Mark Harman investigates Kafka’s move to Berlin:

For 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.” That fiercely maternal, if jocosely ironic, image already suggests the impossibility of his ever quite breaking loose. And throughout his life he felt that Prague was “very un-homelike, a place of memories, of nostalgia, of pettiness, of shame, of seduction, of the misuse of power.” Berlin, on the other hand, became a screen onto which he could project inaccessible longings and dreams of escape, and he soon integrated it into the web of metaphors through which he viewed his every experience.

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