DOCSLIB.ORG

Prague Minorities and the Habsburg Legal System in Jaroslav Hašek’S the Good Soldier Švejk and Franz Kafka’S the Trial

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Prague Minorities and the Habsburg Legal System in Jaroslav Hašek’S the Good Soldier Švejk and Franz Kafka’S the Trial CRIMINAL APPREHENSIONS: PRAGUE MINORITIES AND THE HABSBURG LEGAL SYSTEM IN JAROSLAV HAŠEK’S THE GOOD SOLDIER ŠVEJK AND FRANZ KAFKA’S THE TRIAL JENIFER CUSHMAN In their seminal work on Franz Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari classify the writings of Franz Kafka as “minor literature,” works that challenge the hegemony. Like the German-Jewish- Bohemian-Austrian Kafka, the Czech nationalist Jaroslav Hašek experienced difficulty negotiating Prague’s “territories,” the multiple geographic, lin- guistic and national terrains of the Habsburg-dominated area. Germans, Czechs, and Jews met in unequal terms at the turn of the last century, how- ever, and Hašek and Kafka move from different starting points in opposing directions through their theoretical spaces of Prague. As a result, while both Hašek’s Švejk and Kafka’s The Trial expose absurdities within the Habsburg legal system, the kind of humor and method of criticism indicated in the texts are quite dissimilar. Indeed, there is a sanctuary space in Hašek’s text for those “in the know,” a comfort zone that Kafka does not provide in his “deterritorialized” writing; Josef Švejk is able to evade public authority through word play, but Josef K. is ultimately convicted by his “criminal apprehension,” his guilty conscience in the inhuman system. An examina- tion of portrayals of representatives of legal authorities (police officers, guards, and soldiers) in the two novels provides insight into the question as to whether Hašek’s novel, like Kafka’s, meets the criteria of minor literature. In “Hašek and Kafka,” Karel Kosík postulates a near convergence of appre- hended criminals in two unfinished Prague novels of the early 1920’s, namely Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk 1 and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.2 1 Hašek completed four of the intended six volumes of Švejk between 1921 and 1923, or from the time he returned to Prague after the war until his death. 2 According to Max Brod, he obtained the disordered manuscript in 1920 and “immediately put it in order.” From Max Brod’s postscript to Franz Kafka, The Trial (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 334. 52 Jenifer Cushman “[Josef] Švejk’s “odyssey under the honorable escort of two soldiers with bayo- nets” takes him from the Hracdany garrison jail along Neruda Street to Malá Strana and over the Charles Bridge to Karlín. It is an interesting group of three people: two guards escorting a delinquent. From the opposite direction over the Charles Bridge and up to Strahov, another trio makes its way. This is the threesome from Kafka’s Trial: two guards leading a “delinquent,” the bank clerk Josef K., to the Strahov quarries, where one of them will “thrust a knife into his heart.” Both groups pass through the same places, but meeting each other is impossible.” 3 As executors of an inconsistent legal system, Josef Švejk’s soldiers and Josef K.’s guards unflatteringly represent the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, especially in its treatment of “minorities,” or non-German and non-Hungarian national groups. By extension, Švejk and K., both of whom bear the middle, or minor, name of Emperor Franz Josef, signify the Czech and, less obviously, Jewish minorities in Prague at the turn of the last century respectively. Although the status of minorities was ostensibly protected under the Dual Monarchy, Germans, Czechs and Jews met on unequal terms as the German hegemony felt increasingly threatened by the rise of Czech nationalism. Like the German-Jewish-Bohemian-Austrian Kafka, the Czech nationalist Hašek experienced difficulty negotiating what Scott Spector identifies as Prague’s “territories,” the multiple geographic, linguistic and national terrains of the Habsburg-dominated area.4 In their seminal work on Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari postulate three character- istics of minor literature, namely “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assem- blage of enunciation.” 5 Both Kafka and Hašek were members of minor national groups, and both exposed absurdities inherent in the Austro-Hungarian system through their writing, but can both The Trial and The Good Soldier Švejk be considered examples of minor literature? A close examination of the biographies and texts of the two authors in terms of their portrayals of repre- sentatives of legal authorities (police officers, guards, and soldiers) may shed light on this question. According to Hans Peter Hye in Das politische System in der Habsburger Monarchie, paradox was inevitable in an empire that asserted unity among the multiple lands, nations, beliefs, and political traditions that had developed in 3 Karel Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka: 1883–1922/23,” transl. Ann Hopkins, Cross Currents 1 (1983), 127. 4 Scott Spector, Prague Territories. National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), ix. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory of History and Literature 30 (Minneapolis: U of MN, 1986), 18..
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder
    Document generated on 09/25/2021 10:25 p.m. TTR Traduction, terminologie, re?daction Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder Kafka pluriel : réécriture et traduction Volume 5, Number 2, 2e semestre 1992 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/037123ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/037123ar See table of contents Publisher(s) Association canadienne de traductologie ISSN 0835-8443 (print) 1708-2188 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Binder, H. (1992). Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka. TTR, 5(2), 41–105. https://doi.org/10.7202/037123ar Tous droits réservés © TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction — Les auteurs, This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit 1992 (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Common Sayings and Expressions in Kafka Hartmut Binder Translation by Iris and Donald Bruce, University of Alberta "Bild, nur Büd"1 [Images, only images] Proverbial sayings are pictorially formed verbal phrases2 whose wording, as it has been handed down, is relatively fixed and whose meaning is different from the sum of its constituent parts. As compound expressions, they are to be distinguished from verbal metaphors; as syntactically dependant constructs, which gain ethical meaning and the status of objects only through their embedding in discursive relationships, they are to be differentiated from proverbs.
    [Show full text]
  • Czech Language and Literature Peter Zusi
    chapter 17 Czech Language and Literature Peter Zusi Recent years have seen a certain tendency to refer to Kafka as a ‘Czech’ author – a curious designation for a writer whose literary works, without exception, are composed in German. As the preceding chapter describes, Kafka indeed lived most of his life in a city where Czech language and society gradually came to predominate over the German-speaking minor- ity, and Kafka – a native German-speaker – adapted deftly to this changing social landscape. Referring to Kafka as Czech, however, is inaccurate, explicable perhaps only as an attempt to counterbalance a contrasting simplification of his complicated biography: the marked tendency within Kafka scholarship to investigate his work exclusively in the context of German, Austrian or Prague-German literary history. The Czech socio-cultural impulses that surrounded Kafka in his native Prague have primarily figured in Kafka scholarship through sociological sketches portraying ethnic animosity, lack of communication and, at times, open violence between the two largest lin- guistic communities in the city. These historical realities have given rise to the persistent image of a ‘dividing wall’ between the Czech- and German- speaking inhabitants of Prague, with the two populations reading different newspapers, attending separate cultural institutions and congregating in segregated social venues. This image of mutual indifference or antagonism has often made the question of Kafka’s relation to Czech language and cul- ture appear peripheral. Yet confronting the perplexing blend of proximity and distance, famil- iarity and resentment which characterized inter-linguistic and inter- cultural contact in Kafka’s Prague is a necessary challenge.
    [Show full text]
  • Fin-De-Siècle Vienna and the Larger Central Europe 1900: the Experience of Prague's Intellectuals
    Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Larger Central Europe 1900: The Experience of Prague's Intellectuals Gary B. Cohen, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities The modernist breakthroughs in Viennese intellectual and artistic life around 1900 have attracted great interest over many decades. The remarkable concentration of innovative figures, the originality and significance of their work, the important personal connections among of them, and the apparent cultural fertility of the Viennese environment in that era have captured the attention of scholars and the educated public alike. Carl Schorske's masterful Fin-de-siecle Vienna, now some thirty-six years old, has introduced many readers to the intellectual and cultural world of Vienna and offered students a basic framework for understanding the foundations and patterns of some of the most important innovations. One must be careful, though, not to exaggerate the uniqueness of Vienna around 1900 or to see the city as the single most important cradle of twentieth-century modernism. We recognize that intellectuals and artists in Paris, Berlin, New York, Munich, Budapest, and other major European and North American cities were also breaking away from the nineteenth-century liberal rational synthesis in ways that had wide impact, engaging in their own secessions from established modes of thought and expression with the particular fields or disciplines involved and the exact timing of the revolts dependent on local circumstances. It is good to remember that for Schorske and others who have investigated particular cities in this or other eras of radical breakdown, examining intellectuals and artists in a single urban community has been a means to understand better the parallels and connections between activities in the various disciplines or genres and to identify the conditions, motivations, and impulses that were common to the 2 innovators in various fields.
    [Show full text]
  • A Father, What For? in Connection with the Show “Lettre Au
    Document generated on 09/26/2021 9:45 a.m. Sens public A Father, What for? In connection with the show “Lettre au père” of Jean-Yves Ruf, according to the text of Franz Kafka "Dearest Father" Gérard Wormser, Bernard Lahire and Christine Castelain-Meunier Repenser le numérique au 21ème siècle Article abstract 2014 Can the young man of today visualize the impossible dialogue of Kafka with his father? The evolution of the society has questioned the father's long time role URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1052427ar of supervision and authority. However, does that not open up a restructuring DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1052427ar of his figure? The depth of the father's influence is far-reaching. The English paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott said, “He can become a See table of contents maternal substitute for infants, providing child care from the ages of birth to two years as is maternity care”. Paternal love and everyday father/child relationship has a critical role in the development of early childhood. However, is this structuring enough? Does this not open up an era lacking references? Publisher(s) Today, what is the father's place at a time of contemporary changes in family Département des littératures de langue française life? ISSN 2104-3272 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this document Wormser, G., Lahire, B. & Castelain-Meunier, C. (2014). A Father, What for? In connection with the show “Lettre au père” of Jean-Yves Ruf, according to the text of Franz Kafka "Dearest Father". Sens public. https://doi.org/10.7202/1052427ar Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International This document is protected by copyright law.
    [Show full text]
  • 3. Grzegorz Gazda
    Grzegorz Gazda The Final Journey of Franz Kafka's Sisters Through me into the city full of woe; Through me the message of eternal pain; Through me the passage where the lost souls go. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy 1 Magic Prague, esoteric Prague, Golden Prague. 2 The capital of the Czech Republic bears those names and nicknames not without reason. It is a truly extraordinary and fascinating city. A cultural palimpsest of texts written through the ages, texts that have been magnificently preserved until our times. "An old in folio of stone pages," as V. Nezval wrote. 3 A Slavic city with over a thousand years of history, but a city which at the same time, due to historical conditions, belongs rather to the culture of the West. The capital of the Czechs in which, however, an important part has always been played by foreign ethnic communities. But this arti- cle is no place to present historical panoramas and details. Our subject matter goes back to the turn of the 20 t h century, so let us stop at that. 1 Fragment of an inscription at the gates of hell which begins the third canto of the Divine Comedy (trans. C. Carson). This quote was used as a motto in the novel Kruta leta (1963, The Cruel Years ) by Frantisek Kafka, a Czech writer and literary scholar. 1 will speak more of him and his novel in this article. 2 Among numerous books dealing with the cultural and artistic history of this city, see, for example, K. Krejci, Praga. Legenda i rzeczywistość, Warszawa 1974, trans, from the Czech by C.
    [Show full text]
  • Prague's Public Space and Franz Kafka's Readings of Prague
    MAREK NEKULA The Divided City: Prague’s Public Space and Franz Kafka’s Readings of Prague It is no surprise that the monuments on Prague’s squares, riverbanks, and hills reflect the national ideologies from which they emanated. In the nineteenth century, when the first memorial monuments were founded, middle-class civic society used them to present and pass on its values to viewers in public space, viewers who themselves may have been nationally indifferent. In nineteenth-century Prague, these values were above all national in character: for the Czech and German mid- dle classes, language-based nationalism dominated all other values; it determined the political programs of most Czech and German political parties, as well as more private choices, such as where parents sent their children to schools. Czech middle-class nationalists demanded that the Czech language and Czech people be given equal standing with the Germans, while German middle-class nationalists wanted to maintain the status quo. Both groups were becoming more and more interested in creating linguistically distinct spaces that would be dominated by the language and symbols of Czech and German nationalism. In Prague, public space became the staging ground for national discourse, where adherents of monolingual national ideologies competed with one another and attempted to control public opinion in various ways, including the domina- tion of public space. One of the ways to control and speak to the public was to properly stage ceremonial acts, for example the funerals of Václav Hanka, Karel Havlíček Borovský and Božena Němcová or the laying of the first stone of the Czech National Theater.
    [Show full text]
  • The German Exile Literature and the Early Novels of Iris Mur- Doch
    University of Szeged Faculty of Arts Doctoral Dissertation The German Exile Literature and the Early Novels of Iris Mur- doch Dávid Sándor Szőke Supervisors: Dr. Zoltán Kelemen Dr. Anna Kérchy 2021 Acknowledgements I have a great number of people to thank for their support throughout this thesis, whether this support has been academic, financial, or spiritual. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Zoltán Kelemen and Dr Anna Kérchy for their unending help, encouragement and faith in me during my research. Their knowledge about the Holocaust, 20th century English woman writers and minorities has given exceptional depth to my understanding of Murdoch, Steiner, Canetti and Adler. The eye-opening essays and lectures by Dr Peter Weber about the Romanian painter and Holocaust survivor Arnold Daghani’s time in England provided a genesis for this thesis. Had it not for him, I would not have thought about putting Murdoch’s thinking in the context of Cen- tral European refugee literature and culture during and after the Second World War. This thesis owes much to the 2017 Holocaust Conference in Szeged (19 October) and the 2019 International Holocaust Conference in Halle (14-16 November). I would like to express my gratitude to the March of the Living Hungary, the Holocaust Memorial Centre Budapest, the Memory Point of Hódmezővásárhely, the synagogues of Szeged and Hódmezővásárhely, Professor Werner Nell (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Professor Thomas Bremer (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Professor Sue Vice (University of Shef- field), and Dr Zoltán Kelemen for making these events possible. During my PhD, as part of the Erasmus ++ programme I spent an entire year at Martin- Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, where I made a great deal of research about the German coming to terms with the past.
    [Show full text]
  • Impossible Communities in Prague's German Gothic
    Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2019 Impossible Communities in Prague’s German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, and the Monstrous Feminine in Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915) Amy Michelle Braun Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, German Literature Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Braun, Amy Michelle, "Impossible Communities in Prague’s German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, and the Monstrous Feminine in Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915)" (2019). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1809. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1809 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Program in Comparative Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Lynne Tatlock, Chair Elizabeth Allen Caroline Kita Erin McGlothlin Gerhild Williams Impossible Communities in Prague’s German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, and the Monstrous Feminine in Gustav Meyrink’s
    [Show full text]
  • Brentano and Kafka
    Brentano and Kafka Barry Smith Department of Philosophy SUNY Buffalo [email protected] from Axiomathes 8, 1997, 83–104. For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.1 § 1. The Louvre Circle There is a narrow thread in the vast literature on Kafka which pertains to Kafka’s knowledge of philosophy and more precisely to the fruitfulness of attempts to interpret Kafka’s fictional writings in the light of some of the main ideas of Franz Brentano. Such attempts have been roundly dismissed, not least by Max Brod, who denied the role of all theory in Kafka’s writings (Kafka ‘spoke in images because he thought in images’). As Arnold Heidsieck has thoroughly documented in his recent study of the intellectual context of Kafka’s work, however, Kafka’s fictional writings are informed by … academic and public debates during the first decade of the twentieth century on physiology; perceptual, cognitive and linguistic psychology; the philosophy of mind and language; positive law and natural-law theory; criminal procedure; ethics; and religion. (Heidsieck 1994, pp. 2f.) Kafka became apprised of and to some degree involved in such debates not least through his school-friends (including Hugo Bergmann and Emil Utitz), through the courses he attended in philosophy at the Charles University, courses given inter alia by Brentano’s students Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, and through his three-year membership of a discussion-group organized by orthodox adherents of the Brentanian philosophy in Prague.
    [Show full text]
  • Besprechungen Und Anzeigen Gaelle Vassogne: Max Brod in Prag
    134 Besprechungen und Anzeigen Gaelle Vassogne: Max Brod in Prag. Identität und Vermittlung. (Conditio Judaica, Bd. 75.) Max Niemeyer Verlag. Tübingen 2009. VI, 366 S. ISBN 978-3-484-65175-3. (€ 79,95.) Prague-born Max Brod (1884-1968) wrote many novels and political and philosophical essays, as well as numerous reviews and feuilletons for newspapers, but today he is chiefly remembered for his work as a literary and cultural intermediary, editor, translator, and propagandist. Most famously, Brod undertook to publish his friend Franz Kafka’s manu- scripts after the latter’s death. Even if little of Brod’s fiction is read today compared to the work of his friends Kafka and Franz Werfel, and his essays on politics, culture, Jewish identity, and Zionism are largely ignored, he was a highly successful writer in his time. That fact and his role as an intermediary and propagandist make him worthy of attention for anyone interested in early twentieth-century Central European literary and cultural life and in the Central European debates on Jewish identity and the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to their non-Jewish counterparts. This study offers an intellectual and cultural-political exegesis of Brod’s major works of fiction and his principal writings on philosophical, political and cultural questions, followed by a shorter discussion of his work as a critic, translator, and literary and cultural intermediary. The bibliography includes a highly useful chronological listing of Brod’s pub- lished writings, including his many longer newspaper articles. The author offers a thought- ful description and analysis of the major publications with particular attention to Brod’s concerns about Jewish identity and European Jews’ relations with European Christians.
    [Show full text]
  • KAREL WASSERMANN (Prague, SSR) Some Observations on The
    KAREL WASSERMANN (Prague, �SSR) Some Observations on the Prague Circle Margarita Pazi. Fünf Autoren des Prager Kreises. "Würzburger Hochschul- schriften zur neuren Deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Bd. 3." Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1978. 315 pp. sFr. 55,-(paper). The five authors considered in this work are Oskar Baum (1883-1941 ), Paul Kornfeld (1889-1942), Ernst Sommer (1889-1955), Ernst Weiss (1884- 1940), and Ludwig Winder (1889-1946)-all well known to those familiar with the literature of interwar German-Jewish Prague, and all connected, as their life and death dates show, by strong chronological affinities. In review- ing this book I will sidestep most of the literary text in order to concentrate on the key sixty pages headed by the phrase, "The Prague of the 'Prague Cir- " cle' (hereafter abbreviated as P.C.). This chapter is so intriguing that I am grateful for the opportunity to say something about this controversial theme. Mrs. Margarita Pazi has set for herself the task of revising (or completing) the memoirs of Max Brod, which were published in 1968 when he was eighty- four years old. What is evident, alas !, is her complete devotion to Brod, to his idiosyncrasies and feuds, and her indiscriminate reliance upon "widow's tales" (see her Acknowledgments) and her nostalgia for the German-Jewish cultural milieu of Prague. To discuss Austria-Hungary, "the kettle of nations," and particularly the "Prague" phenomenon in this context reminds one of Venice, the city of lagoons. The national, religious, social, and cultural factors are labyrinthine. The author seems adroit at posing questions, staging the scene, and demon- strating the controversiality of the protagonists.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Kafka in Prague: the Reception of Franz Kafka Between the East and the West During the Cold War
    ! ! ! ! Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold War Veronika Tuckerova Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! © 2012 Veronika Tuckerova All rights reserved ! Abstract Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold War Veronika Tuckerova This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and appropriation of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, against the background of the contemporary international readings of Kafka, especially in West Germany. The first chapter examines Paul Eisner’s translation of the Trial in the context of his influential triple “ghetto theory” and from the perspective of his contemporary translation discourse as well as recent translation theories. The second chapter focuses on the reception of Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, and the reasons why this controversial text was welcomed in the West and dismissed in the East as a forgery. The chapter uses new archival discoveries about Janouch and discusses questions of witness and testimony. The role of “witness” took an ominous turn in the case of Eduard Goldstücker, who is the focus of the third chapter. Goldstücker was tried in the Slánsk! show trials in the early 1950s and forced to testify against Slánsk!. The chapter explores how Goldstücker attempted to come to terms with his past through reading of Kafka. The secret police files that were kept on him provide new insights on Goldstücker’s published texts, public persona, and the Liblice Conference that succeeded in rehabilitating Kafka in 1963.
    [Show full text]