A.J . Liehm
KAFKA AND HIS COMMUNIST CRITICS
I.
On May 27-28,1963, an international symposium on the life and
work ofFranz Kafka was held near Prague at the Liblice Castle, which is owned
by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. There have been dozens of inter–
national conferences on Kafka, so this bare fact would not be particularly
significant if it were not for certain features which made this gathering
different from all the others.
First, it was held in the country where Kafka was born and spent
practically his entire life and where, until 1963, he was little read and
generally regarded as a decadent and harmful influence. Second, this was a
conference ofCommunist Marxists, a branch of contemporary thought which
over the years has gone to a lot of trouble to try to make the world forget that
Kafka had ever existed. The Liblice Conference thus amounted to a public
affirmation that, at least as far as Kafka was concerned, the Communist
Marxists had been wrong.
It
marked their recognition of him as a writer.
Thus, in itself, the conference was an important political milestone in the
evolution of European political thought during the 1960s. And in Czecho–
slovakia it meant even more.
It
became one of the signals for far-reaching
changes within the country's social, political, and cultural structures which
reached a climax five years later, during the first eight months of 1968 . Almost
prophetically, Roger Garaudy, one of the principal participants, entitled his
article about the conference in
Les Lettres franfaises
"Le Printemps de
Prague"-Prague Spring.
What really happened at Liblice? The whole story is full of paradoxes–
comic and tragic, as paradoxes often are . To understand it better let us back up
a year, toJuly 1962, whenJean-Paul Sartre addressed the Moscow Congress for
Peace and Disarmament. Sartre decided to use this particular forum to speak
his mind about a unity of cultures, about the need for disarmament in the
cultural sphere. These were exceedingly explosive words at that time (what-
