In January 2014, M. and I stayed four days in Vienna, en route from Tel Aviv to Toronto. The main purpose of the stopover, for me, was to visit Franz Kafka’s Death House — Sterbehaus — located in Kierling near Klosterneuburg, 19 km northwest of the capital. A Kafka devotee, I’ve slowly been tracing the author’s wake, M., my (sometimes) reluctant partner.
Kafka died at the Hoffmann Sanatorium on June 3, 1924, a month before his forty-first birthday. He lived for seven years with tuberculosis, which he viewed as a mix of gift, judgement and punishment. At its final stage, the illness attacked his larynx. A cure for TB was decades away and the painful treatment, which “goes away again without helping” — Kafka wrote on one of his final ‘conversation slips’ — was camphor injections into the laryngeal nerve. Methods of feeding patients at advanced stages of throat illness had not yet been developed either and at the end of his life Kafka could not eat, and could barely drink. As part of his treatment, he was instructed not to speak. He conversed with his ‘little family’ of caregivers — his friend of four years, Dr. Robert Klopstock, and helpmate of ten months, Dora Diamant, on ‘conversation slips’: his last writings. The final cause of death was likely starvation.
It’s sadly ironic that on the day before he died, he was correcting the galley proofs of A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler) — the collection named for the story of a circus artist who makes his living by public fasting. He becomes a sideshow freak when the art he perfects loses popularity to a panther in the adjacent cage, and he fasts himself to death.
On our third morning in the city — I’d lain ill at the Hotel de France for two days with a mysterious illness of my own — M. and I took the train north to Heiligenstadt Station, the last stop on Line U4 of the Vienna rapid transit system. There we purchased bus tickets to the medieval abbey town of Klosterneuburg. The day was cold, snowless and grey. We sat at the back of the bus watching the suburbs blur by. I was preoccupied with thoughts of how we would reach our destination, so to speak, once we arrived. I hadn’t found information regarding contacts, opening hours, tours, etc., and was counting on momentum.
The bus ride ended at Klosterneuburg where the spires of the medieval abbey rose into a misty void over the town — summoning images of the castle of Count Westwest in Kafka’s unfinished, posthumously-published third and last novel, The Castle (Das Schloss). We walked across the street to Buchhandlung John Doran where I figured someone would be able to direct us to the Sterbehaus in Kierling.
The saleswoman at the counter spoke a clear, clipped English. “We don’t often get people coming into the bookstore asking about the Kafka Museum. You are only about the third and fourth in twenty years,” she said quite seriously. “The person you want is Herr Winkler, Secretary of the Kafka Society.” She happened to have Herr Winkler’s phone number in her Rolodex, and called him for us on the spot. “There are two people here from Canada who have come to visit the Kafka Memorial Room (Gedenkraum),” she announced into the receiver. That much I understood.
It was midmorning and we’d apparently disturbed Herr Winkler’s sleep. But he agreed to meet us — in front of the Hofer. “He will be there in twenty minutes,” the saleswoman told us. We browsed the bookstore quickly, purchased two books by way of appreciation, hailed a cab to Kierling, and arrived at the Hofer in under twenty.
The Hofer is a supermarket next to the former Hoffmann Sanatorium — now a residential building. A man in a red and black jacket pulled in to the car park a few minutes after we arrived, sprang out of his car, hastened toward us extinguishing his cigarette, and introduced himself as Winkler, Norbert — no longer Secretary of the Kafka Society of Austria, but still on call for tours at the Kafka Memorial Room. He led us next door to the staid three-storey building — its narrow entrance located oddly at the far right. A plaque to the left of the entrance identified the building as the Sterbehaus of Franz Kafka, and on intercom panel: the names of the present residents. Barghouty, a prominent Palestinian surname, I noticed, appeared twice.
We followed Herr Winkler up the stairs. He unlocked the door to apartment 6 — the Kafka Memorial Room. “This is not the room where Kafka stayed,” Herr Winkler informed us. “Tenants occupy that space now. But the balcony where Kafka sat can be viewed from the Hofer car park.”
Kafka spent seven weeks at the Hoffmann Sanatorium — from April 19, 1924 till his death. Sunshine was prescribed for TB patients and weather permitting, he would sit shirtless on the balcony, gazing at the garden below and into the firs and pines of the Vienna Woods — the Wiener Wald — beyond.
He was in the countryside, attended to around-the-clock by Robert Klopstock and Dora Diamant — whose hand he’d asked in marriage, probably at the end of April, when hope of remission was buoyed by spring weather, country quiet, fresh fruit, and the scent of cut flowers. Lilacs, peonies and columbine are named in the ‘conversation slips.’ Can’t laburnum be found? he wrote on one of the slips. Laburnum is a flowering shrub with bright yellow flowers. One wonders if he was aware that all parts of the plant are poisonous …
The Memorial Room was stark: medical records and death registers displayed in glass cases, alongside instruments once used in treating TB; copies of Kafka’s last letters to his parents, a family tree, photos of Kafka, Klopstock, Dora and others mounted on the high walls, historical photos of the sanatorium, a few chairs, a table, a guest book — which I signed — and a bookcase of books by and about the author. No original furnishings, nothing personal. I suppose I’d vaguely expected to see the actual room Kafka had slept in, preserved as it had been when he took his last breath; to feel something there of his presence.
Herr Winkler showed us down the hall — to the original elevator, no longer in operation, which Kafka would have used on arrival and departure. The old apparatus reportedly made a huge racket and drained the village’s electrical reserves, so that flickering lights in the surrounding houses announced all arrivals and departures at the Hoffmann Sanatorium. We walked back down the stairs and out, to view the back of the building and the balcony on the second floor where Kafka sat and viewed the Wiener Wald trees — evergreens in the distance.
Herr Winkler offered us a lift back to Klosterneuburg, apologizing for the state of his car; he’d been transporting his girlfriend’s dogs. We thanked him for his generosity, but neglected to give him a tip, which struck me as soon as we boarded the bus back to Heiligenstadt Station. This oversight, which bothers me whenever I think of it, can only be explained, though not excused, by our absorption in the day’s extraordinary unfolding: how we’d been carried by some fortuitous momentum to entering the place where Kafka had languished and passed.
There’s no scoop to offer on Franz Kafka. He died at noon on June 3 after begging morphine from Robert Klopstock. “Kill me,” he’s said to have commanded his friend, “or you are a murderer.” Klopstock administered the morphine. He’d sent Dora on an errand so that she wouldn’t be present at the time of the final ministrations. She returned with flowers, and Franz, it’s told, inhaled their scent as he succumbed in her arms.
What happened between that hour and the hour of his burial on June 11 at the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Strašnice is only sketchily on record. Jewish funerals are normally held as soon after death as possible — within a day or two at most. Kafka was buried eight days after his death, and one wonders, why the delay? He’d lived much of his life resisting life and a certain recalcitrance seems to have attended his last passage as well. The great astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square is said to have stopped still on June 11 at 4:00 p.m.— precisely at the time of his interment.