## Metadata - Author: [[London Review of Books (LRB)]] - Full Title: Will Self's Kafka Journey: A Prague Walking Tour - Category: #articles - Summary: Read more by Will Self in the LRB: https://lrb.me/willselfyt Sign up to the LRB newsletter: https://lrb.me/yousignup Will Self visits Prague for a walking tour in search of Franz Kafka’s genius loci. In the film, Will visits several Kafka sights as part of his research for a digital essay for the LRB looking at Kafka's short story, 'The Country Doctor': http://thespace.lrb.co.uk/ Directed, filmed and edited by Ian Potts. The project was supported by the Arts Council/BBC Space project. ABOUT THE LRB Since 1979, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English. Each issue contains up to 15 long reviews and essays by academics, writers and journalists. There are also shorter art and film reviews, as well as poems and a lively letters page. A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move o... - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3s&v=niIf080qSfE ## Full Document in prague i met up with libra taylor whose task it was to attempt to guide me through a maze of kafka sides i've come here because i'm researching for an essay i'm writing about kafka and in particular about a short story he wrote here in prague called a country doctor yes i mean one of his biographers says that with somewhat inexorable logic our first stop is kafka's place of birth yeah but this is his birth house right on the corner there and there is that statue okay so he gets he gets he gets the cafe with black coffee and the nice little flower baskets along here uh he gets the strange bass relief on the corner of the house and he gets a street named after him or a place the square that he gets a whole square he'd he'd loved it wouldn't he how big do you think the jewish community in prague is now two two people maybe well you know it's funny because we don't even have a jewish rabbi he's not actually technically jewish because yes his mother is not jewish well that's only jews who say that so the jews would say that no i tell people my mother was just like you're jewish there's only jesus to say that no i just wonder if there's anybody anybody to read the hebrew so the at around the time of kafka's birth the german-speaking population in prague was about 30 000 of them maybe half were jews so kafka was inside an ethnic minority inside a linguistic minority linguistic and cultural minority islanded in an increasingly czech-speaking exterior under the pressures of czech nationalism and i could have fought that guy it could have been it could have been a description of a struggle it could have been good and within that captured by this kind of architecture this is another kind of ghetto he's within a gaffer here as well he's confined in this small central area where where almost all the german speakers were the next day we went in search of a small village where kafka lived for a while after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis i thought we were on the main i think maybe we overshot it this was the sort of environment that he pictures in his story a country doctor i was in great difficulty an urgent journey was facing me a seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant a severe snow storm filled the space between him and me i had a carriage a light one with large wheels entirely suitable for our country roads wrapped up in furs with the bag of instruments in my hand i was already standing in the courtyard ready for the journey but the horse was missing the horse my own horse had died the previous night as a result of over exertion in this icy winter my servant goal was at that very moment running around the village to see if she could borrow a horse but it was hopeless i knew that and i stood there useless increasingly covered with snow becoming all the time more immobile the girl appeared at the gate alone she was swinging the lantern of course who is now going to lend her his horse for such a journey i walked once again across the courtyard i couldn't see what to do distracted and tormented i kicked my foot against the cracked door of the pigsty which had not been used for years the door opened and banged to and fro on its hinges a warmth and smell as if from horses came out a dim stall lantern on a rope swayed inside a man huddled down in the stall below showed his open blue-eyed face shall i hitch up he asked crawling out on all fours i didn't know what to say and bent down to see what was still in the stall the servant girl stood beside me one doesn't know the sorts of things one has stored in one's own house she said and we both laughed hey brother hey sister the groom cried out and two horses powerful animals with strong flanks shoved their way one behind the other legs close to the bodies lowering their well-formed heads like camels and getting through the door space which they completely filled only through the powerful movements of their rumps but right away they stood up straight long legged with thick steaming bodies help him i said and the girl obediently hurried to hand the wagon harness to the groom but as soon as she was beside him the groom puts his arms around her and pushes his face against hers she screams out and runs over to me on the girl's cheek were red marks from two rows of teeth you brute i cry out in fury do you want the whip kafka writes so much about movement you know that opening seen in the country doctor it's all about movement it's all about moving some fast movements and crazy it's all about posture it's all about the way people hold their bodies it's all about the way that they physically and interact there's no sense of his physicality in a way in this place which is going to take me a while here one of the great here we are sort of suffering the kind of see i think kafka foretold the digital world that's why i think his permanent you know i think it's elias connetty who says of him that you know the kafka esque moment is always the moment of the kind of anticipation of a kind of limitless number of possibilities that is potentiated by any action that seems to me what the kind of digital world torments us with is this kind of strange yeah so this one i like a lot the true path is along a rope not a rope suspended way up in the air but rather only just over the ground it seems more like a tripwire than a tight rope returning to prague i wanted to find a famous balcony a site of a terrible childhood trauma experienced by kafka at the hands of his father so you know this is in his letter to his father that's where the trauma started this is one of the pivotal traumas of his life so here is house minuta and they were here for eight years and here kafka's three sisters ellie valley and ottler were all born excuse me can you see the old courtyard of the building inside in here of house minute can you see inside it's not boss she speaks check thank you so much so this is where franz kafka yeah yes and his daddy put him on one of these balconies two years yeah just really no no no they wouldn't no longer than that they were here um they were here at house minute for nine years eight years 1889 to 96 and his father put him on one of these balconies you kept saying daddy daddy i want a glass of water i want a glass of what i can't sleep daddy and his father put him on one of these balconies that was it how was it that was it between them it was over thank you so much everything you can just pray for this is so this is the characteristic begging posture of prague why would you choose to suffocate yourself in such an overpowering way will they be checked or would they be from further east i don't it could be from anywhere let's ask him what are these this is a one-pound tool okay here you go where are you from ask him where he's from your check from prague okay and you're welcome that'll do it's like the kind of you know in some cities you get um people pretending to be statues but you know their kids their middle class kids have been to university cafe is a writer that if you read them when you're an adolescent has an enormous impact because lurking behind the ideas and the language is this moaning fetching tormented sexually obsessed adolescent mind you think i think there is in some of this a lot of stuff anyway he really speaks to and if you're a writer and you read him when you're young yeah he's very influential you know you can think of lots of writers in the english language whose first books are kafka ski and mcewen would be another example his novella the concrete garden is a kefkas story in which the children murder their parents and bury them beneath the back garden so and the stuff he's written subsequently is very different it's naturalistic it's realistic so he lost the cafes feel to his work some people say that in uh german he's a really quite funny writer he's amusing even funnier than the museum of torture i think he was uh ambivalent about his work he both loved and hated it uh the way that most serious writers are but that his own personality was one of such rigid perfectionism that he felt when he flipped over to hating it he hated it more he constantly saw what he had failed to achieve though actually in the instructions he gives to his friend max broad to destroy the work they're ambiguous and broad said that he when kafka said to him that he was going to do this max brad said to him well you know if you make me your literary executor responsible for your papers after your death i will disobey your wishes so now why would broad lie about that you know he said if kafka knew that and if kafka knew that he was going to disobey him then why did he stay with it you know it's a cubist cafe so it was built in the cubist period right he went to cafes and he was a salonia he went to saloons and he talked and he laughed and he flirted the image we have of a gloomy tormented man to some extent comes later and of course his friends always said of him that there's a big disjunction between when you read what he writes and things like letters to my father or in his journals and what he was actually like in person personally it was a barrel of laughs this is beautiful isn't it oh you can smoke in the restaurant fantastic so most restaurants have a smoking section yeah oh we're gonna have to go and smoke in a restaurant i haven't been able to do that in london for 10 years how exciting is that it's like a time capsule but i immediately remember that he is a stranger that i don't know where he comes from and he's helping me out of his own free will when everyone else is refusing to as if he knows what i was thinking he takes no offense at my threat but turns around to me once more still busy with the horses then he says climb in and in fact everything is ready i noticed that i've never before traveled with such a beautiful team of beasts and i climb in happily but i'll take the reins you don't know the way i say of course he says i'm not going with you i'm staying with rosa no screams rosa and runs into the house with an accurate premonition of the inevitability of her fate i hear the door chain rattling as she sets it in place i hear the lock click i see how in addition she runs down the corridor and through the rooms putting out all the lights in order to make herself impossible to find you're coming with me i say to the groom or i'll give up the journey no matter how urgent it is it's not my intention to give you the girl as the price of the trip giddy up he says and claps his hands the carriage is torn away like a piece of wood in a current i still hear how the door of my house is breaking down and splitting apart under the groom's onslaught and then my eyes and ears are filled with a roaring sound which overwhelms all my senses at once but only for a moment then i am already there as if the farmyard of my invalid opens up immediately in front of my courtyard gate the horses stand quietly the snowfall has stopped moonlight all around the sick man's parents rush out of the house his sister behind them they almost lift me out of the carriage i get nothing from their confused talking in the sick room one can hardly breathe the air the neglected cooking stove is smoking i want to push open the window but first i'll look at the sick man thin without fever not cold not warm with empty eyes without a shirt the young man under the stuffed quilt he used himself up hangs around my throat and whispers in my ear doctor let me die i look around no one has heard the parents stand silently leaning forward and wait for my opinion the sister has brought a stool for my handbag i open the bag and look among my instruments the young man constantly gropes at me from the bed to remind me of his request i take some tweezers test them in the candle light and put them back yes i think blasphemously in such cases the gods do help they send the missing horse even add a second one because it's urgent and even throw in a groom as a bonus now for the first time i think once more of rosa what am i doing how am i saving her how do i pull her out from under this groom ten miles away from her with uncontrollable horses in the front of my carriage these horses who have somehow loosened their straps are pushing open the window from outside i don't know how each one is sticking its head through a window and unmoved by the crying of the family is observing the invalid i'll go back right away i think as if the horses were ordering me to journey back but i allow the sister who thinks i'm in a daze because of the heat to take off my fur coat a glass of rum is prepared for me the old man claps me on the shoulder the sacrifice of his treasure justifies this familiarity i shake my head in the narrow circle of the old man's thinking i was not well that's the only reason i refuse to drink the mother stands by the bed and entices me over i follow and as a horse nays loudly at the ceiling lay my head on the young man's chest which trembles under my wet beard that confirms what i know the young man is healthy his circulation is a little off saturated with coffee by his caring mother but he's healthy and best pushed out of bed with a sharp i'm no improver of the world and let him lie there i am employed by the district and do my duty to the full right to the point where it's almost too much badly paid but i'm generous and ready to help with the poor i still have to look after rosa and then the young man may have his way and i want to die too what am i doing here in this endless winter my horse is dead and there's no one in the village who'll lend me his i have to drag my team out of the pigsty if they hadn't happened to be horses i'd have had to travel with pigs that's the way it is and i nod to the family they know nothing about it and if they did know they wouldn't believe it incidentally it's easy to write prescriptions but difficult to come to an understanding with people kafka's on-off fiancee was a young woman from berlin called felice bower it looks different to me let's check it out again man she had no connection with the city of prague apart from her relationship with the writer and yet somewhere on this street her name has been curiously immortalized their relationship was a mesolios from the get-go introduced in by max broad it went on and fits and starts for oh about four years with two engagements and a quarter of a million words expended on kafka's part in a correspondence that for sheer nutritional unpleasantness is probably unrivaled in the history of letter writing on his deathbed kafka was asked about her and i think he said words to the effect that she wasn't a bonnie girl but she had a quick and live body or something of that form and stiff got in a way to explain his attraction to her she traveled in office equipment in a kind of early form of the dictaphone so she was oddly on the kind of cutting edge of technology in the 1900s and kind of office equipment and you know she was independent and well's a well set up young woman you might say and presumably her family felt that even the marriage to the rather etiolated kafka who after all had his doctorate was a qualified lawyer and worked here for the kingdom of bohemians bohemia's workers insurance organization was better than nothing but it's uh you know in the context of kafka's life and then of this obsessive and ultimately fruitless uh relationship with felice power the felice brasserie parisienne really stands out in the prague full of uh not so much kafkaology is kind of kafka tatology as a really startling example anyway let's go into the insurance office as was now the hotel century entering the premises of this non-descript upper middle range international hotel in the middle of the foyer we discovered a bust of the man himself so the prague workers insurance association where kafka worked on and laterally as his tuberculosis began to take its toll off for oh 14 years and which many people feel forms the kind of you know buff backdrop to the writer's obsession with grinding and you know logic chopping obfuscatory bureaucracies but in fact kafka was a well-liked employee here rose up to being a senior clerical officer given a lot of responsibility for judging the validity of uh workers claims for insurance it was a scheme introduced under the austro hungarian empire kafka you know in the in the line of famous kind of clerical writers of the 19th century who you know may have been kind of an early 20th century may have been tied to their desks and bemoaned the work they had to do but somehow acquired perhaps a sort of freedom of mind and thought and a kind of intensity of focus on their creative work that was allowed for by the fact that they uh were engaged with something so kind of other uh during their working lives you know not not for kafka the kind of imprisonment of grub street and the daily churning out of cultural bubble wrap for various publications that some of us are engaged in he never you know wrote notes or extensive first drafts he tended to write in kind of you know single drafts with a great intensity after a lot of thought and concentration and there is very little of his writing outside of the fabulous fiction fabulous fiction itself this was one piece about her air show at breccia that he attended with max broad and his brother and that's about the only kind of bit of journalism let alone journalism that kafka ever indulged in and a sort of kind of purity and obsession with his fictional muse was kind of unparalleled in some ways rather monstrous they're not going to let us into this room because it's had a guest in there and the guest is left and it's messy maybe we could prevail upon this czech chamber made to clean it up for us in advance it's a situation that has all the strange sexual ambiguities of kafka's own attitude towards women in his fiction of course there's a middle class prague due his sexual initiations probably would have been through czech women of the chamber made class um i'm rather fantasizing as to what the desire inside kafka's old office may be like now has a rhino run amok in there with a lot of chocolate from the mini bar we just don't know now at this point my visit might have come to an end they have once more called for my help unnecessarily i'm used to that with the help of my night bell the entire region torments me but that this time i had to sacrifice rosa as well this beautiful girl who lives in my house all year long and whom i scarcely notice this sacrifice is too great and i must somehow in my own head subtly rationalize it away for the moment in order not to let loose at this family you cannot even with their best will give me rosa back again but as i am closing up my bag and calling for my fur coat the family is standing together the father sniffing the glass of rum in his hand the mother probably disappointed in me what more do these people expect tearfully biting her lips and the sister flapping at a very bloody hand towel i am somehow ready in the circumstances to concede that the young man is perhaps nonetheless sick i go to him he smiles up at me as if i was bringing him the most nourishing kind of soup ah now both horses are winning the noise is probably supposed to come from higher regions in order to illuminate my examination and now i found out that yes indeed the young man is ill to the west of the old town of prague we went looking for the place where kafka lived with his sister for a short time and where he began his novel the trial we found that during the early years of world war one he lived in this grisly and nondescript building perhaps entirely appropriate for the task he had set himself anyway it took him a while to get out of home because by the time kafka moved into a single room in his uh sister's apartment in this house uh in 1914 he would have been 27 years old which is you know taking a while to get away from home but it's so ethical moment for him both because he began writing the trial here and because he um managed to leave home for four weeks he went then he went back again the reason was um you know notoriously kafka said that he wished ill on all the combatants in the first war and that he felt you know there's a there's an oft retold myth that he was in some way uh disjointed from from the impact of the first world war but of course the reason he ended up here was because his sister's husband had been conscripted and she moved back to the family apartment and there was no space for him there so there was a practical impact from the first war and i think that there was a psychological impact as well i think it is in there i think it is in the in the country doctor i think it is in the stories uh he writes uh throughout the first war and the novels he works on uh how could it not be you know when joyce was asked what he did during the first world war he said i wrote eulessies because you know writing a novel about the protagonist who's a pacific jew was his strongest possible counterpoint to the kind of gotten damarang of of the war which he was islanded from in switzerland and i think kafka in his own way with his own rather more kind of minotaury stories and writings was reflecting the same god and dameron this is the the kafka family home uh in the late 1910s and into the next decade uh nicolas strasser on a plot redeveloped after the ghetto the old ghetto had been demolished and it was a fancy new apartment block facing onto this bridge and facing onto the river the bridge was unfinished at the time the kafkas lived on the top floor of the apartment block and kafka apparently dubbed the sort of pontoon of the bridge that was going out the suicide bridge was a productive period for him and he was much enamored of his view from the top floor of this new apartment block which has gone now and been replaced by this intercontinental hotel so i think we'll go upstairs and occupy the psychic space that kafka did at that time when he was working on the novel he'd begun round the corner uh the trial and other things so this is really the view that we've come for and he didn't call it the suicide bridge he called it the suicide approach it's here that kafka has his celebrated literary breakthrough with this view of the bridge between september the 22nd and 23rd 1912 from 10 o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning he wrote the the judgment the story the judgment in the room here uh and of course you know it ends with a with the character of georg benderman swinging over the balustrade of a bridge quotes still clutching on with a welcoming grip he glimpsed the bus through the bars of the balustrade and knew that it would easily mask the sound of his fall and again in the same room he writes metamorphosis a few weeks later and he writes uh the verse which is often uh titled in english america all in this position and you know it's a very fine unclaustrophobic and distinctly uncap-guest view it's more or less the peak perspective for the city on his right side in the region of the hip a wound the size of the palm of one's hand has opened up rose-colored in many different shadings dark in the depths brighter on the edges delicately grained with uneven patches of blood open to the light like a mine that's what it looks like from a distance close up complication is apparent who can look at that without whistling softly worms as thick and as long as my little finger themselves rose-colored and also spattered with blood are wriggling their white bodies with many limbs from their stronghold in the inner part of the wound towards the light poor young man there's no helping you i have found out your great wound you are dying from this flower on your side the family is happy they see me doing something the sister says to the mother the mother tells the father the father tells a few guests who are coming in on tiptoes or in the moonlight of the open door balancing themselves with outstretched arms where do you save me whispers the young man sobbing quite blinded by the life inside his wound that's how people are in my region always demanding the impossible from the doctor they have lost the old faith the priest sits at home and tears his religious robes to pieces one after the other but the doctor is supposed to achieve everything with his delicate surgeon's hand well it's what they like to think i have not offered myself if they use me for sacred purposes i let that happen to me as well what more do i want an old country doctor robbed of my servant girl and they come the families and the village elders and they take my clothes off a choir of school children with the teacher at the head stands in front of the house and sings an extremely simple melody with the words take his clothes off then he'll heal and if he doesn't cure then kill him it's only a doctor it's only a doctor then i am stripped of my clothes and with my fingers in my beard and my head tilted to one side i look at the people quietly i am completely calm and clear about everything and stay that way too although it is not helping me at all for they are now taking me by the head and feet and dragging me into bed they lay me against the wall on the side of the wound then they all go out of the room the door is shut the singing stops clouds move in front of the moon oh miserable coins tokens pathetic shrine mentality we have lost the old faith we have lost the old faith as the country doctor says many people have interpreted the story as being specifically about that we have lost the old faith and so we leave these tokens and we create new shrines uh out of writers and pop stars and we come and bring them little coins who what could you what could you uh wish for from kafka when if you laid something on his grave you laid a bolt on kafka's grave or is this a reference to tarkovsky's stalker you throw the bolt and follow it what could you uh or the fuse or a lighter what could what could these tokens what would you wish for from kafka what would your kafka prayer be friends uh bless me in some way um the last uh months and weeks of kafka's life were pretty grim a succession of sanatoria in the region of vienna but then after death he was tormented by tourists do you like his writing yes you haven't read his book no so why did you come to visit this grave because you're in prague okay it's very beautiful the cemetery here okay very very beautiful maybe that's suitable in a way that you haven't read it since you didn't really want them to be red actually would have preferred that you just came to visit his grave without having read his book it's a kind of nice way around the whole problem of max broad max brod's decisions is his great friend is commemorated behind you there the man who saved his manuscript there's a lot of what you know might seem to be kind of apocryphal tales that kind of read the counts of uh kafka's death and you know i can seem like being of a peace with the sort of sanctification of him and his kind of confirmation as a a kind of religious thinker that that certainly makes broad wished to take place you know for example uh one of the nurses in the sanatorium where he died you know sort of said of how you know kind of light and simple and pure and kind of uh peaceful his death was you know he's buried here uh in the 11th of june 1924 about 100 mourners hebrew prayers for the dead and apparently the the sky then darkened and rain fell which seems a little bit too biblical to be true but you know maybe it was so his father turned his back on dora diamond the austin judean who had nursed and cared for kafka in the last few months of his life though you know arguably this wasn't some kind of rejection but you know he had after all just lost his oldest child and his only son here they all are herman and julie the father he kind of never got on with the mother who people feel never understood that his writing was anything much more than a pastime uh and the three sisters uh memorialized here who all died in the nazis holocaust and now let's dance let's dance he's a funny guy you know i emailed somebody last night you know the writer is about fonseca in new york and said you know kafka a bit of a schlemiel wasn't he and she wrote back and said you know not the angst merchant of memory a humorous writer a funny guy a yiddish song and dance man should you stand on the right or the left kafka didn't stand on the right or the left but his writing was necessarily informed by the political he lived during a period when the uh when bohemia was often ruled by direct fiat from vienna and there was considerable social unrest the arousal of czech nationalism uh anti-semitic riots all sorts of brew r sorry that was potentially nasty but you know montage rapidity of movement jerking about slamming posture knocking into people that's kafka my last walk across prague was to the harcadney castle in the lee of which during the winter of 1916-17 kafka wrote a country doctor in a diminutive house led to him by his favorite and youngest sister ottler crap uniforms guys in common with much of the old town of prague the castle has become a tourist trap and the room where kafka laboured over the majority of the short fiction that was published in his lifetime is now a shop albeit one with at least a couple of shelves dedicated to his work what better location in which under the eyes of marauding sightseers to read the last section of a country doctor dragging me into bed they lay me against the wall on the side of the wound then they all go out of the room the door is shut the singing stops clouds move in front of the moon the bed clothes lie warmly around me in the open space of the windows the horse's heads sway like shadows do you know i hear someone saying in my ear my confidence in you is very small you were shaken out from somewhere you don't come on your own feet instead of helping you give me less room on my deathbed the best thing would be if i scratch your eyes out right i say it's a disgrace but now i'm a doctor what am i supposed to do believe me things are not easy for me either should i be satisfied with this with this excuse alas i'll probably have to be i always have to make do i came into a world with a beautiful wound that was all i was furnished with young friend i say your mistake is that you have no perspective i've already been in all the sick rooms far and wide and i tell you your wound is not so bad made in a tight corner with two blows from an axe many people offer their side and hardly hear the acts in the forest to say nothing of the fact that it's coming closer to them is that really so or are you deceiving me in my fever it is truly so he took my word and grew still but now it was time to think about my escape the horses were still standing loyally in place clothes fur coat and bag were quickly snatched up i didn't want to delay by getting dressed if the horses rushed as they had on the journey out i should in fact be springing out of that bed into my own as it were one horse obediently pulled back from the window i threw the bundle into the carriage the fur coat flew too far and was caught on a hook by only one arm good enough i swung myself up onto the horse the reins dragging loosely one horse barely harnessed to the other the carriage swaying behind last of all the fur coat in the snow giddy up i said but there was no giddying up about it we dragged through the snowy desert like old men for a long time the fresh but inaccurate singing of the children resounded behind us enjoy yourselves you patience the doctors laid in bed with you i'll never come home at this rate my flourishing practice is lost a successor is robbing me but to no avail for he cannot replace me in my house the disgusting groom is wreaking havoc rosa is his victim i will not think it through naked abandoned to the frost of this unhappy age with an earthly carriage and unearthly horses i drive around by myself an old man my fur coat hangs behind the wagon but i cannot reach it and no one from the nimble rabble of patience lifts a finger betrayed betrayed once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell there's no making it good again not ever finally before my return to london i reluctantly visited the minotary place to which kafka's sisters and the bulk of the prague jews had been forcibly removed by the nazis this is an unavoidable place and it looms large in the european imagination even though many people have probably never heard of it in some senses it's a more perfect and grotesque encapsulation of the nazis genocidal urges even in the extermination camps of treblinka and sobibor and so forth and the colossal industrial booner of auschwitz not that it ever really produced the rubber for which it was intended but in some sense terrazan here is where everything comes home to roost because the nazis stated aim to establish a kind of privileged concentration camp a camp where kind of good jews i.e wealthy or influential jews could be courted in some way as a way of kind of skimming off the possible useful elements of particularly german jury was enacted in this fortress in the sudetenland conditions in the kilometer square concentration camp where anything up to 50 000 prisoners were held at any one time were of course appalling but in order to deceive red cross delegations in the wider world the nazis made a fraudulent film the fuhrer gives a city to the jews there's something about the starface star-shaped fortress of tereza and the idea of the enormous concentration of people who moved through it and it was uh to hear that almost certainly as i'm aware kafka's sisters including his beloved ottler uh would have been deported 40 miles or so from prague on their way to the gas chambers so if we think of kafka as somehow his work casting a shadow forwards in that sense and in some way being itself an instantiation of this kind of dreadful ironizing of the 20th century metamorphosis the writing about the peculiar status of european jury and stories like jackals and arabs or a report to the academy and even in the country doctor which has this sense of uh alienation from the people who surround him then this is where the shadow was being cast but somehow terrazan teresian stat lies at the heart of this essay project this linkage between paul fusell's observations in the great war and modern memory of the enormous impact of the first few months of the first world war on european consciousness the incredible dramatic reversal between the armies going to war full of chivalrous 19th century ideas of the conduct of war and then becoming bogged down in the quagmire of the western front the strange linkage between that and the wound as described in kafka's the country doctor the gaping wound in the young boy's side written in 1917 when principe gavrilo princip the serbian assassin of the archduke franz ferdinand would have been coughing his law here at teresa the most famous uh inmate of this camp people from czech republic they were concentrated in prague my guide to the concentration camp of terezian stat was susannah 155 000 people 87 000 from them was the first place we went to in the concentration camp of terezian stat was the cell in the so-called small fortress where gavrilo princip was held it's the irony he was too young to be executed and that he came to be imprisoned in a place that subsequently became a death camp in essence and that he wanted to die himself i think he took cyanide did he not try and commit suicide himself yeah and uh tuberculosis is such a strange thing because of course it was rife in european cities at that time in in the 1900s uh in all forms and people think of the ghetto in particular as a incubating tuberculosis don't know the disease okay well we better go on so when the people came to this small fortress they had to stand up there on this wall face to the wall and there are long long hours waiting for the registration in this time they were beated and tortured and then where they're called to this office here and they had a prisoners hand over their documents and all expensive things and they've got a number but it was not tattoo the tattoo they've got only in auschwitz right okay and were your family always from around here no you came here and for 100 people was the only one thing one toilet you say a lot of the inmates here would have been czech political prisoners yeah and would they have been communists partisans anybody who was suspected of being against the nazis or against you know would have been brought here this one mostly people they made small things yeah they wrote about nazis something against now yes or they said they said something something somebody must have been talking about joseph k somebody must have been spreading rumors so this is the the shower block not a gas chamber but the shower block for the inmates in this the gestapo prison so you know the iconography it's you know it's hardly possible to think of a shower block in a concentration camp in an innocent sense but this actually was a shower block but the clothes were brought here it'll be a whole day of showering the camp inmates another example of the nazis kind of delight in a sort of institutional bricolage because they would bring the uh the inmates and they'd all be lined up in the courtyard for the whole day brought in and caught in drafts of a hundred at a time the clothes go into this to be de-loused but only by steam no chemicals involved so all of the lice and the bed bugs actually survived the process so it was absolutely pointless they go through the steamer for no point at all you know in the strath colony and then the meanwhile the inmates a hundred at a time brought into this shower area here five to each nozzle in first women who would have some warm water and then the men who would have cold water and then the jews who really would hardly have any water at all and then back out this way to pick up the de-loused clothing and back out into the yard the whole process taking five minutes for every hundred inmates a sense of decay and pointlessness so you know the living space for the uh concentration camp inmates was estimated to be 1.6 metres of space per individual so this would be kind of roomy i've never ever wanted to visit a concentration camp you know teodor dorno said that after auschwitz poetry was impossible you