Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles About Kafka and Berlin.

For Austrian-Czech writer Franz Kafka, Berlin was not so much the real city on the Spree as his private symbol for much that he felt was lacking in Prague. Already in 1902, as a nineteen year-old student, he had coined an often-quoted metaphor for Prague: "This little mother has claws." While Kafka's continual preoccupation with Berlin is certainly no secret, critics and biographers haven't quite done justice to the city's place in his inner life. Here he wishes to explore the tension between his exuberant initial image of Berlin and the grim reality he encountered when he went to live there in the fall of 1923. He should also like to report on an ultimately futile yet perhaps not entirely unproductive search for missing letters that Kafka wrote for a little girl in the suburb of Stegiltz, a search which he carried out on the side while he was in Berlin a couple of years ago writing a series of linked essays about the furtive autobiography underlying all of his writings. Although some commentators trace Kafka's fascination with Berlin to his first meeting with writer Felice Bauer at the Brod family apartment in Prague in August 1912, he had in fact visited the city earlier, in December 1910, after cutting short a visit to Paris.