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Introduction

Kafka’s Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Julian Preece
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

Jewish, German, Czech, born a subject of the Habsburgs at ‘the heart of Europe’ in Bohemian Prague in 1883, died a citizen of Czechoslovakia on the outskirts of Vienna forty-one years later; a speaker of French and Italian in addition to his native German, Czech, and Yiddish, which he learnt as an adult; steeped in both Jewish lore and German literature and surrounded by the sound of Czech for most of his life, Franz Kafka was first and foremost an internationalist and a European. Since his death he has been claimed as one of the foremost Jewish authors of his age, as the greatest modernist prose writer in the German language, and – at least after 1945 – as an icon of both German and Austrian literature. More recently, though with less enthusiasm, he has been hailed in his homeland as a Czech, where his memory helped inspire resistance to Soviet dominance in the 1960s. One thing is certain: in his affiliations and the resonance of his writings Kafka is the most cosmopolitan of all German-language writers.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Julian Preece, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Kafka
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521663148.001
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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Julian Preece, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Kafka
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521663148.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Julian Preece, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Kafka
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521663148.001
Available formats
×