Kafka's Berlin

Wilhelmine Berlin was a place of sensational amusements. Those who could afford it traveled from the provinces for a few days and went to the trendy revues, variety shows and operettas. The center of these amusements was the area around Friedrichstraße with the Wintergarten Theater in Dorotheenstraße and the Metropol Theater in Behrensstraße as the biggest attractions.

Opened in 1898 on a historic site - theater had been performed here since 1764 - the Metropol Theater quickly gained an international reputation as an operetta and revue theater. The premieres of the big annual revues in September were the talk of the town, and the prices for premiere tickets were exorbitant. The subsequent repertoire performances, on the other hand, could be attended at normal prices: Kafka saw “Hurray!!! We're still alive!”, the revue of 1910 with the great star of the Metropol, Fritzi Massary (1882-1969).

Kafka, however, was less than impressed. In a letter to Felice Bauer on October 24, 1912, he confessed that he had sat in the Metropol Theater “with a yawn of my whole being bigger than the stage opening”.

Fritzi Massary, the daughter of a Jewish Viennese merchant family, came to Berlin in 1904 and soon became a great revue and operetta star who had the whole of Berlin at her feet for decades. She had her last great success in 1932 in the operetta 'Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will', written for her by composer Oscar Strauss and librettist Alfred Grünwald. Rioting Nazis disrupted the performances with anti-Semitic chants, and Fritzi Massary and her husband, the no less famous Max Pallenberg (1877-1934), whom Kafka had seen several times at guest performances in Prague, decided to leave Germany before Hitler came to power.

Oscar Strauss (1870-1954) and Alfred Grünwald (1884-1951) managed to flee Nazi Germany, as did other well-known composers of the house, including Jean Gilbert (1879-1942) and Victor Hollaender (1866-1940). Others did not escape the terror, including Leon Jessel (1871-1942), who died in the Jewish Hospital after severe mistreatment in Gestapo custody.

The Metropol Theater's success story, which was shaped by Jewish artists, ended with the beginning of the Nazi era, towards the end of which, in March 1945, the building was largely destroyed by bombs. Only the auditorium survived the attack virtually undamaged and was incorporated into the new building in 1946. Today, you can take a seat in it when you visit the Komische Oper.

Franz Kafka obviously prepared thoroughly for his first stay in Berlin, paying particular attention to the theater program, because when he arrived at Anhalter Bahnhof on December 3, 1910, it was already clear which performances he would attend. “Almost out of the blue”, he wrote to his friend Max Brod on December 4, he had ‘driven to the Kammerspiele’; the program included Molière's Heirat wider Willen and Shakespeare's Komödie der Irrungen. A few days later, he saw Reinhardt's production of Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Deutsches Theater with Albert Bassermann in the title role, whose performance in Kafka sparked an enthusiasm that lasted for years. When the film The Other was announced in Prague in 1913, Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer on the night of March 4-5 that Bassermann was in it. On a poster depicting him in an armchair, he had “seized him again, as he had in Berlin”.

The success story of the Deutsches Theater dates back to the period after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, when interest in cultural events grew in parallel with the economic boom. In 1889, the theater critic Otto Brahm (1856-1912) and nine like-minded people - including Maximilian Harden and the publisher Samuel Fischer - founded the Freie Bühne association, which set itself the goal of cultivating socially critical contemporary drama while circumventing censorship. Poorer social classes were to be offered a sophisticated theater program. Brahm took over the management of the Deutsches Theater on Schumannstrasse in 1894 and was soon celebrated as a director of contemporary drama and as the founder of stage realism. His theater outstripped the “Burg” in Vienna and attracted actors such as the young Max Reinhardt, whom Brahm brought to Berlin from Salzburg.

Reinhardt left the ensemble after eight years and founded a cabaret in 1902, where he developed a new style of acting. He was soon regarded as an experimental innovator, and his sensational successes led him to return to the Deutsches Theater in the summer of 1905 and take over its management. Under Reinhardt, the building was modernized and extended, including the installation of a revolving stage with a diameter of 18 metres. The casino at Schumannstraße 13a was converted into the Kammerspiele, an intimate theater with 300 seats, and the entire building ensemble was given a neoclassical façade. With forms of staging that had never been seen before, Reinhardt became the dominant figure in Berlin theater life for the next almost thirty years.

The celebrated theater and film star Albert Bassermann (1867-1952) left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1934 and later continued his career in Hollywood and on Broadway. Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), son of a Jewish family of small traders, left Germany on the evening of the Reichstag fire. He declined the “honorary aristocracy” offered to him;

Bomb damage to the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele was repaired after the war, and later the historic auditorium and foyers were carefully restored. Visitors to the Deutsches Theater today find themselves in an ambience that corresponds to the one in which Kafka had his first theater experience in Berlin in 1910. And those who want to pay their respects to Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt: Their busts stand on the square in front of the Deutsches Theater.

The terminus and departure station for trains to Prague was Anhalter Bahnhof. When Kafka first arrived there on December 3, 1910, Askanischer Platz in front of the station was one of the most elegant squares in Berlin. It was surrounded by some of the poshest hotels and numerous less luxurious ones, such as the Askanischer Hof in Königgrätzer Straße (now Stresemannstraße), where Kafka stayed repeatedly in the years that followed. 

The first Anhalter Bahnhof, inaugurated in 1841, was no longer able to cope with the demands of increasing rail traffic at the time of the founding of the German Reich, and a new, still legendary building was constructed in just five years, opening in 1880. Based on designs by architect Franz Schwechten (who also designed the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church), an imposing neo-Renaissance reception building was built with separate rooms for the emperor and a platform hall that is hardly inferior in size to today's main station: 34 meters high, 170 meters long and with a clear width of 62 meters. In its day, it was the largest hall on the European continent, a “mother cave of railroads”, as Walter Benjamin called it. 

The story of Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer is closely linked to the Anhalter Bahnhof. It is a stage for appearances and farewells and a place of hope and disappointment. Kafka repeatedly announced his exact arrival time to his girlfriend and later fiancée in vain, hoping that she would meet him on the platform. He rarely let his disappointment be heard aloud; in a letter to Felice Bauer dated March 13, 1914, he wrote rather casually: “I am afraid of the platform, where I have twisted my neck, I am afraid of the entrance to the station, where I have looked forward to the approaching automobiles”. The departure was probably as lonely as the arrival each time. Obviously, emotional scenes in public spaces were not Felice Bauer's thing. 

All that remains of the gigantic Anhalter Bahnhof building today is the sad remnant of the entrance area. Despite heavy destruction in February 1945, the four hall walls were still standing at the end of the war and the station was considered to be rebuildable. Train services were resumed, but were limited to a few long-distance and passenger trains to the Soviet occupation zone and later to the GDR. From 1951, rail traffic declined and finally came to a complete standstill after the Deutsche Reichsbahn of the GDR disconnected the connections. Despite strong reservations from experts, the hall was demolished in 1959. Only the portico with part of the covered driveway and the terracotta moldings of the Kaiser portal, which can be viewed today in the German Museum of Technology, were preserved.

Berlin's rise to a modern metropolis in the last quarter of the 19th century would be hard to imagine without the contribution of Jewish Berliners. Jews were only allowed to resettle in the city in 1671, a century after they had been expelled from the Mark Brandenburg. The core of the modern Jewish settlement was the Scheunenviertel, an area originally used for military purposes in the area of today's Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where barns were built to store grain, hay and straw, which could no longer be stored within the city walls due to the risk of fire. 

With the start of industrial development, the village-like settlement absorbed the population flows coming from the countryside, people who hoped for new earning opportunities in the city. In the 19th century, Eastern Jews who had fled pogroms in Russia and wanted to emigrate overseas kept arriving in waves, but many of them stayed. Tenements were built for those who found accommodation as industrial workers, while the others used the neighborhood's hiding places to get by somehow. The Scheunenviertel was characterized by workers and day labourers, petty traders, cookshops, street vendors, Talmud schools, but also cabarets and small theaters, the downside of which was prostitution and crime. Artists such as Heinrich Zille captured the misery of the area. 

Yiddish was the lingua franca of emigrants from Eastern Europe. The First World War brought further streams of refugees to the district, and tens of thousands of Jewish workers were recruited for the arms industry. Due to anti-Semitic riots in the successor states of the collapsed Habsburg Empire, the flow did not dry up even after the end of the war. Kafka had known the Jewish Volksheim for East Jewish refugee children from afar since 1916; he came into contact with the pupils in July 1923 during his vacation in Müritz on the Baltic Sea, where the Volksheim from the Scheunenviertel had a vacation colony. For Kafka, whose health was severely impaired, the vacation was to be a test of whether he would be able to undertake any further journeys, perhaps even to Palestine. On his way back to Prague, he met up with three East Jewish girls from the vacation colony. It was probably through them that Kafka got to know the Scheunenviertel. Berlin had long since replaced Palestine as the desired location for a new phase in his life - not least thanks to Dora Diamant, a supervisor at the vacation colony whom he had met in Müritz and who was to become his partner in Berlin from September. “Would you like to move to Berlin? Closer, very close to the Jews?” Kafka asked his medical student friend Robert Klopstock at the beginning of August 1923. 

In the period before the world war, Jewish Berlin played virtually no role in Kafka's notes and letters until, during a vacation with his Berlin fiancée Felice Bauer in Marienbad in July 1916, the conversation turned to a project that Kafka's friend Max Brod was in favour of. Alongside Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and several other committed Zionists, he was one of the supporters of the Jewish People's Home, which was opened in Berlin on May 18, 1916 with a speech by Landauer on Judaism and socialism. A brochure published by the Volksheim in the year it was founded states: 

Based on the settlement system, the Jewish People's Home (...) has set itself the task of bringing together the children and young people of the streets in the area of the home, which are mostly populated by Eastern Jewish immigrant families, in communities (kindergarden, youth groups, clubs) in order to gain a cultural influence on the growing generation through appropriate leadership. 

During the war, Galicia and other regions in the German-Russian and Austrian-Russian border areas were among the main theaters of conflict. The Jewish population of these areas fled to the west, preferably to cities with large Jewish communities such as Berlin. The Volksheim was intended to provide educational and social work for the children of these refugees and in this way promote understanding between the established Western Jews and their more rural brethren from the East. 

Felice Bauer obviously quickly had the idea of volunteering as a helper. Kafka encouraged her and provided her with reading recommendations, books and game instructions from Prague when she took over a group of 10-12-year-old girls after appropriate preparatory courses. He received detailed reports on the group evenings and Sunday excursions, gave pedagogical advice, enquired about individual members of the girls' group and was thus involved from afar. Although he agreed with Felice Bauer in his skeptical distance from Zionism, he had also moved closer to positions of so-called cultural Zionism - probably also from the idea of Jewish solidarity, which was based on his encounters with refugees in Prague and his observations of refugee aid there. 

The Jewish People's Home existed for around ten years and the building in Dragonerstraße, now Max-Beer-Straße 5, in which it was housed, still stands. However, like the entire formerly proletarian quarter, it has been lavishly restored to meet the demands of a well-heeled clientele who, since reunification, consider it “trendy” to live or at least go out here.

“Twice a week and only when the weather is good I go to the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies,” Kafka reported to his friend Felix Weltsch on November 18, 1923. The university, which opened in 1872, was an autonomous Jewish academic institution that was not dependent on any state or religious organization. It was officially recognized by the city of Berlin in 1883 as a teaching institution dedicated to scientific research and teaching. In 1921 the university had 63 regular students and 45 guest students. Many of them came from Eastern Europe and had attended Jewish training schools there. They had a much better knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish writings than their German-assimilated fellow students, who, like Kafka, came to the university out of interest in their Jewish heritage. In order to catch up on this lead, students like Kafka who came from assimilated families usually had to attend the so-called preparandy at the university. Here they were familiarized with source texts and forms of interpretation, for which a good knowledge of Hebrew was a prerequisite. Both the teaching and research operations as well as the maintenance of the building at Artilleriestrasse 14 (today Tucholskystrasse 9), which was built in 1907, was financed solely from funds from donors and patrons. In the metropolis, which was shaken by inflation and was even more hectic than usual, the university was another refuge for Kafka, in addition to his Steglitz domicile: 

For me, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies is a place of peace in wild Berlin and in the wild areas of the interior. [...] A whole house, beautiful lecture halls, large library, peace, well heated, few students and everything for free. Of course I'm not a regular student, I'm only in preparatory school and there only with one teacher and with him only a little, so that in the end all the splendor almost evaporates again, but even if I'm not a student, the school exists and is beautiful and is basically not beautiful at all, but rather strange to the point of grotesque and beyond that to the point of incomprehensibly tender (namely the liberal-reformer aspect, the scientific aspect of it all). (To Robert Klopstock, December 19, 1923)

Kafka was quite a striking figure among listeners. The composer Josef Tal (1910-2008), son of a rabbi who taught at the Institute, remembers that his father once even invited this special student home for coffee. Kafka sought conversation, preferably in Hebrew, and stocked up on Hebrew reading material in the library. 

The Higher Institute for Jewish Studies existed until 1942. After 1989 the building was renovated, and since 1999 it has been the headquarters of the Central Council of Jews in Germany as the "Leo Baeck House".

Even when he was making marriage plans with his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka knew that they would settle in a leafy outskirts of Berlin. When he finally realized his dream in the late summer of 1923 and moved to Berlin, he chose Steglitz. “I can hardly get beyond the immediate surroundings of the apartment,” he reported to his friend Felix Weltsch on October 9th, “it is of course wonderful, my alley is about the last semi-urban street, behind it the country dissolves into gardens and villas , old lush gardens. On warm evenings there is such a strong scent that I hardly know from anywhere else." 

Kafka is already severely affected by his pulmonary tuberculosis: at a height of 1 meter 80, he weighs 54 kg, and there are repeated phases in which he is plagued by bouts of fever and cannot leave his bed. Without the caring support of Dora Diamant, whom he met during his holidays on the Baltic Sea in July, it would be impossible for him to live alone. However, the ladies' visit brings problems, and his first landlady doesn't miss the fact that Kafka apparently receives a good pension: she increases the rent. After just six weeks, Kafka moved from Miquelstrasse 8 (today the corner of Rothenburg and Muthesiusstrasse) to Grunewaldstrasse 13. He announced to his friend Max Brod on November 1, 1923: 

I will be moving on November 15th. A very advantageous move in my opinion. (I'm almost afraid to write down this thing, which my housewife won't find out until November 15th, between her furniture reading over my shoulders, but they, at least some of them, also agree with me). 

He now lives in two rooms and instead of the kerosene lamp there is electric light. "(…) I live almost in the country, in a small villa with a garden, it seems to me that I have never had such a beautiful apartment, I will certainly lose it soon, it is too beautiful for me," he reports his girlfriend Milena Pollak on November 20, 1923. Kafka's hunch was confirmed in January when he was fired on February 1, 1924. He is now moving into an apartment in Zehlendorf, at Heidestraße 25/26 (today Busseallee 7/9). “Dearest parents, the new apartment seems to be proving its worth, it should be a little quieter, otherwise it is beautiful,” wrote Kafka on February 12, 1924. “I was already lying in the rocking chair with the window open in the sun, next time I'll dare me on the porch." 

But even this idyll does not last: Kafka's health is now worrying, as his uncle, the doctor Siegfried Löwy, discovered during his visit on February 21st. Kafka follows his advice and leaves Berlin on March 17th to go first to Prague and then to a sanatorium. 

Of the houses in which Franz Kafka lived during his six-month stay in Berlin, only the house at Grunewaldstrasse 13 remains today.