City walk Franz Kafka and Prague self-guided audio tour

This city walk is a self-guided audio tour in Prague. You will experience the city through the eyes of Franz Kafka, the German-Czech writer of Jewish descent. You will listen to some of his diary entries and hear fragments from his stories. The tour leads you past buildings and houses where Kafka grew up, where he went to school, studied and worked.

How does this self-guided audio tour work?

You will need
* the downloaded app
* a charged smartphone
* headphones

* After payment you will receive a code to download the app
* You can start the self-guided audio tour at any time, pause it and listen to it at your own pace
* The tour lasts 90 minutes and follows a fixed route through Prague that is easy to follow.
* The tour starts at Franz Kafka Square at Kafka’s birthplace near Old Town Square.

You will have access to this app for the rest of your life as well as offline access to audio, maps and geodata

Photo: One of the houses in Prague where Franz Kafka lived

Who was Kafka?

Kafka was a novelist and short-story writer. He grew up in a Jewish family in Prague, which in those days was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where German was the official language. Although Kafka spoke fluent Czech, he wrote his books in German.

He was a writer trapped in a boring job. This is what his days were like when he worked for the Industrial Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.

He worked in the office from 9.30 am to 2.30 pm. He had lunch at 4:30 and took a nap until 8:30, did some physical exercises and then had dinner with the family. At about 11 o’clock in the evening he started writing for as long as he had inspiration, often until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Then he went to bed and tried his best to fall asleep to go back to the office the next morning.

Trivia

Kafka’s work was banned literature during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. After the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War, the ban was lifted in 1989.

After Kafka became a vegetarian, he went to the Berlin Aquarium, looked at the fish and said ‘Now I can finally look at you in peace because I won’t eat you anymore.’

Kafka passes Earth every 523 days because an asteroid discovered in 1983 is named after him.

Kafka wrote his short story ‘The Judgment’ – Das Urteil – in one night-time writing session on 22 September 1912.

A researcher going through Kafka’s papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2008 was amazed to come across a fairly large amount of porn. Apparently, he kept his collection of naughty magazines in a locked cupboard at his parents’ home and took the key with him when he went on holiday.

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