Profs and Pints - Philadelphia

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.

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “A Guide to Witches,” on the figure of the witch in history, legend, folklore, and fairy tales, with Linda Lee, lecturer in folklore and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/philadelphia-witches .]

Get ready for something spellbinding: A look at various depictions of witches as reflections of ideas about female sexuality, independence, agency, and power.

Offering up this pre-Halloween treat will be folklorist Linda Lee, who earned rave reviews in giving this talk at the Black Squirrel Club a year ago and has captivated audiences at this Fishtown venue with her past discussions of dark Christmas folklore and the goddess Persephone.

We’ll start with an introduction to witches from European folklore, fairy tales, and legends. You’ll learn how they’re generally portrayed as powerful, solitary, and defiant figures who can be either helpful or harmful. They may appear as mothers, helpers who aid heroes on quests, or monsters to be vanquished. They can represent a threat to the community by snatching children or by pilfering cows’ milk.

Individual witches who will be conjured up include the child-eating witch from Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” and Baba Yaga, the ambiguous witch of Slavic folklore who lives in a hut on chicken legs and flies around inside a giant mortar while clutching a big pestle. Lee contrast such fictional depictions with the ideas about witches and witchcraft espoused by Christian demonological thought.

You’ll learn how witches are described by early modern sources like Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century treatise on witchcraft which also served as a witch hunters’ manual. Such texts presented witches as entirely malevolent figures who gain magical powers through a pact with the Devil (usually signed with menstrual blood). They depicted witches as using a special ointment that empowers them to fly to a Witches’ Sabbath to dance and perform demonic rituals.

You’ll see how such ideas were visually reinforced through engravings, woodcuts, and drawings, by artists like Albrecht Dürer, that depicted naked women riding broomsticks and dancing with devils.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of why witches are among the most versatile, notorious, and enduring figures from fairy tales and legends and remain an iconic part of contemporary Halloween traditions. Feel free to dress witchy if you wish. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30. )

Image: From “Preparation for the Witches' Sabbath,” by 17th Century Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger.