Walk with Kafka in Prague

The “Reading and Debating Society of the German Students in Prague”

Národní Avenue 12, New Town (non existing)

Max BrodOn the 23rd of October 1903 Franz Kafka heard a lecture by a certain Max Brod on the premises in the Ferdinand Street of the „Reading and Debating Society of the German Students in Prague”. The lecturer spoke on the topic “The Fate and Future of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy”. After the talk Kafka accompanied Max Brod home and confronted him with contra-arguments to the points he had made. This evening marked the beginning of the lifelong friendship between the two Prague writers.

Max Brod’s circle of friends numbered people like Viktor Freud, a classmate; the Zionist-oriented English teacher Emil Weis; another schoolmate and admirer, Max Bäuml; an employee of the Union-Bank of Bohemia and Bäuml’s blind cousin, Oskar Baum, who in the following years became one of Kafka’s most important friends and literary travel companions. Brod’s schoolmate from his days in the primary school run by the Piarist religious order, the author and later Zionist, Felix Weltsch, also belonged to this group. Kafka brought Oskar Pollak into the circle, who later became an art historian and was killed on the Isonzo front in 1915, as well as his school friends Hugo Bergmann and Ewald Felix Příbram.

Ferdinand Street (today's Národní Avenue) in 1900 This Society had its meeting rooms at first in the Hibernergasse, from 1889 on in the Ferdinand Street No. 12 and from 1904 on in the Krakauergasse No. 14. The Society, divided into sections according to faculties, was an umbrella organization for the liberal German students and had split off from the Bohemian bi-national student caucus. Its immediate goal was an education in the spirit of (German) nationalism and artistic interests of the stocked library with wide collection of books and offered their readers several hundred newspapers and scientific and literary journals. The reading room on the first floor provided room for forty persons; from its windows the library users could look down on the lively to and fro on the Ferdinand Street.

Národní Avenue; in this place once stood the building of the Reading and Debating Society Like some of his schoolmates, Kafka had also at the beginning of term joined the “Halle” (the Hall, that is the Society), as it was termed in student circles. He participated in events mounted by the “Section for Literature and Art”, from the winter semester 1903 he took on different tasks. From 1905 on Kafka does not appear in the membership list printed in the reports of the “Halle”, although he still had contact with the fraternity. There are no indications he continued on after graduation as an inactive senior member (“alter Herr”).