Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ON KAFKA'S TRAIL
Prague never lets go of you…this little mother has claws. We ought to set fire to it at both ends, on Vyšehrad and
Hradčany, and maybe then it might be possible to escape.
Franz Kafka, “Letter to Oskar Polak” (December 2, 1902)
Franz Kafka
was born on July 3, 1883, above the
Batalion Schnapps
bar on the corner
of Maiselova and Kaprova (only the portal remains and his bust stands outside). He lived
almost his entire life within a short walk of his birthplace. His father was a small business-
man from a Czech-Jewish family of kosher butchers (Kafka himself was a lifelong veget-
arian), his mother from a wealthy German-Jewish family of merchants. The family owned
ahaberdashery shop,located at various premises onornear Staroměstské náměstí. In1889
they moved out of Josefov and lived for the next seven years in the beautiful Renaissance
Dům U minuty, next door to the Staroměstská radnice (Old Town Hall), during which time
Kafka attended the Volksschule on Masná (now a Czech primary school), followed by a
spell at an exceptionally strict German
Gymnasium
, at the back of the palác Kinských.
At 18, he began a law degree at the German half of the Karolinum, which was where
he met his lifelong friend and posthumous biographer and editor,
Max Brod
. Kafka spent
most of his working life in the field of
accident insurance
, until he retired through ill
health in 1922. Illness and depression plagued him throughout his life and he spent many
months as a patient at the innumerable spas in Mitteleuropa. He was engaged three times
(twice to the same woman), but never married, finally leaving home at the age of 31 for
bachelordigsonthecornerofDlouháandMasná,wherehewrotethebulkofhismostfam-
ous work,
The Trial
. He died of
tuberculosis
at the age of 40 in a sanatorium just outside
Vienna, on June 3, 1924, and is buried in the Nový židovský hřbitov in Žižkov.
As a German among Czechs, a Jew among Germans, and an agnostic among believers,
Kafka had good reason to live in a constant state of alienation and fear, or
Angst
. Life
was precarious for Prague's Jews, and the destruction of the Jewish quarter throughout his
childhood had a profound effect on his psyche. It comes as a surprise to many Kafka read-
ers that anyone immersed in so beautiful a city could write such claustrophobic and para-
noid texts; and that, as a member of the
café society
of the time, he could write in a style
so completely at odds with his verbose, artistic friends. It's also hard to understand how
Kafka could find no publisher for
The Trial
during his lifetime.
After his death, Kafka's works were published in Czech and German and enjoyed brief
critical acclaim before the Nazis
banned
them. Even after the war, Kafka, along with most
German-Czech authors, was deliberately overlooked in his native country. In addition, his
accountoftheterrifyingbrutalityandpowerofbureaucracyovertheindividual,thoughnot
in fact directed at totalitarian systems as such, was too close to the bone for the Commun-
