Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Kafka and Prague

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Kafka and Prague,” on how a great author and his works were shaped by the history, culture, and landscape of a city, with Cynthia Paces, professor of history at The College of New Jersey, teacher of courses on European history and Holocaust studies, and author of two books on Prague.

Where we’re from can profoundly shape how we think, what we create, and what we end up doing with our lives. Gain a much deeper understanding of Franz Kafka, the acclaimed and influential author whose prophetic work anticipated European totalitarianism and still shapes dystopian visions, through a talk examining Kafka’s relationship with the city of Prague and those who lived there.

Your guide on this scholarly journey, Professor Cynthia Paces, has lived and worked in Prague and is the author of Prague: The Heart of Europe and Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century. She has extensively researched how Kafka, a German-Jewish writer, came to symbolize the capital of the Czech Republic.

We’ll start by looking at how Kafka’s worldview was influenced by his childhood in Prague’s Old Town during a time when the city was rapidly expanding and industrializing and shifting from being a primarily German-speaking place to being the center of Czech nationalism and culture. Born in 1883 only steps away from the city’s former Jewish Ghetto, as a boy Kafka watched the destruction of the Jewish Quarter during an urban sanitation project. The event profoundly affected him, prompting him to later remark: “We walk through the broad streets of the newly built town” but “inside we tremble just as before in the ancient streets of our misery.”

Professor Paces will discuss Kafka’s relationship to Prague’s rich Jewish heritage, considering how he was influenced by the legacy of the Talmudic scholar Rabbi Loew and by folklore telling of the Golem of Prague, a terrifying monster that Loew was said to have shaped from clay and given life. She’ll describe Kafka’s love for the Yiddish Theater and his involvement with the Prague Circle, a group of German-Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and the author Max Brod.

We’ll explore the tensions between Kafka’s creative endeavors and his work as a bureaucrat during Prague’s rapid modernization in the early twentieth century. You'll learn about the Prague homes where he resided and cafés where he socialized.

Although Prague place names appear in only one Kafka story, the city shaped his fiction. The claustrophobic or ominous settings of works like The Metamorphosis and The Castle recall Prague’s labyrinthine streets, modern office buildings, and looming castle. We’ll listen for echoes of Prague’s landscape and landmarks in Kafka’s writings and end by exploring Kafka’s afterlife as a cultural icon of post-Communist Prague. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image by Canva.