Transcending the Exotic: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and Kafka’s Early Travel Novel, Richard and Samuel

Abstract

The narrative of Kafka’s travels opens in the writer’s earliest childhood, with the famous photograph described by Walter Benjamin (see figure 10). This photograph, taken in a tropically upholstered studio, plush with draperies, easels, tapestries, and palm trees, features the young Kafka at approximately age six. The claustrophobic studio is congested, as Benjamin writes, with the typical accoutrements of exotic travel:

There is a childhood photograph of Kafka,a rarely touching portrayal of the “poor, brief childhood.” It was probably made in one of those nineteenth-century studios whose draperies and palm trees, tapestries and easels placed them somewhere between a torture chamber and a throne room. At the age of approximately six the boy is presented in a sort of greenhouse setting, wearing a tight, heavily lace-trimmed, almost embarrassing child’s suit. Palm branches loom in the background. And as if to make these upholstered tropics still more sultry and sticky, the model holds in his left hand an oversized, wide-brimmed hat of the type worn by Spaniards. Immensely sad eyes dominate the landscape prearranged for them, and the auricle of a big ear seems to be listening for its sounds.¹

The purpose of this work is [ ... ] to let [the countries traveled through] be seen with a freshness and significance too often unjustly reserved for exotic regions only.

—Franz Kafka and Max Brod, foreword to “The First Long Train Journey” (the first, and only completed chapter of Richard and Samuel— A Short Journey through Central European Regions)