On the Oppelt House
About the Prague-based wine wholesaler Jos. Oppelt’s Neffe [Jos Oppelt’s Nephew], by Harald Salfellner
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In November 1913, the Kafka family moved into a four-room flat on the fourth floor of the Oppelt House. We do not know why they moved to the Old Town Square from the elegant House at the Ship on the banks of the Vltava. Hermann was sickly by that point, and may have been attracted by living closer to his business, which was by then based in the Kinsky Palace, only a few metres away. From his room, Franz, now working for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, had a view down Niklasstraße, as Pařížská was then called.
Circumstances were generally pretty unusual if Franz felt the need for a glass of wine. One such occasion arose in the summer of 1914, when his engagement of three months with Berliner Felice Bauer was memorably broken off in the Hotel Askanischer Hof. On 23 July, the day after the “tribunal in the hotel”, the insurance lawyer was sitting with Erna, his ex-fiancée’s sister, in the Belvedere restaurant by the Stralauer Bridge in Berlin. On the table, as Erna consoled him in his misfortune, lay a copy of August Strindberg’s The Gothic Rooms, a belated literary birthday present. Also on the table was a glass of wine, from which he was sipping. “Drank wine”1 Kafka later confided to his diary –the noteworthiness of this fact attesting that it was out of the ordinary.
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When the First World War broke out, Kafka’s brother-in-law Karl Hermann was called up to serve in the army; consequently, his sister Elli preferred to move back in with their parents for the duration of the conflict. Franz offered her the use of his room and looked for somewhere else to live. Wine merchant Franz Schier was also moving house. Even as the World War raged, he had had a magnificent Jugendstil summer villa built in his home town of Glasert [Trávník] in the Lusatian Mountains, to which he and his wife moved in 1916. The same year, he was able to buy Velké Žernoseky Castle from the aristocratic Nostitz-Rienek family, complete with wine cellar, tavern and lordly vineyards. Back in Prague, Schier was hoping to sell the sparkling “Château Žernoseky” house wine that was now stored in the Oppelt cellar from his business on the Old Town Square.
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After the first signs of his tuberculosis emerged in 1917, Kafka briefly returned to the care of his parents in the Oppelt House, although he initially hid his illness from them. He would spend the next few months in Zürau [Siřem], a simple rural town in northern Bohemia, where his sister Ottla had recently taken up managing their enlisted brother-in-law’s farm. While Ottla was away there, Franz could sleep in her unused bedroom. After his first night, he wrote to complain of the noise: “Your bedroom is no use for sleeping. I will say nothing against the kitchen, nothing against the courtyard, there’s noise there at half past six, that goes without saying, even if today is Sunday. I didn’t even hear the cat today, only the clock in the kitchen. But the bathroom above all. Three times, by my count, the light went on there and water was run for unaccountable purposes, on top of which, the bedroom door was left open so that I heard Father coughing.” 2
In the end, his parents let their noise-sensitive son use their quieter room. It was here that he lay, now aged 36, with a high temperature on Monday 14 October 1918. “Don’t come!”, he wrote to his friend Max Brod, “I’m in bed with something of a fever.”3 His concerned sister immediately alarmed her fiancé, telling him about her brother’s illness. His temperature had been almost 41 degrees at midday. The new family GP, Dr Heinrich Kral, had his home and surgery only a few metres away at Niklasstraße 11; he had called to visit the patient and, above all, to reassure his mother, who had been crying the whole day. Julie Kafka was aware of the deadly danger her son was in. Every day, the newspapers brought obituaries for young people who had died “after a short, severe illness”. Ottla helped her brother wherever she could. She apologised to his employers on his behalf, informing them that he was unwell and that they had even sent for “the Professor”.4 By this title, she meant Gottfried “Friedl” Pick, a doctor at the General Hospital, famous across the city and highly skilled in matters relating to tuberculosis. Dr Kral also paid numerous visits to his patient.
Thus, the author Franz Kafka spent several weeks at the peak of the Spanish flu in his parent’s flat in the Oppelt House, with a high fever and seriously ill, cared for by his mother and his sister, who was staying in Prague for a while. Cousin Irma was also a regular visitor. Kafka survived the influenza pandemic but seven months later; this cousin would succumb to one of its subsequent waves.
Kafka was only peripherally aware of the political upheaval in the capital’s streets and the shouting on the square below the flat. The family must have watched with astonishment and concern as the crowds massed there, between the Týn Church and the Old Town Hall. It is very possible that, in lucid moments, Kafka would have heard about events and even looked out of the window himself.
As of September 1920, Kafka’s sister Ottla and her husband Josef David were also living in the Oppelt House, below the family flat, before moving in 1925 with their two daughters Věra and Helena to the block of flats that Hermann Kafka had bought at 4 Bílekgasse (Bílkova).
Over three decades later, Kafka’s acquaintance Minze Eisner, who visited the patient in Teplitz [Teplice] on 24 September 1921, would recall conditions in the Oppelt House flat: “Kafka’s room in his parents’ flat was a horror and I never understood how Kafka stood it there for even an hour.”5
The glory days of the firm Jos. Oppelt’s Neffe continued in the young Czechoslovakian Republic. Schier cellared and sold still and sparkling wines from his own vineyards (particularly Rieslings and Traminers) in the grand manner, as well as Moselle and Rhine wines from Deinhard & Co in Koblenz, and both reds and whites from A. Lalande & Co in Bordeaux.
Wealthy citizens of Prague could order Château Mouton Rothschild by the bottle, or if they preferred, Pinot Noirs such as Beaujolais and Pommard. The cellars beneath the Oppelt House also held decent drops from Austria and Hungary – Bohemian Melniks, Hungarian Rieslings from Badacsony by Lake Balaton or select Gumpoldskirchners and Vöslauers from the spa country south of Vienna. A wide range of dessert and medicinal wines were also available – Malaga and Madeira, port, sweet sherry, Mavrodaphne, Marsala, vermouth and full-bodied Muscatels, as delivered by The Palestine Wine Co. Ltd. When it came to punches and mixed drinks, the company offered its own sparkling Oppelt-Sekt, as well as Asti spumante Beccaro. The upper classes might prefer champagne such as Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin sec, demi sec, or brut; Pommery & Greno by the half-litre; “Monopole, Irroy brut 1914”; or Heidsieck & Co’s goût américain; carte blanche by Louis Roederer or cordon verte by G. H. Mumm & Co. There were cognacs from J. & F. Martell and Jas Hennessy & Co, while Jos. Oppelt’s Neffe also imported expensive brandies by J. G. Monnet & Co, such as Archiv-Cognac from the years 1858, 1848 and 1838; the last of these sold for a whopping 260 crowns a bottle (by way of comparison, a factory worker’s hourly wage at that time was roughly 4 crowns). Lorries brought in whisky, gin, rum, arrack and slivovitz, along with Dutch liqueurs, absinthe, Pernod, Cointreau triple sec, green Chartreuse from Voiron, kirsch from Zug in Switzerland, cherry brandy from Copenhagen, vodka from Riga, Maraschino from Zara, green peppermint from Revel, aquavit from Ålborg and, last but not least, the popular Danzig Goldwasser. Karlsbad bitters (Becherovka) were cheaper, as was “Altvater” the herbal liqueur from Jägerndorf (Krnov). The growing number of teetotallers could also buy wine vinegar in Champagne bottles from Franz Schier, bottled and corked in his own cellars in Tschernosek [Žernoseky]. While business was booming, the merchant was not exempt from personal tragedies – the Schiers’ second son Gerhard lived only a few months. To add to their misfortunes, Franz, the third son, born 1925, would also die young of cancer.
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After almost a year in a lung sanatorium in the High Tatras, Kafka returned to the Oppelt House in August 1921. Between February and June 1922, the first sixteen chapters of his incomplete novel The Castle were written in his parents’ flat. Kafka heard nothing of the burglars who broke into the Jos. Oppelt’s Neffe offices on a February night in 1922, drilled into the iron cash register and got away with 50 000 Crowns. In September 1923, already ill, he moved again, this time to Berlin. His state of health eventually forced him to return to his home city in March 1924, from where he made his final journeys to Austria: to the Sanatorium Wienerwald in southern Lower Austria, then to Prof. Markus Hajek’s Laryngological University Hospital in Vienna, and finally to the Sanatorium Hoffmann in Kierling near Klosterneuburg. Kafka could barely speak or swallow, and looked back with yearning to the beer he had once drunk with his father at Prague’s Civilian Swimming School. He was given wine too. Dora Diamant, who had stayed loyally at the dying man’s side, wrote euphemistically to his parents that Franz had become a passionate drinker, who took beer, Tokai and other exquisite wines at every meal. Two weeks before his death, Franz let his father know that he had recently been converted from Adria Perle liqueur to Tokai. The father was not to know that they were only tiny, painful sips that bore no relation to the enjoyment of fine wines.
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The best Tokai wines were also to be found in the Oppelt House cellar, where František Rudolf Čebiš, born 1895, the son of a tailor from the village of Uhlířské Janovice near Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora), had now started work. The young wine merchant had married his first wife Jaroslava Zouplnová in 1921; in 1923 their little daughter Libuše was baptised.
This new staff member proved his worth, and after just a few years as an apprentice, he and his colleague Maximilian Meyer were given joint power to act for the company in 1926. The legal document was, incidentally, drawn up by Dr Robert Kafka who also entered the Kafka asbestos factory in the records in 1910. The leadership of Jos. Oppelt’s Neffe was to be divided between Čebiš as head of sales and Meyer as cellar master.
Only three years later, on 3 October 1929, the company boss Franz Schier died unexpectedly. His sole heir was his widow Auguste, who lived on Geistgasse (Dušní) in the Prague Old Town. The inheritance included properties in Prague, Groß-Tschernosek [Velké Žernoseky] and Glasert [Trávník], as well as the wine business in the Oppelt House, of which she was now in charge.
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In the run-up to the Second World War, František Čebiš had become one of the key figures in the flourishing business, especially as he could act as an important link between the German owners and their Czech environment. Čebiš undertook long journeys to Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia and especially to France, to buy wine for the company. The elegant wine dealer was always an art lover too; he mixed with Czech artists and writers and was a member of the famous circle around poet Jiří Kolář at the Café Slavia. That may have been why he soon came up with the plan to publish literature on the subject of wine, at the company’s expense, in both German and Czech. In 1930, an anthology entitled Víno brought together an array of Czech writers to pay homage to the fruit of the vine, including František Langer, Josef Hora and Jaroslav Seifert. Karel Čapek was also among them – a keen oenophile, he delighted in the jargon of wine tasting.6 In František Čebiš he had found a wine buff with a taste for literature and art, who opened the depths of the Oppelt cellars beneath the Old Town Square and the world of wine to him. Amid the rows of barrels and bottles, Čebiš could treat his literary counterpart to a top-quality tipple.
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Three years later, Čebiš put another impressive anthology together for his German customers, with texts by Czech-German authors. Printed in 1933, the collection Wein is fascinating – the particular value of this rarity is in bringing authors from across the political spectrum together for a cheerful round of drinks. Čebiš included German-Jewish prose authors such as Oskar Baum, Friedrich Adler and Friedrich Torberg, along with Sudeten-German writers with the heft of Hans Watzlik and Karl Hans Strobl, seasoned with romantic minstrels of German Prague such as Paul Leppin and Oskar Wiener. The oenological and literary collections Víno and Wein boast the pick of the crop of Bohemian literature of their day, plus exotic guest authors from France, for example. The publications were illustrated by Adolf Hoffmeister, while František Čebiš also took up his own pen, as he was keen to do elsewhere. Between 1923 and 1933 he wrote over 60 articles and essays on wine, not including his 1936 monograph Eine Plauderei über den Wein (Causerie o víně, A Chat About Wine) and Das Brevier über den Wein (Brevíř o víně, The Breviary of Wine) from 1939.
The full article about the Oppelt House can be found in Vom böhmischen Wein [From Bohemian Wine].
Harald Salfellner is a publisher, medical historian and author with a particular interest in Austro-Bohemian cultural history and the Prague author Franz Kafka.
Notes
1 Franz Kafka in a diary entry dated 23. 7. 1914, in: Franz Kafka: Tagebücher, eds. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcom Pasley, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 659 et seq.
2 Franz Kafka on 2. 9. 1917 to Ottla Kafka, in: Franz Kafka: Briefe April 1914–1917, eds. Hans-Gerd Koch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 72.
3 Franz Kafka on 14. 10. 1918 to Max Brod, in: Franz Kafka: Briefe 1918–1920, Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 56.
4 Ottla Kafka on 14. 10. 1918 to Josef David, in: Franz Kafka: Briefe 1918–1920, Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 447.
5 Hartmut Binder: Franz Kafka. Ein Leben in Bildern, Prague 2024, p. 972.
6 František Langer, Byli a bylo (Sie waren und es war), Prague 1963.
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