Berlim, 1914

"To avoid complete collapse, he made a firm resolution that, if he could not marry Felice, he would resign his post at the Institute (or ask for a prolonged period of absence), go to Berlin and try to live as a literary journalist. The Berlin to which he would have moved was that of the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose famous Potsdamer Platz was painted in this year [1914]. 'You have to realize what Berlin meant to us back then in Vienna,' the Austrian novelist Flesch von Brünningen had written the year before. 'For us, Berlin was crazy, debauched, metropolitan, anonymous, gargantuan, futuristic. It was literary and political and artistic (the city for painters.) In short: an infernal cesspool and paradise in one.' In not choosing this frenetic metropolis and remaining in Prague, Kafka closed off another avenue of escape, though the idea of Berlin stayed with him, until, in the last year of his life, he finally moved there."

Nicholas Murray. Kafka. London: Abacus, 2014, p. 200

Imagem: "Potsdamer Platz" (1914), de Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)