Kafka in Prague: An Attempt at a Ghost Hunt

published in The independent, october 2019

“If I had a gun, I'd shoot myself in the face.”

The diaries of Franz Kafka include various reflections upon suicide, but none of them are as straightforward as this one, delivered in a warm Welsh accent by a man whose EasyJet uniform is so punishingly tight it is hard to look at. I am waiting for the toilet cubicle; he is at the helm of the flimsy little aisle cart. Halfway down the plane, source of the man’s breezy suicidal ideation, “Coxy’s Stag Do” are once again firing up a flat, bellowed rendition of The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”. The plane sags in the air; I briefly have no knees. Back in my seat, the chanting makes it hard to concentrate on a particularly dense passage of Kafka’s The Castle. A baby cries. The plane continues to hurtle toward Prague, Kafka’s city.

As M. M. Owen disembarks that evening, he finds himself transformed into the sort of writer who can't resist a well-placed Kafka riff, but will predictably attempt to give the riff new life by deploying it with a self-consciousness both weary and wry. In its founding texts, such ruminative and vaguely self-loathing loops are a constituent of the nebulous thing that I am in Prague to investigate: the Kafkaesque. Stepping off the plane, the night air is mild. I am keen to seek out Franz’s ghost.

In the summer of 1911, while lake-hopping through southern Europe, a 28-year old Kafka, and his best friend Max Brod, struck on an idea that they thought could earn them millions of Austro-Hungarian kroner: travel guides. The idea never went beyond the point of business plan, but the men were serious. It was “supposed to make us millionaires,” said Brod. As well as giving insider tips, these guides would protect people from tourist traps. 

Today, Franz is himself a tourist trap. I am stood in the middle of Prague’s Old Town Square – one section of a “little circle” within which, Kafka said, “my whole life is contained.” A woman walks past holding a sort of wooden lollipop with Franz’s printed face on it; she trails a group of Americans with enormous cameras straining at their necks. Kafka famously told Brod that, with the exception of six of his short stories, all his papers and manuscripts were to be “burned unread and to the last page.” Brod famously disobeyed him, and in 1939 he managed to smuggle all of Kafka’s papers out of Prague on the very last train to cross the Czech-Polish border before the Nazis sealed it. Whether or not Kafka had really meant his request (and many think he didn’t): here we are. Franz is a long way from unread. He is also voluminously written about: in 1946, the great Hannah Arendt correctly predicted that Franz would “keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well-fed.” I have swerved everything academic; after decades of accumulation, it will be a labyrinth of opinions more bewildering than anything in The Trial. I want only the life, and the words. I have a long list of Kafka destinations listed in my Evernote and starred in my Google Maps. I set off.

According to the Slovak owner of the AirBnb my wife and I are renting, all Czechs are depressed, which is why Kafka is so quintessentially Czech. A harmless bit of patriotic banter, but it’s true: Franz Kafka was not a happy man. Whatever it is Prague has made a tourist attraction of, it is not the example that Franz set for how to live a contented life. 

Reading biographies is generally a deflating sort of pleasure; even geniuses are revealed as sordidly, boringly human. Kafka was weighed down by what he himself called an “insane selfishness.” Labouring under an ornate Madonna-whore complex, he was a nagging, outlandishly manipulative romantic partner. Far outdoing his published fiction for word count are thousands of love letters that display a theatrical self-loathing mostly too opaque to rise to the level of emotional coercion. Kafka complained that his family were oppressive and cruel, even as he lived with them rent-free well into his thirties and let his mother cook him dinner every night. He liked Flaubert’s phrase about people who are dans le vrai, but felt he always fell pitifully short of such a condition. “My life is a hesitation before birth,” he said. Kafka was a chronic insomniac beset by constant headaches and a weak stomach, and yet his was what he called a “self-enamoured hypochondria.” He loathed his body, and was forever imagining himself as something sub-human. In his diary, he appears perpetually daunted and crushed by life, and obsessed with the nature of his Angst.

All of this is why, in the general literary imagination, Kafka functions as a sort of anti-Hemingway: Hypersensitive, fragile, all brain no brawn – a seer whose attunement to life rendered him a sort of life-size raw nerve stumbling through a cruel world. Milan Kundera, Prague’s second-most-famous writer, has bemoaned the emergence of a sort of cult of personality he dubs “Kafkology,” which “delights in discussing the martyrdom of [Kafka’s] impotence. Thus Kafka long ago became the patron saint of the neurotic, the depressive, the anorexic, the feeble.”

In Anglophone culture, this Kafkology extends to the clichéd Kafka reader, who is framed as the emo kid of fiction: pale, tremulous, if not asleep then likely ruminating on their own nihilism. As with most clichés, this one is often unfair, but also often painfully accurate. On a street whose cobbles have surely twisted many a tourist ankle, I find The Franz Kafka Society. It is narrow and stuffy, and empty apart from the two staff members, who look to be students, and are avoiding eye contact while debating what “ghost” means in Swiss as compared to German. If it is flirting, it is a frosty sort of flirting. They are absorbed, though, making no effort to flog the shop’s panoply of bookmarks and fridge magnets and postcards and miniature busts. The walls make up a sea of doleful Kafka eyes.

They are scattered across Prague, the eyes. Just when I have stopped thinking about Franz’s face, there he is, blown up to pixelated proportions on a café awning. There is no escaping the fact that Kakfa would have found this idea – an artist whose jazzy name and piercing gaze is a bigger selling point than their actual art – worthy of a short story. One final black joke from beyond the grave. They are much mythologised, in the Kafka hagiography, his eyes. No-one can agree on what colour they were. Here in Prague they are whatever colour fits the establishment’s brand palette.

We keep walking, Google Maps guiding us, until we find it. 12-foot-high and solid bronze, the Kafka statue is an upright empty suit with a smaller man perched on its shoulders. People line up and take turns to get photographs, most of them smiling with a feigned naturalness that Franz himself found it agonizing to try and muster. Behind the statue is one of Prague’s synagogues, built on a site of Jewish worship that dates back 800 years. Kafka belonged, as Benjamin Balint puts it, “to a Jewish minority within a German-speaking minority within a Czech minority within a heterogenous Austro-Hungarian Empire being pulled apart by the centrifugal force of rival nationalisms.” Toward the end of his life, Kafka encountered regular anti-Semitic screeds in the Czech paper Venkov. He passed away in 1924, but all three of his sisters died in Nazi gas chambers. At the statue, a girl wearing a bum bag leans on Franz and cocks one leg for her photographer.

In what I quickly realise is a rather unremarkable coincidence – Prague’s Old Town isn’t very big, and it’s where all the tourists spent 90% of their time – “Coxy’s Stag Do” lumber past. Despite the heat of the day, Coxy himself is decked out in full Mexican garb, red-faced under his sombrero and already slow-eyed with drink. Everyone is putting the horrors of history out of their mind; what’s the alternative? My wife and I get lunch. The only place I have felt less warmth from waiters is in Moscow. I don’t blame them. We can still see the Kafka statue from our corner café, until my view is obscured by two “beer bikes” trundling by, on which some shirtless compatriots of mine bellow out a rendition of DJ Pied Piper and the Masters of Ceremonies’ “Do You Really Like It?”

Walking back toward the AirBnb, we pass a bust of Rainer Maria Rilke, another Prague-born writer. The bust is perched on the wall above a Lacoste, out of the entrance of which emerge a middle-aged Chinese couple having a tremendous row. It occurs to me that Kafka could have used some of Rilke’s lyrical hopefulness. Franz enjoyed swimming, and yet he was (in his own words) “physically inactive, everlastingly occupied with himself.” If only he had spent more time in the pool and less time writing his letters, which he himself declared were “nothing but torture, born of torture, create only torture, incurable torture.” All the misfortune of his life derived from “the evil sorcerer of letter-writing,” he told one of his lovers – in a letter. 

My wife and I reward all our walking with a great deal of beer. Some hours later we lay down in bed and watch the street-lamps against the ceiling. Kafka was brutally sensitive to noise, and could sleep in nothing less than total silence. He went to great lengths to source wax ear plugs from Berlin. Prague is noisy at night, and I too like the quiet. I have the benefit of ear plugs made from silicone, a substance not invented until around the time Kafka passed away. Cocooned in artificial silence, I read about Franz’s investment in an asbestos factory – another black joke, in parting – until my eyes won’t stay open.

Kafka portrayed modern humankind as helplessly swept along by currents of influence it could neither control nor comprehend. Visit enough Kafka-related tourist spots in a row over enough days in a row and it all starts to feel a little, yep, Kafkaesque. The young Franz sniffed at the tourists he saw collecting souvenir photographs, and mocked the amateur photographers with their cumbersome equipment. And yet here they are, queueing up again. A massive, layered, re-arranging Kafka head, constructed out of dazzling chrome, observes the tourists taking videos that they will never watch again. Another recurring motif in Kafka’s work is people being punished for reasons they don’t understand. Along the Kafka trail, everyone looks hot and flustered, bereft of places to sit down or get a glass of water. I am certain, looking around, that most people here haven’t read a word of his work. I take a video I haven’t watched since. I keep moving.

In Excavating Kafka, the author James Hawes attempts to demolish the myth of Kafka as a “tortured quasi-saintly genius” and reveal him to have been an essentially stable and ordinary man. Kafka’s major biographer, Reiner Stach, also tries to reset the balance. Certainly Franz seemed to mythologise his own suffering, always straining to imbue it with a metaphysical gravitas. “Don't you enjoy exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” he once asked a friend in (of course) a letter. 

Still: whether he really was crushed by life, or whether he spent a life exaggerating his suffering – we aren’t trailing Franz’s ghost around Prague because we want to mimic him. And despite how enthusiastically the city has claimed him, the biography I am reading has revealed a weird fact: Kafka didn’t even like Prague. “This old crone has claws,” he said in 1902; the only way to escape it would be to burn it down. Partly this was adolescent impatience with one’s stuffy hometown; but it lingered. “My life in Prague is leading to nothing good,” he declared in 1915. In 1920 he dubbed the city a place “of dolefulness, of pettiness, of shame, of being misled, of misuse of energy.”  The happiest period of Kafka’s life was the eight months he spent in the rural Bohemian town of Zürau. He dreamed constantly of moving to Berlin, and nine months before he died, he finally managed it. He and his last love, Dora Diamant, stayed there for four months. Weimar hyperinflation left them so hard up that one New Year they had to heat their dinner using candle stubs. 

Kafka wrote that “there is only one cardinal vice: impatience.” I am consumed with the cardinal vice as we shuffle through the first room of the Kafka museum. Black and white footage of Prague a century ago looks truly grim. Franz had handwriting deserving of the adjective spidery. I try and feel the crossings-outs out as some sort of glimpse of the beyond. The excerpts from The Metamorphosis printed on the museum wall are taken from a different translation to the version I’ve read; my linguistic exile from Kafka’s original German suddenly strikes me as an existential chasm of the kind that is always giving Kafka narrators vertigo. 

After the museum, my wife and I continue to fail in our efforts to escape the tourist trail, and enter a restaurant where the dour waitress takes one look at us and hands over English-language menus. Kafka's oeuvre is full of characters who don't eat enough, or even starve themselves to death. Kafka himself was a fastidious vegetarian, and also a devotee of a pseudoscientific fad called “Fletcherizing,” in which one chews each mouthful a hundred times. I am hampered by none of these obstacles, wolfing down, at a solid pace, thick slices of pork, enormous dumplings, and mountains of cabbage, everything swimming in godlike gravy.

In response to a description of a friend’s 1902 pilgrimage to the Goethe House in Weimar, Kafka (somewhat insensitively) replied that such pilgrimages were a mirage: “We cannot ever have the all-holiest of someone else,” he wrote. Nonetheless, ten years later, Kafka made his own pilgrimage. He wandered around the house and found little trace of Johann, noting that the beech tree that darkened Goethe’s study had gone on mindlessly growing since the great writer’s death. Kafka was more interested in the daughter of the caretaker, with whom he became fleetingly obsessed.

Kafka’s fruitless search echoes in my own. I can be snobby about all these tourists, but mine is a tourism too, and unlike theirs mine is a complex, layered indulgence, with no sense of what success would even look like. I am permanently disoriented. No authority can tell me whether I have succeeded. Time is running out. You guessed it. 

We pass his statue again. Still the queues, the photographs. To judge by Kafka’s diaries, he always felt inescapably alone. His grasping after the Jewish soul – his late attempt to learn Hebrew; his pipedream of a move to Palestine – was all a sort of craving for belonging. So too, in its way, was his naturalism. He was constantly fleeing to rural sanatoriums where he could sunbathe naked in the woods; his very last act in life was to lift himself from his deathbed to smell a bunch of flowers. That cosmic lack, that haunts all his fiction. Would these queues have helped? Would my joining all these dots? 

Kafka’s most perfect piece of fiction is “In the Penal Colony”. Published one century ago this month, it features a complex and brutal machine that tortures then executes people by inscribing their sentence into their skin. Each of the executed receives no trial, and doesn’t know what crime he has committed – until, after six hours, he “deciphers it with his wounds,” and a cruel beatific understanding washes over him. An officer of the colony pines for the days when a former commandant put the ageing machine to more use. Watched by a travelling researcher, the officer is meant to display the machine by executing a condemned man. Instead, the officer eventually clambers into his beloved machine himself. The instrument of justice malfunctions and rapidly kills the officer, and on his perished face there is “no trace of the promised transfiguration.” After a visit to the old commandant’s grave, the traveler rushes to the harbour and flees the colony.

Kafka is an author so sanctified that, as Zadie Smith puts it, readers see him as “sullied by our attempts to define him.” But his genius comes down to this: Kafka is an author of the unconscious. His work is unique within literature for being stripped of identifying markers – the penal colony could be anywhere; none of the characters have names – and this blankness is one part of what makes his tales feel like little black missives from the underground mind. When it works, Kafka’s writing seems to poke a thin needle into places that other stories don’t go. What remains with you, even years after reading, are flashes, images, small bundles of mute feeling. Except obscured, cold feeling; memories with the sideways feel of borrowed hallucinations. With “In the Penal Colony”, what should echo in my mind is that grisly machine. But it isn’t; it’s the awful moment at the very end when the condemned man and a soldier suddenly run after the traveler to try and join him on his departing boat, and yet Kafka tells us that even in their desperation the two men “didn’t dare raise their voices.” The traveler brandishes a “heavy knotted rope” at them, and they don’t jump aboard. The boat sails away. Why are the two men suddenly desperate? Why won’t they cry out? Most of all, if they are that desperate, why don’t they jump, and risk the rope? Why is this so terrible to me? I don’t know.

This is the real genius of Kafka, a genius one can’t blame some readers for not getting, or feeling, because it’s slippery, it gets away from you: his ability to conjure images that are absurd, almost to the point of parody, but that also register like white-hot distillations extracted from dreams you had, until the moment of reading, forgotten you ever had. Somewhat surprisingly for those who come to his books with a vague idea of Kafka as a master of the obscure, his writing is fastidious, almost technical. (Much in the way that even the strangest dreams are one part total clarity.) When Kafka’s writing gets you, it is at its most preposterous, but also its most lucid. His famous hunger artist is at once ridiculous and heartbreaking.

Befitting an author who said that the “sweet and wonderful” act of writing is “the reward for serving the devil,” Kafka wrote a sort of literary horror. His fear is liquid, bubbling up in tremulous arrangements, fragile psychic tableaux. And the horror is always inescapably internal. In Kafka, the central ingredients of human consciousness are the dilemmas we can’t put into words, the anxieties we don’t know how to confess to, the anterooms of the psyche into which we can’t invite people despite living in them. Kafka’s narrators are amongst the loneliest in all of literature. They are chronic overthinkers, and their increasingly fastidious, increasingly verbose overthinking takes them further and further from any resolution. 

This is the Kafkaesque: precise, fussy thinking exhausting itself, achieving nothing. The ultimate failure of the mind, in its encounter with the external, to play mimic. As in the excellent “The Stoker”, Kafka’s characters are constantly running out of time to explain themselves to others, or would need so much time to even begin to explain themselves that it would be absurd, beyond the ken of human attention or conversational etiquette. Every narrator’s interpersonal phenomenology is a sort of runaway equation, rapidly becoming too complex to ever reasonably dissect. Everyone is always embarrassed at being trapped inside themselves. This is the real tragedy at the heart of Kafka’s famous bureaucracies: they care nothing for the inner life. And it isn’t even an active lack of care; that, perversely, would be better. It is sheer, towering indifference. 

And as below, so above: The macro dread of Kafka’s work is the feeling that will creep up on you if you watch tourists walk around Prague for too long with too cynical an eye: Why? So many photographs being taken. So many eyes being purchased. So many slices of pork being eaten. Why? This is the real heart of the Kafkaesque, the heart that you can only feel beating when you actually read him: the total inscrutability of reality, the impotence of rational explanation. Motivations are an utter mystery in Kafka’s work. People are never getting what they deserve. In The Trial, Josef K. is always trying to apply a fastidious rationality to proceedings, and always finding his life turn to ash in his hands. Kafka didn’t much like music, and there is a fundamental discord to his fictional worlds. They have the glossy determinism of dream; everything is one big punching underwater. A go-to adjective for describing Kafka’s writing is nightmarish, but in fact there is none of the lurid threat or bombast of nightmare. There is just a vast opaqueness. Kafka’s fiction manifests the special pain – endemic to deranging, clinical sorts of melancholy – of bending all of one’s powers of reason and analysis to reality, and finding that it won’t conform, won’t cohere. Angst is like this: above the roiling emotional tides, the breaking waves of thought are in fact painstakingly lucid. And yet your life keeps revealing to you that what feels like problem-solving is pure inertia. If you’ve ever felt bound in this knot then you have felt the Kafkaesque.

All fairly gloomy stuff; but then all great art has at its heart the recognition that life is one part hell, and people who are in some core way discombobulated by life are and have always been overrepresented amongst literature lovers. You might have noticed that the classics aren’t generally marketed as uplifting or feel-good. Perhaps you can tap a sort of humour in his work – for all of the angst in his diaries and his letters, Kafka (and his listeners) used to laugh out loud during his readings. Otherwise, all you can do is find solace in its strange clarity. 

And it is a sort of solace. In the academy, generalisations about literature’s function or purpose are anathema. But I fled the academy, so I can say it: Great literature is communion. Life is, at bottom, lonely. A being-stranded-in-one’s-skull. Kafka knew this as well as anyone. Aged twenty, he wrote to a friend: “We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?” And later: “I have seldom, very seldom, crossed this borderland between loneliness and fellowship.” There is an isolation to the fact of being produced by a human brain, but literature can provide the stunned sense that little lightning bolts might reach across our private planets. Everyone who loves writing is hooked on these glimpses of evidence, couriered by alphabets, that someone else has also known that particular play of shadows on that particular surface of the mind. Kafka’s writing does it with a cold embrace, but it is still a consolation: forces and energies, hitherto subterranean, suddenly made solid, made sharp enough to lodge like a splinter in the timber of your being. “A cage went in search of a bird,” goes one of Kafka’s most famous aphorisms. At its best, literature is just this: the bird.

Another day, another grumpy waiter. He looks down at my wife and I with vacant disdain; like the silently ruminating narrator of many a Kafka short story, part of me wants to transmit to him things that would take too long to say: I’m not only here to get drunk, I’m interested in the history, the language, Kafka, all of it. I’m actually quite cultured. I voted Remain! Nevermind; we’ll leave a generous tip. 

I am Kafka at the Goethe house. My enthusiasm for my ghost hunt has well and truly waned. Keep eating dumplings; dumplings are real. What am I doing, peering up at this building which more than a century ago was Kafka’s birthplace, the bottom floor of which is now a souvenir shop selling miniature rubber cockroaches sporting his head? Why am I standing once again in the Old Town square, ignoring the pesterings of a man wearing a giant billboard and the racket of yet another stag do as I try to pick out the particular window behind which Franz once laid his troubled head? What weird osmosis am I hoping for by taking a seat in the Café Louvre, where Franz used to hang out, and forcing a pensiveness on myself?

Instead of traipsing around more places adorned with Franz’s doleful eyes, I sit in the merciful shade and read my Kafka biography. Near the end of his life, I discover, Kafka became “a passionate drinker” of beer. Why? Because when he was a boy, he and his father would go to the public swimming pool, and afterwards they would drink beer. In June of 1924, Kafka wrote a letter to his parents. Though he knew by now that his body was giving up on him, he summoned an optimism that for a man of his temperament was a sort of heroism. He suggested, in his letter, that sometime soon he and his parents might all spend a few days in the countryside: “In the past, as I often remember, during the heat spells, we used to have beer together quite often, in that far-off time when Father would take me along to the public swimming pool.” It was the last letter he ever sent his parents. He passed away the following day, after breathing in the bunch of flowers. 

I am suddenly guilty about the stein I am mindlessly sipping. I would give it to Franz to share with his old man, if I could. This master of the literary unconscious, when time was running out, was still reaching out for the same thing we all crave: A bridging of the borderland. A vision of our selves as just a little more porous at the edges. We crave it in literature because we crave it in life, because the cage will take as many birds as it can fit. Only connect: if only it were that easy. When nowhere else will do, memory will do. Franz, it turns out, was chasing his own ghost a hundred years before I arrived.

The conclusion of my report to an academy: One should expect only the very shallowest sort of revelation from the literary pilgrimage. Whatever remains, whatever is real, survives purely as that dense and ethereal thing: language. Despite having planned it for my last afternoon, I decide not to Uber to Kafka's grave, out in the Jewish cemetery in east Prague. What is left down there? Bones, perhaps a skull fixed in a perfectly Kafkaesque rictus of stunned incomprehension? Franz’s kilogram-and-a-bit of brain tissue, source of the psychic pointillism that powered his impossible stories, would have rotted to nothing by the autumn of 1924, delicious protein for all manner of earthy life. Whatever remains lives in one place and one place only: the words. No: In that brief limbo created when the words encounter another mind.

Enough traipsing, I decide. No graves. On the final evening before Easyjet will catapult us out of Kafka’s city, my wife and I make our way up to the heights of Vyšehrad castle and watch the sun melt into the Vltava river. This, surely, Franz would have laid his doleful eyes on. Something shared there, perhaps: the clarity of the natural, deeper and older than overthinking Homo sapiens, impossible to offend with interpretation. Prague is quiet from up here, and almost too pretty to bear. There is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope,” said Franz, “but not for us.” It feels like hope tonight, though: someone to love, the river turning orange. We walk back down from the castle: reality is opaque, there is suffering to come, but for now we have endless beer and a warm bed and only connecting. Just like every other tourist, in the end. “In the struggle between yourself and the world,” Kafka wrote, “hold the world’s coat.”

It’s a dark carnival, but fear needs to be given shape, if it is to be wrestled with. Kafka’s genius: those narrative chunks that petrify you, then follow you around, nag at you, for reasons you can't describe. The Trial has a recurring motif of people watching people from windows. Another thing of Kafka’s I can’t shake. Something about others always being squinting distance away, being on the verge of drawing the curtains on us – a running out of time to explain ourselves, a never laying a hand on the shoulders of our ghosts for more than one sweet moment. At the end of the novel, as Josef K. awaits his final judgement, we read:

“His gaze fell upon the top story of the building adjoining the quarry. Like a light flicking on, the casements of a window flew open, a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and height, leaned far out abruptly, and stretched both arms out even further. Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is no doubt unshakeable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.”