The museum in regards to the German inhabitants of the present-day Czech Republic in Ústí nad Labem proclaims a poster with a smiling Franz Kafka on it. Subsequent to him is “Naši Němci” – Our Germans. That is what Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the primary president of the Czech Republic based in 1918, known as the residents of his nation, who’re usually thought of “Sudeten Germans.”
The advanced historical past of the “battle neighborhood”, as described by the Czech historian Jan Křen, paperwork the revelation within the northern Bohemian city on the Elbe, whose German title is Aussig. On the opening in 2021, the provocative efficiency of Kafka’s “Our German” deeply affected Czech guests. Director Petr Koura was fast to clarify that his home was “not a museum for Jewish Germans,” however as a substitute “one of many German residents of Bohemian lands.”
An anti-Semitic writer
The exhibition in Ústí exhibits a e-book web page from the German version of Kafka The citadel from 1926 alongside the Czech model from 1935. Within the manuscript the writer substituted “Ok” for “I”. Jan Vondrouš, assistant to the museum’s director and information, calls Kafka “an emblem of the issue between defining a nation and attempting to outline itself.”
The German Sudeten Museum in Munich, which not too long ago opened, places Kafka in a stressed row with the West Bohemian writer Gertrud Fussenegger, who died in 1943 below “the international infiltration willingly suffered by foreigners and decay” which “gave Prague a grotesque look. typically distorted to the purpose of distortion.” She known as “Dragon Seed” on gravestones within the Jewish cemetery.
This isn’t an issue for director Stefan Planker; he refers to an exhibition textual content which, in his opinion, is totally appropriate, which says in abstract: “Fussenegger was early keen about Nationwide Socialism, however the Catholic affect of her work contradicts this” after 1945 she “regretted all factor.” Historian René Küpper calls the Munich exhibition, which is questionable on such factors, “the German Sudeten exhibition” through which Kafka is then attributed the achievements of Sudeten Germany.
Kafka biographer Reiner Stach finds it “unhelpful” to attempt to perceive Kafka “by regional, nationwide or ethnic features”.
“Sudeten” is an previous time period for the mountain vary within the north and east of Bohemia and Moravian-Silesia. Extremists gathered within the Sudeten German Occasion which labored in direction of the destruction of younger Czechoslovakia. In 1938, Hitler invaded the Sudetenland and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the next yr. Jews have been deported and murdered.
The German Sudetenland Workforce at this time firmly admits the crimes dedicated earlier than 1945. That is opposed by crude relativities, together with what the Israeli historian Iris Nachum calls “sudden German Holocaust envy”.
Silence in regards to the homicide of the Kafka household
The query of whether or not Kafka was a Sudeten German was raised by the German Cultural Discussion board for Jap Europe and the Adalbert Stifter Society of Sudeten Germany at a panel dialogue in Berlin to oppose the alleged misuse of Kafka’s work. Nevertheless, there was no actual criticism. The donor affiliation, which funds the Cultural Discussion board by the Federal Expulsion Act, denies that members of Kafka’s household have been killed within the Shoah in a touring exhibition and pays tribute to the anti-Semitic Fussenegger.
In official German Sudeten bulletins, German-speaking Jews are sometimes called “compatrots”. Kafka biographer Reiner Stach finds it “unhelpful” to attempt to perceive Kafka “by regional, nationwide or ethnic features”. The mental house was German literature. “The house he lives in at this time is far greater.”