Kafka: The Early Years

KAFKA

THE

EARLY

YEARS

REINER

STACH

TRANSLATED BY SHELLEY FRISCH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Originally published in Germany as Kafka—Die frühen Jahre

© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2013

Translation copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

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Jacket photograph courtesy of Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

Excerpt from Going Under reprinted by permission of Gerald Casale

Excerpt from Pieces and Parts reprinted by permission of Laurie Anderson

The Sound of the Crowd

Words and Music by Phil Oakey and Ian Burden

© 1981 BMG Dingsong Limited

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All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stach, Reiner, author. | Frisch, Shelley Laura, translator.

Title: Kafka, the early years / Reiner Stach ; translated by Shelley Frisch.

Other titles: Kafka, die frühen Jahre. English

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021490 | ISBN 9780691151984 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924—Childhood and youth. | Authors, Austrian—20th century—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Eastern (see also Russian & Former Soviet Union). | LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

Classification: LCC PT2621.A26 Z88413 2016 | DDC 833/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021490

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association)

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CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

It took Reiner Stach two decades of intense, wide-ranging research and writing to produce this monumental three-volume biography of Franz Kafka. Readers in German-speaking countries were rewarded for their patience when this, the final volume, Kafka: Die frühen Jahre, was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2014, as a capstone to a trilogy that first saw publication with Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidungen (2002) and then Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (2008). The 2002 tome appeared in English as Kafka: The Decisive Years in 2005 and was followed by the translation of the 2008 work as Kafka: The Years of Insight in 2013. And now, with the publication of Kafka: The Early Years, English-language readers have access to the full story of Kafka’s life, a project driven by the author’s intention to invite readers to experience what it was like to be Kafka.

As the titles reveal, the last volume to be written covers Kafka’s early years, and the volume written first covers Kafka’s middle years. This order of publication, which may appear counterintuitive—even fittingly Kafkaesque—was dictated by years of high-profile legal wrangling for control of the Max Brod literary estate in Israel, during which access to the materials it contained, many of which bore directly on Kafka’s formative years, was barred to scholars. The justice system there has now ruled against the family that had been claiming the right to keep these materials in private ownership and away from the public, a welcome ruling for researchers and the general reading public. Reiner Stach has been able to examine three volumes of Brod’s diaries in this collection, those from the years 1909 to 1911; these are referenced in the text simply as Max Brod, diary, followed by the date(s) in question. He has also been able to draw on a detailed (170-page) inventory of the literary estate as a whole. Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography is the first to mine and incorporate these hitherto unknown materials as well as much other information that has never found its way into a biography of Kafka, such as the unpublished memoirs of Kafka’s classmate Hugo Hecht. These materials shed new and revelatory light on Kafka’s early years and more than justify Stach’s decision to hold off on this final (that is, first) volume until he was able to assess and integrate them.

As a translator primarily of biographies, I have had ample opportunity to examine their building blocks from up close. Each biography I work on situates itself at a distinct point along the life-and-works spectrum, most often closer to the works end, focusing squarely on the achievements of an individual and chronicling a life as a means of clarifying how these achievements came about. A different situation applies here. In the case of Kafka, the works have been analyzed and reanalyzed at bookshelf-filling length, yet there has been a surprising paucity of biographical studies. Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography, mammoth in length and scope, offers a panoramic view of Franz Kafka’s life in its socioeconomic, political, religious, artistic, cultural, linguistic, pedagogical, bureaucratic, and even medical dimensions, in a wealth of compelling and poignant detail. Little wonder that critics on both sides of the Atlantic have hailed it as the definitive biography of Kafka.

In his exploration of what it was like to be Kafka, Stach brings the reader inside Kafka’s life and expands on the myriad issues that touched his world: his school and university days; his childhood and adult friendships; his tortured relationships with his parents and with women; the illnesses that dogged him throughout his all-too-brief life; his professional development and daily routines on the job and at home; his voluminous correspondence; his encounters and engagement with emerging technologies, from cinema to airplanes; his evolving identity in regard to Judaism and his German-speaking Czech surroundings; his attraction to back-to-nature movements and odd dietary practices; his travels and yearnings to break away from Prague; his sexual maturation and attempts at marriage; and numerous other facets of his life, particularly his resolve to write, full-time if at all possible, while hesitating to share his writing with anyone, let alone seek publication.

Every detail in this biography is authentic, right down to the correctness of the weather descriptions on any given day. Achieving this authenticity was no easy task, particularly in the Early Years volume, for which the documentary evidence is so much sparser. Readers of this biography will find myths about Kafka exploded, especially the myth of Kafka’s otherworldly nature and alienation from everyday life. His job as a civil servant brought him into daily contact with the stark realities of the Great War, and with the quotidian travails that came with the profession of an insurance institute clerk whose job duties included drafting (brilliantly argued) legal briefs on an array of bureaucratic, technological, and health and safety issues. We also find ample evidence of the startling extent to which his literary and legal writings are intertwined.

While I generally don’t look back at my completed translations once they are out in the world for others to read, I find myself turning to this biography again and again, savoring and perpetually surprised by its sharp storytelling, by turns humorous and poignant. I conjure up images of Kafka’s appearance in swimming trunks at a Christian fundamentalist nudist colony; his dismay at the sight of Felice Bauer’s tainted teeth; his mad dashes up the stairs to the top floor of the insurance institute when running late; his fascination with lowbrow entertainment; his habit of Fletcherizing his yogurt and nuts; his three engagements and disengagements; his short-lived plan, with his friend Brod, to publish a series of travel guides on the cheap; his reluctance to part with his texts for publication. And who can forget what I’ve come to think of as the misery of mirth chapter, when Kafka is offered a promotion at the insurance institute, and instead of offering the requisite solemn words of gratitude, he collapses in loud and reckless laughter? This biography reads like a novel, frames its observations with the visual acuity of cinema, and sheds startling new light on the impulse behind Kafka’s storytelling. When I now return to Kafka’s literary texts, including and most especially his fragments, such as the one about the man who sets a world record in swimming at the Olympics although he cannot swim, I see him facing his own vast sea of impossibilities.

Over the years, I have often been asked whether this biography has been difficult to translate. Every text firmly resists translation, although every text is also ultimately translatable—and this one is no exception. A work as beautifully crafted as Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography sets a high stylistic bar and requires the translator to capture the voices of Kafka the letter-writer, Kafka the diarist, and Kafka the storyteller as well as Stach the biographer, whose semantic and syntactic choices dazzle the reader as fully as the facts and ideas themselves. I hope to have done justice to all the registers and challenges this translation has entailed. As for the spellings of the Czech place and personal names that run throughout the text, I did my very best to check the Czech.

There are factions within the Kafka translation community, most famously surrounding the word Ungeziefer in The Metamorphosis, which has been rendered in English as vermin, bug, cockroach, and insect. Vladimir Nabokov waged a protracted battle against what he considered the erroneous translations of this word, and every new translator of that story needs to grapple with this panic-inducing choice. To my happy surprise, I was spared the quandary of choosing any term for this freighted word, for although Reiner Stach devotes an entire chapter to this work (in the Decisive Years volume), the word Ungeziefer never appears in the German original.

Translating nonfiction takes a village, as I have rediscovered with each new book I tackle, and each project invariably assumes up-close-and-personal dimensions. Some of my biographical subjects—most notably Einstein—had well-established ties to Princeton, where I live. I learned while translating Jürgen Neffe’s Einstein biography that when his brain was stolen during the autopsy following his death, it was stored on Jefferson Road, my very street! Franz Kafka never made it out of Europe, much less across the Atlantic to America, despite having written a novel fragment that takes place in this country, yet even he has a Princeton connection that has proved helpful for Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography. It turns out that two granddaughters of Kafka’s schoolmate Hugo Bergmann, who features prominently in the biography, live right here in town. I now regularly meet up with Miranda Short at the Princeton Public Library, and she has generously shared family photographs for use in the biography. Together, she and I have learned quite a few particulars about her grandfather’s life—and Kafka’s.

Did the work need to be quite this long, longer than Kafka’s entire oeuvre? The answer is a resounding yes, even though Kafka’s geographical radius and chronological timeline were quite circumscribed. His life was brief; he neither married nor had children; he left behind a small body of writing, which he claimed he wanted burned; he stayed in his hometown of Prague with his parents for most of his life, despite his fervent desire to leave; and he was plagued by health problems that confined him to sanatoriums or his bed for extended periods of time. The biography needed to be this long if we are to grasp what it was like to be Kafka, a German Jew with a Czech passport in the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who faced the drudgery of work at an insurance institute while straining to find his path as a writer.

Reiner Stach’s text is studded with archival jewels (such as the high school hexametric hijinks of the Meyeriade, in this volume—which I found grand fun to translate—and a letter from a disgruntled reader in the Years of Insight volume, demanding that Kafka supply the meaning of The Metamorphosis to mollify the reader’s cousin) and with extensive descriptions of the events, large and small, that shaped Kafka’s life: office work, the Great War, the Spanish flu, tuberculosis, back-to-nature movements, dietary fads, séances, anti-Semitic violence, the tug of war between German and Czech life in Prague, airshows, sanatorium rituals, and so much more.

I am frequently asked which runs longer: the original text or the translation? The standard wisdom holds that English is a shorter language, but my experience has been the opposite. Reiner Stach has calculated that my translations of his volumes run a good 12 percent longer than the German source texts. I attribute this increased length in part to the foibles of the respective languages (one German noun can require the equivalent of an entire sentence to convey its many building blocks, and a single German word—dies—can serve as an antecedent to lines and lines of text in a way that no English equivalent can) and also to my determination to shape the text to the reading requirements of its new readership with different reference points, embedding bits and pieces of explanatory text. In my experience, nonfiction translation needs to hew more closely to the requirements and expectations of the target language readership than does fiction.

I would like to express my gratitude to Geisteswissenschaften International for supporting the translation and to offer my heartfelt thanks to Princeton University Press’s outstanding humanities editor, Anne Savarese, and to Juliana Fidler, Mark Bellis, Claudia Classon, Colleen Boyle, and the whole team at the Press. I greatly appreciate the thoughtful comments offered by Stanley Corngold and Mark Anderson, both of whom are old friends and preeminent Kafka scholars, while these volumes were in manuscript form. Thanks also go to Hanne Winarsky, who first acquired the rights to the biography for the Press, to the many print and online reviewers of these volumes, to the jurors who awarded prizes to the biography and to the translation, and to the many readers who waited unwearyingly—or wearily—for the publication of each succeeding volume. Most of all, thank you, Reiner Stach, for dedicating so many years of your life to writing a truly colossal work, which brings Kafka’s life to life, and for your friendship, invaluable support, and advice as I strove to make this work accessible and inviting to an English-language readership.

Readers seeking a standard edition of Kafka’s complete writings will find that no such edition exists in the English language. In translating all three volumes, then, I have provided new renditions of all passages from Kafka’s prose texts, diary entries, letters, and other writings that are quoted here.

Shelley Frisch

Princeton, February 2016

CHAPTER 1

Nothing Happening in Prague

Think you heard this all before,

Now you’re gonna hear some more.

—Devo, Going Under

July 3, 1883, was a clear, pleasant summer’s day, with a gentle breeze wafting through the narrow streets of the Old Town in Prague, where the temperature had risen to 30 degrees Celsius by noon. Fortunately it was not a muggy heat; the few clouds that appeared in the afternoon were not threatening, and thousands of people in Prague were looking forward to a mild evening in one of the countless open-air restaurants, enjoying pilsner, wine, and brass band music. Today was a Tuesday, which meant that there were a good many military concerts in store. In the spacious beer garden on the Sophieninsel, the hoopla started up at four in the afternoon for tourists, students, and retirees. Most people still had a few more hours of work ahead of them, and those unlucky souls who earned their living in a shop had to wait until after sundown to join the festivities. Getting there even in time to attend a theater performance could depend on the boss’s goodwill. For the Czechs, that day’s schedule featured Fedora, the latest melodrama by the best-selling French author Victorien Sardou, while the Germans could see Johann Nestroy’s musical He Will Go on a Spree (which later became the basis of Hello, Dolly!). Anyone who found that too highbrow could head into Wanda’s Musical Comedy Hall, where Fräulein Mirzl Lehner, the snazzy lady from Vienna, presented her amusing and very proper show, together with other newly hired artists. A well-organized set of offerings for the nearly 160,000 residents of Prague.

Prague in the summer, Prague in peacetime. The hours went by, the stock market ticked up and down ever so slightly (as it had been doing for the past ten years), and life seemed to lack verve. Even the usual reports about con artists, women committing suicide, and embezzling and absconding bank tellers, which readers of the Prager Tagblatt and the Bohemia soaked up eagerly, were absent from the newspapers. At the Civilian Swimming School, the river bathing area open to the public, a toddler fell into the Vltava and was saved by a thirteen-year-old boy. That was the only newsworthy calamity on this third of July, apart from the natural fatalities reported in impossibly tiny print. On Hibernergasse, a frail eighteen-day-old infant named Augustin died, and two-year-old Amalia succumbed to tuberculosis. But who wanted news like that?

And yet this day would go down in the annals of the city of Prague for two reasons, one instantly in the public eye and the other of no consequence to anyone but the Kafkas until much later. A political and mental shock rocked the city on this day. At first, very few people knew about an unthinkable new development, but in the coffeehouses, word soon got around, even before the press had a chance to react. Elections for the Bohemian parliament were now taking place, by order of the kaiser himself, under entirely new circumstances. Ever since there were parliaments, the only people eligible to vote were men who paid a certain sum of money in annual taxes. Now the Austrian government suddenly cut this sum in half, with the approval of the kaiser, and to the horror of a small, but significant segment of the population. Even the most politically naive among them could clearly see the consequences of this decision: more eligible voters meant more Czech voters. The upshot was instantaneous on this day: the Czechs outnumbered the Germans and had a solid majority, for the first time and quite likely forever; after all, who would ever dare to infringe on the new right to vote? Most of the large landowners voted Czech, as did the chambers of commerce, and quite a few well-to-do Jews followed suit. The Germans in the downtown area around Altstädter Ring shook their heads in disbelief: even their immediate neighbors, the residents of Josefov, the old Prague ghetto, generally voted Czech, and as if to add insult to injury, word got around that the Jewish butchers—who had never been allowed to cast a vote in the past—were probably the deciding factor.

Most people in Prague had little interest in the workings of the Bohemian parliament, and even among educated speakers of both languages, only the most avid readers of newspapers gleaned the authority this parliament actually had and could gauge its impact on everyday German and Czech life. But it was a symbolic victory for the Czechs, the most important one thus far, as everyone understood, and so it was deemed historic. Even the losers saw it that way. Their tone was muted. The German-speaking newspapers held back, not wanting to inflame the Czechs, with whom the German populace lived in close proximity in all parts of the city, nor did they wish to incite their own subscribers. Only the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna gave a frank assessment of the situation; this liberal newspaper of record, on display throughout Prague, could afford to do so. Here the Bohemians were told that the foolish way they had voted might spell the end of the West: Will it really get to the point that Prague drowns in the Slavic inundation? Absolutely not, the paper insisted. "The German delegates of the capital may disappear from the Landstube, but the people in the streets and houses will remain until the day finally comes that puts an end to the Slavic counter-reformation and Prague will again become what it was, a center of human culture, that is to say German culture."¹

This blunt wording was too strong even for the government censors in Vienna, who confiscated the paper a few days later. However, the aggressive tone and chauvinistic clamor reveal that the momentous nature of this day had been grasped. An elite had always concentrated the power in its hands, but from now on, the majority would rule, legitimated by simple demographics, which in Prague was, inevitably, four to one in favor of the Czechs. What if this principle of majority rule were to prevail throughout the monarchy? The Bohemians would be blamed for having been the weakest link in the chain, a chain broken in their capital city, on this very day of July 3, 1883.

Not everyone in Prague took note of the landslide in the Bohemian parliament. Real life was happening elsewhere, and for anyone who had lost a small child, an Augustin or an Amalia, everything political stopped mattering for a long time to come. The same was true of those welcoming a newborn into the world. They, too, were crossing the threshold of a new epoch and experiencing the dawn of a new era from which there was no turning back. In the warm physical presence of their child, the rest of the world faded away.

This is exactly what was happening in a building right next to St. Nicholas Church on the corner of Maiselgasse and Karpfengasse, the residence of the Kafkas, a Jewish couple married only ten months. The building had seen better days and had once been the prelature of the famous Strahov Monastery, but apart from the Baroque facade, not much remained of its former glory. The building had served as an ordinary apartment house for quite some time, and the neighborhood was unimpressive and ill-suited to making new acquaintances: on the one side the church, in which the Russian Orthodox Christians held their somber services, on the other several dubious-looking dives and even brothels, almost an extension of Josefov, a tumbledown part of town rumored to be slated for demolition.

The Kafkas would not be staying here for long, but for the time being they needed to scrimp, because they had put all their savings—consisting mainly of wife Julie’s dowry—into a new business selling thread and cotton, just steps away at the north side of Altstädter Ring. The sole proprietor was thirty-year-old Hermann, but his wife, who was three years younger, had to work here full time for the shop to survive. The two of them had little time for themselves; they even forwent a honeymoon so that they would not neglect their duties in Prague, and a pregnancy did not align with their vision for launching the new store, let alone with paying a nurse and nanny.

But the baby was a boy, and in a patriarchal world—Hermann and Julie’s—the male child was the guarantor of the future, the next link in the generational chain that preserved and guided the individual and conveyed a sense of permanence. Up to this point, the Kafkas knew that they wanted to move up the socioeconomic ladder, but now they also felt that this goal would extend beyond their own time on earth and thus become unassailable. The newborn was an heir in the eyes of his parents and in the world around him, before he even took his first steps. The Kafkas’ relatives, employees, and customers also revised their view of Hermann and Julie from one day to the next; it was like a promotion, yet even better, because the new status was enduring unless this child were to die. But no one wanted to think in those terms right now. The boy was a delicate, but healthy child, as his mother would later note²; he would surely survive and be the heir for whom they would sacrifice themselves and for whose sake they would now be part of the world at large. And so it was only right and proper for him to bear the name of their kaiser. Yes, indeed: they would name him Franz.

As the world would know a century later, Franz’s future turned out altogether differently from the way the Kafkas imagined it. A plaque would mark the first home the Kafkas shared, commemorating not a successful shopkeeper, but a writer. The linear generational succession, which rejuvenates the family and anchors it in the world, would prove just as vulnerable and ephemeral as the isolated existence of the individual. Hundreds of thousands of such lines would be broken off and even violently extinguished while Franz Kafka’s parents were still alive. But July 3, 1883, which for so many people in Prague was a day of profound disillusionment and for the Kafkas a day of pride and joy, would acquire a new and distinctive significance.

Franz Joseph I, the fifty-two-year-old kaiser whose first name Kafka bore, also spent this day in a cheerful mood. He was in Graz, Austria, making the standard round of visits: mass in the cathedral, opening day of a regional exhibition, looking in on the fire department and the military hospital, receiving delegates and high-ranking individuals, and attending formal dinners. He also read a series of dispatches, including several from Prague, where the Czechs—as anticipated—had finally gotten their way. But this annoyance was instantaneously overshadowed by the cheers of the population of Graz, who all turned out for this occasion, and by more pleasurable duties, which buoyed the kaiser’s spirits once again. One highlight was a repeat visit to the fiercely loyal Styrian riflemen in the shooting range, bedecked with flags and flowers. The endless gun salutes of the overzealous riflemen made the horses of the imperial state coach skittish, and Franz Joseph had to call a halt to this activity. But he enjoyed seeing the women in traditional costume, and receiving bouquets of flowers from fetching girls. The riflemen wanted him to go beyond fine speeches, and urged him to try his hand at the shooting range to start the gala display of marksmanship. He was ceremoniously led to the loaded rifles, while the spectators waited with bated breath. Twice he took aim at the moving target—and once he hit the rings, scoring a one. Gun salutes rang out to inform the entire city, accompanied by a never-ending roar from a crowd of thousands.

CHAPTER 2

The Curtain Rises

God always trades as a wholesaler.

—Kierkegaard, Stadier paa Livets Vei

The old center of the city of Prague is a stage, an ample arena taking up almost two and a half acres and accessible from several sides, yet well structured and compact enough to convey the feeling of a space that is clearly demarcated and symbolically elevated. This area is called Altstädter Ring, a focal point for the social energies of an entire region.

By the early modern age, it was considered a bourgeois privilege to live in the first row, right on the Ring. While Prague no longer had a say in world affairs, and all of Bohemia became a plaything of foreign dynasties, the Ring was still the grand social platform. This was the marketplace of Prague, the place where business transactions were negotiated and political deals struck. One was here to see and be seen, and all the foreign dialects and languages lent the Ring a flavor of cosmopolitanism that obscured the city’s actual loss of importance. The people of Prague knew that their Ring, lined with stately buildings, was famous throughout Europe, and they were quite used to the sight of travelers who had come from far away for the sole purpose of viewing the mind-boggling marvel of the huge astronomical clock on Altstädter Ring. A travel guide published in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War directed readers to this sight in its opening sentence: The old city of Prague is situated to the right of the Vltava, at the level of the valley, offering the view of many splendid buildings, in particular the Old Town Hall, which has such a high tower with a very artistic clock that is virtually unparalleled anywhere in the world in respect to its artistry.¹ At the time these words were published, the clock was already more than two hundred years old, and when its hands, a full yard in length, were first set in motion all those centuries ago, Prague was the seat of a kaiser.

On numerous occasions in the history of Prague, Altstädter Ring also served as a social stage, in the literal sense. There were processions across the square, and political addresses that ran the gamut, from homages to vitriolic attacks. Monuments were erected on the Ring, and there were demonstrations, proclamations, and acclamations. Anyone who assumed power in Prague put in a public appearance on the Ring, even in the twentieth century, when bustling Wenceslas Square had long since outshone the old center and reduced it to a place of historical interest. The beginning of the sole communist rule in February 1948 was celebrated against the backdrop of Altstädter Ring. This location was ill-chosen, because in picking it, the rebels had hit the nerve of collective memory in which a far more brutal scenario was ingrained, one that dated back more than three centuries, but that every Czech high school student knew inside out. The installation of a new regime that took place on Altstädter Ring on this dark day was accompanied by public torture, rope, and the executioner’s sword.

On the night leading up to June 20, 1621, the Old Town in Prague bristled with tension born of fright. People lay awake, whispering, praying, and making sure their doors were bolted shut. They listened intently to what was going on outside, where the sounds of militaristic goings-on gave notice of the horrors that would ensue the following day. The new rulers in the service of the Habsburg dynasty had imposed a curfew, and hundreds of armed men with torches and clanking weapons prowled through the streets to strike down anyone they got hold of. Torches illuminated Altstädter Ring, and the local residents quaked with fear as they listened for hours to the hammer blows of carpenters erecting a stage two-and-a-half meters high and about three hundred square meters right at the town hall. This stage was known as a blood scaffold. The horrified residents of Prague had been informed of what would be occurring here in a few short hours.

They had risked a revolt, and they had lost. This uprising was both religious and political, an attempt to extricate themselves from the increasing dominance of the Catholic Habsburgs, a rebellion of the Bohemian estates against the emergence of absolutism. The nobility, Protestant clergy, and bourgeoisie were at odds about how far this resistance ought to go, yet in May 1618, the leaders in Prague opted to burn their bridges and provoke open war: they unceremoniously threw two Catholic imperial officials and their clerk out the window and fired several bullets at them for good measure. This act of violence, which was well staged and not spontaneous in the least, was ridiculed throughout Europe as a regional farce (especially because the three victims got away with mere injuries), but in the following year, it became clear that the Bohemian estates and their allies in Moravia and Silesia were serious and that they were shaking the foundations of the power structure of Europe: The rebels deposed the Habsburg Ferdinand II as the king of Bohemia (just days before he was named kaiser) and instead seated a Palatine elector, confirmed Calvinist, and self-proclaimed crusader of Protestantism on the throne of Prague.

The extraordinarily abstruse diplomatic and military actions that followed were told and retold in accounts for the general reader and have taken their place in the shifting foundation of specialized historical knowledge. But the public would recall that the Defenestration of Prague unleashed decades of conflagrations that ravaged and depopulated broad areas of central Europe and the sensational debacle that the rebels suffered in the critical showdown in November 1620. The Battle on the White Mountain lasted less than two hours, on a plateau just a few miles from the center of Prague, and it ended with a devastating defeat for the underpaid troops of the Bohemian rebels, with a hasty escape by the Calvinist Friedrich von der Pfalz (who served briefly as king of Bohemia, and went down in the history of Prague with the derisive nickname Winter King), and with the total triumph of the Catholic League. Czech tradition came to call the Battle on the White Mountain the beginning of a period referred to as the darkness (temno), which lasted for three centuries. It was the Catholic age of the Habsburgs, who not only gained absolute rule in Bohemia, but also lost no time in setting a bloody example as a warning.

It was less the military defeat that was later interpreted as a national trauma (many generations to come in Bohemia would grow up with the conviction of having a score to settle with the Viennese) and more the victors’ calamitous strategy of suppressing any notion of a further rebellion by inflicting the greatest possible humiliation. Ferdinand II was not content with confiscating the property of Protestant nobility and forcing these men into exile if there was the slightest suspicion they had participated; he also required them to turn themselves in if they wished to escape execution. Non-Catholic clergymen suffered the same tough fate, because the new regime did not bother to draw what it considered subtle distinctions between moderate Lutherans and more radical Calvinists, Hussites, or Anabaptists. Not only did Ferdinand ignore the Letter of Majesty that Kaiser Rudolf II had issued just one decade earlier, which the Protestants furiously invoked to ensure the free pursuit of their religion, but he also set up a special court in Prague that flouted the Bohemian legal system and was subject exclusively to political directives from Vienna. To make matters worse, he orchestrated the death of disenfranchised defendants in such a cruel manner that he instilled a hatred of the Habsburgs even in the many apolitical people who did not care for rebellions and who would have much preferred to get along with the new rulers. This hatred endured for generations.

Twenty-seven men condemned to death, nearly all of them gray-haired and held captive mostly at the Prague Castle, were brought to the Old Town Hall to be on the scene for a punctual start to the proceedings: three from the highest class of nobility, the Herrenstand (lords), seven Ritter (knights), and seventeen commoners, the most prominent of whom was Dr. Jan Jessenius (Jesenský), the rector at the Charles University of Prague. As the sun rose, the first gawkers began to inch up to the scene of the spectacle, with the scaffold displayed in all its bleak splendor, bedecked with a black cloth. At five o’clock, a cannon shot rang out, signaling the onset of act one. The judges of the show trial, appointed from Vienna, took their places; next to them were the preeminent Catholic military leaders, among them Albrecht von Waldstein (alias Wallenstein). An executioner with medical training named Jan Mydlár—even his name has survived—stepped onto the stage, followed by several hooded assistants bearing sharpened knives. Then the first condemned man, the highest in social rank, was led to the scaffold, upright and unshackled. This man, fifty-two-year-old Joachim Andreas Graf Schlick, was one of those responsible for the Defenestration of Prague. A Jesuit clergyman made one final attempt at religious conversion, but Schlick, who had already complained about this clergyman’s intrusiveness on the previous evening, flatly rebuffed him. The executioner saw to the rest; in two blows, he transformed the kneeling count into a pile of dead flesh: first his head, then his right hand. The assistants disposed of the corpse, which was wrapped in cloths.

And on it went, one after the other, for nearly four hours, with horrifying monotony. It seems strange today that not a single eyewitness report mentioned the striking contrast between the archaic carnage that was unfolding in front of the east side of the Old Town Hall and the subtle, highly artificial technical showpiece, the resplendent astronomical clock just steps away on the south side.² It is difficult to determine how many spectators—many of them family members of the victims—witnessed the bloody events, and we know even less about whether the crowd was mournful or furious. But great pains were taken to ensure that no one would even think about interfering with the ritual punishment, which was intended to resonate well beyond this city and serve as a shock to the remaining opponents in all of Europe. The stage was abundantly secured by a cordon of armed cavalry and mercenary soldiers who were positioned in military-style block formations. Neither catcalls nor the last words of the condemned men had a chance of being heard above the sounds of the countless drummers who were also posted on the Ring and who produced an incessant, deafening racket that went on for hours. It was as though the new masters had reduced the people of Prague to silence—not even a sob could be heard.

But the humiliations were far from over. Unforgettable procedures were devised to escalate the horror. The most influential of all the accused, the humanistically trained and politically attentive physician Jessenius, suffered an especially cruel fate; his tongue was cut out before he was beheaded and his corpse was quartered in public. Three of the accused were tormented even longer; they did not die on the scaffold itself, but rather swung, slowly suffocating, from executioner’s ropes. Twelve of the severed heads were impaled on iron hooks and displayed on the old imperial Bridge Tower (this method was learned from the British). They remained there for a full ten years for all of Prague to see, and parents had to explain the event to their children. End of lesson.

As we know from many episodes in history, crushing defeats can contribute to shaping a collective self-awareness over quite a long period of time, and such defeats had a major role in the history of Judaism and modern Zionism. The legends about Simon ben Kosiba (known as Bar Kokhba, son of a star), a Jew who in 132 started a revolt against the Roman occupying power in Palestine, offer an impressive example. Although this initiative ultimately ended in a catastrophe and cost the lives of half a million Jews (including himself), Bar Kokhba became a role model for Jewish resistance and even a guarantor of national Jewish identity more than 1,800 years later. Evidently the question of the historical rationale was peripheral: What mattered was the heroic gesture that from a distance seems frozen in time, and the we that is created by stories of this kind is timeless, a reality that transcends history. This is why the question of what the deeds of these heroic figures have to do with us sidesteps the essential point. The idea of the Jewish people is everlasting.

Skeptical questions targeted at establishing the historical truth of the story that has been handed down are also beside the point. The front lines of history are rarely as straight and narrow as later myths would have us believe. Virtually nothing is known about the motives and objectives of the real Bar Kokhba, and the sparse evidence only suggests that in this case, religious self-delusion culminated in a politically senseless and suicidal undertaking. But the myth tells us that in a sense, these people fought for us and that as a result, their deeds are valid for all time as a moral yardstick, a benchmark for our own actions. The virtuosos of identity politics have exerted this moral pressure since the nineteenth century, creating a guilty conscience vis-à-vis one’s own group and a fear of exclusion that make it so difficult to penetrate all the historical simplifications, stylizations, and fabrications and get to the reality.

One of the most revealing, yet convoluted examples of a defeat that shaped the foundational myths here was the Battle on the White Mountain and the victors’ public revenge, a historical event of such complexity that it seems impossible to recount without drastic simplifications. The only fact not in dispute is that the fate of Bohemia and Moravia was decided on the White Mountain, and the resulting decision lasted for centuries. But what had actually triggered the conflict, and what aims and principles were being fought for? The Habsburgs claimed it was for legitimacy. The rebels claimed it was for the freedom of religion. The later Czech nationalists believed it had been for liberation from the yoke of the Germans.

This interpretive clash was tied to special interests from the very start. Kaiser Ferdinand II had to take into account his Protestant noblemen, so he did his best to avoid the public perception that he was waging a religious war against the people of Prague. In order to convey this impression, he even had a Catholic man executed on Altstädter Ring, and the fact that the executioner was himself Protestant was an opportune coincidence.³ The rebels, by contrast, were eager to bring up the subject of religion, and insisted that professing their Protestant faith ought not to incur any social or material disadvantages for them. They spurned any suggestion that they were against a strong kaiser, and interested only in their own gain in power—they, too, had an eye to powerful allies. The Czech historiography of the nineteenth century then used the events to serve its own national ideology, claiming that the Habsburgs promoted the supremacy of Germanness in Bohemia. Hadn’t they, in the years after their victory, filled all the key administrative posts with Germans—despite the Czech majority—and hadn’t they even legally established in the new state constitution that the German language would be on an equal footing with Czech?

It is one of the many ironic twists in the history of Bohemia that this third interpretation, which is by far the weakest and hardest to reconcile with the historical facts, ultimately prevailed, and that the men who were executed on Altstädter Ring (of whom at least a third were German-speaking) lived on in the collective memory not as champions of civil liberties or as victims of religious suppression, but as national martyrs. The White Mountain, from which the darkness had once spread throughout the land, became a place of pilgrimage for Czech nationalists, and after the collapse of the Habsburg regime, which brought the Czechs national emancipation, a monument was erected there. By contrast, the toweringly high Marian column on Altstädter Ring, with which the Habsburgs had once celebrated their brutal and successful re-Catholicization of the country, was destroyed after World War I by a procession of Czech demonstrators who first congregated on the White Mountain to prepare for the onslaught. And even today, crosses on the pavement mark the spot on the Ring at which the blood of the victims of 1621 was shed.

The multitude of these kinds of historical markers is characteristic of Prague; they are like a grid over the city, and particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Prague was still identified with its traditional center, this ubiquitous and demonstrative historicity, and even obsession with history, shaped the educated bourgeoisie’s attitude toward life. Every house, Johannes Urzidil recalled, every street, every square in Prague incessantly evoked its entire history: ‘Don’t forget this! Don’t forget that!’ so much so that all the remembering and desire for retaliation made people well-nigh forget the lives they were actually leading.⁴ It was the pressured feeling of being caught in a web of historical fault lines and responsibilities and having to constantly wrench oneself away from the force field of Prague’s past. And this feeling was intensified by the cityscape of the old Prague, which was calculatingly clustered, interlocking and superimposing the prevailing styles of various epochs with a form and facade that often blended them into a single structure. It was as though one were living atop the accumulated rubble of dozens of past generations whose destinies, sufferings, and achievements kept one’s own thoughts under a spell. School and university curricula and public discourse as a whole incessantly referred back to what had once taken place here—not to be savored and relished from a safe distance, but rather as a caution that this history was not over and done with, and that there were still scores to settle. Anyone who grew up in the Old Town of Prague—or, for that matter, the adjacent, more prosperous New Town, which had existed for half a millennium as well—had to get used to living in the presence of the past: nothing was moved, nothing thrown away. One could easily come away with the impression that the famous statues on the Charles Bridge were the actual inhabitants of Prague, and the living residents of Prague mere transient guests.⁵

All this was truer of the Germans than of the Czechs, of the bourgeoisie more than of the working class. The Old and the New Town were evolving into museumlike zones. The tone had been set primarily by the Germans, for whom the locus of memory was also the locus of current and future life. The Czechs thought otherwise. Their rapidly expanding suburbs and industrial areas provided correctives to a crippling fixation on the past. Even before 1900, there were many thousands of Prague Czechs who felt like visitors in the downtown area, visitors to a museum full of showpieces that may have addressed their own history, but had little to do with the accelerated and mechanized life in the modern age. The Czech cafés, movie theaters, and street signs did nothing to change that. The Czech future—and the people of Prague had little doubt that the future of this city would eventually be Czech—would preserve its historical roots in the old center, of course. But its stage would resurface elsewhere.

Prague’s dual populace not only used different languages, but also maintained different symbolic systems, systems that were reflected in urban development. The stark differences could be experienced up close by laying aside the Baedeker travel guide and strolling from the Kleinseite with its Baroque palace—the style of the victors in 1620—to the industrial zone of Smichov or across Altstädter Ring to the tenements in Žižkov, populated by Czechs, which were not especially tourist worthy. This area was dominated by a present devoid of history, and sparked by a recurring sense that a new era was about to dawn, with steadily intensifying visions for the future. Prague, which was once an imperial city, might have descended de facto to the level of a regional center, but this parochialism was felt and experienced almost exclusively by the Germans, who were constantly confronted with the evidence of a grander past and their dependency on Vienna, while the Czechs in Prague continued to live in their own center, the center of the Czech population and of Czech culture. It was as though the one group had jurisdiction over the wellsprings, while the other was left with bodies of water that may have been more impressive but were now stagnant and putrefying.

This place hates, loves, punishes, protects, honors,

Depravity, peace, crimes, laws, honesty.

The grammatical incongruity of this inscription, emblazoned on the Old Town Hall, makes it hard to understand the first time around. Even so, it was an apt watchword; the confluence of peace, crimes, and laws had been a reality in Prague from time immemorial. The city had been ravaged by poorly healed wounds, and visitors here never seemed to experience the pleasures of the uncomplicated Gemütlichkeit (coziness) that were ascribed to Vienna, despite Prague’s narrow, winding streets and stairways, and its countless pubs and quirky patrons. Instead, the nineteenth century gradually imposed on this city the image of a gloomy stage set, which came to be known as magical Prague as a means of promoting tourism, yet its core of authentic experience has endured to this day. In some corners of this city, the intertwining of past and present, of death and life can make the presence of history feel downright eerie.

This urban folklore, nurtured by travel guides, poets, and, later, film directors, conveyed little more than a distorted image from the outset; even the old Prague, the Prague before the world wars, was neither a museum nor a historical theme park. What tourists saw as a mysterious abundance of signs, inscriptions, and styling configurations was anything but magical for the residents of the city, and they represented fault lines that persisted even as the city was rapidly modernizing into a provincial metropolis. For the people of Prague, these were all scars to remind them that they lived in an urban battle zone, and what loomed from the city’s past were not specters or promises of magic, but rather unresolved social, ethnic, national, and religious conflicts, kept alive and fueled by a rhetoric of scores to settle.

The Jewish minority of Prague drew an especially sharp distinction between historical experience and urban myth. Jews had played a significant role in the economic development of Prague all along, and within the area they were allotted—the ghetto, situated right next to the Christian Altstadt—they had for centuries an autonomy that went well beyond religious and ritualistic concerns. Even the Prague jurisdiction had no access here. However, these privileges were tempered by an abundance of collective coercive measures, the unpredictable ups and downs of which kept the Jews in a perpetual state of fear: special taxes, bans on professions and marriages, constraints on liberties, forced conversions, evictions, and organized lootings. To outsiders, the ghetto seemed like one big, woeful organism with secret powers and connections that rendered it ineradicable and capable of recovering quickly from even deep wounds. Jews were feared and despised, but also needed. Their urban enclave could not be attacked at will without detriment to the rest of Prague or even to the region as a whole. Even Maria Theresa came to recognize that. Although she had dreamed of a Bohemia without Jews, she had to rescind, after a few short years, the merciless edict of expulsion she had issued in 1744—and even to expand economic opportunities for the Jews.

Although Christian anti-Semitic propaganda tried to muddy the facts, resentment of the Jews did not stem from their alleged lack of belief, keen business sense, or magical rites, but rather from their lack of seamless integration into the social pyramid, and their autonomous decisions even in the political arena. They were always seeking connections to those in power who might ensure them the greatest degree of legal security, as might be expected, but for this very reason, they were constantly suspected of treachery. If an enemy turned up at the gates, the behavior of the Jews was closely monitored, and any indication that they were communicating with the enemy could set off wide-ranging reprisals, as was the case in 1744. Maria Theresa sensed that the Jews in Prague were a bit too cozy with the French and Prussian occupying forces, and concluded that they were opportunists, traitors who thought of nothing but their own advantage.

The Jews had gotten caught between the millstones of a war of succession that was no concern of theirs, and they were required to demonstrate loyalty to a regime that had recently stripped them of a set of fundamental rights. To make matters worse, the Habsburgs’ biopolitics intruded harshly on Jewish family planning. According to the Familiants Law, decreed in 1727 by Karl VI, the father of Maria Theresa, only the eldest son in each family could start his own family, and the number of Jewish families allowed to live in Bohemia was frozen. This decree forced thousands of young people to choose between leaving the country and their extended family permanently or eking out an existence as peddlers devoid of legal rights. In a Bohemia under Prussian influence—which of course remained a mere pipe dream—a barbaric law of this kind would surely not have lasted for long.

The Habsburgs had obviously forgotten that during the previous century, in the Bohemian zero hour that culminated in the Battle on the White Mountain, the Jews had made significant contributions to the victory of the Austrian kaiser. Moreover, in the fateful year of 1620, the Jews voted pragmatically, in the interest of prosperity and legal security, and hence Catholic, because the business relationships with the Catholic rulers were well established, so the Viennese court was always open, at least as an appellate authority. What did the Protestant rebels have to offer; what did they have in mind for the Jews if these rebels emerged victorious? That was unclear, and the sermons of their spiritual leaders, many of whom were aggressive Lutheran anti-Semites, were not encouraging.

Jacob Bassevi, the richest Jew in Prague, whose conservative business strategy extended well beyond the borders of the country, was assured of the support of the great majority of the people who lived in the ghetto, including the rabbis. Bassevi was the typical court Jew, on the best of terms with the Habsburg rulers Rudolf II, Matthias, and Ferdinand II, and when the decisive military duel between the kaiser and the Bohemian estates drew near, Bassevi’s generous financial support flowed not to the neighbors on Altstädter Ring, but to their adversaries in Vienna, who used it to motivate the troops. Bassevi had an indirect, but considerable influence on the outcome of the Battle on the White Mountain, and Ferdinand II expressed his gratitude during the inevitable weeks of looting in Prague by Catholic troops, when he arranged for the ghetto to be spared—a political miracle that the Jews of Prague commemorated annually for a long time to come. Bassevi himself was freed from paying any taxes, and was the first Jew north of the Alps to acquire noble status; from then on, his name was Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg. He instantly put his new privileges to good use by lining his own pockets during the largest currency fraud of the early modern era as a member of the Bohemian coin consortium, yet he was unvaryingly generous in the ghetto and the Jews continued to hold him in high regard, while he now became an object of hatred for the defeated Protestants who were already mortified by the public mass execution.

The role of the Jews in Prague was a relatively marginal issue in view of the ever-expanding front lines of a religious war that eventually spread through most of Europe. The Jews were not regarded as political subjects, but rather as a disruptive influence. They neither waged wars nor possessed any territory of their own and were therefore unsuited as allies or enemies in any true political or legal sense. Nevertheless, the manner in which they acted as participating observers in an intra-Christian conflict, the audacity with which they redesignated the wretched day in Prague as a day of celebration, and finally their gains at the table of the victor contrasted starkly with the devastating sanctions the Protestant estates had to endure. On the list of scores to settle, this historical fact could not be overlooked, and when, centuries later, the anti-German, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish attitudes combined into a single resentment, the wellspring of this odd phenomenon might well have lain right in front of the gates of Prague, at the White Mountain, in 1620.

It was far more than a military and political defeat—it was actually a turning point in Bohemian history that left not a single stone standing. No sooner were the last Protestant acts of resistance suppressed and the situation made relatively stable than the victors decided it was time for a radical economic reorganization of Bohemia, a reshuffling of almost the entire ruling class to a degree not seen in Europe for half a millennium.⁶ At least two-thirds of the property belonging to the nobility in Bohemia and Moravia, as well as countless buildings in the city, were expropriated or sold forcibly for paltry sums of money, and if the families of the former owners clung to Protestantism, they were expelled from the land along with their servants and clergymen. A total of about 36,000 families and more than 150,000 people were involved. The primary beneficiaries of this punitive action were Catholic noblemen, whose financial and military backing had made the victory possible and who now came into the possession of enormous estates, sometimes for free and other times at prices far below the market value. The new rulers were Wallenstein, Liechtenstein, Eggenberg, Trauttmannsdorff, and Metternich.⁷ Valuable realty was changing hands in the cities as well, and some of the vacant houses that Protestants had left behind in a hurry went to prospective Jewish buyers in accordance with a special decree.

This kind of bloodletting could not of course be compensated for by the mere allocation of new property deeds. All of Bohemia was now depopulated, some regions eerily so. There was an especially striking lack of craftsmen and merchants, fields and forests went to rack and ruin, and the ongoing war in Europe, which kept spilling over into Bohemia—Prague was also attacked several more times—brought devastation, epidemics, and further mass migrations. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Bohemia’s population had been reduced to one million—one-third less than at the beginning—and half of all dwellings in Prague stood vacant.

But there was no capital without people. If the cheaply acquired manors stood a chance of yielding a profit for their new owners, work had to start up there. Once again, families were relocated, and a great deal of effort went into luring workers from afar into the Bohemian vacuum. It was a good time for people who had nothing left to lose, and thus a good time for the Jews, who were always on the move in large numbers, having been cast out or robbed and in search of safety. In the first years after the war, they streamed into the country from the east, from Polish-ruled Ukraine, where the insurgent Cossacks carried out horrific massacres with the enthusiastic participation of the rest of the Russian Orthodox rural population. It is estimated that more than a quarter of a million Jews died a violent death. The survivors were grateful for any offer, and wherever they were