Prague German Circle(s): Stable Values in Turbulent Times? An Introduction

Abstract

This introductory essay revisits the concept of “Prague German Literature,” focusing on the Prague Circle’s engagement with enduring humanistic values amid early twentieth-century upheaval. While Franz Kafka is one of the most well-known authors of the twentieth century, this essay (and the Special Issue) highlights lesser-known Czech German authors and engages with the criticisms of the definitional boundaries of terms like “circle” and “school.” Drawing on recent scholarship, it situates these writers within Prague’s multilingual, multiethnic context and challenges postmodern approaches that reduce the literature to power discourse. Instead, it advocates for renewed attention to moral ambiguity, cultural mediation, and universal human concerns. Revisiting foundational scholars such as Max Brod, H. G. Adler, and Margarita Pazi, the essay also engages contemporary critics who propose more nuanced models of literary affiliation. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued relevance of these authors in fostering intercultural dialog and reflecting on the (in)stability of values in times of crisis, framing the contributions of this Special Issue.

1. Introduction: Why This Issue?

Prolific Max Brod scholar Margarita Pazi has argued that the unique historical and geographical constellation of Czech German writers provided the context for some of the world’s greatest literary talents, including but not limited to Franz Kafka (Pazi 1995, pp. 355–56). At the same time, while Kafka’s work is often read, discussed, and researched, this is not true for many of his fellow Czech German authors, especially in an English-speaking context. Indeed, the study of modernist Czech German literature is not common in Germanistik and German studies programs in Europe and the United States—except in the Czech Republic and by their colleagues at universities in Germany and Austria.1 Still, the fact that Czech German authors are relatively unknown in certain parts of the world is likely not, in and of itself, reason enough to read and discuss their work. So, why should we study them? In the essays that make up this collection, each author seeks to address the question of value, that is, the value that engaging with their texts can have.

Recently, Manfred Weinberg and his colleagues have brought renewed attention to “Prague German Literature,” even ironically, including reasons why it should not be called such (Becher et al. 2017). Indeed, the question of whether these Czech German authors, centered—though not exclusively—in Prague make up a “circle” (Brod 1966), a “school” (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010), “circles” with “nodes” of connection (Weinberg 2017b), or a number of different “epicenters” (Jungmayr 2014), is not the primary focus of this Special Issue, though individual articles do touch on this controversy. However, any attempt to answer the value question brings up others: Is there something in their heritage, their ostensibly humanistic impulses, or something as broadly defined as fate that unites the writers of this group and evokes the term “circle”? Do the definitional contours used by Max Brod to create this constellation of German-speaking authors still have validity? Was H. G. Adler correct in his assessment that this was a one-time phenomenon never to be seen again? And if one dispenses with the singular term, that is, the circle, does that properly adjust the focus away from Kafka as the central figure or obscure him?

This introductory essay will summarize the controversy surrounding the various terms used to designate this group of authors. However, its purpose is to focus attention on texts often not familiar to an English-speaking audience and on the context in which they emerged. In addition, each paper in this Special Issue seeks to bring to light what these authors have to say to readers today about the (in)stability of cultural values in turbulent times, the authors’ engagement with stable values, the dissolution of values (Broch 1952)2, or the necessity of their rejuvenation (Schönwiese 1959). As Beizaei points out in her contribution to this collection, these authors grapple with the big questions of the first half of the twentieth century (2024, p. 2). Equally important, there is something abiding about the questions they pose, something that can function as a voice out of modernity urging for caution in the chaos of postmodernity. As Kountouroyanis puts it in his contribution, “in a world that prioritizes instant reactions over considered responses, we desperately need spaces for deliberate, meaningful communication […;] the art of mediation, of bridging divides through thoughtful engagement, is more critical now than ever” (2024, p. 17). Thus, amidst the tensions in the years leading up to the First World War and the chaos of the interwar period, these authors, in different ways, turned to complex fiction as a way of, if not answering the big questions, at least pointing the way towards something like answers.

As mentioned, this introductory essay will explore a bit of the controversy surrounding terminology. More important, however, is a foray into recent scholarship about Prague and Czech German authors. Recent postmodern cultural studies’ approaches often treat these works less as literature than as reflections of power, oppression, nationalism, or sexism. Thus, the purpose of this collection is to revisit the work of some Czech German authors and how it might help us answer some of the following questions: What is the role of modernist literature in a postmodern world? Can an analysis of the work of women writers of this time and place contribute something new to and expand the conversation of/about women in literature more generally and Prague German literature specifically? How might one carry on in Brod’s or Pazi’s spirit of a unifying moral imperative that makes these works identifiable to their time and place, despite quibbles one may have with their work?3 Can we identify epicenters among these writers that do not include Brod and Kafka? What about Hartmut Binder’s “lost generation” (Binder 1991) and authors not included by Brod in his Prager Kreis (1966, The Prague Circle)? Is Czech German literature as a phenomenon greater than the sum of its parts? What is the role of Prague in the works of these authors in the postwar period? And what do Czech German authors contribute in their role as cultural mediators? However, before we turn to secondary literature, I will sketch the history of the multi-ethnic society that was Prague at the turn of the last century.

2. Historical Background

To properly understand the context, one must go back in time to a situation that no longer exists. For centuries of Habsburg rule over a multi-ethnic empire, German and Czech speakers lived together as neighbors in many areas. Recent historical studies of German-Czech relations in these territories proliferate in both languages and include the social, political, and nationalist conflicts between the two groups in the traditional Czech lands, that is, Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia (e.g., Becher et al. 2012; Krappmann 2013; Kural 2001). In addition, several studies in English have attempted to create a picture of the Prague of that time as a context for the search for meaning. They depict Prague as the birthplace of a unique form of modernism (Jungmayr 2014, p. 260) with a complex, multicultural heritage and historical developments that spurred on crisis and creativity. In different ways, these scholars attempt to complement (or correct) earlier speculations as to what accounts for this “sudden flourishing of literature within a certain period” (Pazi 1995, p. 2): Bruce Berglund’s Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague (Berglund 2017), Peter Demetz’s Prague in Black and Gold (Demetz 1997), Derek Sayer’s trilogy (The Coasts of Bohemia [1998], Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century [2013], and Postcards from Absurdistan [2022]), and Scott Spector’s Prague Territories (Spector 2000) all provide background and context for the uncommonly rich environment of modern Prague.

While these books provide a trove of insight into Prague as a multi-ethnic city, Gary Cohen’s The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Cohen 1981) in particular discusses two things that are vitally important to contextualize this discussion of Prague German (or Czech German) literature in this era.4 First, Cohen provides statistics on the declining number Germans in Prague, a large portion of which were Jewish. Second, he traces the development of nationalist identification, which took the place of a group identification by class, over the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, his focus on the complex developments of Czech-German relations in Prague and elsewhere gives an account of how a heterogeneous group called “Bohemians” came to identify as distinct nationalities, namely, Czechs and Germans.5 For example, members of the German-speaking elite had thought of themselves as Bohemians and Austrians, as part of a multinational monarchy, and not as “Germans.” As the traditional side-by-side nature of their neighborliness gave way, nationalist tensions form the foreground to Czech German literature in Prague in the 1900–1939 period. As Cohen notes, in Prague in the 1860s, that is, twenty years before Kafka was born in 1883, social and economic interests were the determining factors in the choice between Czech and German loyalties; not even linguistic habits gave them conscious ethnic identities (p. 44).6 Cohen makes the argument that the decision to identify as “German” and to align oneself along linguistic borders came subsequent to the rise of Czech nationalism, which itself was an attempt to push back on “Germanization” as necessary for social and economic mobility (pp. 26–27).

Cohen’s historical account does justice to the complexity of a multi-ethnic, multilingual Prague. It traces the developments from “Bohemianism” to an identity and primary social connection tied primarily to national groupings. As he notes, the change in how statistics were gathered provides interesting insight into this developmental process. In other words, before a certain point, statistics on national identification were not reliably gathered because they were not considered relevant or interesting. Still, though the statistics were unreliable, both Cohen (1981, p. 20) and Zimmermann (2006b, p. 69) note that German speakers likely made up the majority of Prague’s citizens in 1848. Furthermore, it is “indisputable,” says Cohen, that the wealthy manufacturers and professional classes were “overwhelmingly German speakers” (p. 20). Czech nationalists wished to destabilize this status quo. However, it must also be clarified that, for many in Prague, the process of establishing primary social connections with one national group often took place over many years (1981, p. 45). This clearly contextualizes the generation that parented the authors under study here (see Brod 1966, p. 36). As Cohen states:

The division of Prague’s population into Czech and German groups, distinct in ethnic identity and social interrelationships, was an evolving process that lasted through the 1860s and 1870s. As long as bilingualism was frequent and Czechs and Germans intermingled extensively in private life, individuals could move with surprising ease from one identity and affiliation to another. […] Yet the late 1850s and early 1860s marked a significant turning point, for at this time the Czech-German distinction first emerged as a social reality, and Bohemianism finally ceased to be a real option.

(p. 45)

Reliable statistics on ethnicity began in 1880 with a question addressing “language of everyday use” for the first time (Cohen 1981, p. 88). To highlight the complexity of linguistic allegiance, Cohen gives multiple examples of family members that claimed differing linguistic loyalties (pp. 109–10). The Prager Literaturhaus/Pražský Literární Dům, or Prague Literature House, gives an example with Franz Kafka’s own family of origin.7 As they note, when Kafka’s father, Hermann Kafka, filled out the census form in 1900, he claimed Czech as the “language of everyday use.” In 1910, however, Franz Kafka was the sole family member who claimed German as his “language of everyday use” (Prager Literaturhaus).8 To give another famous example, Bedřich (Friedrich) Smetana (1824–1884) was a German speaker who first learned Czech as a young man (Jungmayr 2014, p. 263).9

For context, it is also important to note that the German-speaking population of Prague (and in the Czech lands) was a shrinking minority after 1880. As the Prager Literaturhaus reports, in 1880, 42,315 of 296,647 Prague citizens were registered as German speakers, that is, 14.26% of the total. As Prague’s population increased over the following decades, the German speaking minority experienced fluctuations, but their numbers generally declined. By 1900, Prague’s population was at 487,997 and the German minority was counted at 34,105 (or 6.99%). In 1910, the numbers were 580,952 to 37,226 (representing an increase, but the overall percentage declined to 6.41%), and in 1921, they were 676,657 to 30,429 (4.5%). In 1930, Prague’s total population was 848,823, and the German minority registered at 41,701 (4.91%) (Prager Literaturhaus). Goldstücker (1967, p. 30) has slightly different numbers but notes the same shrinking German minority.

Cohen’s statistics reveal the same trend. As he reports, censuses from 1880 to 1910 track a growth in the Czech population in Prague from 213,000 to 405,000, whereas the German population (and he includes in this category Catholics, Jews, and Protestants) declines relatively and absolutely from 39,000 to 33,000 (p. 86). Cohen also delves more specifically into the Jewish population in Prague: between the 1840s and mid-1880s the overwhelming majority of Prague Jews had aligned themselves culturally with Austria’s German middle classes. He traces the “large-scale linguistic and cultural Germanization of Bohemian Jews” back to Emperor Joseph II (p. 80). By 1860, German was the principal language in the larger Jewish communities in the Czech lands, and it remained so until after 1900, even though nearly everyone also needed to speak Czech for business purposes (pp. 80–81). Cohen cites some interesting statistics for the Prague Jewish community: in 1890, 12,588 (74%) of Prague’s 17,806 Jewish citizens declared German as their everyday language. By 1900, the numbers had shifted: only 8230 (45%) declared German as their everyday language; by the end of the century, more than 4000 of the 18,000 Jewish citizens in Prague had switched from German loyalties to Czech in the census. Thus, half of the net decline in the Prague German-speaking population was due to this switch in loyalty. It should be noted, however, that this shift occurred mainly in the lower socio-economic strata of the German population (Cohen 1981, p. 101).10 The Prager Literaturhaus also reports that this shift in linguistic allegiance resulted in the overall decline in the German-speaking population. Still, as Zimmermann (2006b, p. 69) notes, though not all Jewish people in Prague were German, they still made up approximately half of the German minority in Prague in 1910.11 Cohen cites statistics for 1900 that show the German minority was 46% Jewish (p. 102), whereas Max Brod, citing Hans Tramer, bases his comments on population statistics of 415,000 Czechs, 10,000 non-Jewish Germans and 11,000 Jewish Germans (Tramer 1964, cited in Brod 1966, p. 65). Though the actual numbers vary slightly, the trends are the same.

As Jungmayr reports, before the 1848 revolution, Prague had been almost completely dominated by German culture, but this changed rapidly with industrialization (Jungmayr 2014, p. 267). In 1921, 30,429 (4.59%) of the total 676,657 population of Prague were German speakers. Of the 31,751 Prague citizens who identified as Jewish, 7000 spoke German and over 19,000 Czech. In 1930, the numbers increased slightly: the German-speaking community made up 5%, or 41,701, out of 848,823. Despite the overall decline, however, educational institutions for German speakers remained strong and plentiful in Prague: in addition to Charles University there was also a German technical university; until 1918, five out of ten public high schools (Staatsgymnasien) were German (p. 267; see also Cohen 1981, pp. 131–38), as were various organizations that supported the social life of the German minority, such as the German theater, multiple coffeehouses, and cultural and student clubs (Jungmayr 2014, p. 268; see also Cohen’s in-depth treatment of German cultural life in Prague, pp. 52–85; and Spector 2000, pp. 13–17). As Jičínská and Ludewig point out, however, all aspects of this significant “cultural potential” were not available to women and girls (2024, p. 4).

These statistics provide a compelling context in which one should think about Czech German or Prague German literature. An earlier metaphor, that is, Paul Eisner’s infamous and oft-cited “three-fold ghetto” (Eisner 1933, cited and affirmed by Goldstücker [1963] 1973, p. 361) has been subsequently rejected by scholars.12 The “three-fold ghetto” which putatively surrounded Prague German authors was made up of linguistic (German), religious (Jewish), and class boundaries. Max Brod vehemently rejects this depiction with respect to his generation of authors but concedes that it applies to the generation of their fathers (Brod 1966, p. 36).13 Instead, recent scholars tend to emphasize the often porous nature of the boundaries between these three groups. As Pazi intones, the literary flourishing of this group of authors “resulted from the merging of the German, Czech, and Jewish cultures” (1995, p. 356). Indeed, an awareness of Prague’s unique composition is necessary to understand the special nature of the texts under consideration. Even scholars such as Escher who wish to problematize, or dismiss entirely, the term “Prague German Literature” will agree that one needs to consider Prague’s multilingual and multicultural atmosphere between 1900 and 1939 to do justice to the “fascinating diversity” that one attributes to this term in the first place (Escher 2010, p. 208).14

The entangled closeness of Czechs and Germans during this period, as well as the shifts in the concentration of power, puts Brod’s famous concept of “Distanzliebe,” or love from a distance (Brod 1966, pp. 62–63), into an understandable context. These statistics also help the uninitiated understand Weinberg’s marked emphasis of the cultural context as the entry point to Kafka’s work and that of other Czech German writers. Furthermore, it gives insight into the poignancy of Franz Werfel’s 1914 comment who noted that German chauvinism would lead to the end of the Prague German community (Werfel 1914, cited in Krolop 1964, p. 334).

3. Prague German Literature: The Stakes and History of the Concept

3.1. What Is in a Name?

While by no means posed by each scholar who writes about Czech German and/or Prague German literature, there are three questions that recur in this field more generally, and none are uncontroversial.15 The first pertains to the definition of “Prague German Literature,” that is, what it is and who should be included among its authors. Despite the broad acceptance of the term “Prague German Literature” among today’s literary critics, varying definitions and criteria for inclusion abound (Escher 2010, p. 197). As Escher notes, trying to decide whether “Prague German” pertains to those born in Prague, those who moved to Prague, or even those who wrote about Prague, can already expose the difficulty of using the term (Escher 2010, p. 197). One of the major accomplishments of most recent studies on “Prague German Literature,” says Escher, is the deconstruction of the unity that the term suggests, as the more one reaches for a definitional certainty, the more it recedes from grasp. One might then ask whether it is more accurate to discuss German-language literature of the Czech lands. However, as Weinberg suggests, it would be difficult to dispense with the term since “Prague German literature” is more familiar to Germanists and German studies scholars (Weinberg 2018, p. 224), and it is pithier.

The second question, addressed by fewer scholars in recent years, centers on the reasons why this time (circa 1900–1939) and this place (Prague) might have produced so many authors who captured the “world’s interest” (Goldstücker [1963] 1973, p. 361).16 To this, I add the question of value, that is, why their writing is, or should be, of interest to us today. Earlier scholars, such as Pazi (1995) and Goldstücker ([1963] 1973), hazard opinions about the generative nature of this time and space, that is, what gave rise to a special kind of modernism. As mentioned above, recent books in English by Demetz, Sayer, and Berglund attempt to pinpoint the nature of the modernist crucible which was Prague. At the same time, with the rise in postmodern literary studies, more recent scholars urge—either explicitly or explicitly—moving away from such pronouncements of value. Indeed, for Escher, accounting for what we think of as so special about “Prague German literature” would require decoupling the “isolating and homogenizing equation of space with literature,” as the simple mapping of what is essentially a social and communication process onto the confines of the linguistic boundaries of the city space eliminates the complexity of the process itself (Escher 2010, pp. 207–8).17 At the same time, Robertson’s conclusions recommend caution vis-à-vis the embrace of postmodern abstractions. As he states, “recent concepts of ‘interculturality’ and ‘hybridity’ fail to capture the coexistence of multilingualism with social boundaries that characterized Prague and other cities of the Habsburg Empire” as an “ill-fitting conceptual armory” flattens the reality of multidimensional human experiences (Robertson 2020, p. 209). Prague’s multi-ethnic composition and the opportunities for cross-pollination highlighted in the previous section, in addition to the connections German authors had with other German-speaking contexts (e.g., Vienna and Berlin), set the stage for a fruitful discussion of Czech German literature. In the following section, I will summarize important, field-defining scholarship that attempts to grapple with these two questions.

3.2. Prague German Literature, the Prague Circle, or the Prague School: Eduard Goldstücker, Max Brod, H. G. Adler, and Kurt Krolop

One cannot understand the deconstruction of the term “Prague German Literature” without first investigating how and why it was constructed. First and foremost, one should be aware that there was a consciousness of being “Prague German” among those contemporaries who grew to maturity in the context that Cohen describes so vividly (see above). As Escher reports, literary critics in Prague’s German and Czech publications were already talking about a “Prague German literature” at the beginning of the twentieth century (Escher 2010, p. 203). Escher (2010, pp. 199–200) and other recent scholars have noted (e.g., Weinberg 2017a), however, that the term took on more rigid definitional contours with the publication of conference proceedings under the leadership of Marxist Czech Germanist Eduard Goldstücker and the two famous conferences in Liblice, one on Kafka and Prague in 1963 and the second on Prague German Literature (Goldstücker [1963] 1973, 1967; see also Weinberg 2017a, 2017b).18 According to subsequent scholars, Goldstücker and his colleagues accomplished these definitional contours by setting arbitrary parameters in time, space, and membership. As Weinberg explains, first, Goldstücker included Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Werfel to justify the “world class” nature of their literature (an inclusion Weinberg rejects; see Weinberg 2017b, pp. 212–14). He also set the beginning of Prague German Literature in 1894 with Rilke’s first volume of poetry, thus effectively cutting off the phenomenon from continuities that existed earlier in the nineteenth century and severing authors from their cultural context. Then, Goldstücker endorsed Paul Eisner’s now thoroughly debunked assessment of a “threefold ghetto” (mentioned above), but mainly to highlight the role of the Prague German authors as cultural mediators with the Czech avant garde of the same time period. Based on these qualities, Goldstücker further set up a dichotomy between a humanistic Prague German population and the nationalistic (and later fascist) Sudeten German population (Goldstücker 1967, pp. 24–25; see also Weinberg 2017b, p. 195 and pp. 215–16; Robertson 2020, p. 209), a crude distinction that Brod himself rejects (Brod 1966, p. 64). Interestingly, Weinberg’s main quibble is not with Goldstücker. After all, these rigid categories allowed scholars in Communist Prague to focus their attention on these “bourgeois decadent authors” (Weinberg 2017b, p. 195). Instead, he points out that, other than Escher (2010), there has not been sufficient scholarship drawing attention to the fact that one needs to question categorical boundaries drawn in Communist Czechoslovakia. Weinberg justifiably asks why the fall of the Iron Curtain did not encourage more recent scholars to re-examine Goldstücker’s conclusions (Weinberg 2017a, p. 27) and suggests that, with the disappearance of this cultural context, the simplistic categorizations actually contributed to their staying power (Weinberg 2017b, pp. 196–97).19 Though subsequent scholars have found fault with Goldstücker’s literary critical method, one must admit that, like Brod, he is asking interesting questions even if he does not always have satisfactory answers. This is a point to which I return below.

Just as famously, Max Brod (1884–1968) coined the term “Prager Kreis,” or the Prague Circle, in his 1966 book of the same name.20 For those unfamiliar with Brod’s work as a novelist, essayist, and executor of Franz Kafka’s will, Hans Dieter Zimmermann provides context: “When readers in the twenties or thirties of the last century were bewildered and asked, ‘Who is Franz Kafka?’ they would be answered: ‘He’s a friend of that famous Max Brod.’ If readers ask today, ‘Who is Max Brod?’, then the answer is: ‘The friend of that famous Franz Kafka’” (Zimmermann 2006a, p. 233).21

Brod most certainly had a knack for storytelling, even outside of the novel genre (and some of his more important novels and books, including Der Prager Kreis, have been reissued in this century). In his account of literary activity in Prague, though there is an “inner” or “narrow” Prague Circle at its core, this work contains multiple chapters which narrate elaborately overlapping circles in time and space. The work itself begins by defining the other circles of influence, both historical and contemporary, on this “narrow circle” of writers. Indeed, in contrast to Goldstücker’s account, Brod acknowledges the difficulty in pinning down the Prague Circle in terms of time, space, and its members. An “exact demarcation” (Brod 1966, p. 9) evades the scholar.22 However, he precisely defines the “narrow” Prague Circle as four authors bound by “close ties of friendship”, namely, Franz Kafka, Felix Weltsch, Oskar Baum, and Brod himself.23 After Kafka’s death in 1924, a fifth joined the group: Ludwig Winder (Brod 1966, p. 35).

The background in the previous section provides the context for the uninitiated to follow Brod’s narrative. In seeking to account for the particularity of German-speaking literature in Prague, Brod begins in 1830 with an “ancestral hall,” or Ahnensaal (Brod 1966, pp. 9–34), in which he names the important predecessors for the “Prague Circles” that he goes on to describe. One such influence is Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916). The fact that she was a German writer surrounded by Slavic influences and enjoyed a bilingual upbringing impacted those who followed in her footsteps (Brod 1966, p. 10). Brod creates a compelling narrative, precisely because he attempts to account for this special grouping of artists at this time and in this place. Brod also periodically mentions other typical qualities of Prague German authors. In addition to their Slavic surroundings’ evident influence (p. 10), they possess a social conscience (p. 10), are interested in the distinction between good and evil (p. 12), have a prophetic sense of impending events (p. 29), and an openness to nature and to the rest of the world (in contrast to a provincial quality one might attribute to Prague). They are thus not German nationalists (with which he also strikes back at Eisner’s theory) and have good relations with their Czech neighbors (p. 47). Further, they engage with Jewish traditions (p. 97). Ideologically, their realism placed them in direct opposition to the Neo-Romantics or to the Expressionists, who were “screaming,” but with no real content to their screams, as Brod judges (pp. 177–80).24 What unites all members of the Prague Circle, he asserts, is an “absolute or transcendent realism” (p. 177).25

While mildly critical of Brod, especially on this last point, Weinberg clearly prefers Brod’s “multiple circles” to Goldstücker’s more rigid categorical distinctions. To begin with, Brod’s approach allows for many circles with “nodal points” (Weinberg 2017b, p. 195) in a larger, pan-European network.26 Brod’s way of approaching the phenomenon, according to Weinberg, demonstrates its complexity as a model of concentric circles that follow each other in time while also intersecting in space (p. 196). Thus, although Brod may exaggerate at times the closeness of the Czech and German artistic communities, his judgment was closer to historical facts than was Goldstücker’s (p. 197).27 In addition, Brod avoids the ideological moralizing of an easy dichotomy of “Prague German” vs. “Sudeten German” authors and, even though they are not the focus of his book, he makes mention of several of the latter that had a significant influence on his “Prague Circle” (p. 197; see Brod 1966, p. 64). Importantly, Brod’s influence and role as cultural mediator exceeded the local and linguistic boundaries of Prague’s German-speaking artists and writers: he was a “networker” of the highest order (Weinberg 2017b, p. 196).

Despite the ways in which Brod gets it right, however, Weinberg insists that one cannot simply accept whole cloth his representation of German-language literature in Prague in the first decades of the 20th century (Weinberg 2017b, p. 198).28 Spector is more critical when he chides Brod for his self-serving “retrospective formulation” and naïve “reproduction of cultural and political power” (Spector 2000, p. 17).29 However, in a 2016 collection of essays (Höhne et al. 2016), Weinberg and his colleagues also conclude that Brod “invention” of the term Prague Circle was a retrospective act. In this collection, Weinberg highlights the dual nature of the word “invention”: Brod both brought the term into being and was in large part responsible for the authors whom it defined experiencing an upswing of attention (Weinberg 2016, p. 128). With his “invention” of the Prague Circle, Brod retrospectively brought together what later always seemed to have belonged together (p. 131). The “transformation of Prague’s literary scene from provincial to cosmopolitan” took place not in small part due to Brod’s activities and his invention of a “mythic Prague Circle” (Höhne and Ludewig 2016, p. 7).30

But Brod’s circle metaphor naturally begs the following question: who or what is at the center of this circle or these circles? Though Spector sees Brod clearly placing himself at the center (Spector 2000, p. 17), for Max Brod, as Weinberg sees it, it is clearly Franz Kafka (Weinberg 2017b, p. 196).31 Weinberg challenges, as most Kafka scholars do, what he sees as Brod’s one-sided interpretation of his friend’s person and work. Weinberg emphasizes that Brod rejects all other Kafka interpretations as various shades of ridiculous (Weinberg 2017b, p. 198; Brod 1966, p. 93) and that Brod advances instead a view that Kafka is fundamentally shaped by a “Zionism that is humane-universalist, humanistically directed” (Brod 1966, p. 100; Weinberg 2017b, p. 198).32 According to Brod, this resolves much of the riddle that is Kafka. Perhaps more importantly, Weinberg takes issue with the fact that Brod imposes a different kind of unity onto his authors that is at odds with his attempt and claim to blur definitional boundaries: they are, as noted above, “adept at absolute or transcendental realism” (Brod 1966, p. 177; Weinberg 2017b, p. 198). For Weinberg, this goes against Brod’s initial impulse and imposes a uniformity that has since been thoroughly deconstructed. Hence, much of Weinberg’s (and his colleagues’) work has been a concerted effort to re-evaluate and re-define German language literature of the Czech lands.

Without explaining his choice of the term “school,” fellow Prague German and modernist author H. G. Adler picked up the gauntlet of categorization in his 1976 essay on the work of the “Prague School” and “supplemented” Brod’s work by adding additional authors of later generations to the category.33 H. G. Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler, himself a well-regarded scholar of German studies, provides the forward to the 2010 republication of his father’s essay on these authors and their work. He notes that H. G. Adler’s essay still stands out today because of its expansion of Brod’s choice of authors and his own insights into the authors’ respective literary works (J. Adler 2010, p. 6). In these introductory remarks, Jeremy Adler reminds us that, even though the two conferences in Liblice had taken place, “Prague German literature” had not yet taken hold as a term for postwar critics in Germany, and its authors had not yet been included in any Germanist or German studies canon (J. Adler 2010, p. 5).34 Such authors, whom H. G. Adler highlighted, include, for example, Paul Leppin and Leo Perutz. H. G. Adler accepts Brod’s spatial criteria for belonging to this school, namely, that the authors have a close connection to Prague (either born there or lived and worked there for a significant period) and are native German speakers from the Austrian cultural context. However, he expands Brod’s temporal criteria by 15 years to being born between 1850 and 1910 (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 9).

H. G. Adler (1910–1988) was a prolific Prague German novelist and essayist who was not particularly well known during his lifetime but has been the subject of increased scholarly attention in the past two decades (e.g., J. Adler and Dane 2014, Bojadzija et al. 2016, and Wolff 2019). Though he does not include himself in his own essay on the “Prague School,” Jeremy Adler categorizes his father’s novels Panorama (1968, Panorama 2010), Eine Reise (1962, The Journey 2008), and Die unsichtbare Wand (1989, The Wall 2014) as the “last great prose of the Prague School” (J. Adler 2010, p. 8).35 Like Brod, H. G. Adler was a Jewish Prague German who experienced the end of a multilingual and multicultural Prague in 1939. He survived the Holocaust and lived the rest of his life as an exile in London.36 Immediately apparent in this essay is H. G. Adler’s ability—like Brod’s—to discern quality prose and advocate for it.

In his essay on the “Prague School,” H. G. Adler divides his chosen authors into eight groups depending on birth year and common concerns (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, pp. 11–12). While the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was a seminal moment, it did not mean the end of the Prague School (p. 12). Like Brod, H. G. Adler highlights the impact this multicultural environment had on these authors. He quotes Johannes Urzidil:

The German literary artists and writers of Prague had simultaneous access to at least four ethnic sources, viz., to the Germans to whom they were related by culture and language, to the Czechs who surrounded them in everyday life, to the Jews who historically served as a basic and pervasive factor of the city, and finally to the Austrians, among whom they were born and raised and with whom they shared a common destiny, regardless of whether they viewed this destiny positively or critically.

(Urzidil 1968, p. 11; original German Urzidil 1965, pp. 7–8; cited in H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 15)37

Though the events of 1938–1939 and 1945 were not the absolute end of the Prague School—as some authors escaped or survived and continued to write in exile—the foundation for continuing the tradition and building upon it was irrevocably destroyed. For its authors, however, the city of Prague remained a touchstone as, for example, in Urzidil’s famous quote, “my home[land] is what I write” (Urzidil 1958, p. 37; cited in H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 12).38 Thus is the destroyed past revisited. H. G. Adler interprets Franz Baermann Steiner’s nostalgia for the Prague of the Habsburg Empire in a similar way, that is, “not as a desire to substitute its end with fantasy images born of a longing for the past, but rather playfully conceived of its continuation as a way to continue the idea of a sunken or submerged humanity, at least in an unrealistic dream, as a place of salvation” (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 13).39

Interesting for Germanists today, H. G. Adler also discusses the differences between Prague German and the German spoken in Austria or Germany (pp. 13–14). Besides the potential quirkiness of this cultural background, Adler asks whether there is “a noticeable peculiarity” (p. 15) to be found in Prague German literature.40 Rather than focus on “external features,” Adler identifies a feeling common amongst the authors, which is “an emphasis on the melancholy of the transitory, both of all creation and their own situation,” that is, “on the city of Prague and on all of imperial Austria however it expressed itself in their prose” (p. 15).41 Again, the transitory quality applies less to the city itself than to what it represented particularly and universally, for example, the possibility of a multicultural context of discordant harmony, or as for Steiner, the lost dream of a humanist reality.42 Even with all the conflict and tension, the Prague School, says Adler, “remained predominantly humanistic-liberal” (p. 18).43 As others noted above, Adler also contrasts this quality with the nationalistic impulses taking hold at this time in other German language communities in the Czech lands. Antisemitism and nationalistic havoc were not normal occurrences in the Prague School, something Adler attributes to its high educational level, especially in the Jewish community (p. 19).

As mentioned above, H. G. Adler does not place himself in the “Prague School,” but in the wake of the Shoah, his work sought out the lost dream of a humanist reality. As was stated in a 2020 book review,

In contrast to Adorno, who—similar to many postmodernists—collapses traditions of value into barbarity and admits no distinction between the two, Adler struggles to maintain, describe, and explain the possibility of human goodness in the face of overwhelming evil. It is certainly true for Adler that in the world of the camps much, if not most, of the ability for ethical action was destroyed—but not all. And since this is true, Adler’s work challenges his readers to face the truth in its entirety and to define the scale of human value they will adhere to in the face of barbarity.

(O’Brien 2020, p. 750)

This stance is evident in all of Adler’s work, including his essay on the Prague School. Like Brod, he is asking the big questions. This provides the context for his stunning assertion that Georg Kafka, Hans Kolben, and Peter Kien probably wrote their best work in Theresienstadt (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 34). Adler delves into Hermann Grab’s work (pp. 29–32) and considers Grab’s linguistic debt to Kafka inspiration, not imitation. In breathtaking brevity, Grab is able to capture all too “human inhumanity” (p. 30) in language, in high-level prose, a fact which is echoed in Malte Spitz’ contribution to this issue (2024, p. 2). For H. G. Adler, Grab is similar to his role model Kafka in this way. In other words, Kafka’s poetic language is to be understood in the spirit of his love of truth, in his moral and aesthetic essence. Kafka doubted perhaps the reality of appearances (and was able to depict that as no one had before him), but he never doubted the most binding social asset that human beings have—namely, language and its meaningfulness—and its ability to express doubt and despair (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, pp. 28–29).44 For this reason, Adler would surely have agreed with Brod’s claim that Grab was destined to be the next leader of Prague German literature (Brod 1966, p. 206; see also Spitz’s essay in this volume). Unfortunately, as Weinberg notes, attempts to categorize Grab’s Stadtpark as paradigmatic of the late phase of Prague German literature, have been unsuccessful. With Grab’s death in 1949, it was left to Urzidil to depict and inform the uninitiated about this fascinating community of Germans and Czechs, including his reflections on language, which are characteristic for the bilingual Prague authors (Weinberg 2017b, p. 219).

As a coda to this section, I will briefly mention eminent scholar Kurt Krolop. Though Krolop is not a Prague German in the technical sense that we are discussing here, his work in contextualizing these authors—and over a generational time span—has earned him great respect in the field. Krolop’s research approach is clearly more indebted to the modernist than the postmodernist paradigm. Like H. G. Adler and Cohen, Krolop insightfully discusses the work of authors such as Kafka, Brod, and Franz Werfel in their historical context, meaning they are both active in the early twentieth century and the sons of their liberal fathers. In contrast to Spector, Krolop does not chalk this generational conflict up to some abstract failure of liberalism. Rather, he puts it in the context of the values with which they grappled, such as the secularization of Judaism, and suggests they were driven by the uniquely materialistic or dessicated liberalism of their fathers to seek a renewal or rediscovery of traditions of value. He writes of a generation of sons seeking to be “geistig,” that is, spiritual or intellectual (Krolop 1964, p. 333), and looking for the “Last eines wirklichen Zweckes,” or burden of a real goal (Werfel 1914; cited in Krolop 1964, p. 334). I return to Krolop’s work in the following section, but it is worth noting here Krolop’s assertion that these young authors were all writing against being seen as some kind of “Endprodukt,” or culminating product (Krolop [1967] 2005, p. 26), of their fathers’ liberal projects. Hans Dieter Zimmermann calls it a “Legitimationsdefizit,” or crisis of legitimacy, that pushed them towards a search for the real (2006b, p. 75).

3.3. Later Scholars Reflect on Prague German Literature: Margarita Pazi, Jörg Jungmayr, and Manfred Weinberg

Max Brod and H. G. Adler were both survivors of these “circles,” that is, Prague Germans who continued to write and publish after the destruction of the German and/or German-Jewish community in Prague. Their perspective, along with Urzidil’s There Goes Kafka (Urzidil 1968), offers insight that perhaps no others can.45 Though both Weinberg and Jungmayr mention H. G. Adler’s essay, neither evaluate its relevance for further scholarship. Brod is another matter altogether: later scholars such as Weinberg, Jungmayr, and Spector are more openly critical of what they see as Brod’s self-stylization. In contrast, prolific Brod scholar Margarita Pazi unsurprisingly remains loyal to Brod’s categorizations. For the uninitiated in English, a combination of Pazi’s article, “The Prague Circle” (Pazi 1995), and Cohen’s book (Cohen 1981; mentioned above) about German speakers in Prague from 1861 to 1914 gives a broad context with which to understand these later criticisms. Pazi works more traditionally with inherited categories and seeks to expand the depth of understanding about these authors and their texts in a literary context rather than a cultural studies context. This is an important distinction when discussing the value of literature.

In her 1995 article, Pazi spends the first few pages painting with broad brushstrokes the context in which the Prague German authors grew to maturity (pp. 355–57). She acknowledges that “no one has ever clearly defined who should be counted among the writers of the Prague Circle” but includes a list of the usual suspects nonetheless and discusses their educational background, literary activity, and cultural mediation as important factors:

Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, und Franz Werfel, usually Ernst Weiss, Paul Kornfeld, Oskar Baum, Ludwig Winder, Otto Pick, Willy Haas, Johannes Urzidil, Hermann Ungar, Rudolf Fuchs, Franz Carl Weiskopf, Hermann Grab, Friedrich Torberg, and Paul Adler are considered as having been, at least during the decisive years of their lives, part of this group. Almost all of them were university graduates, and many of them had finished law school, though they rarely practiced as lawyers. In 1912 in the last number of the short-lived Jewish literary review Herderblätter […], in which all authors of the “Prague Circle” then in Prague published their early and sometimes first literary contributions, appeared an article by Otto Pick entitled “Tschechische Dichtkunst” (Czech Literary Art), which could almost be termed a proclamation of their active mediation of Czech literature.

(Pazi 1995, p. 357)46

Prague as described by Cohen (1981) is vital to understanding this group of authors. Pazi notes that it “had become the center of unprecedented cultural and national activity as well as rivalry between Czechs and Germans” (p. 355). Furthermore, almost all the authors she names, “who in a loose and fluctuating pattern formed the group later to become the ‘Prague Circle,’” were Jewish (p. 355).

After this introduction, the rest of Pazi’s article is dedicated to what Brod called the “narrow” Prague Circle, that is, himself, Kafka, Oskar Baum, Felix Weltsch, and Ludwig Winder, as mentioned above (Pazi 1995, pp. 357–84). In 1995, Pazi was also already vehemently rejecting the “threefold ghetto” thesis and repeats what Brod has stated, namely, that the three most important influences were the German, Czech, and Jewish cultural heritages that they inhabited.47 Like Goldstücker, Pazi explains the particularity of this time and place in larger historical terms. For Goldstücker, it was the transition from bourgeois liberalism to imperialism (Goldstücker [1963] 1973, pp. 362–63). For Pazi, this phenomenon “can best be understood as the result of the fateful clash between historical decadence and national awareness, the intimate meshing and interpenetration of old values with new thoughts, overreached by an emotional return to ethnic roots [that is, Judaism]” (Pazi 1995, p. 356). However, for Pazi the “sudden flourishing” of literature in Prague is not as remarkable as the “ethnic similarity which surmounted all other influences. Not Jewish culture but the Jewish heritage became the dominant element in [their] being and character” (p. 357). From this heritage also stems the “shared readiness to appreciate and help promote Czech cultural achievements” (pp. 356–57). For Goldstücker as well, their common Jewish heritage is highly relevant: the rise in antisemitism that accompanied the transition to imperialism, and more specifically in Prague where the battles between nationalities played out center stage, sensitized the Jewish authors in the Prague Circle to some kind of ending and directed them back to a humanist tradition in German culture (Goldstücker [1963] 1973, pp. 361–62). Pazi concludes her article with an emphasis on the city itself: for these authors, Prague, or “their” Prague, remained an important part of their exile—both spiritually and geographically—and it was reflected in all their works (Pazi 1995, p. 384).

What makes Pazi’s article worth reading is the wide range of humanistic questions that Pazi (re)opens for today’s postmodern literary critic. As she explains, the members of this inner circle wrestled—as many modernists did—with topics such as free will and its limits (e.g., p. 359; p. 361; p. 383), as well as with concomitant questions of human ethical action (e.g., p. 362).48 Pazi makes explicit that these questions are generalizable to the human experience while also remaining specifically Jewish questions (e.g., resistance vs. acceptance of suffering). In addition to problems resulting from the secular separation from Judaism, debates were had about the tension between cultural loyalties and their Jewish heritage (resolved either by joining a community of believers or aligning with Zionism). Furthermore, as Weinberg points out, the authors of this time and place were highly engaged in public-facing debates either in newspapers, periodicals, or public lectures on such issues (Weinberg 2017b, pp. 217–18; see also Beizaei 2024).Thus, though today’s scholars tend to damn Pazi’s conclusions with faint praise, she reminds us of the big questions with which this group of authors wrestled, and her work is a good introduction to these themes.

Moving to more contemporary scholarship on the Prague Circle, Jörg Jungmayr, like Weinberg, also effectively challenges the idea of a singular phenomenon with his investigation of “a variety of epicenters” among German-speaking citizens of the Czech lands and the network of authors, musicians, and artists that was not as centered on Brod as Brod would have us believe (Jungmayr 2014, p. 266).49 He also rejects the inclusion of Rainer Maria Rilke (Goldstücker) and Ernst Weiß (Pazi) as his criteria are first, that the author networked with the German-speaking literary scene in Prague, and, second, that they had an intensive connection to the city of Prague itself. This could leave the door open for authors born elsewhere, however. As if to underscore the variability of terminology, Jungmayr calls the context a “pragdeutscher Soziotop,” or Prague German social environment (p. 263), and uses the terms “Prague German literature” and “German Prague literature” interchangeably throughout (e.g., pp. 260, 289, 307, 308).

However, though Jungmayr challenges the idea of a Brod-centric definition, he affirms the uniqueness of the context and begins his piece with an epigram about the paradoxical connection and division between Germans and Czechs in the Czech lands (Jungmayr 2014, p. 260). He then qualifies Max Brod’s “Prague Circle” as a loosely connected group of German-speaking authors that from 1900 to 1939 were positioned between assimilation and emancipation, a social position Pazi also emphasizes. The unique brand of literary modernism did not develop solely out of conflict or exclusion (as the minority position within a minority might imply), but rather also in dialog with the cultural milieu in which they were embedded (Jungmayr 2014, p. 260). In other words, Jungmayr does not reduce their cultural output to reflections of complicity or resistance to the respective national groups. On the contrary, among the German speakers in this ever-shrinking linguistic diaspora, their intensive social contact with Czechs and Czech culture led to a remarkable “Dialogfähigkeit,” or dialogical capacity (Jungmayr 2014, p. 260; see also Beizaei 2024). This context, Jungmayr asserts, gave the authors a “seismographic feel” for literary developments and tendencies (p. 267).50 Furthermore, Jungmayr agrees that it was this interoperability that protected them from descending into German nationalism, as was the case with many Sudeten Germans. Though Jungmayr comments on the narrowness of Brod’s circles, he notes Brod’s nose for identifying talent on both sides of the linguistic divide (Jungmayr 2014, p. 268). Jungmayr also highlights Brod’s political activities and connection to Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomaš Garrigue Masaryk, Brod’s Jewish activism, and his cultural work for the Prager Tagblatt to bridge the Czech German cultural divide (pp. 264–69).

Like H. G. Adler, whom Jungmayr also briefly mentions (Jungmayr 2014, p. 261), Jungmayr seeks to expand on Brod’s narrower definition, and he highlights (as does Weinberg) Brod’s willingness to dismiss anything that did not fit his world view or aesthetic sensibilities.51 At the same time, Jungmayr begins with the “Ahnensaal,” or ancestral hall (Hugo Salus and Friedrich Adler), as Brod did, which “set the tone” for later authors (Jungmayr 2014, p. 271).52 He then moves to the “inner circle,” as defined by Brod, and the “broader Prague Circle,” e.g., Franz Werfel and Willy Haas, while also making connections to others, such as Otto Pick. Jungmayr dwells on further categories, such as the “Prager Bohème,” or Bohemian Prague (pp. 275–78) and “das dämonische Prag,” or “demonic Prague” (pp. 279–84). In the latter, the Jewish Ghetto, which had been demolished in the nineteenth century, still looms large both as a historical place and as a sinister symbol for criminality and underworld. For Jungmayr, author Hans Klaus’ contributions to the “demonic Prague” belong to some of the most impressive literary production of Prague German literature (p. 285).

In addition, Jungmayr includes authors who received short shrift from Brod. For example, Jungmayr discusses two avantgarde writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Melchior Vischer (p. 287) and Hermann Ungar (p. 288), noting that the latter was perhaps deliberately misunderstood and marginalized by Brod (p. 288). Paul Kornfeld, to whom Jungmayr dedicates several long paragraphs, deployed a “resistant alienation” (p. 294)53 not valued by Brod. Like H.G. Adler, Jungmayr devotes a section to writers forced into exile or murdered by the Nazis, such as Peter Kien, Georg Kafka, Hans Werner Kolben, and the more well known Johannes Urzidil, Rudolf Fuchs, and Ludwig Winder (pp. 289–307). He ends his long chapter with a plea to take measure of all that was lost in 1939 with the disappearance of this culture. At the same time, though Jungmayr chides Brod for his narrow aesthetic categories, he does not explicitly state what he finds valuable as a literary critic nor what his criteria are for inclusion in the category called worthwhile literature.

Manfred Weinberg’s pointedly titled 2017 essay “Prager Kreise,” or Prague Circles, is a contribution to a much larger project, namely, the 400+ pages of Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder, edited by Weinberg along with Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne, and Jörg Krappmann (Becher et al. 2017). This “handbook” is the product of much effort to challenge the idea of a singular phenomenon called “Prague German literature” or a singular entity known as a “Prague Circle” (Weinberg 2016). Weinberg and his colleagues have done a tremendous service in the literary criticism dedicated to Czech German literature, both with their enormous output and the founding of the Kurt-Krolop-Forschungsstelle (Weinberg 2016) to make this scholarship more visible.54

Weinberg does an admirable job of laying some important groundwork for contemporary scholars by intervening in the imprecision surrounding two questions. First, what is German-speaking Prague literature? And second, who was Kafka and what is his work all about? He thus finds fault with many Kafka scholars who do not consider the cultural context into which Kafka was born, and which permeates his prose. He begins his hefty, informative essay with a historical contextualization of the terms “Prague German literature” and the “Prague Circles” (Weinberg 2017b, p. 195). He reviews in detail both Goldstücker’s and Brod’s foundational works (mentioned above) while acknowledging how difficult it is to pin down the phenomenon, precisely because the Prague Circle had connections to so many others, including Czech authors and the influential writers of previous generations, in addition to a larger, pan-European network. Weinberg credits Brod’s book with an attempt to use a complex model of circles that connect over generational time and geographic space (Weinberg 2017b, p. 196).

In this essay on “Prague Circles,” Weinberg naturally addresses, as Pazi does, the authors of the narrow circle (Brod, Kafka, Felix Weltsch, Oskar Baum, and Ludwig Winder). Weinberg highlights, for example, that Weltsch’s texts are very much representative of the thought produced by their generation and literary work of the (narrow) Prague Circle (p. 198). As did Brod, Weltsch fled the Nazis with the last possible train out of Prague in 1939 and emigrated to Palestine, where he died in 1964 (p. 198). In addition to thematizing (his own) blindness, Oskar Baum’s work focuses on other themes important to this group of authors, such as Zionism and the problems of living life as a Jewish person among Christians (p. 199). Baum engages with the idea of “noble and ignoble misfortune,” an idea that was also of crucial importance to Brod (p. 199). One must ask, though Pazi is not cited here, whether Weinberg is partially relying on her conclusions in his own analysis.

Weinberg dedicates significant space in his essay to Brod as an author with an impressive generic breadth (all literary genres, journalistic work, essays, and philosophical and biographical texts). Weinberg takes us through Brod’s early expressionistic and “indifferent” influences (i.e., Schopenhauer) but notes, as most scholars do, that Brod quickly went in another direction. He mentions Brod’s fascination with the search for faith and active participation in the world as a solution to the theodicy problem in both his novels and philosophical works. His later “nostalgic novels” written in exile process the turbulent times of the 1930s and display a tendency to memorialize (pp. 199–200). Weinberg ends this section with a nod (citing, for example, Krolop ([1967] 2005, p. 24) to the significant impact that Brod had on Prague German literature in the expressionist decade. As the much more well-known author, Brod’s activities as networker and mentor helped Prague German literature achieve continental fame (p. 200).

Like Brod, Weinberg seeks to correct approaches to Kafka’s work and person, namely those that neglect the context that was Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century, and dedicates nearly ten pages to this endeavor (pp. 200–10). A huge part of his project is thus to ground Kafka’s work and person in their (inter)cultural and historical context, including the proximity to Czech, both in language and culture.55 Weinberg insists that such a grounding is uniquely important for this group as the ordinary Germanist is not acquainted with the specifics of multicultural Prague during Kafka’s lifetime, specifics which ceased to exist less than a quarter century after his death in 1924. Weinberg criticizes scholars’ obsession with Kafka’s “Unfassbarkeit,” or inscrutability (p. 200), while they overlook, for example, the fact that the term “Kafkaesque” has two translations in Czech. This neglect is paradigmatic for Kafka scholarship, Weinberg asserts, as it excises the author from his original (inter)cultural context. Such specialists are also unaware that Kafka’s work was actually read in the Eastern bloc before the 1980s, where scholars naturally felt an affinity for the “Kafkaesque.” Indeed, they are responsible for the second definition of Kafkaesque, which is not metaphoric but rather corresponds to real situations under totalitarianism (p. 201). Scholarly obsession with inscrutability extends to Kafka the person. Was he the perceptive cultural critic of his time or was he completely separated from the world and self-obsessed? Was he an ascetic seeker of God, someone who wanted to renew religion, or someone who suffered from Jewish self-hatred and thus was also a hypochondriac? Or lastly, was he someone who was only interested in the process of writing and the endless play of signs and thus was satisfied to thematize this anew in infinite meta-reflexivity? For Weinberg, this proliferation of Kafka descriptions is also the result of excising him from his cultural context (p. 202).

His criticism of other scholars’ work notwithstanding, Weinberg does not mean to suggest that the paradoxes in Kafka’s work can be accounted for with simple answers. Instead, Weinberg asserts one must look at the entire paradoxical spectrum and not just selectively choose elements according to one’s interpretive goal (p. 204). Along these lines, there are those who orient their Kafka scholarship along theoretical concepts that are provably wrong, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “minor literature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986; see Weinberg 2017b, pp. 204–5). Based on a misconstrual of a passage in Kafka’s diary, which they cite as foundational, Weinberg traces how Deleuze and Guattari compare Yiddish literature written in Warsaw to Czech literature and then turn this into a generalizable category they name “Jewish literature in Prague.” According to Weinberg, this leads to one false claim after another with no attention paid to the actual historical context (p. 205). By unproblematically connecting Kafka’s diary entry from 1911 to a passage in a letter from Kafka to Brod in 1921 and drawing no distinction between the Habsburg monarchy and the First Republic, they can hardly be in a position to make a generalization about Jewish writers in Prague. Secondly, they collapse any distinction between the German and Jewish populations in Prague, which automatically excludes the Czech Jews, and those who switched allegiance from the German to the Czech culture (p. 205).

Though Weinberg does not claim to have found the final entry point into Kafka’s world or texts, he affirms that there is meaning to be found in both. Context is the key to the quest. Of course, Weinberg is not the first to assert the relevance of Prague to Kafka’s work, and he cites Willy Haas and Johannes Urzidil on this point. The latter, for example, states that “Kafka was Prague, and Prague was Kafka” (Urzidil 1965, p. 102; Urzidil 1968, p. 192; cited in Weinberg 2017b, p. 206).56 Urzidil also compares Prague to the salt in the water solution of Kafka’s writing: one cannot see it but one can taste it (Urzidil 1965, p. 11; Urzidil 1968, p. 18; cited in Weinberg 2017b, p. 207). As Weinberg notes, this is a point about which Goldstücker ([1963] 1973, p. 354; cited in Weinberg 2017b, p. 207) and Brod agree (Brod 1966, p. 96; cited in Weinberg 2017b, p. 207).57 Although Weinberg would again accuse them all of slight exaggeration, he notes that an embrace of this perspective would revolutionize Kafka scholarship.

For Kafka readers who may want to know how all of this translates into literary analysis, Weinberg provides a concrete example with two of Kafka’s short stories, “Das Stadtwappen,” or “The City Coat of Arms” (written in 1920 but published posthumously in 1931) and “Schakale und Araber” (“Jackals and Arabs”, published in 1917). Both stories are generalizable to other contexts, says Weinberg, but both also reflect a specifically Prague-type interculturality among different warring groups of people at a much more fundamental level (p. 209). Weinberg stresses again that he does not want to create a “Kafka from a Prague point of view” school as the only true way to read Kafka, but rather that such contextual knowledge will help to reduce the obsession with inscrutability and specifically determine what makes up the complexity of Kafka’s work.

As mentioned above, Margarita Pazi determined that the Jewish heritage the authors of the Prague Circle shared “became the dominant element in [their] being and character” (p. 356). In this vein, for Pazi the “dichotomy of ethnic sources and cultural ties, which resulted in a perennial tension between an illusory sense of security and deep-rooted doubts,” is also vital to understand their works (p. 356). In his essay, Weinberg addresses a similar tension. He mentions the frequent contact that the representatives of the Prague Circles had in the Lese- and Redehalle Deutscher Studenten in Prague, in the Zionist organization Bar Kochba, and at the newspaper Selbstwehr, which was a response to the need for a German-language periodical for Jewish persons in the Czech lands (pp. 216–17). Weinberg emphasizes the importance of the diverse cultural and political publishing work they were performing. Almost all the authors of Prague German literature had an intensive and broad engagement with the public through publications within and outside of the Czech lands (p. 217; see also Beizaei in this issue).

Weinberg spends the last third of this essay on other aspects of the Prague Circles and individual authors, refuting—as mentioned above—claims by both Goldstücker and Brod. He concludes with a plea for attention to the macro- and micro-circumstances of diverse literary and cultural contact and conflict zones, such as in the many coffeehouses, theaters, and cultural clubs. Only a more detailed account, Weinberg says, can shed interpretive light on the phenomena of German literature in Prague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in its drawing of boundaries, connections, influences, and meeting places (p. 216). Interestingly, Weinberg does not mention Adler’s view on Grab (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 13) or his view of the role of nostalgia in Prague German literature as emerging out of their humanistic impulses (H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, p. 14). It seems as though Weinberg wants to remove humanism from the analysis and replace it with an intercultural relationship of potential othering. However, this also avoids the “big questions” that the Prague German authors were confronting. Their attempts to “push back against the trivialization of life” (Weinberg 2017b, p. 219) seems to me an effort requiring values which challenge the givens of history and, for some writers, religious traditions. Weinberg only briefly cites Spector (Weinberg 2017a, p. 26; 2017b, p. 210), but the latter’s deconstructive appeal seems to hover in the background of much of Weinberg’s scholarship as it avoids discussions of value. Clearly, Spector’s approach gives permission to challenge traditional approaches. However, rather than positing another affirmative viewpoint, it reduces literature to a dichotomy of complicity and resistance. For example, in discussing Kafka’s “deterritorializations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, pp. 16–27), Spector warns that we must be careful not to turn them “into a univocal subversion narative” which would “miss the point” (Spector 2000, p. 29). Instead, he advocates for acknowledging the “strands of collusion as well as resistance, breaking away as well as digging in one’s heels” (p. 29). In fact, there is no escape from a hermeneutic deconstructionism à la Spector because, as he sees it, “even challenges to dominant discourses on nation, language, and race can buttress their foundations” (p. 33). Scant, if any, attention paid to other topics, such as moral ambiguity, human (that is, universal human) frailty, and the lived lives of others in nuanced contexts. In this way, Spector completely avoids what is affirmed in the work in terms of its human value.

Thus, though Pazi, Brod, and Goldstücker are perhaps not taken as seriously as they once were, I would reiterate that they pose important questions about human existence. Heinz Kuehn says as much in his “reappraisal of Max Brod”:

Even in his best novels and poems he is more analytical and intuitive than creative and imaginative. Yet what sustained me in my exploration of Brod’s writings were those sudden flashes of inspiration, of subtle yet persuasive psychology, of intuitive penetration to the heart of a crucial matter that made me hurry through the next stretch of uninspired, rambling cogitations in expectation of the next illuminating burst of brilliance and sometimes even genius. What he had to say did not deal with trifles. Because of him I know more about what moves the modern Jew in the diaspora and about the driving forces behind the Zionist movement. Through his writings as much as through the example of his life, he taught me something about the inexhaustible subject of love: love and politics, love and suffering, love and virtue, and love as passion and as manifestation of the divine. Above all, I found in him a scholar of vast erudition and an activist of selfless zeal for whom everything that occupied his mind or stirred his being to its depth converged on the single question, “Does faith in a living God still make a difference in private and public life?” To that question Max Brod answered yes, persuasively, passionately, a yes that had far-reaching consequences for his and our time. It is a gift for which we owe him a long overdue debt of gratitude.

(Kuehn 1993, p. 276)

The assertion that Brod may not always have the right answers but asks the right questions seems to me to be at the heart of the humanist quest. His musings on “edles und unedles Unglück” (Brod 1921, pp. 28–55), or “noble vs. ignoble misfortune” (Brod 1970, pp. 13–25), for example, will give anyone pause for thought, as Brod asks which sufferings are unavoidable (e.g., mortality) vs. avoidable (e.g., certain social ills). At the same time, though, as noted above, most Kafka scholars reject Brod’s interpretation of his friends’s life and work, Weinberg et al. are just as interested in correcting what they see as the vast number of misinterpretations of the same (Weinberg 2017b, p. 206), such as Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of a minor literature as applied to Kafka.

Echoing Kuehn’s evaluation of Brod’s work, Pazi narrows in on humanistic questions in her analysis of Ludwig Winder’s Die Pflicht:

In this, his last book, Winder returns to the central question of the “Prague Circle” writers; man’s moral strength to prove himself in the supreme test and to make the right choice between the “right” and “good” deed. By the achievement of his “ordinary man” Winder not only negates the conceptions of his former novels, he also attains an ethical level which was reached neither by Brod, who made this problematic notion the core of his works, nor by Felix Weltsch, for whom it was the subject of his philosophical writings and reflections and not even by Kafka, who had to pay with his life for his failure to pass this test. The last scene in Winder’s novel, when Rada, his wife, and comrades wait patiently to be led to their execution [for resisting the Nazis in some small way], exchanging small talk, recalling their modest wishes […] evokes the impression of a medieval death dance […].

(pp. 383–84)

In our postmodern era, the work of scholars like Brod and Pazi tends to be deconstructed and undervalued. Though his conclusions regarding what constitutes Prague German literature have also been thoroughly deconstructed, Goldstücker uses literary criticism in a similar manner, namely, to arrive at some kind of truth about the text without falling into dogmatism (Goldstücker [1963] 1973, p. 359). More recently, Alena Wagnerová asserts that, for the organizers of the Liblice conference in 1963, the power of Kafka’s texts lay in their “humanity and empathy,” and it was precisely “Kafka’s power of humanity with which the people could fight against the power of Stalinist violence” (Wagnerová 2024).58 H. G. Adler is no different in that respect. He does not avoid the concept or existence of truth, but is “obligated” to it, as is evident in the title (and content) of his collection of essays, Der Wahrheit verpflichtet (H. G. Adler 1998). In contrast, postmodern scholarship, such as Spector’s, is primarily concerned with the truth of non-truth. More valuable, I assert, is scholarship that is frank about the hierarchies of value upon which it implicitly or explicitly relies (O’Brien 2020, 2023, p. 53).

Spector’s position is that recent scholars examine the documented Prague German activity (i.e., frequent contact with the Czech artistic community, translations and cultural mediations, and a “persistent return to the idea of universalism in their expressionist, Zionist, or socialist works”) and project “onto this slim segment of the Bohemian population a face of liberal humanism” (Spector 2000, p. 33).59 Spector dismissively calls their work “historical ventriloquism” (p. 34). Engaging with such scholarship can be frustrating because—despite promising to do so—it does not deliver remedies to past mistakes. Instead, it creates an incoherent theoretical construct based on deconstructing “hierarchies of value (as abstract badness) while covertly relying on them in new formulations of truth” (O’Brien 2020, p. 85). In the process, affirmations of value (traditions) are coded as naive. Literary critics should be cautious when using postmodern theory as the foundation of their analysis as it excises authors from their time and place—thus also their value systems and attempts to wrestle with humanity’s questions. In his review of Spector’s book, for example, Jeremy Adler begins by calling it a “lively work” (J. Adler 2003, p. 163) and praises its general “ability to link politics, culture and literature in a series of illuminating individual studies” (p. 164). However, he also notes that the book clearly reveals its debt to postmodernism and skews the reading of the political landscape (“post-liberal”) “towards Spector’s own political agenda” (p. 164). In Jeremy Adler’s view, therefore, Spector “unhelpfully elides aesthetic and historical differences” (p. 163) in the service of abstract agentless power structures. At this juncture, I would recur to H. G. Adler’s comments about Kafka and the expressive power of language: utterances have content to be examined and evaluated and are not simply resistant or complicit in abstract power discourses.

This Special Issue seeks to bring the concept of humanism, humanistic value, and the debates about humanity’s big questions back into focus. Weinberg and his colleagues rightly foreground the historical context that was Prague from 1890 to 1938. However, as Robertson opines (Robertson 2020, p. 210), too little history can be as frustrating as too much. Other than fascinating historical interest in cultural “in-between spaces” (Weinberg 2013, p. 135), more recent scholarship does not necessarily answer the question of why we should be reading these texts today. Why are we deeply moved, for example, as Krolop notes, when we read Franz Werfel’s 1922 article about Prague (Werfel 1922, cited in Krolop 1964, p. 335)? For Krolop, it is as if Werfel were “trying to grab hold of the last little bit of something as it was disappearing” (1964, p. 335).60 Even if we affirmed the desirability of today’s much debated “transcultural competence,” or Max Brod’s “Distanzliebe” (mentioned above), these abilities are not developed without attention paid to the cultural work of answering big questions and solving big problems—or at least attempting to do so. As a recent research project asserts, the “notion of value is pervasive in modernist Prague” (Communities of Dialogue n.d.; cited in Spitz 2024) and many of the “intellectual traditions that shaped interwar Prague involve an explicit discussion of the notion of value” (Communities of Dialogue n.d.).61 The fields in which these discussions of value occurred include, for example, structural linguistics, Neo-Kantian philosophy, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology (Communities of Dialogue n.d.). Against this background broad intellectual interest, they assert that

A clear danger in approaching modernist Prague through the political logic of its “communities” or “territories” (cf. Spector 2000) is to overemphasise its fragmented, segregated nature and to preclude negatively (as alienation, ignorance, or competition) the interactions of its constituent elements. […] The defining feature of the crisis of identity expressed by Prague modernism, in this sense, is to be found not in the singular form of alienation or “deterritorialisation” of its ghettoised actors and communities, but rather in the fact that each community’s project to define its own identity and formulate its traditions was constantly confronted with, and constitutively depended on, the parallel efforts of its rivals.

(Communities of Dialogue n.d.)

Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to address all these intellectual endeavors specifically, it behooves us to remember that these authors were not just passive resonators of some kind of power discourse but engaged and active in such debates. With that, I turn to the papers included in this Special Issue.

4. Papers in This Special Issue

With this introductory article, I have attempted to provide non-experts with both a summary of historical contextual information as well as contributions by important secondary scholars of modernist Czech German authors. It bears repeating, as both Goldstücker and Pazi opine, that these writers grasped the historical importance of their time. Furthermore, as H. G. Adler and Krolop assert, the end of their fathers’ so-called liberal era sent these authors in search of new boundaries of truth. With Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as its inaugural author, Brod’s “Prague Circle” counted among its members some of the most sophisticated crafters of the German language. Though they may disagree with the criteria for inclusion, subsequent scholars note that many authors, such as Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Werfel, Ernst Weiss, Paul Kornfeld, Oskar Baum, Ludwig Winder, Otto Pick, Willy Haas, Johannes Urzidil, Hermann Ungar, Rudolf Fuchs, F.C. Weiskopf, Hermann Grab, Friedrich Torberg, Paul Adler, Hanna Demetz, and Hans Klaus, were well-received critically in their own time but are not well-known today, especially in the Anglophone world. For the purposes of this collection, we also include Lenka Reinerová (1916–2008) who, as Balcarová puts it, was the “final ray of the setting sun” of this unique collection of authors (Balcarová 2024). Though by no means exhaustive in its focus, this Special Issue brings much needed attention in English to this group of Czech German writers with the hope of attracting a broader array of scholars to its study.

The papers included here emphasize the intercultural, cross-cultural, and even international connections of these authors. Such qualities are potentially responsible for their past categorization as humanists (contrasted with the more nationalistic group of Sudeten Germans) as well as for their connections to traditions of value and search for meaning. Individually, the papers delve more deeply into such relationships and their mutual impact and influence. With their work on “Kafka’s last living heir” (Honegger 2005), Markéta Balcarová and Ernest Schonfield argue for the importance of Lenka Reinerová in discussions of Prague German literature. In “’Final Rays’ of a Setting Sun: Lenka Reinerová and the Legacy of ‘Prague German Literature,’” Balcarová first briefly reviews aspects of the Brod–Goldstücker controversy to argue that Reinerová belongs in this category. In fact, Reinerová attended the first Liblice conference on Franz Kafka and Prague and considered herself a successor of Egon Erwin Kisch, who himself was a member of the wider Prague Circle (Brod 1966, pp. 191–92), due to her “joy in documenting reality” (Balcarová 2024, p. 7), her use of a “Golem variant” (p. 8), her Kafkaesque encounters with institutions and state representatives (pp. 9–10), her “neo-Bohemianism” that assumes a mediator role in between cultures (p. 11), and her opposition to war and violence (p. 11). Balcarová thus highlights Reinerová’s active attempts to clarify what Prague German literature is and how she fits into the definition.

Ernst Schonfield brings us “Humanist Anecdotes in Hard Times” by Reinerová and her friend and mentor F.C. Weiskopf. Centering them both in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, Schonfeld echoes the title of the Special Issue. Weiskopf has recently fallen out of favor with scholars (see also Balcarová 2024, p. 7), but as Reinerová reminds readers, he was dedicated to a more just social organization of human beings, and this is worthy of analysis. Weiskopf rejected “artificially fuelled nationalist disputes” and saved many lives, including Reinerová’s (Schonfield 2024, p. 1). Expanding on Balcarová’s premise, Schonfield examines Weiskopf’s and Reinerová’s anecdotes from the “turbulent times of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s” (p. 2). Schonfield begins by narrating the (humanist) tradition of this prose form, whereby the “best anecdotes are instructive—they almost always imply a (humanist) moral framework” (p. 2) or the “humanist storytelling tradition” (p. 2). While Heinrich von Kleist and J.P. Hebel were responding to the violence of the Napoleonic Wars, Weiskopf and Reinerová dealt with the violence of World War Two (p. 3).

To contextualize these two authors and their work, Schonfield sketches out the show trials in post-1948 Czechoslovakia to which both Reinerová and Weiskopf were subjected. By 1952, “the humanist, cosmopolitan approach of Weiskopf and Reinerová was no longer welcome” (p. 3). Neither was their Jewish heritage and their native German language, which others now associated with the horrors of Nazi occupation. Schonfield argues, however, that from today’s perspective, they are as “relevant as ever” (p. 3) and they both juxtapose “extreme horror with some positive elements” (p. 4). Indeed, he argues that their chosen form enables them “to focus on what is most important to them, i.e., respect for other human beings” (p. 4). Without wishing to rehabilitate Weiskopf, Schonfield notes that these anecdotes avoid ideology and instead are “concerned primarily with human feeling” (p. 8) and are focused on “human values (e.g., truth, reason, love)”, giving them a “certain timeless, universal quality” (p. 9).

In his analysis of Reinerová’s later work, Schonfield shows that it is still clearly indebted to Weiskopf’s influence. In a series of anecdotes contrasting “the best and worst of her own life experiences” (p. 9), Reinerová takes her reader through the horrible events of her life while mining these experiences for the good. The latter explains her resilience in the face of trauma. As Schonfield notes, “[h]uman solidarity is a thing of lasting beauty for Reinerová” (p. 11), and her anecdotes refuse to dwell on the pathos of “inexpressibility” but instead “express the agency and determination of a survivor who maintains her humanist values as a mark of respect for those who have died” (p. 12). As a humanist storyteller, Reinerová dwells “patiently” on “moments of comfort and solace” (p. 12). In conclusion, Schonfield asserts that, though both texts have a clear moral and political framework, they are not focused on political ideology but on individual human stories and are always “worth reading for their insights” (p. 12).

In “Emptiness and Enslavement,” Michal Smrkovsky analyzes texts of three Moravian-born Prague German writers, Ernst Weiß (1882–1940),62 Hermann Ungar (1893–1929), and Ludwig Winder (1889–1946), for the “recurring motif of fear of intimacy and the paradoxical actions of their characters” (Smrkovsky 2024, p. 1). By leaning into object relations theory, Smrkovsky shows that the fear of “interpersonal relationships as a threat to one’s own identity” is a “central theme not only for Franz Kafka, but also for many of his Prague peers” (p. 1). With the double bind vis-à-vis the desirability of intimacy with another human being, characters perceive “the escape into fantasies, seclusion, and a disturbed sexuality” as “independence,” and thus strength (p. 8). Ultimately, however, this leads to “feelings of weakened identity, emptiness, and insecurity associated with the absence of valuable relationships and trust in others” with very few characters possessing the will to overcome these difficulties (pp. 8–9). Smrkovsky finally contextualizes this inability in certain motifs of expressionist literature and notes that these themes, such as the inability to form relationships or emotional parasitism, “are explored more deeply in their works than elsewhere” (p. 9). This theme, he asserts, carries relevance today. For Smrkovsky, it not only re-validates scholars like Krolop who analyzed these traits early on but also “offers hope for [the] renaissance” of such scholarship, as our situation today is “often seen as an age of alienation” (p. 9).

Konstantin Kountouroyanis explores the work of Rudolf Fuchs (1890–1942) as “An Underestimated Cultural Intermediary and Social Critic in Times of Conflict.” Kountouroyanis’ analysis shows how making claims of value can provide readers with insight into the particularity of this time and place—as well as the ability, in Brod’s terms, of these figures to build bridges of connection rather than recreate national division. As Kountouroyanis asserts, Fuchs’ work demonstrates the “power of literature” (Kountouroyanis 2025, p. 16) and “yields insights into the management of cultural diversity and ideological conflicts, as well as the upholding of social values amidst political volatility” (p. 1). At its core, says Kountouroyanis, “are three primary values: social justice, a commitment to intercultural understanding, and a critique of oppression in all its forms” (p. 16).

Like many others, Kountouroyanis acknowledges Max Brod’s contribution to what became known as the Prague Circle but notes, as do Jungmayr and Weinberg, that Brod’s categorizations of people led to “obdurate misunderstandings about the true complexity and size of the Prague Circle” (p. 1). Kountouroyanis suggests that Brod’s brief mention of Fuchs did not give the latter his due, thus, his purpose is to fill in some of those gaps with extensive archival research. He provides important corrective biographical information and traces Fuchs’ development from an enthusiast for expressionism to a translator of the poetry of Czech national poet Petr Bezruč and to his own later socialist writings (p. 2). Interestingly, Fuchs spoke more Czech than German as a child, hence his move to Prague and enrollment in a German school required significant adjustment. However, by all accounts, he achieved native or native-like fluency in both languages, which was vital to his role as a cultural mediator (pp. 3–4).63 Like others mentioned above, Fuchs “understood the National Revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reaction to Germanizing policies and aimed to strengthen Czech literary and national identity to achieve parity with German culture,” most likely for a German audience (p. 9).

Fuchs’ “increasing engagement with themes of social justice and a focus on Czech-German mediation” (p. 7) led to his embrace of Communism (p. 9) as the answer to national conflicts and social struggles. Like Schonfield, Kountouroyanis mentions the Slanský trials and the fate of many devout Communists under Stalinism, especially Jewish members of this “Circle”: their bilingualism and ability to mediate between cultures was no longer necessary and was, instead, suspect (p. 13). For today’s reader, argues Kountouroyanis, “Fuchs’ socially critical mediation can offer deep insights into the dynamics of cultural and ideological values under conditions of political volatility” (p. 16). Fuchs’ translation activity reveals his “dedication to amplifying marginalized voices and bridging divides,” while Fuchs’ own texts are “characterized by existential reflection and a quest for stability amidst chaos” (pp. 16–17). Kountouroyanis concludes that the “loss of these islands of reflection and depth poses a grave risk” and that a return to “deliberate, meaningful communication […] is more critical now than ever” (p. 17).

In “Mosaics of a Broken World: Hermann Grab’s Social Science, Literature and Music,” Malte Spitz traces Grab’s response to the “dissolution of values” (Broch 1952) which he witnessed in the modern world. In Spitz’s view, Grab used something akin to mosaic tiles from different fields, such as sociology, art, and literature, to fashion this response and point to something beyond the dissolution. As Spitz shows, this metaphor for an author whom both Brod and H. G. Adler considered the future of the Prague Circle is apt:64 “Grab consistently challenged literary traditions, developing and rethinking them in the context of historical and personal upheavals,” while also exploring the social causes of the “European catastrophe” (p. 2).

Grab’s academic pursuits between 1924 and 1928 brought him into contact with the “scientific triangle” of Heidelberg, Cologne, and Frankfurt and with social science thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm (p. 4). However, in Grab’s view, “social scientists had only analyzed the dissolution of values without using gained insights to improve social conditions” (p. 5) and instead were resigned to the absolute rationalization of everyday life as the solution to human social problems (p. 1). Thus, Grab turned towards the “socially impactful potential of the arts, particularly literature and music” (p. 2).65 Echoing H. G. Adler, Spitz notes that Grab successfully juxtaposes his role models (Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka) with his unique experiments to refine and condense literary language (p. 7; see also H. G. Adler [1976] 2010, pp. 29–31).

Spitz’s work traces the extent to which Grab’s stance on such issues remain present in his fiction and non-fiction by analyzing Grab’s one published novel, Der Stadtpark, and several short stories written between 1932 and 1938. To support this point, Spitz also delves into Grab’s newspaper articles from the 1930s, which emphasize cultural bridge building and social commonalities. In addition, Grab’s introduction of German and Czech composers on his German radio program provides yet another example of the inaccuracy of the “three-fold ghetto” metaphor (p. 9). Instead, Grab’s critical insight into his contemporary surroundings, his ideas to improve “social coexistence” (p. 12), and his search for “true harmony” (Schönwiese 1959, p. 265; cited in Spitz 2024, p. 12) require a different metaphor. At the same time, assembling these mosaics is not Grab’s nor even Spitz’s role. Instead, they lay bare the “events that led Europe to its deadliest war” (p. 12) in invite the reader to join them together.

In “The Prague-Frankfurt Orient Express: Eschatology, New Humanism, and the Birth of Dialogical Thinking,” Baharak Beizaei extends the discussion beyond the typical “circles” of Prague German literature. Indeed, she makes the point that the particular “Dialogfähigkeit,” or dialogical capability (Jungmayr 2014), of the Prague German Circle was an example of the “cross-pollination” of the time period. A concurrent group called the Patmos Circle transformed this dialogical capability into a “structured form of dialogical thinking” and used this dialogical capacity as a “foundational element” in the “promotion of a New Humanism, which sought to integrate various religious traditions within a secular framework” (Beizaei 2024, p. 1). Both the Prague German Circle and the Patmos Circle sought to transcend nationalist narratives, instead looking to a “universal approach to knowledge and identity” while acknowledging that universals cannot fully capture every element of a culture (p. 2). Like Hermann Grab, the members of the Patmos Circle, and then also the Forte Circle, were critical of rationalist notions of progress and advocated a “renewed humanistic ethos that acknowledged historical struggles” (p. 2). The intellectuals included in Beizaei’s article embraced secular values as a way to interact with public concerns and debates. At the same time, however, they called for a “philosophy of dialogue” centered on such final theological questions as “creation, revelation, and redemption” (p. 3) that assimilationist trends had made opaque. Approaching the work of the Prague German Circles from this different angle, Beizaei highlights a secularizing approach via comparison to circles in Germany that grappled with the three major religious traditions in Western Europe (p. 11).

As Beizaei argues, “Brod’s exploration of the three spiritual powers—Christianity, Judaism, and Paganism—provides a thought-provoking perspective from which to historicize the Patmos Circle’s predominant concerns” (Brod 1921, 1970; Beizaei 2024, p. 4). With this tripartite structure, they attempted to unite the diversity of thought and world views with a common language for discussion (Beizaei 2024, p. 5) around a common purpose (p. 6). This common language developed around “New Humanism” and the concept “creatureliness,” that is, the state of the human condition in a modern (fallen or secular) world. Despite their many intellectual differences, the members of the Patmos Circle shared a commitment to “adult education and spiritual renewal in the aftermath of the Great War” (p. 6). Against this background, Beizaei explores Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Rosenzweig and Barth shared an overarching goal: “to trace, rather than negate, the borders of confessions, groups, and circles […] and to fold them back into the lived experience of truth” (p. 10) thus also transcending nationalist narratives (p. 11). Beizaei rehearses “this fraught history of circles” with their corresponding publications because they make up “a significant foil against which one might gauge the secularizing impulse at work in the Prague Circles’ preoccupation with values such as literary worldliness, creatureliness, and world literature” (p. 11).

In “Mind the Gap: On the Absence of Writing Women in German-Language Literature of the Czech Lands,” Veronika Jičínská and Anna-Dorothea Ludewig draw attention to a “particularly striking gap” in Czech German-language literature around 1900. They ask pointedly: where are the women in the Prague German Circles? Their purpose is therefore to discuss “female writing forms” beyond “male interpretive sovereignties” (Jičínská and Ludewig 2024, p. 1) and to call for approaches that would make possible the inclusion of such forms and their authors in literary histories.

Jičínská and Ludewig begin by clarifying the “female-specific social realities” of the time to highlight non-canonical literary genres, such as translation or journalism. Such genres tended to be preferred by women at that time for cultural, social, and historical reasons (p. 1). They note that, according to literary histories covering Prague at the turn of the last century, there is a dearth of female voices in both German-language literature and journalism among the German-speaking minorities of the Czech lands (p. 1). Since this state of affairs stands in stark contrast to other European cities around 1900, Jičínská and Ludewig posit that there may be other reasons why women writers are absent from literary histories. Indeed, there were several German-speaking women active during this time but, as is common for such authors, they fell into obscurity after their deaths. Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, these women (like their male counterparts) came from Jewish families of the intellectual middle and upper classes. In wanting to go beyond “male interpretive sovereignties,” they build on Wilma Iggers’ Women of Prague (Iggers 1995) but focus exclusively on the German-speaking community (p. 2).

Jičínská and Ludewig are frank about the problems with such research, citing, for example, the lack of source material and lack of access to the public sphere. To fill in the “gaps,” they shift to “minor genres,” relying heavily on Deleuze and Guattari’s term “minor literature.”66 In addition, this allows them to investigate the cultural potential and “subversive power of female writing” in this context (p. 3). Even though women could not profit from all the (educational) institutions that German-speaking Prague had to offer (see above), they could, due to a shared common language, socialize “in an environment that was not defined nationally or regionally but rather transnationally” (p. 4). Female journalists wrote for both conservative and international newspapers in Prague, Vienna, and Berlin (p. 4), but, as they note, such work is often under-researched. At the same time, Jičínská and Ludewig maintain that “systematic marginalization” does not fully explain women’s exclusion from literary histories (p. 13). Recovery efforts must also reconsider the “value of ‘minor’ genres and topics” and the expansion of our definitions of literary texts (p. 13). In addition, an analysis of women’s texts could shed light on the reality of all German speakers in the Czech lands, namely, their belonging to an ever-shrinking linguistic minority in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire with varying “national, ethnic, and linguistic affiliations” (p. 14). This final claim is a call to future scholars to expand their notion of what constitutes a valuable contribution.

A closer examination may therefore require us to “clarify some assumptions about Prague German literature” (p. 5). To begin this process, Jičínská and Ludewig contribute three biographical case studies: Ossip Schubin (Aloisia Kirschner), Hermine Hanel, and Elsa Brod. Ossip Schubin (who seems to fit Cohen’s description mentioned above of aristocratic loyalty to a multi-ethnic identity) was the author of 20 novels and numerous novellas but is hardly mentioned in the secondary literature about the Prague German Circle, “to which her oeuvre can certainly be attributed” (p. 5). Jičínská and Ludewig’s frustration is evident when they note that Max Brod

did not mention her in his book on the so called Prague Circle […], although he compiles an almost endless list of male Prague (German-language) authors in the broadest sense. Female writers or literary agents rarely appear, not even Brod’s own wife. Brod’s idea of literary circles, with Kafka as center and culmination, did not include women, he simply did not notice them, and could not see them as (equal) colleagues. Unfortunately, his list narrowed the picture and still shapes the image of Prague German Literature today.

(p. 5)67

They find equal fault with contemporary scholars (e.g., Becher et al. 2017) have not filled this gap, especially since an author such as Schubin provides insight into the challenges that were involved Prague’s multicultural society and the danger of nationalism. As Jičínská and Ludewig conclude, “Schubin was of course not a visionary of a modern democracy, but rather a keen observer of the social conditions of her time. She combined ideas of humanity, equality and tolerance with sympathetic descriptions of the aristocracy, creating texts that are still as entertaining as intelligent” (p. 8).

With Hermine Hanel, Jičínská and Ludewig jump ahead a full generation. Born in Prague in 1874 to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, Hanel is a “precise observer of social conditions” (p. 10). Jičínská and Ludewig assert that her work deserves attention because it sheds light “on the situation of (bourgeois) women in Prague” around 1900 and, despite an entertaining style, it demonstrates “her sharp eye for injustice and mechanisms of social exclusion. Hanel’s autofictional approach also opens up interesting links to contemporary Jewish literature” (p. 11).

The third and final case study is Max Brod’s wife, Elsa Brod, who participated in many of the “circles” which her husband describes in his book (Brod 1966). She was, for example, a public reader for Kafka’s stories (Jičínská and Ludewig 2024, p. 12) and a successful translator into German from Czech, French, Italian, and Russian (p. 13). Despite this, Elsa Brod is not mentioned in her husband’s autobiography nor is her “contribution to the remembrance of Franz Kafka”, namely, the four-page list of Kafka’s work that she compiled after his death (p. 13).

With “Marriage and the Devil: The Literary Exchange, Values, and Power Structures of Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská,” Darowska is responding to Jičínská and Ludewig’s call. She speculates in her article about dialogic exchange and “reflections on being human, the world, religion, and prose” that well-known Prague journalist Jesenská shared with Kafka (Darowska 2025, p. 1).68 Darowska reads works by Jesenská (and Kafka’s admiring response to them) for the “stance, attitudes, and politics that are needed for social change” (p. 1).

While Franz Kafka surely needs no introduction to the reader, this may not be true for Milena Jesenská, especially in English-speaking circles. She was well known in her own time and is a focus of academic scholarship today, including biographical articles and anthologies of her journalistic work. As Darowska notes, her relationship with Kafka has been the subject of attention since Willy Haas published Kafka’s letters to her in 1952 (p. 1; see also, for example, Sayer 2022, pp. 13–16). However, Darowska asserts that no previous work has focused on the topic of their (shared) humanistic values and “their responses and/or resistance to unequal power dynamics” (Darowska 2025, p. 2). Furthermore, though there has been ample attention paid to this relationship, “[e]ven Reiner Stach, Kafka’s acclaimed biographer, fails to recognize the intellectual significance of Jesenská’s work” (p. 2). As Darowska shows, however, Kafka recognized Jesenská’s talents and Darowska sheds light on possible mutual influences and, more broadly, the role of such exchanges in the activities and heritage of the Prague German Circles.

Darowska mentions Brod’s seminal work on the Prague Circle (Brod 1966), and like Jičínská and Ludewig, notes that it consists largely of fellow men. Still, Brod affirmed at the time the literary quality of Jesenská’s work (Darowska 2025, p. 2). Though he did not mention Jesenská specifically, Darowska asserts the qualities that he attributed to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Bertha von Suttner—that they were humanists to the core, upstanding, and willing to fight for a good cause—are valid for Jesenská (p. 2). This seems appropriate since Jesenská’s “underground journalism” during the Nazi occupation led to her arrest, imprisonment, and eventually her death in Ravensbrück (p. 3).

Assuming that not all readers will be familiar with Jesenská’s background (though Jičínská and Ludewig discuss the general difficulties women intellectuals faced in this period), Darowska provides some biographical information. Like many women of her time, Jesenská began by writing fashion columns but was particularly interested in cultural, social, and political issues (p. 3). With her particularly expressive style, Jesenská did not just criticize social situations but also had suggestions for change in the real world.69 In addition, like Fuchs and Elsa Brod, both mentioned above, she translated multiple languages into Czech for Prague periodicals. Thus, she was acquainted with Kafka’s work before she met the man, having translated “Der Heizer,” which was published in Czech in 1920 (pp. 3–4).

Darowska briefly reviews the chronology of their relationship and then breaks down her analysis of the intertextuality between these two authors into three separate sections, each according to a different key word: marriage, the devil, and the castle. Based on this intertextual exchange, Darowska moves on to an investigation of shared values, a “potential connection” that has not been “sufficiently explored in the scholarly literature on the Prague German Circle” (pp. 12–13). Much like Jičínská and Ludewig would like to forge a new scholarly path, Darowska’s speculation about this possible connection is meant to inspire future scholars. Brod and Kafka both “engaged in contemporary debates about ethnicity, religion, and belonging,” and this was also true of Jesenská (p. 13). Darowska argues that “Kafka’s prescience about the political situation could have given him deeper insight into Jesenská’s humanity” and thus, by transcending the timeframe of their relationship, his comments can give us deeper insight into Jesenská’s work: Jesenská disregarded a “natural impulse for self-protection and became, in fact, ‘a rescuer’ for Jews and Czechs, fulfilling Kafka’s earlier description of her” (p. 15). Jesenská called for solidarity with non-Nazi Germans in the Sudetenland as well as with the German refugees from Nazi Germany. Significantly, she refused opportunities to emigrate but continued writing directly and honestly about her contemporary situation, even after the catastrophic events of 1938 and 1939 (p. 15). According to Darowska, how much her relationship with Kafka influenced her later stance on these issues must remain speculative—but also the subject of future research. It could be that “Kafka’s deeply personal accounts of antisemitism in Czech society [… strengthened] her already strong opposition to antisemitism” (p. 18).

In her final section, “This (In)human World,” Darowska highlights the values these two authors held in common and the different manifestations of their fearless accounts of human nature. Kafka’s “almost unprecedented ability” to depict human beings in society (p. 19) is well known, making him one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. As Darowska asserts, however, work on Kafka does not take into consideration the high esteem in which he held Jesenská’s writing, a fact confirmed by Brod (p. 20). Thus, it could be that further research on Jesenská, and all of the authors mentioned in this Special Issue, would enhance our understanding of Prague and/or Czech German literature, its intertextuality, and its intercultural efforts, in a way that transcends postmodern epistemological obsessions, and places them firmly in the context of actual historical events and universal human concerns.