A Dream of Jewishness on the Frontier Kafka’s Tumor and “A Country Doctor”

Abstract

Franz Kafka knew his Freud. Franz Kafka grew up and into the age of Freud on the frontier that was Prague in imperial Austro-Hungary. Freud had been moved as a small child from the provinces to Vienna. He had crossed the frontier for those acculturated Jews in the provinces who oriented themselves toward Vienna (or even Berlin). Kafka was as much at home in Prague as he was anywhere. As with Freud in Vienna, Kafka’s sense of being on the frontier had much more to do with an awareness of his own body that was shaped by what it meant to be Jewish (read: ill) in a world of health (read: non-Jewish bodies). This was Kafka’s sense of the frontier, as it was of many Jewish thinkers in his time.