Margaret Montet

Enduring Images of Kafka’s Prague

 

 

As the café’s gypsy band played Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” my cousin’s son proposed to his girlfriend and presented her with my Aunt Grace’s antique engagement ring. Until I went there myself, this was the image that sprung to mind when anyone mentioned Prague, the "City of a Hundred Spires." I looked forward to exploring Franz Kafka’s Prague: Castle Hill, the medieval architecture, the Charles Bridge over the Vltava River, the Old Town Square, and the Astronomical clock around the corner. Descriptions of the Castle intrigued me most before my sister and I arrived for our short stay. Up on a hill and visible from almost anywhere in the city, it is thought to be the inspiration for Franz Kafka's great novel, The Castle. My imagination went berserk reading about this castle and imagining it in a foggy twilight. (Would it be my most enduring memory from Prague?) Although he felt like an outsider all his life here, Kafka is very important to the Prague experience.

 

Our tour started in Prague’s Staré Mĕsto or Old Town. While some of our group members scrambled to buy umbrellas for a rain shower that would last 15 minutes, I sat down on a curb in the Old Town Square to wait. This was Kafka’s world. He spent most of his life living and working in buildings on the square with names like U Radnice 5, Sixt House, The House at the Three Kings, and House U Minuty. That last building has spectacular examples of Renaissance murals on the exterior featuring ivory-colored figures on a charcoal-grey background. The name means “at the minute” in Czech and refers to the small servings of tobacco that were once sold there. I saw the spot where Kafka was born in 1883, now the Kafka Café, adjacent to a shop that sells only pencils. There’s a Kafka bookstore and numerous plaques commemorating buildings in which he lived. Kafka fans can go to the Kafka Center to get a map of the Kafka sites.

 

I watched as another tour group huddled around their guide, their multicolored unfurled umbrellas forming a roof over most of the group. I snapped a photo of this scene, with the Tyn Church’s spires rising behind the group and the cobblestone pavement shiny from the rain. That photo of the umbrellas in Old Town Square would become my favorite photograph from Prague.

 

There were other things going on in Old Town Square as I was capturing my picture-perfect moment. To the left of me, three Segway riders tried to lure tourists on a Segway tour. To my right, emanating from some vendors’ stalls, large soap bubbles rose to the clouds. Another pair of sisters in our group recommended a tubular pastry sold from a cart on the square: “These are to-die-for! But if a whole one is too much you can share like we did.”

 

And so we did, one evening after dinner. These pastries had no name from what I could tell except for "Bavarian Treat," and they were sold all over town. They are baked in long tubes on metal cylinders and cut down to about six inches for the customer. Chocolate is spread inside just before you eat it and the thing is still warm and fragrant. I could smell those pastries as I watched the people in the square.

 

There were brides being photographed on the square. Lots of brides, and all seemed to be Asian. I found out later that a popular South Korean television soap opera called, “Lovers in Prague,” takes place right here in the Czech capital. Eighteen episodes aired in 2005 and fans still come to Prague’s town hall to be married and pose in Old Town Square and in front of the iconic Astronomical Clock. We lost count at 25 brides that morning. Prague is still so important to those Korean fans that the Czech Republic has opened a tourist office in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. I found the show on YouTube and watched a little bit. It’s no Downton Abbey.

 

The most famous attraction near the square is the 15th-century Astronomical Clock. This mechanical marvel marks every hour with a grandiose show of chimes and a parade of twelve apostles inside the little windows above the clock. Please note also that the sun and moon revolve around the earth here, and Prague is the center of the earth. The zodiac signs were added in the 19th century. Our group got to watch the clock go through its top-of-the-hour machinations through a curtain of light rain. Kafka never wrote about clocks from what I can tell, but he would have walked past this one every day on his way to the Worker’s Insurance Accident institute where he worked as an insurance claims officer for fourteen years.

 

Our tour group eventually wound its way over hilly cobblestone streets to Prague Castle after checking out the architecture in Old Town. The castle is actually a megalopolis of smaller palaces, houses, and the imposing St. Vitus Cathedral, built over the centuries around Castle Square. From a distance it looks like one giant castle, grandly illuminated at night. Our group cruised through Castle Square, inside the main gate where we saw the guards change, and briefly stopped in St. Vitus Cathedral. (We were headed to swanky Lobkowicz Palace for a tour.) Visitors may buy a ticket to tour some of the other castle buildings, and see more of St. Vitus than just the free zone just before the nave. St. Vitus’s stained glass windows are impressive, but the one most visitors crane their necks to see was created by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha. Without a ticket, though, we could only see about half of it, even with some serious neck-craning. This cathedral is very important to Czech Catholics as many of their local saints and kings are entombed here. Kafka probably had St. Vitus in his head when he wrote chapter nine of his novel, The Trial. We were tempted to linger longer here, but we didn’t want to miss the Lobkowicz Palace tour at which we were promised a fancy lunch and chamber music concert.

 

Defenestration. I heard this curious word often in Prague. It means to be thrown out of a window. The famous Defenestration of Prague happened in 1618, when two imperial envoys were sent by the Habsburgs to argue with some Protestants. Their names were Slavata and Matinic, and perhaps they did not excel at conflict management because they and their secretary were thrown out of the windows of the council room of the Hradčany part of Prague Castle which we passed on our way to the Lobkowicz section. The envoys and secretary were not seriously hurt because they fell onto a pile of garbage or dung or both. The event brought about the Thirty Years’ War. The Czechs still love to talk about it, hence the overuse of the word defenestration within the city limits of Prague.

 

The Lobkowicz name should be familiar to music aficionados as many from the family were generous supporters of the arts. The family's palace is now a museum and the property has an interesting history: it was confiscated by the Nazis at the beginning of World War II, and then again by the communists in 1948. William Lobkowicz, until recently an investment banker in Boston, managed to reclaim the family's property in the 1990s and had the idea to turn it into a museum. Our group was treated to lunch in one of the palace's sumptuous rooms. After lunch, we attended a short concert at which a violinist, cellist, and pianist played selections from the family's music-supporting heyday. Then we explored the museum’s treasures: paintings by Canaletto, a Bruegel which is famous for being the first secular landscape painting, arms and armor, Lobkowicz family portraits, and decorative arts. The recorded tour is narrated by William Lobkowicz, the former banker and now gracious host. I bought my copy of Kafka’s novel, The Castle, in the Lobkowicz Palace bookstore thinking I was very clever. (The novel is as complex as Prague Castle. You might describe it as “Kafkaesque.”)

 

Audrey and I were delighted with the Lobkowicz family art treasures, but the palace’s Music Room was the main event for me. Behind glass cases live manuscript scores of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth symphonies, an early manuscript of Beethoven’s Op. 18 String Quartets, a printed copy of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (the "Eroica"), and a score of Handel's "Messiah" with corrections and reorchestrations by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There are more scores in the collection's archives, but these are the items on display. (If there had been any more musical treasures to look at, the tour group would have lost me. I could have gaped at them all day.)

 

Beethoven met the seventh Prince Lobkowicz, Josef František Maximilián, when the two were in their twenties. They became friends and the Prince arranged to support Beethoven’s compositional career by paying him a pension or subsidy. This income continued beyond the Prince's death until Beethoven's own in 1827. Beethoven showed his gratitude by dedicating a number of his compositions, important ones, to Prince Lobkowicz: Symphony No. 5, Symphony No. 6, the six String Quartets Op. 18, the Harp Quartet Op. 74, the Triple Concerto, and the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte. When you dedicate your musical compositions to someone, it is customary to send him or her a fine copy of it. That’s how these precious scores came to be in the Lobkowiczes possession. Beethoven’s celebrated Third Symphony, (the “Eroica,”), a quintessential specimen of this genre, was dedicated to Lobkowicz and premiered privately in the Lobkowicz's other property, Jezeří Castle, in 1804, a whole year before its public Vienna premiere.

 

Three years before Beethoven died, Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) was born. He is remembered for a multi-part symphonic work dedicated to his homeland and named Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”). Each of those movements is a full symphonic poem, and the most famous of these is “Vltava,” the musical depiction of the river which flows through Prague. (Germans call the same river Die Moldau, and the musical work is also known by both names.) This twelve-minute symphonic poem is often performed alone, without its five companions from Ma Vlast. I read once that Smetana believed that when a listener could tell a composer by just a few bars of his music, that composer had achieved true originality. Smetana achieved this with his stunning illustration of flowing water in “Vltava.” It is extraordinary to learn that Smetana went deaf while composing Ma Vlast, and just as Beethoven did, continued to compose music as a deaf genius. The Vltava River, which I’ve heard depicted musically thousands of times, live, on recordings, and stuck in my head as a mind worm, would turn out to be profoundly connected to my most enduring Prague memory.

 

Smetana might command Prague’s musical identity, but when it comes to the written word, Prague is Kafka’s city. It’s almost a cliché to quote this, but I’ll do it anyway: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” That’s the first line from Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis, and one of the best first-lines in literature ever. This description of Samsa trying to get out of bed for the first time as a bug gives me the shivers: “He would have needed arms and hands to hoist himself up; instead he had only the numerous little legs which never stopped waving in all directions and which he could not control in the least.” Already by this point in the story, Kafka has created a deictic shift: the reader has entered a new reality where it is entirely possible for a man to wake up as an insect. The reader then learns how excruciatingly painful this is for Gregor Samsa and his family. His parents don’t know how to deal with their son in this form, but his sister Grete compassionately experiments with food to find something that her brother in this new form might like to eat. She also gets her mother to help move furniture in Gregor’s room to give him room to move around, but Mrs. Samsa shrieks when she makes eye contact with her son who is hiding under a quilt. That couldn’t have been easy for him. (Wait—he’s not real.) Kafka did not write about music much, so it is interesting that one of Gregor’s biggest concerns is how to send his violinist sister to the conservatory: “…it was a secret plan of his that she, who loved music, unlike himself, and could play movingly on the violin, should be sent next year to study at the Conservatorium, despite the great expense that would entail, which must be made up in some other way.” He had made no promises, but he was worried about his earning potential as an insect and how he would pay her tuition. Kafka must have been aware of musicians in his most musical city. Could he have known a young female violinist dreaming of enrolling at a conservatory?

 

I bristle when I recall my academic Kafka experience, but studying Kafka again caused those memories to bubble to the surface. We read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a college literature course focused on short stories. This was my first exposure to Kafka, and I remember being captivated by the writer’s imagination. Kafka’s description of Gregor Samsa’s reaction to how people treated him after he woke up as a bug hit home with me. My father had a crippling stroke three years before I took that course, and I vividly remember how my nieces and nephew, then nine, eight, and five, reacted to him once he was different. They were confused and didn’t know what to say or do. It was hard to watch, and I didn’t know what to say to them to make it easier. I was so sure that this tough memory related to what Kafka was attempting to represent in Metamorphosis that I timidly raised my hand in that class and offered the memory and my analysis. Our chairs were arranged in a circle and I could see everyone’s face. I was horrified to see twenty or so college-student faces staring blankly back at me. “Oh, why did I speak, at all?” I asked myself. I don’t usually share such personal information and feelings. The professor finally moved on to another discussion point without acknowledging my comments. I still bristle.

 

Thirty-two years later, I finally received vindication. I was reading about Kafka as part of my over-preparation for this Prague trip, and a scholar I was reading (Michael P. Ryan) suggested a possible inspiration for Metamorphosis. It was similar to my collegiate analysis, involving illness and changing interactions with people around the afflicted person.  I’m not so naïve to think that that is the only possible theory, but it vindicated mine and gave me some scholarly closure. The article, “Samsa and Samsara: Suffering, Death, and Rebirth in ‘The Metamorphosis’” from The German Quarterly (vol. 72,), goes on to describe the concept of Samsara, a centuries-old concept which includes disease, death, rebirth, and lust. I don’t have to be an English professor to notice the similarity between the word Samsara and the Metamorphosis family’s surname, Samsa. I wish I had that gem on the tip of my tongue in that Short Story classroom thirty-something years ago.

 

Last spring, a student visited my office in order to present me with a gift. He enjoyed a course I taught, “The Evolution of the Symphony,” and knowing I’m a writer, Ismael gave me a leather-covered notebook and my favorite kind of pen (including refills). It was a lovely but fleeting moment followed by an awkward conversation about travel in front of my amused office mate. We talked about places we would be visiting that summer and I mentioned how there were important rivers associated with my destinations: The Danube, the Salz, and Prague’s Vltava which we knew from class was rendered in music by Bedřich Smetana. Grasping for something relevant to say, Ismail blurted out, “Oh, I really like rivers.” I was grasping, too. My witty retort: “I really like bridges.” I was just starting to realize that I notice bridges, aesthetically. Nevertheless, my comment sounded stupid and I could tell my office mate (pretending not to listen) wanted to burst out laughing. I’m pretty sure I saw tears of repressed mirth squirting out of her eyes. Now that I’ve metamorphosed into a professor myself, I surmise that it is not always obvious how a teacher should respond when a student says or does something unexpected, but that response can have an enduring impact on the student.

 

The truth is that bridges were on my mind. I had been working on a magazine article about a local railroad bridge over the Delaware River which I discovered was having its 100th birthday that year, the same year my father would have celebrated his own 100th birthday. I pass this bridge twice a day, going and coming from work, and its fourteen arches remind me of an ancient Roman viaduct. It’s an inspiring sight lit by the morning sun or fading into twilight. Train enthusiasts know that the CSX Juice Train, a train transporting orange juice from Florida to New Jersey, passes over that bridge a few times a week. My appreciation for that bridge grew as I learned more about that bridge in particular, and about bridges in general. I explored bridges as metaphors for joining things, and for building relationships between people and groups. (“Make connections; Build bridges; Add value” is my librarian-motto.)  I hadn’t recognized yet my habit of admiring bridges. Considering my newly-recognized affinity for bridges, though, it should have been obvious that the Charles Bridge would become my most enduring image of Prague, and one that connects to Kafka.

 

“The Bridge” is one of Kafka’s later stories. A man imagines himself as a bridge spanning a creek. His coattails become rumpled, but he cannot fix them, of course, because he is now a bridge. I’m not a metaphor-detection expert, and I was unable to find any literary criticism published on this particular short, short story. (The best metaphor I can put together for this is “People are walking all over me!” Maybe that’s not far from the truth.) I prefer to believe that Kafka had an affinity for bridges just as I do (“I like bridges!”), and in one of his wild daydreams as he crossed the Charles Bridge he imagined himself as the bridge.

 

The Charles Bridge, known as the Stone Bridge until 1870, traverses Smetana’s Vltava River and connects the Old Town (Staré Mĕsto) to the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) at the foot of Castle Hill. King Charles IV set the first stone in 1357, and his larger-than-life patina-ed statue stands by the huge medieval gate on the Staré Mĕsto side. Beginning in 1402 when it was completed it would be the city's only bridge for 400 years. Built of Bohemian sandstone, the bridge originally had no statues, but now it is populated by life-size saints and heroes along with live street musicians and artists selling their work. The imperial Hapsburg family had those religious statues built in an attempt to re-convert formerly Protestant Hussite Czechs to Catholicism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of the original statues have been preserved in museums because they were showing wear from weather and pollution. We see replicas as we cross the bridge, but Kafka would have seen the real ones.

 

Though Kafka’s writing in both his fiction and his diaries is usually gloomy and dark, he painted a pleasant picture of the Charles Bridge in his 1916 diary. After a date with a woman named Ottla, he walked home over that bridge: “Was excited by the statues of saints on the Karlsbrücke (The Charles Bridge). The remarkable light of the summer evening together with the nocturnal emptiness of the bridge.” That little passage describing the open-ness and light is a departure from the dark, depressing, even cramped literature he usually produced.

 

The Madonna is on the bridge with St. Bernard, and with St. Dominick and St. Thomas Aquinas. St John of Matha and St. Felix are depicted there freeing imprisoned Christians and St. Adelbert, St. Nicholas of Tolentino, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Procopius, and St. Francis Xavier (with his sculptor’s self-portrait to his right). The most interesting of all is the bronze Baroque statue of St. John of Nepomuk with five golden stars around his head. This fourteenth-century priest heard the queen’s confessions, and when her husband, King Wenceslas IV, demanded to know her secrets, St. John of Nepomuk refused to tell. The king had him tossed off the Stone Bridge at the very location of today’s statue. When the priest hit the water, five stars appeared. The unfortunate priest became a saint in 1729. This statue is the oldest on the bridge, placed there in 1683, three hundred years after the St. John of Nepomuk’s death. Imagine generations of little Czech children learning their Catechism by scrutinizing these statues.

 

Audrey and I walked through the towering medieval Staré Mĕsto gate, and over the bridge to get from Old Town to Prague Castle, admiring the saints and heroes and listening to the music of a three-piece jazz ensemble. I almost forgot what we were crossing over: the Vltava! I stood between some saints to look at Smetana’s river, now with more bridges across it and a few modern sightseeing boats passing beneath. Narrow canals branched off the river and wound into the red-roofed buildings on either side. I saved some images of the Vltava in my mind and in my camera to share with Ismail back at school. (He likes rivers.)

 

In the end, Kafka’s Prague did woo me with its uniqueness: the medieval architecture, the Old Town Square, Prague Castle, Kafka’s haunts, and especially the magnificent Charles Bridge. I may have been mentally exhausted from a fast-paced week of sightseeing where we woke up in a new city each day, but I left this final city with a collection of enduring images. I couldn’t have predicted the brides on the square, the complexity of Prague Castle mirrored in Kafka’s novel, The Castle, the abundant collection of Lobkowitz treasures, or the sight of the Astronomical Clock in the spring rain. In retrospect, it seems a no-brainer that the bridge would be my most exceptional Prague memory. What seemed like a goofy statement back in that conversation with Ismail doesn’t seem so goofy any more. I like bridges.

 

 

 

Margaret Montet’s essays are travel narratives with memoir, research, and anecdotes braided in. “I'm a college librarian in-pursuit of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and I teach Music History, Effective Speaking, and whatever else I can find to teach because I enjoy teaching. My work has been published in DM, Pink Pangea, Toastmasters Magazine, Edible Jersey, and other fine periodicals.”