Kafka, Heartfield, Prague
This won’t be your typical European travelogue. There won’t be any marvelling over architecture, raving about gourmet cuisine, or plugging of four star hotels. This is a literary tourist’s reaction to a stunning, precious city, in unsettled times, filtered through the work of two great artists, Franz Kafka and John Heartfield. One who bore witness, indelibly. The other who courageously fought injustice.
Prague. Photo by Nigel Beale
First appeared in Fine Books & Collections magazine.
The first time I visited the magical city of Prague, about twenty years ago, I took a "Kafka" walking tour.
I showed up at the allotted time under the big clock in the Old Town Square. To my surprise, I found myself alone with the tour guide. We waited a while for others to show up, but none did. It was just me and this beautiful young woman. She didn't seem to mind, and I wasn't about to complain.
We started walking. It felt a bit like a first date (well, for me anyway). Was this a dream? She talked about Kafka’s early life, pointing to the house at Karpfensgasse and Maiselgasse where he is said to have been born (in 1884), mentioning that Kafka's mother had died when he was still very young.
I knew this wasn't true. Julie Kafka (née Löwy) died in 1934, ten years after Franz’s death.
We walked through some narrow side streets in Josefov, Pragueʼs former Jewish Ghetto, where Kafka used to hang out and write. It was here that he produced such works as “The Trial,” “The Castle,” and “Metamorphosis.”
We went past the Jewish Cemetery and on to a small church where we stopped. The guide then stared into my eyes and started talking about herself; about her studies at Charles University; her childhood; living in the surrounding countryside; the corruption of local politicians and the police; and her desire to leave the country.
Why was she sharing these personal stories with me? Was this some kind of set up? The Tour website looked legitimate enough.
We moved on, stopping as she described various buildings, Kafka's school and university, the house where he met his future wife, Felice Bauer; some of the salons and synagogues where he spent time. She pointed out various architectural features, a sculpted fish on a wall.
Given her error about Julia, I wasn't sure I could believe anything she said.
The tour ran for about an hour as I recall. We ended up standing in front of each other in the Square where we'd first met. She asked if I had any more questions. I knew what I wanted to say. I didn't want her to leave, but all I could do was shake my head. She then turned and slowly walked away. I watched her shapely form disappear into the crowd and made my way back to the restaurant where my brother awaited.
Kafka wrote that being in love was like exploring yourself with a knife; like a knife slowly twisting in your heart. I must've fallen in love with the tour guide. Though I wasn't bleeding, I sure felt something strange and painful. Frustrating and powerful. There's no other word for it: the whole experience was surreal. A surreal exhilaration tempered with a feeling of sadness and loss. Lost opportunity. Also, an uncertainty about what exactly I'd just experienced, and why.
In many ways it was like being caught up in one of Kafka's short stories, only here in Prague for the first time, it had in fact actually happened.
Kafka Museum, Prague. Photo by NB
The second time I went to Prague, four or five years ago, I visited the Franz Kafka Museum. It's about a ten minute walk from Prague Castle and close to the famed Charles Bridge. The museum's box office is in this striking pink building right behind which you'll find two men pissing - well, statues of the same anyway. If this isn't strange enough, when I was there photographing them, this guy steps up and starts plucking handfuls of coins out of the water surrounding them.
The museum itself isn't very big but it's certainly evocative of both Kafka's internal and external lives. The entrance way is dark and narrow. Its walls are filled with what look like filing cabinet drawers. I was impressed to see so many early editions of Kafka's better-known works. Kurt Wolff was the first to promote and publish him, posthumously. I loved this copy of Wolff’s publishing house logo.
There were also diaries, early drafts of book illustrations, and original letters and drawings on display. Kafka was pretty good with the drafting pencil too. An English-language bookstore, Shakespeare and Sons, is located a short 2-3 minute stroll away. It's stocked to please your average earnest young undergrad pseudo-intellectual-type (heavy on the Lacan and Foucault), plus there's a strong contemporary fiction section.
It may just have been a coincidence, but the view from our particular Airbnb that trip served very much to confirm my belief that Prague is inspiringly surreal and weird.
Here's a building just down the street.
Andre Breton wrote that Surrealism tried to cast a conductive wire between the waking and sleeping worlds, between exterior and interior reality, reason and madness. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who is still alive, claimed that this is what Kafka achieved in his writing; this is why it bewitches us.
One of the things that Kafka feared most in his short life was that the dreams and nightmares he described in his writing might somehow prefigure reality and come true. He was worried that his horrific visions might jump the circuit from dream to reality, and that reason might transmute into madness and result in mass suffering. This is why he specifically asked his friend Max Brod to destroy everything he'd written.
There have been many attempts to explain the angst found in Kafka's writing, much of it connected with his strained relationship with family, language, and the city of Prague itself. German was his "mother" tongue. His mother spoke it to him. She was from a prosperous German-speaking Jewish family. As Franz himself wrote in a diary entry in October, 1911 however: "It occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it...the Jewish woman who is called 'mutter' therefore becomes not only comic but strange."
Herman Kafka's command of the German language was poor. The sign over his dry-goods store carried the Czech spelling of his name, not the German (with two "n"s). This, reports Derek Sayer in Prague The Surreal City, spared him more than one Krystallnacht-type attack.
Ironically, despite being considered a master of the German language, Franz didn't feel at home in it. Nor was he comfortable in Czech. His German accent kept him apart, separate. Plus he was Jewish. As a result, he felt like an outsider. Frozen in the interstices, in a city that "spat on him from both sides of the street," as my friend and Prague antiquarian bookseller Dan Morgan puts it. Kafka hated this, but couldn't leave. Prague had an unnatural hold over him. It kept him in its "claws." He died in 1924 at age 40, after years struggling with tuberculosis.
Artist, photomontage pioneer, John Heartfield
To my mind there’s a conductive bolt between him and artist John Heartfield; between the former’s nightmarish vision and the latter’s response to its realization. Passive identification on the one hand, active fighting on the other. A baton was passed between them.
Heartfield's striking, politically charged, anti-fascist photo-montages started to gain traction, to gel in the popular mind, right at the time of Kafka’s death. This was thanks largely to Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung or AIZ (in English, The Workers Pictorial Newspaper) magazine founded by Willi Munzenberg - a sort of German precursor to Life magazine (which was launched in 1936). It was published between 1924 and 1933 in Berlin, and afterward in Prague, until 1938.
Dan had a good selection of AIZ magazines on hand at his shop and I was able to pour over them during my current visit.
Heartfield's ingenious, cogent montage work was a tangible response to a reality that eerily mirrored Kafka's imaginative world. Photography now was no longer simply a means of imitation, it was a tool for expression.
Heartfield’s practice involved the creation of trenchant visual commentary through the juxtaposition of familiar, often incongruent images. This resulted in a stark, blunt, often brilliantly simple expression of “truth.” Kafka, interestingly, also resorted to this method of jarring surprise in some of his short stories.
Heartfield had a talent for clear, unbridled criticism which when combined with access to large new audiences, and applied to an incendiary political environment, rendered his attacks on injustice and corruption extremely effective. By boiling the complex down to the simple Heartfield’s photomontages served as powerful visceral visual condemnations. As such, I don’t think they’ve been bettered.
An early leader of the Berlin Dada Movement, Heartfield worked at his brother Weiland's book publishing firm, Melik-Verlag, throughout the twenties and thirties, designing hundreds of striking photograph-based dust jackets. They were recognized not only for how successfully they attracted attention, but also for their use of the entire jacket, back and front, to display persuasive imagery.
***
Right before visiting Prague for a third time, last Fall, I headed to Munich and the Dachau Concentration camp on its outskirts. Dachau, for me, was where Kafka's nightmare became real. It was shocking to be confronted with what had happened there. Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany. It was established in March 1933, five weeks after Hitler became chancellor, less than a decade after Kafka's death. It became the model and training center for all other SS-organized Jewish extermination camps. Kafka's horrific vision converted systematically into reality by the Nazis. Thousands of small operations throughout Germany sent prisoners to the bigger concentration camps, in addition to supplying slave labor to factories all around the country.
There was an air of unbelievability about being there. A sense that this was where madness had taken over from reason.
This punch was followed by one in Munich at the National Socialist Documentation Center. Here you see how Hitler's dream of pure Aryan domination, cleansed of Jewish "contamination," was normalized. You learn about the propaganda tactics used to spread and popularize this heinous vision (how the words "Jewish" and "Aryan" were painted on the sides of shops, for example); how a nightmare was systematized and converted into policy and practice.
It was one of the most powerful, chilling museum visits I've ever experienced in my life. It’s also where I first learned about John Heartfield.
From Munich I went to Prague where I met up with bookseller Dan Morgan and interviewed him about Czech modernist book design and the important role that photomontage played in it. Jindřich Toman’s book Photo/Montage in Print (Kant, 2011) is the one to reach for, according to Dan, who, before our interview had taken me on a tour of some of the antiquarian bookshops in the downtown core. At one, he got to talking with the proprietor, so I just did what I do best, which is happily browse among dusty bookshelves. I emerged with a copy of Karel, Basnicke, Havlicek, Dilo, Borovsky (Statni, Praha, 1962). Dan kindly praised by my taste. All I’d done was gone for what I thought looked pretty. I knew the Czechs were renowned for their brilliant children’s book illustration and design. The one I’d picked happened to be highlighted in Snklhu Odeon, Nikola Klimova (ed.). I got it for less than $5.00.
After our booking we stopped for an obligatory beer, big ones for less that $2.00 each.
***
The same month that the Nazi government opened Dachau in 1933, it seized the Berlin offices of Malik Verlag and destroyed some 400,000 of its books. Weiland Herzfelde, the company founder, escaped to Prague with little more on him than the clothes he was wearing. His brother John Heartfield followed the next month, on Good Friday, walking across the Sudenten Mountains.
The two quickly re-established their press but were unable to legally incorporate in Czechoslovakia, so they arranged for a sign to be affixed to John Lane's Bodley Head offices in London. All books published in Prague from 1933 -1938 thus carry a London imprint.
The brothers also continued to publish AIZ magazine although its circulation in Germany fell from 200,00-300,000 to about 12,000. Nonetheless, Heartfield did some of his best, most memorable work while he was in Prague during the thirties.
In April 1934 he exhibited thirty-six photomontages at the First International Exhibition of Caricature and Humor at the Manes Gallery alongside works by Otto Dix, Jean Cocteau, George Grosz and others.
The German embassy strenuously objected. They were especially outraged at “Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Trash.” It made the link between fascism and capitalism sickeningly obvious, as did much of Heartfield’s work. Eventually the Czech government caved to Nazi pressure and ordered several of Heartfield works removed. This boosted attendance of course
(estimates run as high as 60,000), and prompted Heartfield to create a piece in AIZ captioned “The More Pictures They Remove, the More Visible Reality Becomes!”
Heartfield escaped the Nazis once again in 1938 when he left Prague for England. He returned to East Germany, in 1952.
**
I arrived in Prague most recently just in time for Bloomsday. Dan had invited me to read some passages from Ulysses at his bookshop. We were joined by Bryn Haworth who founded the Irish Studies program at Charles University some thirty years prior during the early 1990s. After butchering the text, and analysing its fireworks with surprising acuity, the three of us headed over to a hill-side orchard near Prague Castle. After a time, we were joined by a crowd of Bryn’s ex-students. Many were seeing him for the first time in years. Watching the reunions and observing the respect that was paid to Bryn was a heart-warming experience. Set against such a spectacular backdrop it was, yes, surreally beautiful. Later that night, on the way home, down the hill, we passed this little bookshop: [ ]
What’s weird, I thought the next day at lunch, is that there’s a war going on only 700 miles away from here.
I watched a couple of young Czech mothers pushing their babies along in prams. Then I thought…what if we were in Ukraine. What if some sort of rocket suddenly exploded in front of them and blew them all apart?
How would that affect reality? How insane would that be? How would I be able to function rationally after that?
There’s such a calm beauty here in Prague. So many smart, reasonable people. And yet such madness so close-by.
Bear witness. I thought. Fight injustice. Pay attention to artists. Don’t allow history to repeat itself.
The next morning I went over to Dan’s bookstore in Prague 6 and bought a couple of issues of AIZ magazine from 1933.
***
I’m now getting wired up to participate in the Prague Summer Program for Writers in hopes that it might help me both improve my storytelling skills and better emulate the brilliant work of Franz Kafka and John Heartfied.
