Walk with Kafka in Prague

The German Primary School for boys

Masná (Meat Market Street) 18, Old Town

The edifice is a classicistic school building from the years before 1853, in 1879 it was rebuilt in a neo-renaissance style and is used as an apartment building today.

Thein LaneOn September 16, 1889, Monday, little Franz Kafka, started out for the first time on his way to the German Primary School for boys in the Meat Market Street. Kafka’s path to school led from the house „Of Minute“, where the family lived, past the complex of buildings which formed the Town Hall with its famous Astronomical Clock directly across the Old Town Square, past the St Mary’s Column, toward the Thein Church. Between the church and the then still baroque exterior of the house „Of the Stone Bell“ ran the narrow little passage, the Thein Lane by which one reached and crossed the Thein Courtyard or past the side of the Thein Courtyard into the Meat Market Street. The family cook was told to accompany the young boy there.

Kafka writes to Milena Jesenská in 1920: „Our cook, a small, desiccated, lean woman with pointed nose and sunken cheeks, with a waxen complexion but determined, energetic, and superior, took me to school every morning. We lived in the house that separates the Big Square from the Small Square. So the path led first across the square, then into the Thein Lane, then through a sort of arched passage into the Meat Market Street down to the market itself. And the same thing now repeated itself every morning for about a year. On leaving the house the cook said she would tell the teacher how disobedient I had been at home. Well, I think I was probably not that disobedient, but I was stubborn, a good for nothing, sad, angry, and out of all that one probably have concocted something good to tell the teacher. The German Primary School for boys in present daysI knew that and so I didn’t take the cook’s threat lightly. But for the time being I felt that the walk to school was terribly long, that a lot could still happen (out of such seemingly recklessness of a child, since paths are precisely not endless, there develops over time that anxiety and death-like seriousness reflected in the eyes). And on the Old Town Square I was still very doubtful whether the cook, who was a person to be respected, but only at home, would even dare to speak to that universally respected person, the teacher. Perhaps I even said something to that effect to her and she usually gave the curt reply with her thin and merciless lips that I didn’t have to believe her, bit she would tell him anyway. So around where we entered the Meat Market Street – as yet it had no historic significance for me (in which area of town did you live as a child?) – the fear of her threat started to predominate. I mean, school itself was a terror for me and now the cook wanted to make it an even greater one, I began to beg, she shook her head, the more I begged, the more valuable that for which I was begging for seemed to me, the greater the danger too.. The German Primary School for boysI stopped and begged for forgiveness, she dragged me on, I threatened her with the retribution of my parents, she laughed, here she was omnipotent, I held on to the entrance gates of the stores and to the stone markers at the street corners, I didn’t want to continue until she had forgiven me. I grabbed and tugged at her skirts (she didn’t have it easy either), but she dragged me on assuring me that she would report this behavior to the teacher too; it was getting late, the clock of St Jacob’s Church struck 8; one heard the school bells too; other children started to run. My greatest fear was always that I would arrive too late, now we also had to run and always the thought; ‘she will tell him’ – well, she didn’t, never did, but she always had the possibility and a seemingly rising possibility (yesterday I didn’t say anything, but today I certainly will) and she never loosened her grip on that. And sometimes – just imagine, Milena – she stamped her foot on the pavement in her anger over me and sometimes a coal merchant’s wife was standing around there somewhere too and looked on. Milena, what foolishness and how I belong to you with all the cooks and threats and this huge amount of dust, which the last 38 years have caused to swirl up and that now has now found its place in my lungs.”