In the footsteps of one of the most famous love stories in world literature, we take a walk through Merano, which, enriched with readings and stories, seeks to recreate the development of the love of these two extraordinary people at the place where it was written. Franz Kafka and the married Czech feature writer and translator Milena Jesenská met in a Prague coffee house in autumn 1919. Milena Jesenská offered to translate Kafka’s story “The Stoker” into Czech. When Franz Kafka, who had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis for several years, then travelled to the Ottoburg guesthouse in Merano in April 1920 for a longer recuperative stay, a passionate correspondence quickly developed between the two, which we know today as the “Letters to Milena” and in which Franz Kafka’s world opens up to us in a new, perhaps hitherto unexperienced way.
