Amerika?

[TheThill]

The problem is that you are applying today’s American standards to historical European identities. The Haspburg Empire was a multi-ethnic state, with it’s people not refering to themselves as ethnically Austrian, but rather German, Bohemian (Czech), Moravian, Hungarian, Romanian, etc. or sometimes as Jewish or as both Jewish and something else. And one did not just “become” Czech if one moved to a Czech-speaking area, the way one moves to the States and becomes American (after a while, anyway.) In fact German-speakers have lived in parts of Romania, Ukraine and Russia to this day and still refer to themseleves as Germans (even if this era does seem to be coming to an end now.)

Kafka did in fact speak and write Czech as well, but (as far as I can recollect from all my readings by and about him) did not think himself to be particularly Czech (unless you have evidence to show otherwise). He was in fact much more interested in exploring his Jewish identity, learning Hebrew, and even contemplated emigrating to Palestine(Israel).

[TomH]

The problem is that you are applying today’s American standards to historical European identities.

I don’t know about the other posters, but I am European.

In fact German-speakers have lived in parts of Romania, Ukraine and Russia to this day and still refer to themseleves as Germans

Yes, and I suppose there is a sense in which they are German. There is also a sense in which they are Romanian, Ukranian, Russian or whatever. They do not enjoy the rights of German, or of EU, citizens, for example.

The reductio of your argument is that nobody is Belgian, but French or Dutch; nobody is Swiss, but French, Italian, German, etc. And nobody at all is Austrian.

[TheThill]

It’s a quite complicated matter, and it depends on the time and places we’re talking about.

In today’s Europe, we have a nation-state system that has vastly supplanted other forms of identity. But alas, there are many Belgians and Swiss who see themselves has Flemish or Romand first, and Belgian or Swiss second or last. Austria is an interesting anomoly created by a long and difficult political history.

Despite that, nation-state identities go back much longer in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe, with Belgium and Switzerland being unique entities in the system of European states.

But the creation of ethnic states has been a troublesome one to say the least, and the very squabbles we have to today in Eastern Europe are the result of it. Ask the Hungarian-speakers in today’s western Romania or southern Slovakia about their nationality, and most all will still say that they’re Hungarian (I happen to know a few, one is currently taking care of my plants in fact).

In Kafka’s time, at least until his last couple of years (he died in 1924), he lived in the multi-ethnic Austria-Hungarian Empire, without local national monopolies. His own identity was definitely a matter of family background and not geographical location.

[TheThill]

Here’s an interesting insight into the subject from: http://longman.awl.com/kennedy/kafka/biography

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As Frederick Karl says of Kafka, “The uncertainty he felt whenever he contemplated reality was matched by the uncertainty of the Jew in an enemy setting, among Germans, whose language he spoke, and among Czechs, whose nationalism had no role for the Jew to play. But as a Westernized Jew, Kafka had to deal with more than anti-Semitic Germans and anti-German, anti-Semitic Czech nationalists… The question of assimilation–or, rather, the question of whether assimilation was even possible, given the prohibitions of the host countries in which Jews resided–created in itself an ambiguous kind of reality, often more hallucinatory than realistic.”
**