Pražský kruh – Brod Max (2024)

The memoir book Pražský kruh (1966) represents the last work of Max Brod, the renowned German writer, essayist, and translator. The five chapters of this book, in which a friend of Franz Kafka and a leading figure among Prague's German-speaking authors narrates and reminisces, significantly transcend the boundaries of memoir literature and become a distinctive literary-historical work. It is an engaging book that is also factually so rich that it remains an invaluable guide for Czech readers through Prague's German literature. In Pražský kruh, the human and literary fates of not only the most famous protagonists (Kafka, Werfel, Rilke) but also personalities from three or four preceding generations (from Marie Ebner-Eschenbach to Hugo Salus, Franz Adler, Victor Hadwiger, Paul Leppin, and Oskar Wiener) come vividly to life. It is largely due to Max Brod's efforts that the literary public becomes acquainted not only with Franz Kafka but also with other Prague German-speaking authors, this small world within the great Czech city. The book is now being published in a revised translation more than 30 years after the first Czech edition, with a new preface by Professor Manfred Weinberg, director of the Kurt Krolop Center in Prague, and an afterword by Professor Steffen Höhne.