A cage went in search of a bird.
--Kafka, “Fragments from Notebooks and Loose Pages”

Franz Kafka was born into a myth called Prague, a city in which Czechs, Germans, and Jews lived side by side for centuries, yet were separated by culture, ethnicity, and language. These divisions left their mark on the city’s face, turning districts into hermetically sealed compartments and creating invisible boundaries. However, they did not define the ultimate nature of the cage. This we may intuit from the bird’s point of view.

Let us imagine a child, a German-speaking Jewish boy, who is a mystery to himself, an enigma surrounded by dead brothers, distant sisters, cold governesses, and a caustic cook. He is besieged by a world that he experiences through a veil of fear and guilt, a world where his father’s personality expands in all directions, leaving very little space for the life of a hypersensitive son.

The Jewish Quarter of Prague.

This area, known as Josefstad, extended from the edge of Old Town Square to the Charles Bridge, which spans the Moldava River. For centuries, the ghetto was home to scholars of the Kabbalah and other Jewish mystics, learned Hasidim, alchemists, astronomers, and astrologers. In time, however, Josefstad became a squalid district of decaying houses, brothels, and junk shops. By the time Kafka was born, in 1883, very few of the traditions remained. In 1895, the city began a drastic restoration of the district, part of an ambitious and radical ten-year urban renovation project. The old ghetto lives on in Kafka’s writings; in fiction by Leo Perutz, Paul Leppin, and Johannes Urzidil; and most vividly in the phantasmagoric atmosphere of Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel The Golem.

The Hilsner Case.

On April 1, 1899, near Polná, on the border between Bohemia and Moravia, the murdered body of a young Christian woman named Anezka Hruzova was found. Because the death took place close to Passover, the local Christian population interpreted it as a Jewish ritual murder. Although there was no evidence to support an indictment, Leopold Hilsner, a Jewish cobbler, was accused of the crime.

The Hilsner Case—later considered the Dreyfus Affair of Central Europe—was part of a wave of anti-Semitism that swept the kingdom of Bohemia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the subsequent attacks against Jews did not directly affect the Kafka family, they very likely influenced Franz’s childhood and youth, as they were openly reported in the Prague press. Traditionally, the persecution of Jews had been carried out by German and Czech groups on religious grounds, but by the late nineteenth century it had acquired the racist overtones of theories promoted by Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Schönerer, among others. Schönerer was the founder of the German National Party, which proposed the unification of all ethnic groups of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under German rule—except Jews.

The Shadow of Hermann Kafka.

Kafka’s famous “Letter to His Father,” written in 1919 but never read by the person to whom it was addressed, is a unique autobiographical and literary document. Childhood and adolescence, family and friendships, profession and vocation, literature and marriage, the rejection of an empty Judaism and the search for its authentic roots—all of Kafka’s conflicts unfold in this desperate outpouring to and diatribe against his father. It is generally interpreted as a classical example of the Oedipus complex as formulated by Freud. Yet the letter goes further, turning Kafka’s dispute with his father into an endless leave-taking, and a rejection with universal implications.