Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City

From the corner where Kafka was born to the cafés of Havel and Seifert: an endless tower of books, a Jesuit library that once burned them, the birth of the háček, and the theatre where Don Giovanni and the Czech anthem were first heard

Prague · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. At the Ship: The Riverside Flat Where Kafka Wrote in One Night

   nám. Curieových, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   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.

2. 2. Kafka's Birthplace: The Corner Where It All Began

   nám. Franze Kafky 24/3, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   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.

3. 3. Kinský Palace: A Schoolboy, a Pacifist and a Vanished Man

   Staroměstské nám. 606/12, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Find the pink and white Rococo palace on the eastern side of Old Town Square, just to the left of the dark towers of the Týn church, with stucco ornament like icing on a cake and a balcony above the entrance. Three very different stories, all of them about words, begin behind that facade.

   The first is a schoolboy. From 1893 to 1901 the palace housed the German grammar school of the Old Town, and Franz Kafka sat in its classrooms for eight years, learning Latin and Greek and quietly convinced, as he later wrote, that he would fail every exam. He never did. Later his father Hermann moved his fancy goods shop to the ground floor of the same building. The shop sign is said to have carried a jackdaw... in Czech, a kavka.

   The second story is a girl born in this very palace in 1843: Countess Bertha Kinsky. As Bertha von Suttner she wrote Lay Down Your Arms, a novel that shocked Europe with its picture of war, and she kept nudging her friend Alfred Nobel towards a prize for peace. In 1905 she became the first woman to receive it.

   The third story belongs to the balcony. On 21 February 1948, Klement Gottwald stood up there in the snow and addressed a huge crowd during the communist takeover. It was cold, and his comrade Vladimír Clementis put his own fur hat on Gottwald's bare head. The photograph went around the country. Four years later Clementis was hanged after a show trial, and the propagandists erased him from the picture... all that remained of him was the hat on Gottwald's head. Milan Kundera opens The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with exactly this scene.

   A novelist, a pacifist and a man who was made to disappear, all on one facade. Today the palace belongs to the National Gallery. Now walk back across the square, past the great Jan Hus monument, and through little Malé náměstí and Linhartská lane to Mariánské náměstí, where a public library hides a tower of books.

4. 4. Municipal Library & the Tower of Books: Banned, Typed, Survived

   Mariánské nám. 98/1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Go through the doors of the Municipal Library on Mariánské náměstí, and in the entrance hall you will find a column built entirely of books, thousands of them, stacked in a tight cylinder rising from the floor. Lean into the opening in its side and look down, then up... mirrors at both ends turn it into a tunnel of books with no bottom and no top.

   The installation is called Idiom, by the Czech artist Matěj Krén, and it has stood here since 1998. Children love it, photographers queue for it, and hardly anyone notices that the books are not chosen for their titles. They are simply books, the anonymous raw material of a city that reads. That is the point: a tower of words that goes on forever, like the conversation of a whole culture.

   In this city the image means more than it would elsewhere. After the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, the regime drew up lists of forbidden writers, and their books were quietly pulled from the shelves of public libraries, this one included. Hundreds of authors simply vanished from the catalogues: Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and many others who had signed the wrong petition or left the country.

   So literature went underground. Writers typed their manuscripts on thin paper with carbon copies, about ten at a time, and readers retyped them again. It was called samizdat, self-publishing. The novelist Ludvík Vaculík ran an entire typewritten publishing house from his flat, Edice Petlice, the Padlock Edition. Books passed from hand to hand overnight, and being caught with one could cost you your job.

   Now look around the square. Opposite stands the Baroque Clam-Gallas Palace, its doorways held up by straining stone giants, and on the corner of the New Town Hall sits a statue of Rabbi Loew, the scholar of the Golem legend. Behind you, a wall runs on and on, seemingly without end. That is the Klementinum, and that is where you are going next: follow its wall round into Karlova street, to the gateway of the old Jesuit college.

5. 5. Klementinum: The Library That Once Burned Books

   Klementinum 190, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk along the long, plain wall of the Klementinum and try to guess how big it is. You cannot see the end of it from anywhere at street level. After Prague Castle this is the largest complex of buildings in the city, a world of courtyards, chapels and towers that swallowed some thirty houses, gardens and lanes when the Jesuits built it.

   The Jesuits arrived in 1556, invited by the Habsburgs to win Bohemia back to the Catholic faith, and they settled in an old Dominican monastery of St Clement... which is where the name comes from. They built a college, schools, a printing house, an observatory. In 1654 their academy was merged with Charles University into a single institution. Education was their weapon, and books were their battlefield.

   Because books ran both ways. After the Protestant Bohemian estates lost the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, non-Catholic books were confiscated and burned across the country. The most notorious hunter was a Jesuit preacher, Antonín Koniáš, who compiled an index of forbidden Czech books. Legend credits him with burning around thirty thousand volumes. The number may be exaggerated, but in Czech his name became shorthand for a book burner.

   And yet inside these walls hides one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Baroque Library Hall, finished in the 1720s: a long gallery of carved wooden shelves, gilded columns, painted ceilings and rows of old globes. Today the complex is the National Library of the Czech Republic, which keeps a copy of every book published in the country, including all the ones that were once condemned. High above, in the astronomical tower, the weather has been measured every day since 1775, one of the longest unbroken records anywhere.

   So the place that burned books now guards them all. Prague loves that kind of irony, and Kafka would have enjoyed it. Leave through the courtyards to Karlova street and wind south through the lanes to Betlémské náměstí, where a plain white building with two steep gables is waiting.

6. 6. Bethlehem Chapel: Jan Hus and the Birth of the Háček

   Betlémské nám. 255/4, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk into the small, quiet square and face the white building with two steep, pointed gables side by side. It looks medieval, and it is... and it is also younger than many of the people walking past it. Both are true, and that is the story.

   Bethlehem Chapel was founded in 1391 for one unusual purpose: preaching in Czech. Not in Latin, the language of the Church and the university, but in the language of market women, brewers and craftsmen. The hall could hold around three thousand people. From 1402 its preacher was a university master named Jan Hus, and Prague came to listen.

   Hus did not only speak Czech, he thought hard about how to write it. A Latin treatise on Czech spelling, traditionally attributed to him, proposed replacing clumsy letter combinations with single letters marked by small signs above them. From that idea grew the háček and the čárka, the little hooks and accents on every street sign in this city. Every time you struggle to pronounce Dvořák, you can blame, or thank, this building. Centuries later, other Slavic languages, Slovak, Slovenian and Croatian among them, borrowed the same idea.

   Hus attacked the sale of indulgences and the wealth of the clergy, and in 1415 the Council of Constance had him burned at the stake as a heretic. His followers, the Hussites, held Bohemia against crusade after crusade, and the chapel became a sacred place of the Czech Reformation... until the Jesuits took it over, and in the late eighteenth century most of it was pulled down.

   What you see is a reconstruction from the early 1950s, raised on the old foundations around surviving fragments of the original walls. The communist government admired Hus as a revolutionary hero. A medieval reformer, restored by an atheist state to celebrate a rebellion... Prague again. Now continue west through the lanes to Anenské náměstí, a tiny square with a theatre whose name means On the Balustrade.

7. 7. Theatre on the Balustrade: Havel's Absurd Stage

   Anenské nám. 209/5, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   In front of you is a small theatre with a modest entrance on a sleepy little square. No columns, no gold, just a sign: Divadlo Na zábradlí, the Theatre on the Balustrade. If the National Theatre is the cathedral of Czech drama, this was its laboratory... and it ended up changing the country.

   It opened in 1958, one of several small stages that appeared when the regime loosened its grip a little. In 1960 a young man from a wealthy family that the communists had dispossessed came to work here. Because of his bourgeois background he had not been allowed to study what he wanted, so he started at the bottom, as a stagehand moving scenery. His name was Václav Havel.

   Within a few years he was the theatre's dramaturg and resident playwright. In 1963 his play The Garden Party premiered here: a comedy about a young man who climbs an absurd bureaucracy by learning to speak only in empty slogans, until even his own parents no longer recognise him. Audiences laughed until they cried, because they all spoke that language at work. Then came The Memorandum, about an office forced to adopt an artificial language nobody can understand. Kafka's grandchildren, you could say, had found their stage.

   After the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, Havel's plays were banned at home. He was watched, harassed and imprisoned for several years in all, while theatres abroad kept performing him. Then, in December 1989, after the Velvet Revolution, the dissident playwright was elected president of Czechoslovakia. The stagehand who once shifted scenery on this tiny stage moved into Prague Castle.

   The theatre still plays, and its programme is still sharp. Picture the audiences of the sixties spilling out into this little square at night, arguing in low voices about what they had just laughed at. From here, head south to the river and follow the embankment upstream to the National Theatre, where a famous café looks out over the water.

8. 8. Café Slavia: The Living Room of Czech Literature

   Smetanovo nábř. 1012/2, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stand on the corner where Národní avenue meets the river, and look at the tall windows on the ground floor of the building opposite the National Theatre. Behind them is Café Slavia, open since 1884, and for well over a century the living room of Czech literature.

   Its regulars read like the contents page of a national anthology. Writers and painters, and actors from the theatre across the street who came over after the curtain fell. In the 1920s the young avant-garde poets of the Devětsil group, with their theorist Karel Teige, argued here about poetry, surrealism and revolution over cups of cold coffee. The poet Jaroslav Seifert, one of them, sat in these rooms for decades. In 1984 he became the first Czech to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a signatory of the dissident Charter 77, to the visible discomfort of the regime.

   Inside, look for the painting on the wall: The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva. A man sits at a café table, staring at a glass of pale green spirit, while a translucent green woman, the spirit of the drink itself, perches on the table in front of him. It has hung here for so long that the café is hard to imagine without her.

   In the 1970s and 1980s, Slavia was also where dissidents met, and where secret police informers sat at the next table pretending to read the paper. Václav Havel was a regular. After 1989, in a dispute over the building, the café closed for several years, and Havel, by then president, was among those who called for it to reopen. It finally did in the late 1990s.

   The view is the real reason to come. From these windows you see the Vltava, Petřín Hill and Prague Castle floating above Malá Strana, the panorama every poet in this room tried at some point to put into words. Now turn your back on the river and walk east along Národní, past the National Theatre's golden roof, to the long facade at number 22.

9. 9. Café Louvre: Where Kafka Met the Philosophers

   Národní 116/22, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   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.

10. 10. The Head of Franz Kafka: Prague's Shape-Shifting Portrait

    Spálená 2121/22, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    In the little square behind the Národní třída metro station stands a silver head more than ten metres tall, built from forty-two horizontal slices of polished steel. Wait a moment... the slices start to turn, each on its own, until the face breaks apart into a shining spiral of plates. Then slowly they find each other again, and Kafka is looking at you once more.

    This is David Černý's Head of Franz Kafka, unveiled in 2014. Černý is Prague's great provocateur, the artist who in 1991 painted a Soviet tank memorial pink and later sent giant faceless babies crawling up the Žižkov television tower. Here the joke is gentler, and sadder. Kafka wrote about a man who wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, about an identity that can crack without warning. A head that keeps falling apart and reassembling itself is about as faithful a portrait as metal can offer.

    It is a machine as much as a sculpture: every layer has its own motor, and a computer choreographs the whole dance. The mirror-polished surface reflects the passers-by, the trams, the shop windows... so Kafka's face is always partly made of you.

    There is an irony here that Kafka would have recognised. In his lifetime he published only a few slim books and was barely known outside a small circle. He asked Max Brod to burn everything else. Brod refused, and in March 1939, on the night before German troops entered Prague, he escaped on one of the last trains out, with Kafka's manuscripts in his suitcase. That is how the world got The Trial and The Castle.

    For long stretches of the communist era Kafka's books were hard to find in his own city. Now the writer who wanted to vanish revolves ten metres tall in a shopping passage. Walk east along Charvátova and up Vodičkova to Jungmannovo náměstí, a small square watched over by a seated bronze scholar.

11. 11. Jungmann Square: The Man Who Rebuilt a Language

    Jungmannovo nám., 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Find the bronze gentleman seated high on his pedestal in the middle of the square, calm and slightly tired, as if he has just finished a very long book. He is Josef Jungmann, and without him the Czech you have been reading on every street sign today might look rather different.

    Around 1800, Czech was in serious trouble. After two centuries of Habsburg rule, the educated people of Prague spoke and wrote German. Czech lived on in villages, in kitchens, in hymns, but many believed it could never again be a language of science, philosophy or poetry. Jungmann, a schoolteacher, set out to prove them wrong.

    His weapons were translation and a dictionary. In 1811 he published a Czech translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, a demonstration that the language could carry the grandest poetry in Europe. Then, between 1834 and 1839, came his Czech-German dictionary in five volumes, with well over a hundred thousand entries. Where Czech lacked a word, he dug one out of old texts, borrowed one from another Slavic language, or simply coined it. Many of those coinages are now so ordinary that Czechs have no idea they were ever new.

    That is the strange beauty of the Czech National Revival: a nation rebuilt first in grammars, dictionaries and theatre plays, and only later in politics. By the time this monument was unveiled in 1878, Czech had its own theatres and newspapers, and a few years later Prague's university split to give it a Czech half. The writers had won the argument before the politicians did.

    Kafka grew up at the end of this story, a German speaker in a city turning Czech around him. He spoke Czech well, and his first translator into it was Milena Jesenská, the journalist he wrote some of his most famous letters to. Now walk north along Na Můstku and through the market street of Rytířská to the Gothic bay window of the oldest university in Central Europe.

12. 12. Carolinum & Estates Theatre: Diplomas, Don Giovanni and an Anthem

    Železná 541/9, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Your last stop is a delicate Gothic bay window, a stone oriel with pointed arches and carved tracery, jutting out from the wall of the building on Železná street. It belonged to the chapel of the Carolinum, the historic heart of Charles University, founded by Emperor Charles IV in 1348, the oldest university in Central Europe.

    In 1882 the university split in two, a Czech one and a German one, sharing the same history and refusing to share almost anything else. On 18 June 1906, at the German university, Franz Kafka received his doctorate in law. He had chosen law almost by default, the safe path for a merchant's son. A decade earlier another Prague-born poet, the young Rainer Maria Rilke, had enrolled here briefly before leaving the city for good.

    Now turn to the elegant green and white building next door, the Estates Theatre, opened in 1783. On 29 October 1787 Mozart himself conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni on its stage. Prague adored Mozart when Vienna was lukewarm, and he knew it... he is said to have remarked that his Praguers understood him.

    And in 1834, in the same theatre, a comedy by Josef Kajetán Tyl, The Fiddler's Feast, had its first night. In it, an old blind fiddler sings a gentle song beginning Kde domov můj... Where is my home. The play is mostly forgotten, but the song became the Czech national anthem. A country's anthem born as a number in a popular comedy: that tells you a great deal about this city.

    So the walk closes here, between a stage where an opera and an anthem were born and a university where Kafka became a lawyer and Rilke a runaway. Within a short walk of this corner, Hus, Jungmann, Seifert, Havel and Kafka all found their words. Prague does not let go, Kafka wrote. After today, perhaps you understand why.