Journal Article

Kafka’s Statue: Memory and Forgetting in Postsocialist Prague

Thomas, Alfred

2015

Overview

This essay is not about Kafka’s Prague – a veritable industry of scholarship – but Kafka’s statue; or rather, what a modern statue of Kafka in postsocialist Prague signifies both about his fate as a writer in the city of his birth and what that fate may tell us about the complex history of twentieth-century Prague and Czechoslovakia. My essay explores how Kafka’s transformation from a largely overlooked writer among the Czech intelligentsia in the 1930s to his belated emergence as the hero of the reformist generation of the 1960s, and from his deliberate erasure by the Soviet-backed regime after the invasion of Prague in 1968 to his reinvention as a national icon following the collapse of Communism in 1989, describes a familiar dialectic between memory and forgetting that has characterized the history of the city in the twentieth century. I argue that Prague’s postsocialist reinvention as the city of Kafka represents neither a radical departure from the past nor the continuation of a specifically Czech tradition of tolerance. I conclude that the city’s latest incarnation as the birthplace of one of European modernism’s greatest writers represents a history of constant reinvention in which political-cultural self-fashioning and economic calculation have all played – and continue to play – an integral role.

• Publisher: Institut d'études slaves
• Subject: Communism / Forgetting / Jewish history / Memory / Modernist art / POLITIQUE MÉMORIELLE / Slavic culture / Stalinism / Statues / War / Writers