Why Kafka’s relationship with Munich was difficult

Wer einfährt, muss auch wieder raus. Franz Kafka hat München immer mit dem Zug erreicht. Der Hauptbahnhof zur Prinzregentenzeit sah anders aus als heute, aber er war auch damals schon ein Kopfbahnhof mit zweiundzwanzig Gleisen. Heute steigt man in einer Baustelle aus, seit mehr als sieben Jahren geht das so, und weil die Fertigstellung der zweiten Stammstrecke wahrscheinlich bis Mitte der Dreißigerjahre dauern wird und weil bis dahin die Nerven aller Pendler aufgerieben sein werden, baut man jetzt schnell einen „Interimsbahnhof Hybrid“, der schon 2026 fertig sein soll. Bahnhofsneubauten als Synonyme für Fehlplanungen und enteilende Kosten – „kafkaesk“, so sagt es der Duden, bedeutet „auf unergründliche Weise bedrohlich“.

Viermal taucht die Stadt zwischen 1903 und 1916 in Kafkas Lebensweg auf, das erste Mal Ende November 1903, als Kafka im Alter von zwanzig Jahren erwägt, an der Isar Germanistik zu studieren. Schließlich ist es die Stadt Thomas Manns, den Kafka verehrt und der mit „Gladius Dei“ eine Erzählung geschrieben hat, die Kafka nicht aus dem Kopf will, seine Sehnsucht nach einem wahrhaft großstädtischen Leben befeuert.

During this first and longest visit, during which he stayed in the city for almost two weeks, he was still very impressed, even though he wrote to Prague that he had only scratched the “superficial” surface. In addition to the main attractions, he also explored the Maxvorstadt, which was important for subculture at the time. There are various locations along Türkenstraße that are worth a visit, and at least the buildings are still there today, although – with one exception – they are used for something else.

At number 28, for example, there was the famous cabaret “Elf Scharfrichter”, whose advertising slogan was “Executions every evening at 8 o’clock”. And Kafka biographer Reiner Stach is not the only one who assumes that Kafka watched a program there. Today, the lively Bäderloft design studio can be found on this spot, which wants to lure its customers “into the bath of emotions” with the question “When will you bathe in happiness?” Kafka was not so lucky, perhaps a little more wellness would have done him good.

But at number 57, where the “Alter Simpl wine, coffee and bottled beer restaurant” was located in Kafka’s day, you can still find the “Alte Simpl”. It came about like this: In 1903, the legendary landlady Kathi Kobus moved the former “Weinrestaurant zurdichtelei” (Türkenstrasse 81) to the house at Türkenstrasse 57. She was looking for a new name and found it in the short form of the satirical magazine “Simplizissimus”. The illustrator Th. Th. Heine gave her a logo of a snarling Great Dane biting open a bottle. Guests at this meeting place for Munich’s bohemians included the scandalous author Frank Wedekind, the communist Erich Mühsam and the Austrian publicist, critic and translator Franz Blei. Number 81 is now the home of the international welfare organization Oxfam.

If Kafka were to return, he would find his way back on his old paths, even if a building on the west side of Türkenstraße would probably be a mystery to him. The Brandhorst Collection, with its façade made of colorful ceramic rods, speaks an architectural language that Kafka did not know, and the same applies to the Pinakothek der Moderne towering behind it.

When Kafka stayed at the Pension Lorenz in Sophienstrasse on the eastern edge of the Old Botanical Garden, he was confronted with a massive exhibition hall – the Glass Palace. With a length of 234 meters, a height of twenty-five meters and a width of sixty-seven meters, the art gallery was more than impressive. It offered almost eighteen thousand square meters of exhibition space. Kafka was unable to visit the Glass Palace, as the gigantic, unheated building was closed in winter.

Kafka wrote to Paul Kisch, his friend in Prague, a brother of Egon Erwin Kisch, who later became known as the “raging reporter,” that he was staying at “Sophienstrasse N 15, 3rd floor.” The house number didn’t even exist at the time, and this slip-up meant that Kafka didn’t receive a reply from Kisch. This made him increasingly angry because he had hoped to get contacts and company addresses from him.

If you want to know exactly: A man who has been studying the paths of Munich’s bohemians for decades has answers to detailed questions. The literary scholar Dirk Heißer is the local reconstruction luminary, he knows “where the g
hosts wander” – that is the title of his first book, published in 1993, on the topography of the Schwabing bohemians around 1900. Now he has done some fine-tuning and has literally followed the Prague visitor step by step with his study “Kafka in Munich”. In his essay in the “Munich Contributions to Jewish History and Culture” (Vol. 18, Issue 1, 2024), Heißer follows Kafka as a shadower. Regarding the mishap with the address, for example, he has a theory that the guest at the pension could have understood the house number “5c” to mean “fifteen”.

Two days after his arrival, the Prague law student is sitting in the Café Luitpold on Brienner Strasse and drinking a “bad coffee”. That could never happen to him today; the coffee in the Luitpold is appropriate, but the prices in this popular meeting place for the well-off and those who want to be seen are only suitable for students who don’t mind five euros for a cappuccino. The decor has long since changed; a huge cake counter dominates the dining room, lots of marble and dark wood suggest unshakable middle-classness. The Salon Luitpold offers an ambitious program with readings, discussion groups and music evenings to match. Kafka would drink his coffee in the Literaturhaus just a few steps around the corner today, only to find that there are more bankers and ministerial officials there than writers.

When Kafka arrives in Munich again on August 26, 1911, it is a short, rapid visit. On the way from Prague to Zurich, accompanied by his friend Max Brod, he has met a young woman on the train, the twenty-four-year-old officer’s daughter Angela Rehberger, who evidently triggers an erotic frenzy in the young men. There are thirty minutes to change trains, and the three of them spend twenty of them in a taxi on a city tour, Maximilianstrasse, Isar, Friedensengel, Prinzregentenstrasse, Feldherrnhalle. At ten o’clock in the morning, in the rain. They probably haven’t seen much, perhaps they were busy doing other things. Heißener suspects that it was supposed to be an “erotically tingling adventure”. It ends abruptly, Miss Rehberger boards her train to Innsbruck. The dream is over.

The third visit also lasts only one day. Kafka passes through Munich on his way back from a three-week stay in a sanatorium in Riva on Lake Garda. Heißerer also has to speculate here; he suspects that Kafka made up for the visit to the Glass Palace, which was not possible for him in the winter of 1903.

And then comes the episode that left the biggest mark. Kafka only read in public twice in his life, on December 4, 1912 in Prague and on November 16, 1916 in Munich. The venue of the event, the Goltz book and art shop at Brienner Strasse 8, no longer exists. The art dealer Hans Goltz not only shows contemporary art in the Luitpoldblock, but also organizes evenings for new literature. Max Brod and Franz Kafka are also scheduled to read in this series. But Brod is not allowed to leave the country – we are in the middle of the First World War. To deceive the censors, Goltz calls the evening “Tropical Munchauseniad” in reference to a previously approved reading by Mynona. Just don’t mess with the police, they are merciless in times of war. Kafka finds the title humiliating, but he still wants to go to Munich to meet his former fiancée Felice Bauer. You will stay in separate rooms in the Bayerischer Hof.

At Goltz, Kafka first reads poems by Brod, then he reads his story “In the Penal Colony”. Three newspapers report on the evening. In the “Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten” Kafka is a complete failure, but the “Münchener Zeitung” and the “München Augsburger Abendzeitung” are more forgiving. Two now-forgotten writers, Eugen Mondt and Max Pulver, who attended the reading, talked about the “smell of blood” and women fainting. It is more likely, as Heißener has reconstructed it, that some of the listeners left the hall early because they were fed up with the description of an execution.

In the end, only a few visitors stayed to speak with Kafka, including Rainer Maria Rilke, who followed Kafka’s literary development closely. Rilke himself later called the Munich appearance a “truly great failure”. He said he had misused his “little dirty story” as a “travel vehicle” to “Munich, with which I otherwise have no spiritual connection whatsoever”. The next day, a small group sat down again in the Café Luitpold, probably without much reconciliation from Kafka’s point of view.

He later dealt with the Munich appearance in the story “The Bucket Rider”, but he only had an indirect connection with the city. His publisher Kurt Wolff had settled in Luisenstrasse 31 in 1919, and in 1920 he published the volume “A Country Doctor. Short Stories”. A planned spa stay in Partenkirchen, which Wolff advised against, failed due to a visa. Kafka went to Merano instead and wrote to his publisher “Bavaria remains brittle”. Four years later he was dead.

Munich took little notice of this unfortunate relationship and remained rather indifferent. In 1971, the city dedicated a five-hundred-meter-long street to the world-famous writer in the culturally distant district of Ramersdorf-Perlach in t
he southeast. You wouldn’t pass through the area on a city tour. At the beginning of August, the road surface of Kafkastrasse was renovated; this probably had nothing to do with the centenary of his death.