Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War-era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, a wave of new Kafka translations, editions, and critical works swept across the English-speaking world. In retrospect, it is not hard to understand what fueled this vogue.
As Mark Greif writes in his study of midcentury literature and ideas, Kafka’s writing “seemed to show the condition of the individual under a continuous line of totalitarians—first Hitler in Western Europe, now Stalin in the East—with Kafka usefully, geographically, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the border between them.” This uncomfortable intermediate position, and the anachronistic image of Kafka as a writer suspended between two “totalitarian” worlds, would help him become the most important missing figure in a history of cultural exchange between dissenting American and Czech writers during the Cold War era. But just as Kafka was no prophet, his eminent Cold War status was hardly inevitable: the year 1947 was the pivotal moment for this unforeseen development.
Just as a “Kafka craze” was beginning to take hold in the postwar United States, there were tentative signs that the neglected Prague author might also enjoy a Czech-language renaissance in his native city. But then, in February 1948, the Communist Party seized control of Czechoslovakia, and Kafka was declared both a dangerous relic of interwar Prague’s decadent bourgeoisie and a corrupted symbol of the postwar existentialism being imported from abroad. His writing disappeared from public view for almost a decade.
Although Kafka was slowly “rehabilitated” in the period after 1956, he was once again banned after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For many American intellectuals, there was an attractive irony to the idea that Kafka, popularized in the United States as a writer of anti-totalitarian fables, was proscribed in his home country. By the last decade of the Cold War, the image of Kafka as a prototypical dissident writer had taken hold in both the American and Czech literary imagination.
But in 1947, not everyone yet agreed about Kafka. “I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer,” the American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in a review that year, “and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.” As he observed, since the Second World War, Kafka’s reputation had risen in the United States like a “meteorological phenomenon.” Wilson, however, remained unconvinced.