Franz Kafka
1883 · 1924
“He wrote the dream the century woke into.”
Kept by Here After All · open to visitors
Their story
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, worked days at an insurance institute, and wrote nights at the kitchen table while the house slept. He asked that everything be burned. His friend Max Brod refused, and so the century received the trial, the castle, and a clerk named Gregor who woke changed.
He published little and doubted all of it. Few writers have been so wrong about their own worth, and few have been proved wrong so completely.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
Standing here now
You are standing at Franz's plot. Whoever arrives will see you here.
Words spoken here stay only with those standing here. Nothing is recorded.
Remembrances
Where the family and those who loved Franz gather, post, and return. Visitors may leave a tribute in the family's keeping.
"For we are like tree trunks in the snow. They seem to rest lightly on the surface, and with a small push one ought to be able to shift them. No, that cannot be done, for they are bound firmly to the ground. But look, even that is only seeming." From The Trees, in Betrachtung, 1912. Translated from the German for Here After All.
"Life is astonishingly short. In my memory now it crowds so close together that I can hardly grasp how a young man can decide to ride to the next village without fearing that, quite apart from unlucky accidents, even the span of an ordinary happy life may fall far short of the time such a ride needs." From The Next Village, in A Country Doctor, 1920. Translated from the German for Here After All.
"Rightly understanding a thing and misunderstanding the same thing do not wholly exclude one another." From The Trial, published 1925. Translated from the German for Here After All.
The Trial as it first reached the world, 1925. Max Brod kept the pages his friend had asked him to burn.
A letter on its way to Robert Musil, February 1914, about the printing of The Metamorphosis.
The Old Town bridge tower, 1856. His daily walks crossed beneath it.
The first page of The Trial in his own hand, 1914. He wrote the ending that same autumn.
Contemplation, 1912. His first book, eighteen short pieces in a printing of eight hundred.
Prague from the castle side, photographed by Andreas Groll in 1856. The city that held his whole life.
The last portrait, 1923. Berlin, Dora, and one unburdened year.
The year of the aphorisms, written at Zürau under open sky.
The insurance years. One office by day, the other by night.
Prague, 1906. The young doctor of law who wrote after hours.