From 1889 to 1896 the Kafka family lived in the 17th century House “U minuty” (At the minute), whose sgraffito walls guarantee it a mention in guidebooks… even when Kafka’s connection to the place is unreported. But we are not here concerned with the particulars of this house, but about the nearby object that the house’s name seems to suggest: Prague’s famous astronomical clock (orloj).
Built in the early 16th century it is, by the norms of more modern ages, a very curious thing indeed. Each time it strikes the hour a skeleton figure representing Death gives a pull on a rope that he’s holding in one hand, and turns over the hourglass he’s holding in the other. Two windows then open, through which we can see a procession of apostles. The whole thing then culminates in the crowing of a cock. And there are other moving figures: The Turk (a symbol of lust), Vanity, and Greed (a Jewish moneylender).
As a child Kafka would have walked past this clock nearly everyday. And so he might have noticed its strange conceptions of time, space, and stereotype.
The purpose of the clock was to imitate the supposed orbits of the sun and moon around the earth. The hand with the sun points to the hour, and it records three different kinds of time: Old Bohemian time, in which the day was divided into 24 hours and reckoned from the setting of the sun; time as we know it (measured in Roman numerals on the center ring); and so-called Babylonian time, which measures the period of daylight divided into 12 equal parts. The clock also shows the movement of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac.
The orloj isn’t the only clock in Prague to be creative with our conceptions of time and space (see Jewish Town Hall).
