A .J . lIEHM
411
mediately shipped him off to Siberia for seven years . Miraculously, he sur–
vived , returned to Warsaw after the war , joined the Social Democratic Party,
and became a Communist when the two parties merged. In 1968 he was a
warm supporter of " Prague Spring" and of the Polish students who were
staging their own demonstrations at that time, during which his daughter
Bronia was arrested. She spent several months in jail. He himself was officially
recalled , fired from his teaching post at the university during the wave of anti–
Semitism , and hounded by the police until finally he and his daughter were
forced
to
emigrate . In 1969 he became a full professor of German literature at
the State University of New York at Stony Brook .
What follows are excerpts from a series of conversations between Profes–
sor Karst and the author :
Karst :
First, we must realize that Kafka was accepted in different East
European countries in different ways, at different times, and to differing
degrees . In the German Democratic Republic they made a virtue out of neces–
sity : they allowed Kafka into the living room but they made him stand in the
corner.
It
was different in Hungary . While it was the "people" who opened
the door for Kafka in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in Budapest he was declared
salonfahig
"from above." In other words, the Central Committee of the
Hungarian Communist Party decided that the time had come to liberalize
their cultural policy and Kafka got the benefit of their decision. This was
around 1964, when the Hungarian situation was an interesting compromise
between the Soviet position and what developed later in Czechoslovakia and
Poland.
In Poland Kafka's acceptance was conditioned on the one hand by the
prewar evolution of Polish literature and on the other by postwar political
developments . Kafka really emerged our of a world which had almost been
forgotten since 1945 . He had not been entirely unknown in Poland between
the two world wars , of course. I found an article about him in a 1927 issue of
WiadomosciLiterackie ,
a leading Warsaw journal. Kafka had his admirers in
Polish literary circles . The most distinguished among them was Bruno Schulz,
to
whom we are indebted for his sensitive translation of
The Tnal,
which was
published in the 1930s. Schulz, one of the greatest Polish literary talents of
that decade , was influenced by Kafka , but he never allowed himself to be
submerged by him. Actually, Kafka is a very dangerous author, in the sense
that he threatens
to
destroy all his admirers who do not succeed in defending
their own independence . Bruno Schulz had too strong a literary personality to
be able
to
ignore Kafka, but he was also too strong an individual to subordi–
nate himself to Kafka .
In prewar Poland therewas a vigorous avant-garde movement which was
