I’ve generally seen this spelling of “America” used when referring to the United States as an oppressive, intolerant, totalitarian etc etc police state. Without getting into the accuracy or lack thereof, of this point of view, what is the origin of this spelling?
It’s a novel by Franz Kafka, a paranoid Czech of the turn of the century. It doubtless portrays the USA as a shell of a nation, torn by an elite ruling class and a proletariat class living in fear. Never read it, that’s just how most of his novels work. Kafka also wrote The Metamorphosis, a story about a man who turns into a giant cockroach. Those Czechs, tons of fun. 
Well, Kafka used this spelling for his novel “Amerika” but, slightly more helpfully, I’m sure I saw this question raised here fairly recently - I just can’t recall whether a satisfactory answer was found. Good luck.
Amerika is actually pretty funny, unlike most of Kafka’s other books. I believe that the “k” spelling is the standard German one and so “Amerika” is just German for “America”. I guess that the decision to keep the German title is to reflect the foreigness that the idea of America conveys to Europeans, but not to Americans.
Thanks for the link. I must have been out of town that week.
ice cube writes it as either amerika or amerikkka to try and tie in a racist connotation
I don’t know that Kafka’s novel is the origin of the spelling, as it is the spelling used in German and many other languages.
But I do know that Kafka wasn’t exactly a Czech, but rather a German-speaking Jew. Although he lived in Prague, which is now a nearly homogenously Czech city (except for the thousands in the Anglo ex-pat communities), at the time, Prague as a multi-ethnic city with a vast German speaking population. There are in fact, still old washed-out signs in German throughout Prague, or at least there when I was there a few years ago (they may have since all been painted over in the name of progress).
He was:
(a) Czech;
(b) a first-language German-speaker; and
© a Jew.
None of those things contradicts or excludes any of the others.
But why do you say he was Czech? Just because he lived in what is now the Czech Republic does not reflect on his national identity.
On another note, the name in English and in the Latin alphabet is “America.” But in the Russian language and the necessary Cyrillic alphabet, it is “Amerika.” (Wish I could use Cyrillic here; it would make things a lot easier to demonstrate.)
Anyway, it used to appear a lot in Pravda and Izvestia and other publications printed in the Russian language that came from the Soviet Union. It wasn’t always used in a complimentary fashion in those days.
No doubt it is still used in Russian publications–after all, they have no reason not to use it–but likely not quite as disparagingly as in the days of the USSR.
Just out of curiosity, why do people think this? I hear this asserted all the time, in defiance of the text. In the text he is described as having turned into an insect, and at one point a character refers to him as a dung beetle. I’m not trying to nit-pick, I just think it’s weird that so many people are specific about what creature he turns into (cockroach) when a slightly less specific term (e.g. bug) would be more accurate.
I guess what I’m wondering is, is there some story or movie or whatever where a character actually does turn into a cockroach, that might be confusing people? How about that Hesse novel, Steppenroach? chuckle
But why do you say he was Czech? Just because he lived in what is now the Czech Republic does not reflect on his national identity.—TheThrill
Good point. Kafka’s first name is Franz, which is clearly German, while his last name is apparently Slavic—Czech, in this case. Kafka was born in Prague in the late nineteenth century, thus making him an Austrian by citizenship, but ethnically? Ah, who knows? What’s the Czech Republic today was largely populated with Germans for centuries, until those Germans were kicked out around 1945. Kafka wrote in German, so I suppose you could argue that he wrote German literature—though he wasn’t exactly German. Kafka didn’t write in any nation’s literary tradition; he was certainly his own man as an artist.
There are numerous people whose nationalities you could dispute like this. Was T.S. Eliot an American writer, or a British writer? Was Nikola Tesla Serbian, Croatian, Yugoslavian—or American? And does one’s nationality have anything to do with one’s craft? Douglas Coupland is a Canadian citizen, sure, but he writes in the truest American tradition. What do you call him? Margaret Atwood is Canadian, too, but she herself considers herself to be a Southern writer (Southern as in the southern United States. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish, since she’s from Baltimore, which some wouldn’t consider to be the South, though she does have something of a Southern style: that gothic, dreamlike quality borne of Antebellum times. Jeez, I’m getting off the track here…)
For convenience’ sake, I’ll call Kafka a Czech writer, since he’s from Prague, though I also consider him to be a German writer. The man defies easy categorization—which pretty much sums up his body of work to begin with.
It has nothing to do with the origin of the spelling, but “Amerika” was also the title of a Kris Kristofferson mini-series back in 1987. I liked it when I saw it, but apparently my youth (I was 12) distorted things. It was horribly reviewed and the ratings were worse.
**obfusciatrist[/]
The haze of our youth does cloud our memories!
When I married my husband he told me about a GREAT movie he saw as a teenager, “Alice’s Restaurant.” Well we rented the tape and I settled in for what I thought was good viewing. After about a half hour I turned to him and asked, “Are you sure this is the right movie?” He told me he remembered it better than it apparently was (no he didn’t remember it through a drug haze, although that, at least, would have given him an excuse!) Now whenever anything from our past turns out to be somewhat less than we remembered, we call it an “Alice’s Restaurant” Moment!
The TV Amerika was a story of the United States taken over by the Soviets. Therefore the spelling with a k to suggest Russian domination.
Ever since the 1960s, lefties have been using the k spelling of Amerika to suggest Nazism because the Germans have discarded the letter c and replaced it with k.
When you see “Amerika,” is it supposed to be German or Russian Amerika? Confusing, isn’t it?
Then there’s the Black Nationalist spelling of “Afrika” with a k which you often see accompanying the black, gold, red and green African Nationalist colors. That one puzzled me for the longest time, until I figured out it was supposed to be the Swahili spelling of Africa!
Boris–true, Kafka never specifically identified the insect (I believe he just says that Gregor was transformed into a “loathsome insect”), the description of the bug is pretty close to that of a cockroach. However, I have also heard that the description is somewhat similar to a bedbug.
I think the visual impact of someone being turned into a cockroach fits the theme of the novel better; i.e., Gregor has become something to be reviled and shunned.
Thill, To clarify: it’s not that I am particularly keen to classify Kafka as Czech, but that your post could have been taken to imply that being Jewish or German-speaking procluded him somehow from being Czech. I suspect a lot of German-speaking Czech Jews might disagree.
I know I always visualized a 6-foot-long cockroach. The book describes a waxy carapace with a split down the center of the back. An apple gets stuck beneath it, causing the character problems. And, yes, I know Franz Kafka was from Germany but moved to Prague. Same as my grandmother, who was from Austria but moved to America. My grandmother is American, so Kafka was Czech. When different people find two different problems with my post, I gotta stick up for myself.
Ach, Kanada…
Amerika was also the name of Adolf Hitler’s headquarters train.
I’m sure that little piece of info will save me one day when my back’s against the wall.