Café Louvre: Where Kafka Met the Philosophers
Why is it significant?
Find number 22 on Národní and lift your eyes to the first floor windows... that is where you are going, in your imagination at least.
Key Facts
| Place | Café Louvre: Where Kafka Met the Philosophers |
|---|---|
| Address | Národní 116/22, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08210, 14.41870 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Find number 22 on Národní and lift your eyes to the first floor windows... that is where you are going, in your imagination at least. Café Louvre opened up there in 1902, in a city where a café was not a place for a quick espresso but a room you lived in: warm, bright, full of newspapers clamped in wooden holders.
In the years before the First World War, the Louvre was one of the meeting places of Prague's German-speaking intellectuals. Franz Kafka came here with his friend Max Brod. Both took part for a while in a philosophical circle of followers of Franz Brentano, who debated perception and the nature of the mind over coffee. The story goes that Brod and Kafka eventually fell out with the group and stopped coming. Prague's intellectual world was small enough for a quarrel like that to be remembered.
Albert Einstein taught at the German university in Prague in 1911 and 1912, and he too moved in these circles, playing the violin in the salon of Berta Fanta, one of the great hostesses of German-speaking Prague. Kafka attended the same salon. Kafka and Einstein in the same rooms, then... although nobody has ever proved that the two had a real conversation.
After the communist takeover in 1948, the Louvre was closed. The new regime had little love for independent cafés where people talked freely, and the rooms were put to other uses for more than forty years. Only after the Velvet Revolution did the café return, in the early 1990s, with its billiard tables and high windows. It is one of the old Prague cafés that has kept its spirit.
A few doors back along Národní, under an arcade, a small memorial marks the spot where police beat peaceful student marchers on 17 November 1989, the night that began the end of the regime. That is a story for another walk. Now go on a few steps along Národní, turn into the passage beside the metro entrance, and look for a giant silver head.