Exploring Prague, eating dumplings, and chasing Franz Kafka’s ghost

I am Kafka at the Goethe house. My enthusiasm for my ghost hunt has well and truly waned. Keep eating dumplings; dumplings are real, writes MM Owen on his Kafkaesque pilgrimage

Kafka portrayed modern humankind as helplessly swept along by currents of influence it could neither control nor comprehend (Anthony Delanoix)

If I had a gun, I’d shoot myself in the face.” The diaries of Franz Kafka include various reflections on suicide, but none of them more explicit than this one, which I hear delivered in a warm Welsh accent by a man whose easyJet uniform is so punishingly tight it is hard to look at. I am waiting for the toilet cubicle; he is at the helm of the flimsy little aisle cart. Halfway down the plane, the riotous cause of the man’s breezy suicidal thoughts, “Coxy’s Stag Do”, is once again firing up a flat, bellowed rendition of The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”. Back in my seat, the chanting makes it hard to concentrate on a particularly dense passage of Kafka’s The Castle. A baby cries. The plane continues to hurtle towards Prague, Kafka’s city.

In the summer of 1911, while lake-hopping through southern Europe, a 28-year old Kafka and his best friend Max Brod struck on an idea that they thought could earn them millions of Austro-Hungarian kroner: travel guides. The idea never went beyond the point of business plan, but the men were serious. It was “supposed to make us millionaires,” said Brod. As well as giving insider tips, these guides would protect people from tourist traps.

Today, Franz is himself a tourist trap. I am stood in the middle of Prague’s Old Town Square – one section of a “little circle” within which, Kafka said, “my whole life is contained”. A woman walks past holding a sort of wooden lollipop with Franz’s printed face on it; she trails a group of Americans with enormous cameras hanging from their necks. I am in Prague to investigate the Kafkaesque and chase down Franz Kafka’s ghost.