Like any sizeable place, Prague works on one on many levels, not all of which are immediately apparent. It is the city of a thousand statues and a hundred spires; the spotless town of bubble-blowing street entertainers and caramelised chimney-cake stalls; the site of great historical defenestrations, spring awakenings and velvet revolutions. Its literary genii include the likes of Kafka and Kundera, Holub and Havel, as well as their descendants, whose names remain unknown to me. Established in the seventh century, it is both venerable and vigorous, its present deeply rooted in its past, its past richly imprinted in the present. And though the future may seem harder to detect in such well-clotted contexts, it is there too, rising behind the hoardings guarding building sites, flitting in the eyes of younger generations.
Kafka haunts a Prague where it is always winter, never spring. The long, low expanse of the Castle—which owes its name more to its hilltop location than to any readiness for battle—dominates the skyline to the north-west, especially at night, when it is lit-up with a creamy-gold glow, while the spires of the cathedral of St. Vitus, which lies within its precinct, rise as figures of contrasting darkness, black on black. Even if wasn’t the highly visible presence of the bureaucratic and the clerical over the cityscape that would inspire Kafka’s great unfinished novel, he must have had Prague’s seats of church and government in mind as he set about writing The Castle while in Spindlermühle.
The Kafka Museum shares a courtyard with a riverside restaurant and a sculpture of two men pissing into a Czech Republic-shaped pond. Their urine spells out literary quotes, but whether any of Kafka’s are among them is unclear to me. In contrast to the brightness of the day, the museum is darkly lit and somewhat disorienting. Glass cases harbour photos, letters, and first editions, while a filmscreen projects watery, rippling images of early twentieth-century Prague. Like Pessoa, whose ghost presides over Lisbon in many a similar way, Kafka never married. As affecting as the photos of the three women with whom he had significant romantic relationships—Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská and Dora Diamant—and the letters to his employers—pleading for a raise or time off for ill-health—are, I left feeling that my hour at the museum might have been better spent revisiting “The Metamorphosis” or a chapter from The Trial. But then this sentence on an information board may not have struck me as it did: “The threshold is a deferred place, a postponed end, an unfinished work”—a suggested derivation of the Czech name for Prague being práh, or “threshold”.
Kafka haunts a Prague where it is always winter, never spring. The long, low expanse of the Castle—which owes its name more to its hilltop location than to any readiness for battle—dominates the skyline to the north-west, especially at night, when it is lit-up with a creamy-gold glow, while the spires of the cathedral of St. Vitus, which lies within its precinct, rise as figures of contrasting darkness, black on black. Even if wasn’t the highly visible presence of the bureaucratic and the clerical over the cityscape that would inspire Kafka’s great unfinished novel, he must have had Prague’s seats of church and government in mind as he set about writing The Castle while in Spindlermühle.
The Kafka Museum shares a courtyard with a riverside restaurant and a sculpture of two men pissing into a Czech Republic-shaped pond. Their urine spells out literary quotes, but whether any of Kafka’s are among them is unclear to me. In contrast to the brightness of the day, the museum is darkly lit and somewhat disorienting. Glass cases harbour photos, letters, and first editions, while a filmscreen projects watery, rippling images of early twentieth-century Prague. Like Pessoa, whose ghost presides over Lisbon in many a similar way, Kafka never married. As affecting as the photos of the three women with whom he had significant romantic relationships—Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská and Dora Diamant—and the letters to his employers—pleading for a raise or time off for ill-health—are, I left feeling that my hour at the museum might have been better spent revisiting “The Metamorphosis” or a chapter from The Trial. But then this sentence on an information board may not have struck me as it did: “The threshold is a deferred place, a postponed end, an unfinished work”—a suggested derivation of the Czech name for Prague being práh, or “threshold”.
Of the (at least) two statues of Kafka in Prague, one stands in the Jewish quarter, not far from the Old Jewish Cemetery. It was inspired by a scene in his first novel, Amerika, in which a politician is carried on the shoulders of a giant. Kafka has posthumously assumed that position, becoming the great upon whose shoulders we now strive to stand. The brass of both of his shoes has been worn shiny with rubs for luck, much as the once-derelict Wilde’s Parisian grave has been kissed back to life.
Kafka is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery; no-one who died later than 1786 is to be found in the older one. But in the Pinkas synagogue adjoining it, the names of the 77,297 Czechoslovakians who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and subsequently killed in Nazi extermination camps are written out in careful red and black script on the walls. One will never be prepared to be confronted with the scale of their loss. Overwhelmed, I try to focus on just one or two names and their curtailed lives: Rudolf Buchbinder, 1913-42. Ludvik Buchler, 1936-42. Upstairs, an exhibition of children’s pictures rescued from the camps is unbearable. I am, again, only able to focus on one of them, “A Boat In Turbulent Seas”, drawn by Jindrich Triescheř, 1932-44. It is as bleak a rendering of a boat at sea as anybody could imagine.
Outside, in the old cemetery that Leigh Fermor ranked as “one of the most remarkable places in the city”, a magpie emits an acrid cackle, to the sweeter backdrop of two great tits foraging at the foot of some ivy. It is said that, owing to the yard’s confinement, the dead here are buried in stacks 12 feet deep. Under the leafing elder trees, gravestones are arrayed at every angle other than the perpendicular, with some leaning on others for support. The writing on them is in Hebrew, so I cannot tell how long these precursors to the Holocaust lived, nor whether they did so in relative peace. It is unlikely, though. Little notes with prayers or wishes are ensnared among the graves, lodged in crevices or weighed down with rocks. The Golem’s alleged creator, late sixteenth century rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel, is buried in this graveyard, and it’s claimed he gave the creature life by inserting slips of paper inscribed with incantations into its mouth, in an effort to defend his people from the pogroms that Leigh Fermor reminds us long preceded the atrocities of Nazi Germany:
The russet-coloured synagogue, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe; yet it was built on the site of a still older fane which was burnt down in a riot, in which three thousand Jews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1389. (The proximity of the Christian festival to the Feast of the Passover, coupled with the myth of ritual murder, made Easter week a dangerous time.)
Chilled to the bone, I thaw out on the terrace of the Času Dost (Time Enough) café, pivoting into the pleasures of the present, counting my blessings.
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Daniel Williams is a writer from Hampshire. His first novel, The Edge of the Object, is due to be published in the coming year by The Half Pint Press, which also published a limited letterpress edition of his short story, “Letterpress” (2017). His writing can be found online at https://awildslimalien.wordpress.com/ and you can follow him on Twitter @awildslimalien
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