New Jewish Cemetery (Kafka's grave)

Historic · Žižkov (Želivského)Prague,Czechia

A seven-hectare Prague burial ground still in use, where Kafka lies under one plain hexagonal stone with his father and mother.

Franz Kafka's grave is about a hundred metres inside the gate of this cemetery, and it is a plain pale shaft, six-sided and cut to a point. His father Hermann and his mother Julie were buried under the same stone with him, so three names share it. He died of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in June 1924, at forty, with his novels unpublished. The rest of the cemetery is a nineteenth-century burial ground of the ordinary kind: ivy, iron railings, family tombs, long avenues. Prague's Jewish community opened the ground in 1890 on more than seven hectares, laid out in numbered square fields, and it is still in use. The scale surprises people who come for one grave: the fields run a long way back, and most are empty of visitors. A memorial to Max Brod stands on the wall opposite Kafka's stone. Most of the community these fields were laid out for was deported and murdered in the 1940s, and many of the graves have had no family to tend them since.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do not come on a Saturday — the cemetery is closed on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays, which catches out a steady stream of visitors who have travelled out on the metro for one grave.
Men should cover their heads — paper caps are kept at the gate for those who arrive without anything, and the request is a condition of entry rather than a suggestion.
The grave is signposted near the entrance — It lies a short way in on the right-hand path, so there is no searching, and the rest of the cemetery is optional.
This is a long way from Josefov — the Jewish quarter in the centre is three kilometres away, and the distance is why the grave feels like a separate errand rather than part of a walk.

Things to do

1
Read the family off one stone
Stand at the grave and take the names in order: Franz, then Hermann, then Julie, cut on the hexagonal shaft, and then the small marble tablet at the base for Elli, Valli and Ottla. The stone holds three people; the tablet holds three more who are not buried anywhere. That is the whole household.
2
Turn round and find Brod
With your back to the grave, look at the cemetery wall. The plaque set into it commemorates Max Brod, who is buried in Israel. He was told to destroy his friend's papers and did the opposite. The two markers face each other across a path, which is as close as the argument gets to being staged.
3
Walk one avenue past the grave
Go a few hundred metres further in, away from the signposted route. The fields are ivy-covered, the family tombs are grand and nineteenth-century, and almost nothing is recent. Walking it for ten minutes tells you what the community expected of the twentieth century and what actually happened to it.