Photo: Martina Kutková, Radio Prague International
The great writer Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and spent his entire life in the city. His early years, and the life of his family, are closely linked to its Old Town district.
Today Prague’s Old Town is filled with tourists from all over the world. Naturally, the place looked rather different in the final years of the 19th century, when the young Franz Kafka walked its streets.
To get a flavour of Kafka’s links to the Old Town we spoke to guide Dana Kratochvílová, who shows visitors – foreign and local – around the district of his youth.
“Czechs don’t know much about Kafka. It always surprises me that teenage Americans have read The Metamorphosis and Kafka is a familiar subject for them. Many Czech young people have also learned about him. But under communism here, Kafka was taboo. For several generations, including my own, he was simply kept secret.”
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Author: Magdalena Hrozínková