Kafka's Birthplace: The Corner Where It All Began

Why is it significant?

Stop at the corner of the small square squeezed between the baroque church of St Nicholas and the start of Maiselova street, and find the bronze bust on the wall of the corner house: a narrow face, big ears, enormous dark eyes. That is Franz Kafka, and this is where he was born, on 3 July 1883.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop at the corner of the small square squeezed between the baroque church of St Nicholas and the start of Maiselova street, and find the bronze bust on the wall of the corner house: a narrow face, big ears, enormous dark eyes. That is Franz Kafka, and this is where he was born, on 3 July 1883.

Well... almost. The house that stood here burned down in 1897, and only its stone portal survived to be built into the new house. The bust, by the sculptor Karel Hladík, appeared in the 1960s, during the brief thaw when Czech intellectuals rediscovered Kafka after years in which official critics had dismissed him as gloomy and bourgeois. The square itself received his name only around the turn of the millennium.

In a letter to a school friend, the young Kafka complained that Prague does not let go... that this little mother has claws. Stand here and you see what he meant. Within a few hundred metres of this corner he was born, went to school, studied, worked, fell in love and wrote almost everything. His family moved again and again, but always inside this small circle. Look across to the corner where the elegant Pařížská avenue opens onto Old Town Square: in the Oppelt House there, the Kafkas rented a flat from 1913, and he returned to it in his last, sick years. You walked right past it a minute ago.

When Kafka was a boy, the streets just north of here were still the old Jewish Town, a tangle of crooked lanes, courtyards and taverns. In the 1890s the city decided to clear it. Almost everything was pulled down except the synagogues, the old cemetery and the Jewish town hall, and broad avenues like Pařížská were cut through, lined with grand apartment blocks. Kafka grew up watching the world of his grandparents turn into a building site.

Remember who walked these streets. Kafka was a German-speaking Jew in a city that was becoming ever more Czech, fully at home in neither world. His three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust. His novels survived only because his friend Max Brod ignored his request to burn them. Now cross Old Town Square to the pink and white palace on its eastern side, beside the dark towers of the Týn church.