At the Ship: The Riverside Flat Where Kafka Wrote in One Night
Why is it significant?
Stand where Pařížská avenue runs out of shop windows and meets the embankment, and look across the river: the Čech Bridge straight ahead, with bronze figures on tall columns, and beyond it the steep green slope of Letná.
Key Facts
| Place | At the Ship: The Riverside Flat Where Kafka Wrote in One Night |
|---|---|
| Address | nám. Curieových, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09140, 14.41780 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand where Pařížská avenue runs out of shop windows and meets the embankment, and look across the river: the Čech Bridge straight ahead, with bronze figures on tall columns, and beyond it the steep green slope of Letná. In the autumn of 1912, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer looked out at almost exactly this view from a window on this corner.
From 1907 to 1913 the Kafka family lived here, on the top floor of an apartment house called At the Ship. Franz worked at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute on Na Poříčí, a job he had chosen because of its single shift, eight until two. That left his afternoons for sleep and his nights for writing, while the rest of the flat, parents, sisters and maid, went quietly to bed.
On the night of 22 September 1912 he sat down at about ten in the evening and wrote a whole story, The Judgment, in one sitting, until six in the morning. In his diary he compared the experience to giving birth. Trembling, he went to his sisters' room and read it aloud to them. Two months later, in the same flat, he began The Metamorphosis: a travelling salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family has no idea what to do with him.
Now look at the bridge again. The Judgment ends with a young man running out of his father's flat, swinging himself over the railing of a bridge and letting himself drop into the river, while the traffic streams across above him. The Čech Bridge had opened in 1908, a few steps from Kafka's door. He did not have to invent his bridge... he only had to look up from the page.
The house At the Ship is long gone, later buildings stand on its site, and nothing marks the window. That is very Kafka. Now walk south along Pařížská, an avenue that did not even exist when Kafka was born, towards Old Town Square, and stop at the small square beside the baroque church of St Nicholas.