The life of society moves in a circle.
--Kafka, quoting Dostoyevsky’s “Letter to a Woman Painter”

One day, when Kafka and his Hebrew teacher, Friedrich Thieberger were looking out over Old Town Square from a window of Oppelt House, Kafka pointed out his secondary school in Kinsky Palace; what they could see of the university where he had studied law; and, a little farther away, the location of his office. The writer twice gestured in a small circumference, condensing his entire existential space. “This small circle contains my whole life,” he told Thieberger. Prague had become both cage and refuge, a place that protected him from the natural world, but also a place that the writer changed in his dreams. We see how Kafka slowly creates the mesh, weaves the web, lays the foundations of his mysterious literary architecture.

Kafka’s world was only deceptively narrow. It consisted of intersecting Prague circles that included intimate friends, fellow writers at the Café Arco, and those who, like him, frequented Berta Fanta’s intellectual salon at the Unicorn House.

Kafka’s Body.

Kafka first experienced the contradictions of urban modernity within the family circle, during visits to his father’s fancy goods shop. His initial fascination with his native bourgeois sphere, however, was gradually penetrated and finally undermined by his discomfort with his own body, even as he moved into the wider circles of Prague’s Jewish intelligentsia. Although his photographs and Max Brod’s biography reveal Kafka to have been a bit of a dandy, his Diaries tell us that he hated his “miserable appearance,” which he attributed to the “awful clothes” that started him off on the road to self-contempt: “I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms at awkward angles, was afraid of mirrors.”

The Inner Circle.

The Austrian-born Max Brod (1884–1968) was a leading figure in German-speaking Czech intellectual circles from the beginning of the twentieth century until his exile to Israel in 1939. Brod was a prolific and wide-ranging writer, but he is chiefly remembered as Kafka’s friend, executor, and first biographer. Their friendship began in 1902 and deepened over the years. They traveled together to Italy, Weimar, Paris, and Switzerland. At the end of his life, Kafka, in Kafkaesque fashion, asked Brod to burn almost all of his manuscripts, but his friend—not without feelings of guilt—disobeyed him, thereby bequeathing to us what Jorge Luis Borges called “the most singular works of our century.”

The Philosophy Circle at the Fanta Home.

Like Madame de Staël, the French-Swiss woman of letters, Berta Fanta hosted a preeminent intellectual salon. The soirees at her house in Prague—which was distinguished by the unicorn on the façade—might feature readings from Hegel, Fichte, and Kant. Lectures explored major new topics of the time, such as psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, transfinite numbers, and quantum theory. Besides Kafka, Max Brod, and Felix Weltsch, other frequent visitors were the mathematician Gerhard Kowalewski, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, the physician Philipp Frank, and the physicist Albert Einstein, who was then teaching in Prague.

Café Arco.

The Café Arco, at Hibernergasse 16, was where the young German-speaking Prague writers—known as “the arconauts”—met. Kafka himself best defined their dilemma in a letter to Max Brod: “[The Jewish writers] live beset by three impossibilities: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German and the impossibility of writing differently, and we could add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing at all.”

First Publications.

In his youth, Kafka was particularly reticent to show his work. When Max Brod began to publicize his early writings, Kafka furiously rejected the entire literary machine, which Brod knew inside out. The mundane aspects of a writer’s existence seemed to Kafka painfully, even dangerously, incompatible with his idea of what that life should be: independent and uncompromised by any demands extraneous to the work.