Kierling near Vienna
How often Kafka had longed to leave his Prague! He noted the desire “to go away from Prague. To take action against this, the greatest human damage I have ever suffered, with the strongest chemical agent I have at my disposal” in his diary on 9th March 1914. This wish was fulfilled in the most tragic way: the final phase of his life was spent in Dr Hoffmann’s sanatorium in Kierling near Klosterneuburg, a picturesque village a few miles outside Vienna. Here, on 3rd June 1924, the ill-fated author succumbed to tuberculosis; he was cared for in his last agonizing weeks by his friend Dr Robert Klopstock, and his lover Dora Diamant. Franz Kafka thus gave sleepy Kierling a place in the annals of literary history.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
The day before yesterday, Dr Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died in the Kierling Sanatorium, near Klosterneuburg, near Vienna. Only a few people knew him here, because he was a loner, a knowing man, shocked by the world; he had been suffering from a disease of the lungs for many years and, even when he overcame it, he was still unconsciously feeding it and fostering it in his thoughts. […] It bestowed on him an almost incredible tenderness and almost macabre uncompromising intellectual sophistication.
Milena Jesenská
