Kafka in Berlijn

For the audio documentary Kafka in Berlin, radio and podcast maker Guido Spring travelled through Berlin with Niels Bokhove, a great expert on Kafka's life and work. They pass the only house where Kafka lived that still exists, on Grunewaldstrasse, and they go to the park where Kafka met a girl who had lost her doll and to whom he wrote letters to comfort her. They also stand in front of the building on Miquelstrasse where Kafka lived with a landlady about whom he wrote the story A Little Woman.

When you hear the name Franz Kafka, everyone immediately thinks of the city of Prague, where the writer lived and worked for most of his life. What is less well known is that Kafka lived in Berlin in the last year of his life, from September 1923 to March 1924. During these months he still wrote, despite his tuberculosis. He was reasonably happy there because he was finally freed from his tyrannical father. And finally things seemed to be going well in love: he lived together with Dora Diamant, a woman from a Hasidic Jewish family in Poland.

Through Dora he became interested in Judaism again and he started taking lessons with her at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. But he also had a hard time in Berlin: due to hyperinflation Franz and Dora had trouble surviving and had to move twice within Berlin. In addition, his health deteriorated due to tuberculosis. He eventually died of the disease, a few months after his stay in Berlin.