A hundred years after his death, the author’s presence is as strong as ever in the Czech capital – from his childhood homes and the literary cafes he frequented to the remarkable buildings immortalised in his work
t’s a boiling summer’s day in Prague and I’m staring into the austere face of Franz Kafka. Not the real Kafka, of course – he died exactly a century ago, which is why I’m here – but a cast-iron plaque on the wall of his birthplace., sits pretty much on Old Town Square, which as usual is thronged with tourists snapping pics of its fairytale architecture, sipping drinks on terraces and gawking at its 15th-century astronomical clock.
Nonetheless, the former ghetto’s labyrinthine, claustrophobic and mysterious topography seems to have leaked into Kafka’s writings, most of which were written in two residences on Pařížská, today a high-end shopping boulevard. At No 30, where the Hotel InterContinental now stands, he wrote The Judgement in a single night , and his best-known novel; and at the other end of the street, close again to the square , he penned A Hunger Artist and part of The Castle.
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