Prague TerritoriesNational Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle

Abstract

This book maps the “territories” carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. The readings of an array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called “Prague circle,” and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation, as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the “postliberal” Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, the author observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness: Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries; a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity; and a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of “territory.” The investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity.

Cite this

Scott Spector (2000). Prague TerritoriesNational Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle. University of California Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520219090.001.0001

@book{scott2000prague,
  title  = {Prague TerritoriesNational Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle},
  author = {Spector, Scott},
  year   = {2000},
  publisher = {University of California Press eBooks},
  doi    = {10.1525/california/9780520219090.001.0001}
}