The Conference in May 1963 on the Prague author who sparked the cultural revolution of the Sixties
Today, Franz Kafka is part of Prague: museums, souvenirs, statues, streets, restaurants, and references to his name, may be found in many places; Kafka is everywhere, an unaware travelling companion for tourists. Nothing would surprise a passer-by more than to read in a newspaper the news of a group of intellectuals getting together to talk about the works of the Prague writer on the anniversary of his birth.
Yet, when it took place in 1963, (Franz had already died almost forty years earlier), an entire system was beginning to falter. During the first decade of socialist Czechoslovakia, in fact, his name had to be whispered. No home, or museum, and the old president Klement Gottwald, who took power in 1948, would have been keen to erase his name, while in Europe it was being published frenetically.
In fact, Kafka had become a writer of international fame several years after his death, during the years of World War II. In Eastern Countries, however, he had been considered by the Party elite as a bourgeois writer, that was to be shunned and who was not in keeping with the foundation of socialism. The main theme of his literary production such as decadence and alienation, were foreign to Communist perfection.
Another leading figure is Eduard Goldstücker. Professor of German literature, who escaped the Nazis in 1939 because of his Jewish origins, a first generation communist who fell victim of Stalin’s purges in 1951. Four years in a labour camp, then the de-Stalinization period and slow rehabilitation. In short, he had undergone a lot of hardship. At the age of fifty and thanks to his past endurance, he was now a sturdy person and in 1962, at a meeting of the Writers’ union, he suggested organizing a conference on Kafka the following year, eighty years since his birth. He tells them that Kafka is a son of Prague; that he lived and wrote in this city and that all over the world they are discussing about his works with an ever-increasing number of fans coming to the Golden City to try and follow his traces. Why then should Kafka remain a sort of taboo in Prague? The political committee reacts with a certain amount of resentment and hesitation: for some time, from the leadership, there are no directives on the issue. The Party seems baffled, but does not reject the idea. However, a small opportunity soon presents itself and Professor Goldstücker takes advantage of it. In March 1963, he announces the conference during a debate organized in Slovanský dům: the room is crowded and there is great excitement among the university students. A modest official by the name of Ladislav Stoll, a stereotypical bureaucratic-bully – placed there to undermine the success and atmosphere of the meeting – tries to minimize the author’s merits by making a long speech full of blunders. However, the Prague audience replies with its well-known sense of humour and does not allow him to continue, by interrupting him skilfully, using the technique of applauding rhythmically to every word he says – until the speaker is annoyed and is forced to leave the room.
Thus, thanks to this humorous exploit and perhaps a hint of revenge, Eduard Goldstücker was able to open the conference in Liblice Castle – one of many premises of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. On Monday, May 27, 1963, the meeting lasts two days, with the participation of Czech and international Marxist writers and intellectuals to discuss the figure of Franz Kafka. A breach was finally made and many publishers began publishing his works again, first in Czechoslovakia, then in Poland, Hungary and even in the Soviet Union (where, as a funny but peculiar example of the Soviet era, the author was actually translated into Russian, but books were not allowed to be sold within the country), and finally in East Germany, where a delay in its publication cannot be attributed to the translation because (Kafka wrote in German), but most likely was due to the fact that someone in Moscow had not noticed the blunder. In East Germany in fact, the Party even attempted to organize a counter-conference to denounce the “bourgeois revanchist policy of the Prague intellectuals”: which turned out to be a flop.
Roger Garaudy, the communist intellectual who took part at the conference for the French party – on his return – published an editorial entitled “Prague Spring” in the monthly magazine “Les Lettres Françaises”: this where the original and appropriate epithet was coined , that was eventually used by the Western media to describe the events of 1968. It is thus not fortuitous that the world of culture during the Czechoslovakian 1960s played a crucial part in this respect. Without a Church to secretly guide the moral sense of the people (as happened a few miles farther north, in Poland), from Prague to Bratislava it was the intellectuals who acted as a point of reference for ordinary people. The writer’s weekly magazine, Literární noviny, had a circulation of over 100,000 copies (up to 150 thousand in 1968). Thus, forty years after his death, the shy, modest Franz becomes the famous “pen that hurts more than the sword”. A battering ram to achieve the renewal of culture that like an avalanche grows and changes the Country. After Kafka, it is time for the economy: a new board is set up at the Academy of Sciences and new political leaders are appointed in the various Czech and Slovak party offices (one of whom is Alexander Dubček, who began his career in 1963, becoming first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party).
This is followed by the Soviet tanks, the normalization process and total silence. Leonid Brezhnev wonders incredulously how the Czechoslovaks have been able to go so far. His officers try to find a scapegoat – other than the politicians and intellectuals – and this is achieved when from the GDR , the communist cultural director, Alfred Kurella, “winks” to Moscow with an article in the Neues Deutschland: “Franz Kafka, the spiritual father of the Czechoslovak counter-revolution2.
Poor Franz, tugged from one side to the other, he is not even allowed to rest in peace in his Jewish cemetery in Žižkov.
Eduard Goldstücker, however, finds refuge in Italy, like many other new course politicians. It is here that he tells his story, in 1981, in a book published by Editori Riuniti (entitled “From Prague to Gdansk”, he attempts a parallelism with the Solidarność civil opposition).
The story continues with the Velvet Revolution and the welcome introduction of the market economy. The name of Kafka returns to the city as a hero, but in a world that does not belong to him. Less culture and just marketing. Postcards, magnets, key rings, packs of playing cards, t-shirts, cushions and lighters.
Here we are today, fifty years after the conference in Liblice, one-hundred and thirty years since his birth. He, the man Franz, is carried around on the plastic bags of tourists, silent between purchases, with no message or scandal.
Yet, his name once had the power of overthrowing dictators.
by Giuseppe Picheca