History, and Territoriality in To all of this, Spector poses the question Prague Jewish Culture "what, if any, is the relation of this extraordinarily Scott Spector's Prague Territories seeks to wide-ranging production to the common social capture the cultural history of a moment, a highly and political context from which it sprang?" (p. 3) creative moment in time, which, in the author's This cultural production, Spector argues, took words, "can only be described as exceptional." place in "uniquely charged spaces between identi‐ The book's frame of reference is the small group ties"-- social, national, spiritual, and political. of writers and intellectuals born to the German- Moreover, the "Prague circle moment," as he speaking, Jewish milieu of Prague in the 1880s sometimes refers to his subject, "constitutes a and active in the years immediately preceding privileged site for cultural history because of the and following the First World War (roughly equiv‐ special role of the fgure of 'culture' within the po‐ alent to Max Brod's imagined Prager Kreis, a cate‐ litical discourse, along with the special function of gory that Spector appears both to challenge and, the fgure of 'language' in Kafka's Prague" (p. xi). ultimately, accept). Its chapters proceed from a Prague Territories is daringly original in a discussion of the language of Prague "Germans" to number of respects. Not only does Spector seek to the literary modernism of Franz Kafka and Franz extract from "an example so unexemplary" in‐ Werfel; from the journalism of Egon Erwin Kisch sights into the more general projects of European to the cultural Zionism of Hugo Bergmann and modernity and cultural nationalism, he also has Max Brod; arriving fnally at the eforts of such in‐ made the conscious decision to write across disci‐ dividuals as Brod, Otto Pick, and Rudolf Fuchs to plines, producing a history largely through the mediate between various cultures--German and close reading of literary texts. Czech, or the Jewish communities of eastern and "Territory," the book's overarching interpre‐ western Europe. tive concept, functions somewhat loosely, refer‐ ring at times to physical space or geography and H-Net Reviews at times standing as a metaphor for social, politi‐ al and political assumptions reappears through‐ cal, and interpersonal relations. Spector explains out the study as a leitmotif. Kafka and his fellow that his use of the concept derives in large mea‐ Jewish writers of German, for example, may have sure from Henri Lefebvre's deployment of the re‐ rejected their parents' naïve confdence in the lated notion of "space" as an analytical category, power and privilege of Austrian German liberal‐ by which he understood both a discursive system ism, but they nevertheless had internalized many and "a matrix of socially produced relations."[1] of the attitudes and assumptions on which this be‐ Spector also fnds the "fgure of territory" use‐ lief rested, including the tendency to "feminize" ful in establishing literary and cultural produc‐ the Slavic other and condescend toward East Eu‐ tion as political acts in their own right. Reaching ropean Jews.[3] back to a 1975 study of Kafka by Deleuze and At another level of analysis, the idea of simul‐ Guattari, he proposes to challenge Carl Schorske's taneous resistance and acquiescence is deployed "aestheticist hypothesis," according to which the in order to unmask the collusion of Kafka and the pursuit of artistic expression (and even science) Prague Zionists--several of whom were among his in fn de siecle Vienna consituted a retreat from closest associates--in the "re-territorialization" of the political. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Central European Jewish identity. Spector is refer‐ the "cramped space" of a minority literature in ring here, not to the project to remove European fact "forces the immediate connection of every‐ Jewry to Palestine, but to the special interest that thing in it to the political."[2] Kafka and his friends had in Yiddish language One must ask, however, whether a term such and culture. "Kafka's initial enthusiasm toward as territory loses its analytical power when it can Yiddish culture," he writes, "was clearly grounded point to so many things at once: physical space, in his identifcation of 'Jews of a particularly pure confict and coexistence among social groups, and kind,' the sort that accepts its Jewishness unrefec‐ psychological space; both interiority and exterior‐ tively, without self-consciousness as the non- ity. Additionally, the plural usage of the term ("ter‐ Christian other--in other words, a territorialized ritories") in the title would suggest that domains Jewry" (p. 86). Several pages later Spector ob‐ of social space and interaction beyond the Ger‐ serves, paradoxically, that Yiddish stood in Kafka's man-Jewish sphere would command our atten‐ writing for the Jewishness that existed beneath tion. Is there a Czech-Jewish territory in Prague? the surface culture ("masked behind assimilated What should we know about Czech-Christian and cultivation") of modern, Western Jews. Finally, it German-Christian spaces? How many of these stands not so much for "territoriality" as for "the "territories" come into play in the production of terrible prospect of a liberation of language from the collective experience of the city's "German" the cozy imprisonment of territory" (p. 88). Jews? Finally, how attenuated or multi-lingual Here, I think, we have a good example of the does this space need to be before it ceases to be extreme elasticity of "territory" as a conceptual "German"? tool. The image of Yiddish qua Jewish authenticity Early in his reading of Kafka's literary re‐ operates both as psychological projection and as sponse to the predicaments of German liberalism, social reality; it exists both outside and within the Spector remarks that the noted writer succeeded personalities and experiences of Prague Jewish in‐ in articulating "a nuanced and complex web of tellectuals; and it constitutes both a de-territorial‐ territorial relations ... including strands of collu‐ ized and a re-territorialized inscription of Jewish sion as well as resistance" (p. 29). The theme of re‐ identity. sistance to--and compliance with--received cultur‐

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It is possible that such contradictions (possi‐ then, he maintains that the imaginative engage‐ bly ultimately resolvable) result from the close, ment of Prague Jews with both the Slavic and the "literary" readings to which Spector subjects his East European Jewish worlds was the expression texts. But they also underscore the challenges one of a kind of erotic desire for a feminized (and, faces in attempting to blend a kind of open-ended hence, diminished) other. It is easy enough to textual criticism with historical argument. The make such a claim. The title of Max Brod's 1909 two key considerations that limit interpretive novel was, after all, Das tschechische Dienstmaed‐ freedom in historical argumentation, one might chen. The fact remains, however, that the critical suggest, are internal, rhetorical consistency (is reception of the book by Czech, German, and Jew‐ there an internally consistent interpretive argu‐ ish contemporaries was highly contentious (and, ment?) and the imperative of contextuality (by hence, nuanced). Moreover, it appears to have which one is forced to withdraw from one's texts been a particularly sardonic review of the work and subject one's readings of them to the test of in the pages of the Zionist paper Selbstwehr, of all contextual plausibility). Both operations may con‐ places, that started Brod on his own path toward stitute a kind of "straightjacketing" of the inter‐ cultural Zionism. pretive enterprise, but they are indispensable In his conclusion, Spector argues that the Ger‐ nevertheless. man-speaking Jewish writers of Prague carved Scott Spector's study of Prague includes excel‐ out a "unique space" for themselves by means of a lent chapters on language, art and politics in Ger‐ radical reconfguration of the terms of the cultur‐ man-Jewish Prague (chapter 2), on Prague cultural al system in which they lived and worked. They Zionism (chapter 5), and on practices of cultural accomplished this, not through a rejection of the mediation (chapter 7). His fascinating description dominant discourse of Czech and German cultural of the encounter between Prague Jewish national‐ nationalism, but by carrying "its terms to the lim‐ ists and both the ideal of East European Jewish its of their logical consequences" (p. 236). Far life and its reality is, unfortunately, marred by un‐ from rejecting the "laws of modern territoriality," substantiated assumptions concerning the attitu‐ he concludes, individuals such as Franz Werfel, dinal and psychological starting points of this en‐ Hugo Bergmann, and Egon Erwin Kisch accepted gagement. Hugo Bergmann's verbal sketches of them in the extreme, creating in the process a Jewish society in Galicia, for example--drawn kind of "radicalized rootlessness." It was the liter‐ from a journey that he made in 1903--are belittled ary, cultural, and ultimately political act of media‐ as "condescending" (p. 168), "patronizing" (p. 169), tion that stood at the heart of this group's self-un‐ and consistent with "a German's prejudices" (p. derstanding as being both Jewish and of Prague. 169). Yet the texts upon which these judgments Judaism, Spector suggests, was central to the vari‐ are based, it seems to me, are more subtle than ous projects of cultural translation and mediation; Spector allows; they reveal, in fact, that the preoc‐ and the synthesis to which these aspired was cupation of the Prague Zionists with the "East" nothing short of messianic. amounted to a project a good deal more compli‐ Notes cated than the Foucauldian terms "gaze" and "de‐ [1]. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. sire" would suggest. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cam‐ Spector also follows the major exponents of bridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). The quote is from post-colonial theory in classifying the eastern Spector, p. 30. reaches of the Habsburg monarchy as "feminized" [2]. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: in the metropol's imagination. Not surprisingly, Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan

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(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), original French edition Kafka : Pour une lit‐ erature mineure (Collection critique. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1975). Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vien‐ na: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). The quote is from Spector, p. 29. [3]. See, for example, the aside on p. 85: "In ways strikingly parallel to their attitudes toward the Czechs, the German-Jewish Praguers' fascina‐ tion with Yiddish and its speakers was a strange amalgam of romantic glorifcation, envy, and con‐ descension."

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Citation: Hillel Kieval. Review of Spector, Scott. Prague Territories: National Confict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. October, 2002.

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