Every hour, hundreds of visitors gather in Prague’s classic Old Town Square to witness the tolling of the Astronomical Clock, when a sinister medieval figure of Death emerges to pull the bell cord.  It seems appropriate that the first doorway to the left of this haunted edifice is the Hause Minuta, or House of the Minute, the childhood home of Prague’s most famous literary son, Franz Kafka. In his short life, from 1889-1924, he wrote some of our most gripping tales of paranoia and alienation, including The Trial (where a man is caught up in an mind-boggling legal system for an offense that is never named) and Metamorphosis (where a man wakes up in bed one morning and finds he has turned into a cockroach).

This splendid Renaissance-era house, with its elegant black-and-white painted façade, is where the writer spent the first seven years of his life, and where his nightmarish imagination developed.  The eldest child of a middle class, German-speaking Jewish family, he was tormented, according to his own account, by his father, “a huge, selfish, overbearing businessman,” who became a model for the menacing authority figures that tread through his fiction.  Young Franz moved with his family to several other apartments in Prague (one is now the US Embassy building), and developed a love-hate relationship with his home city: He tried to live in Germany and Vienna, but was always drawn back by the eerie beauty of Prague.  And although Kafka does not name the city’s monuments in any of his fiction, the winding alleyways of the Old Town, its shadowy plazas and looming castle, provide their distinctive atmosphere.

Kafka died here at age 35 or tuberculosis and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery; most of his work was published posthumously, to huge acclaim.  Today, improbably enough, his gaunt portrait is reproduced all over Prague on souvenirs, T-shirts, coffee mugs and key chains.  But maybe he wouldn’t have disapproved entirely.  Kafka also had a highly developed sense of black humor, and a Czech ability to laugh at the ironies of life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 8:40 am and is filed under Czech Republic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.