ARTHUR A. COHEN
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merely despised the Jews in the familiar terms all European cultures
have known . Although , in Kafka's day , eighty-five percent of the
German population of Prague was Jewish, they lived as a belea–
guered minority, albeit in elitist segregated neighborhoods around
the Stadtpark, while the German ruler looked down on their arrival
in his schools and university, and held in contempt their passion for
his cultivation and ease .
It is no wonder that the family name of Franz Kafka should al–
ready contain the ambiguity of his birth. An authentic Czech name,
Kafka was acquired in the background of generations when the fam–
ily lived in Bohemian lands and was presumably on easy terms with
its Czech surroundings. When Hermann Kafka rushed from the
country village ofOsek in southwest Bohemia to Prague, he attached
himself to the German minority, acquired German speech and iden–
tity, and raised his children within the German community . He set–
tled in the old ghetto, married a woman from the Alstadter Ring into
which the ghetto thrust its promontory , and lived in a house at its
edge . In this house Franz Kafka was born and briefly lived, and in
this miniscule ancient quarter of ancient Prague, the Kafka family
had (with the exception of five months) numerous dwelling places for
the remainder of their lives .
The ghetto was ordered razed and rebuilt in 1893 , and this was
carried out, slowly and before Kafka's eyes, between 1897 and 1917 .
The Fifth District of Prague, known colloquially as
"bei denJuden,
"by
Kafka's time, had become a ghost world . But Kafka could speak to
his friend J anouch about the incubus of old Prague "still alive in us
- the dark corners, the mysterious alleys , the sightless windows ,
dirty courtyards, noisy pothouses, and secretive inns. We walk about
the broad streets of the new town , but our steps and looks are uncer–
tain ; we tremble inwardly as we used to do in the old miserable
alleyways. Our hearts know nothing yet of any clearance: the un–
sanitary old ghetto is much more real than our new, hygienic sur–
roundings . We walk about as in a dream, and we ourselves are only
a ghost of former times."
The ghost is always within ; the reality never catches hold , hav–
ing no substance beyond the shadows which photographs retain for
us , obliging us to consider not only the photograph of Kafka which
occupied Walter Benjamin's atten tion , but the photographs of old
Prague by Sudek, Plicka , Pollak, Marco, and Urzidil already
snapped by Kafka's eye. Kafka, who fell in love with a woman he
hardly knew and to whom he engaged himself twice, demanded of
