Prague, the capital of Bohemia, was by no means the cozy Austro-Hungarian enclave around 1900 that today’s tourists like to imagine.

The city was marked by escalating national tensions between Czechs and Germans, which placed the Jewish population, in particular, in a precarious situation.

But the rapid pace at which a multitude of technical innovations were introduced within just a few years also gave many residents the feeling that they were standing at the end of an era. Kafka keenly sensed the eerie fascination of this challenge: telephones, dictation machines, streets lit at night, electric trams, and, not least, movie theaters also transformed his everyday life.

Dr. Reiner Stach studied philosophy, literature, and mathematics.
His monograph *Kafka’s Erotic Myth* was published in 1987. In 1999, Stach curated the exhibition *Kafka’s Bride*, in which he presented the estate of Felice Bauer, which he had discovered in the United States.
In 2002 and 2008, the first two volumes of his highly acclaimed three-volume biography of Kafka were published. In 2008, Reiner Stach was awarded the Special Prize of the Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize for *Kafka: The Years of Insight*.
In 2016, he received the Joseph Breitbach Prize for his outstanding body of work in the field of literary biography.