Abstract
In accounts of both Czech and German-Bohemian literary history, there are references to the impulses that central authors on both sides - by no means only Kafka, Werfel or Vrchlický - received from the reception of Walt Whitman's poetry. However, this topic has not yet been comparatively investigated, although it would be useful for the general consideration of the relations between the two literary fields to establish which transfer processes, analogy formations, differentiations or even interdependencies came about in connection with the reception of the phenomenon of the modern world literary canon (which was becoming established at the time), which was a foreign language from the Czech as well as the German point of view.
The chapter attempts to answer these questions in relation to the role that Whitman's name and various Whitman views played in literary criticism, programmatic statements and self-commentaries by the authors. In particular, it considers the role of the reference point 'Whitman' in the transmission of culture across the linguistic divide - and possibly in the performative determination of cultural boundaries themselves.