The City Kafka Actually Lived In

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924, having spent much of his life within a remarkably small area around the Old Town and Josefov. According to a frequently retold anecdote, Kafka once stood at a window with his Hebrew teacher and indicated how his school, university, office and family home all lay within a tiny radius around Old Town Square. He reportedly remarked that this small circle contained nearly his entire life.

That circle still exists. Most of it is still standing. Walking it takes less than an hour and covers almost nothing that is marked or announced. That is rather the point.

Where he was born

The house at the corner of Kaprova and Maiselova Streets, now on náměstí Franze Kafky, was where Kafka entered the world on 3 July 1883. The original house was damaged by fire and demolished in 1897; what remains is the Baroque portal and doorway, preserved through the reconstruction. A memorial plaque and a bust mark the site today. The address sits on the edge of what was then the Jewish ghetto, a neighbourhood in the process of being demolished and rebuilt when Kafka was a child. He grew up watching the city erase itself.

The House at the Minute

The family moved frequently, but never far. From 1889 to 1896 they lived in the House at the Minute, dům U Minuty, at Old Town Square 2, directly beside the Astronomical Clock. The facade is covered in Renaissance sgraffito that was plastered over in Kafka's time and only rediscovered decades later. His three sisters were born in this house. He went to school across the square at the Kinský Palace, where his father also ran a haberdashery on the ground floor. The palace is now part of the National Gallery. The bookshop inside it stands roughly where Hermann Kafka sold buttons and thread.

Oppelt House: the last address

The family's final Prague apartment was on the top floor of Oppeltův dům, at Old Town Square 5, on the corner of Pařížská Street. The ground floor today is occupied by a Cartier boutique. Kafka moved in and out of this apartment throughout his thirties, returning during illness, leaving for rented rooms elsewhere in the city. From the apartment he overlooked Old Town Square and many of the places that shaped his life. The building was damaged in 1945 and the top floor was not rebuilt.

Golden Lane

At Prague Castle, tucked into the arches of the defensive wall, is Zlatá ulička, Golden Lane, a row of tiny coloured houses that Kafka rented with his sister Ottla from 1916 to 1917. Number 22, the house he used, is now the last stop on a visit to the castle. Living there gave him one of the most productive stretches of his writing life, and several of his important stories were drafted in the little house. The quiet of it, the smallness of it, the distance from the family apartment across the river: all of it, apparently, was what he needed.

The office on Na Poříčí

Kafka worked for fourteen years at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, at Na Poříčí 7. He worked from eight until two, a schedule he chose and protected, leaving the afternoons and evenings for writing. The building still stands. It is now a hotel. He is, by some accounts, the most unusual civil servant in the history of Czech bureaucracy, a man who spent his days processing workplace injury claims and his nights writing The Trial.

The café on Dlážděná Street

The Café Arco, where Kafka met regularly with Max Brod and the circle of German-Jewish writers who formed his intellectual world, stood at Dlážděná 6 near Masarykovo nádraží. The sign is still there on the building, faded but legible. The café itself closed long ago. Milena Jesenská, the journalist and translator who became one of the most important people in his life, was part of the same Prague literary world. His letters to her, written after they stopped meeting in person, are widely regarded as among the most remarkable literary correspondences of the twentieth century.

A note on the Kafka Museum

The Franz Kafka Museum on Cihelná Street in Malá Strana is worth an hour of your time, particularly for the documents, letters, and photographs that place him in the city as it actually looked. It offers a thoughtful introduction to his life, work, and relationship with Prague.

The Julius is a short walk from the birthplace and the Old Town Square addresses, and a little farther from the Kafka Museum across the river. The walk between them passes through the centre of the city Kafka spent his entire life inside. It looks, in many places, almost exactly as it did then.

We are always glad to mark up a Kafka walking route on a city map; it is a quiet favourite of ours. Just ask at reception.