Franz Kafka in Munich (talk)

A city tour and the curse of the Eleven Executioners: What did writer Franz Kafka experience during his visits to Munich and how did it become literature? Go on a journey of discovery with literary scholar and author Dr. Dirk Heißerer in the Kafka Year 2024, celebrate the poet's birthday, who would have been 141 years old on July 3.

Kafka in Munich? Between 1903 and 1916, Kafka was in the city a total of four times: for just under two weeks as a 20-year-old law student, in 1911 for a night-time half-hour tour of the city, in 1913 for a day on his way back from Lake Garda and finally in 1916 as a 33-year-old insurance clerk with a doctorate for two days for a reading. In between, the 25-year-old Kafka made his debut in 908 with prose pieces in the Munich luxury magazine Hyperion.

Kafka's Munich experiences in his works

Two works of art from Munich, an antique relief and a contemporary etching, hung on the wall of his study in Prague. The student made a momentous mistake with the address of his guesthouse on Sophienstrasse (opposite the former Glass Palace) and received a terrible curse from the Eleven Executioners. The city tour with his friend Max Brod and a young lady from the station to the Friedensengel and Siegestor became a chapter in a novel. And the unsuccessful reading of ‘The Penal Colony’ in the presence of fellow Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke strangely gave rise to the prose piece ‘The Bucket Rider’.

Kafka year 2024 at TUM

100 years ago, on June 3, 1924, Franz Kafka died. The Prague writer is commemorated worldwide in the Kafka Year 2024. The TUM Center for Culture and Arts is also dedicating a series of events to him.