Fodor's Expert Review Franz Kafka Museum
The great early-20th-century Jewish author Franz Kafka wasn't considered Czech and he wrote in German, but he lived in Prague nearly his entire short, anguished life, so it's fitting that his shrine is here too. Because the museum's designers believed in channeling Kafka's darkly paranoid and paradoxical work, they created exhibits true to this spirit. And even if the results are often goofy, they get an A for effort. Facsimiles of manuscripts, documents, first editions, photographs, and newspaper obits are displayed in glass vitrines, which in turn are situated in "Kafkaesque" settings: huge open filing cabinets, stone gardens, piles of coal. The basement level of the museum gets even freakier, with expressionistic representations of Kafka's work itself, including a model of the horrible torture machine from the "In the Penal Colony" story—not a place for young children, or even lovers on a first date, but fascinating to anyone familiar with Kafka's work. Other Kafka sites in Prague... READ MORE
The great early-20th-century Jewish author Franz Kafka wasn't considered Czech and he wrote in German, but he lived in Prague nearly his entire short, anguished life, so it's fitting that his shrine is here too. Because the museum's designers believed in channeling Kafka's darkly paranoid and paradoxical work, they created exhibits true to this spirit. And even if the results are often goofy, they get an A for effort. Facsimiles of manuscripts, documents, first editions, photographs, and newspaper obits are displayed in glass vitrines, which in turn are situated in "Kafkaesque" settings: huge open filing cabinets, stone gardens, piles of coal. The basement level of the museum gets even freakier, with expressionistic representations of Kafka's work itself, including a model of the horrible torture machine from the "In the Penal Colony" story—not a place for young children, or even lovers on a first date, but fascinating to anyone familiar with Kafka's work. Other Kafka sites in Prague include his home on Zlatá ulička (Golden Lane), his Staré Mĕsto birthplace at Náměstí Franze Kafky 3, and Jaroslav Rona's trippy bronze sculpture of the writer on Dušní street in Staré Mĕsto. (Speaking of sculptures, take a gander at the animatronic Piss statue in the Kafka Museum's courtyard. This rendition of a couple urinating into a fountain shaped like the Czech Republic was made by local enfant terrible sculptor David Černý, who also did the babies crawling up the Žižkovská televizní věž [Žižkov TV Tower].)
READ LESS
