ARTHUR A. COHEN
553
served Kafka with excuses for lateness or cancellation of appoint–
ments, and engendered a distinctly queer arrangement of lodgings
(maintaining, as he did for many years, one apartment in which he
slept, another in which he wrote, and a third - the home of his par–
ents - in which he took his meals and kept score for them while they
played cards). In Kafka's view, his despair provoked his body to re–
bel against the orderly seductions of
"Ie vrai,
"but in his last years, he
was increasingly confirmed in the sadness of his condition and the
decisions he had made on behalf of literature to cut himself off from
the possibility of ordinary life. Kafka had left nothing to chance. He
saw both his disease and his achievement as fatal necessities.
Kafka's relatively brief life was passed within a small area of his
native city, bounded by the precincts of the AltsUidter Ring, whose
principal monuments were the rococo Kinsky Palace, the baroque
church of St. Nicholas (in one of whose converted clergy houses
Kafka was born in 1883) a short walk from the Judenstadt whose syna–
gogues, small shops: and brothels marked the presence of a poor and
petit-bourgeois
Jewish community. The gothic and baroque quarter of
old Prague was a small city within a sprawling nineteenth-century
metropolis in which Czechs from the countryside settled by the tens
of thousands, to which Germans from the Sudeten came briefly to
study, to which Jews began to come after restrictions against their
internal migrations within Bohemia-Moravia had been lifted.
During the years of his childhood, Kafka rarely left Prague, and
in his maturity his brief trips to Paris, Italy, Germany, Switzerland,
and the Bohemian countryside were few. Rather it was Prague - the
city which had, in his words, "claws" to whom one must surrender or
else, as he wrote a friend, "we would have to set it on fire from two
sides" (the castle complex of Hradcany and the ancient citadel of
Vysehrad) - that was the home of Franz Kafka and his enemy. Yet
Kafka was constricted by no single Prague: his prison was every–
where, devised according to his own doctrine of penal constructions
and justified punishment.
After years of fantasizing escape and urging others to undertake
the surrogacy of flight, Kafka managed to leave Prague for Berlin,
also a fantasy city, where he imagined that Jews speaking German
could make culture without attracting enmity or notice, where life
could be engaged with the greatest intensity and anonymity, where
loneliness might be bearable. A secular heaven, Berlin was balanced
in Kafka's imagination by the hieratic Palestine. At the very end of
his life, the two fantasies came to reality-he studied Hebrew seri-
