Božena Němcová
    Božena Němcová  (Bo-zhe-na  Nyem-tso-vah) (1820?-1862) was one of the greatest Czech writers.  Her masterpiece, Babička (Ba-bich-ka) (Granny, or The Grandmother), was published in 1855 and was based on her memories of her own grandmother, who lived with her family when she was a child.  She was born Božena (shortened to Barunka) Panklová February 4, 1820 in Vienna, where her German father, Jan Pankel, was a coachman and her Czech mother, Terezie Novotná, was a laundress.
 
    It should be mentioned right now that much of the preceeding is in doubt.  The reason for the question mark next to her birth date is due to an ongoing mystery about who she was.  She was born illegitimate, but her paternity is in question.  Rumor has it, and many scholars agree, that she was in fact the daughter of a duchess or prince, and also that she was really born about three years before her "official" birthdate.  She was supposedly given to the Pankels to raise, and her noble relatives took quite a lot of interest in her, at least until her marriage.  In any case, on with the story.
 
    As a small child her family moved to the village of Ratibořice in northeastern Bohemia, where they lived with her (supposed) maternal grandmother, Magdalena Novotná, also the name of the grandmother in Babička.  At the age of 17 (or 20) Božena married Josef Němc, a customs official about 15 years her senior, and had four children—Hynek, Karel, Theodora, and Jaroslav—in five years.  However, she was very unhappy and in 1850 they separated, although the reason for the separation was that both had become involved in "subversive" patriotic activities (according to the Austrian government) and so her husband was transferred to Hungary.  She had many unhappy affairs with men, some of them among the major Czech literary figures of the time that she associated with.  She wrote many books, including collections of Czech and Slovak folktales and fairy tales, but despite this she suffered grinding poverty and illness.  After the death of her favorite son Hynek in 1853, she started writing Babička, which was published in 1855.  She died on January 21, 1862 at the age of 41 (or more likely 44), broke and lonely.  She has become a strong, patriotic national heroine, and there are no fewer than three museums dedicated to her in northeastern Bohemia where her story is set.

    Now what does this have to do with The Castle, you ask?  Well, this novel proved to be one of Kafka's favorite books ever since he read it as a child—as an assignment for his Czech class. The idyllic locale and, especially, the fact that the children in the story were happy with their parents affected him strongly, since his own life with his parents was considerably less than idyllic.  This book was also Milena Jesenská's favorite novel, and she would later write that her own grandmother was exactly like the one in the novel. Kafka wrote in one of his first letters to  her: "The only linguistic music I know in Czech (given my limited knowledge) is that of Božena Němcová," and at one point he sent her a copy of it while she was on vacation, cautioning, however, that it was so badly printed as to be illegible.  As Max Brod has pointed out in his essay on The Castle, "Thoughts on The Castle," (see below) there are more than a few similarities between Babička and The Castle. Admittedly, the tones of the works are completely different, Babička being a happy childhood story and The Castle a disturbing tale of intrigue, despair, and searching, but nevertheless the similarities, along with some differences, are striking.  Here's a partial list:
 
 
 

    "Temptation in the Village" is the title of the fragment in Kafka's Diaries which may be regarded as a preliminary study for his major novel, the tragedy of the man who wishes to live among the people in a village but cannot strike roots in the alien environment and cannot find the way into the "castle" that dominates the life of the village.  This piece was written in 1914, whereas the novel was not begun before 1917 at the earliest.  The atmosphere of an isolation almost emptied of hope, of fateful mistrust and a sense of being misunderstood by the natives, flashes like heat lightning through the entire tale.  This comes through at once, in the first sentences spoken by one of the natives.  He speaks to his wife: "I am coming in a moment.  I just want to see what this man is going to do here.  He is a stranger.  He is running around here in a quite unnecessary way.  Just watch."  Whereupon the hero of the fragment replies: "I am looking for the inn here, that is all.  Your husband has no right to talk about me in this way and perhaps to give you a false opinion of me."  Somewhat later, it is true, the woman replies softly: "He talks so much."  Nevertheless it is clear that the villagers have only the most guarded attitude toward the stranger.

    A recent rereading of this fragment, with its haunting power and mysterious overtones, reminded me of a still earlier germ for The Castle.  This was connected with Kafka's encounter with a work by the Czech woman writer Božena Němcová, whose influence upon him has, as far as I know, gone unremarked.

    Božena Němcová was born in 1820 and died in 1862.  Her principal work, The Grandmother, an idyllic novel of masterful simplicity, was used at the Prague German gymnasium as the basis for instruction in the Czech language.  That is where Kafka became acquainted with the remarkably appealing, sincere, and upright tale of a village at the foot of the Riesengebirge.  I, too, read it in school a year later, and fell equally in love with it.

    It is odd that even as this highly gifted Czech novelist was writing of peasant life in northeastern Bohemia, one of the greatest of German writers should have undertaken to portray the peasants of the Bohemian Forest in southwestern Bohemia,  to show their good old customs, their popular traditions, and religious feeling.  I am referring to Adalbert Stifter.  Stifter and Božena Němcová probably knew nothing of each other's work, although they were contemporaries and spiritually much akin, even to their love of woodland solitude.  Němcová, in her writing and her folkloristic studies,was a passionate partisan of reviving Czech nationalism—which, however, did not prevent her from admiring such German works as Gutzkow's Ritter vom Geiste and using a quotation from that book, in the original German, as a motto for her own The Grandmother. Her husband and her friends were considered dangerous revolutionaries by the Austrian authorities and were treated accordingly.  Stifter, on the other hand, fought no battles and made only schoolmasterly little protests against the repressive regime.  Yet for all the disparities between them, the common element in the two writers is unmistakable:  the search for a simple, right existence guided by spiritual principles.

    Kafka particularly loved the letters of this passionate and beautiful woman whose sudden appearance out of the provinces a few generations before our own time had created a sensation among the patriots and the Czech language zealots in Prague.  Her unhappy marriage, her burning love affairs with fellow nationalists, her tender care for her children, her raptures and depressions, her tempestuous life which contrasted so strongly with her somewhat old-fashioned manner of writing, her early death—all these were things which aroused Kafka's understanding and sympathy, with which he could well identify.  He frequently read aloud to me from her letters, which so far as I know have not been translated out of the Czech, although they belong among the great documents of a struggling soul.

    Madame Němcová, then, might well be named as one of the foremost influences on Kafka.  Kafka was accessible to such influences; he testifies repeatedly to this in his diaries, often with exaggerated conscientousness, with a rather touching sense of obligation.  Thus, for example, he felt he had to acknowledge a debt to Dickens's David Copperfield for his own novel Amerika.  To my mind,  he went much too far in his whimsical emphasis upon this "dependence."  In the case of  The Castle, he seems not to have been aware of any such line of descent.  And yet certain elements of The Castle are strikingly similar to elements in The Grandmother which had made such a profound impression upon him.  In his letters to Milena there is repeated reference to the author.

    The people in Němcová's The Grandmother live in their village and have no real access to their overlord in the castle.  In the castle German is spoken, in the village Czech.  That fact alone produces alienation.  In addition, the duchess (or princess) who rules over the village is at home in the castle only for short periods; usually she is traveling, far off in Vienna or Italy.  An episode of her youth, related by the grandmother and one of the finest passages in the book, deals with the virtually fabulous appearance of the good emperor, Joseph II, among the astounded country folk.  He passes by like a comet from distant worlds.  The duchess who dominates the village is also a kindly, enlightened ruler in the pattern of Joseph.  But between her and the peasants (and here the analogy to Kafka's Castle becomes quite strong) there intervenes a sinister horde of servants, castle officials, selfish, vain and knavish bureaucrats.  The duchess is cut off from the people against her will; she remains inaccessible, uninformed.  Only the protagonist of the novel, the grandmother, succeeds in breaking the spell; she reaches the duchess despite all obstacles and ultimately obtains justice for the persecuted—something that the hero in Kafka's Castle strives for but never succeeds in achieving.  To that extent Němcová's novel belongs to an age which had greater confidence in the ultimate triumph of the "good man" than our own crisis-born generation.

    In the description of the types who block the way between the rulers in the castle and the peasantry, there are points of agreement between the two novels which are sometimes staggering.  In both novels, the village inn plays a significant part as the center for the formation of public opinion.  Peace is disturbed by a young Italian court flunkey who is after Christel, the inkeeper's beautiful daughter, and who makes her indecent proposals even as in Kafka's novel the court official does to Amalia.  It is remarkable, too, that Kafka's court official has an Italian name—Sortini—the only such name in the novel.  A great deal has been written about the curious complexities of the Sortini episode in Kafka's Castle.  Perhaps many of the elements will seem clearer if we compare it with the simple source from which it sprang, the story in the Cz ech novel.  Here also, the girl rejects the coarse approaches of the castle official, but she too is uneasy about doing so; she rightly fears the consequences of this, fears the reprisals which may come from this powerful and influential man.  The manner in which she relates the adventure to the grandmother bears a close kinship with Kafka's story, especially at the beginning.  I quote a few sentences spoken by the girl in The Grandmother:

    "Imagine, that good-for-nothing, the Italian, came to us every day for a beer.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, the inn is here for anybody.  But instead of sitting at his table like a decent person, he kept after me.  Wherever I turned, he was at my heels.  My father made a sour face, but you know him, he's such a good man, doesn't want to hurt a chick and doesn't like to offend any of his guests, especially not the ones who come from the castle."

    It seems to me that Kafka's equivocal melody in The Castle is sounded here clearly enough.  It occurs often in the subsequent pages of the Czech novel.  Thus we have Christel repenting of what she has done with the best of intentions.  Or the tone in which she discusses the attempt to bribe the castle officials: "That is our only hope.  Since they have listened to his plea, they may possibly help after all; but it has often happened that they have listened and not helped; then they only say curtly that it was not possible; and one must be content with that."  Is this not the very note which, grown to a major motif in the Kafka novel, makes our hearts tremble with the perception of the inexplicable, unpredictable and unappeasable nature of the reigning powers?  This is Kafka's special ghostly note, but it is not altogether alien to Němcová's straightforward realism.  The suggestion was there, and Kafka found it in his youthful reading.  He turned it to his own purposes, raised it from an incidental detail to a mighty principle.  In Němcová's novel the mistress of the castle is only seldom seen.  In Kafka's novel the supreme lord of the castle is never seen at all.  This is a difference not merely of degree but of basic emphasis.  The invisible overlord has already become something more than human.
 
 

Bozena Nemcova    To read more about the mysteries of her origin and her life, click here to go to Radio Prague's Virtual Cemetery site about her.

Bozena Nemcova    A brief biography in German.

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