Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 59 (2010) H. 1 134 Gaelle Vassogne: Max Brod in Prag. Identität und Vermittlung. (Conditio Judaica, Bd. 75.) Max Niemeyer Verlag. Tübingen 2009. VI, 366 S. ISBN 978-3-484-65175-3. (€ 79,95.) Prague-born Max Brod (1884-1968) wrote many novels and political and philosophical essays, as well as numerous reviews and feuilletons for newspapers, but today he is chiefly remembered for his work as a literary and cultural intermediary, editor, translator, and

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... pagandist. Most famously, Brod undertook to publish his friend Franz Kafka's manuscripts after the latter's death. Even if little of Brod's fiction is read today compared to the work of his friends Kafka and Franz Werfel, and his essays on politics, culture, Jewish identity, and Zionism are largely ignored, he was a highly successful writer in his time. That fact and his role as an intermediary and propagandist make him worthy of attention for anyone interested in early twentieth-century Central European literary and cultural life and in the Central European debates on Jewish identity and the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to their non-Jewish counterparts. This study offers an intellectual and cultural-political exegesis of Brod's major works of fiction and his principal writings on philosophical, political and cultural questions, followed by a shorter discussion of his work as a critic, translator, and literary and cultural intermediary. The bibliography includes a highly useful chronological listing of Brod's published writings, including his many longer newspaper articles. The author offers a thoughtful description and analysis of the major publications with particular attention to Brod's concerns about Jewish identity and European Jews' relations with European Christians. For this, V a s s o g n e 's work will be useful to readers looking for an introduction to Brod. One cannot call this book an intellectual biography, however, because the author deals very selectively with Brod's life circumstances and the context of each of the major writings. V. takes up the Prague context for Brod's life and work most explicitly in the introduction and first chapter and then again in the final two chapters, which treat his work as a public intellectual under the first Czechoslovak Republic leading up to his departure in 1939. The author generally follows a current consensus view among historians who have written in English and German during the last two decades about the development in Prague between the 1880s and 1930s of nationalist politics, culture, and literary life among Czech and German Christians and the Jewish population. National loyalties became increasingly problematic for Jews in the city after the mid-1880s as they faced the choice between Czech, German, and Jewish loyalties. The defining of group cultural and political allegiances became a major concern for Brod as well as most of the largely Jewish group of German-speaking writers to which he belonged. In fact, the very concept of a distinct "Prague Circle" of writers and Brod's central role in it was Brod's own creation; and he campaigned tirelessly on behalf of that group's reputation. V. has some occasional difficulties with spatial realities in Prague and the geography of interwar Czechoslovakia: in 1900 Prague's German-speaking population was most numerous in the New Town, Josefov, the Old Town, and Vinohrady, with far fewer in Malá strana and Hradčany (p. 3). The city of Prešov (Hung. Eperjes) is in eastern Slovakia, not in Subcarpathian Ruthenia/ Ukraine (p. 145). V. is sensitive to the culturally and politically liminal position of Brod and the Germanspeaking Jewish writers of Prague. Brod's search for social and ethical meaning, connectedness, and identity took him on a long odyssey. As a writer of fiction he passed through a fascination with Schopenhauer to a phase of aestheticism and "indifferentism" summed up in his successful novel "Schloss Nornepygge" (1908). But there was also a strong realist element in Brod's literary aesthetic, and he, along with many other writers of his generation, soon developed a fascination with the erotic, which took Brod and many of the others into the early phases of expressionism. V.'s account of these developments is clear and sound, illustrated with references to various writings of Brod. Other scholars have also traced this path of development in the literary careers of Brod and his contemporaries. It is a significant shortcoming of this current book that the author cites the earlier works but