Franz Kafka Museum
History
The exhibit was first displayed in Barcelona in 1999 in a three-part exhibition exploring famous authors' relationships to their cities. The Kafka exhibit was called "The City of K.: Franz Kafka in Prague" and the two other exhibits explored James Joyce and Dublin and Fernando Pessoa and Lisbon. The Franz Kafka exhibition moved to New York City's Jewish Museum in 2002 before its permanent installment, which opened in the summer of 2005 in the Herget Brickworks building in the Malá Strana district of Prague.
Exhibition
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The exhibition features copies of manuscripts, photographs, and personal documents but no originals. It includes correspondence between Kafka and writer Milena Jesenská. Some of the explanatory texts are hardly readable because they are on transparent surfaces and exhibit the same color as the letters. All texts are in English, and some - mainly quotations - are also in Czech and German. The impression, therefore, is that the museum is principally made for foreign tourists rather than people from the Czech Republic. There are two permanent exhibitions: one explores Prague's influence on Kafka's work, and the other focuses on how Kafka describes Prague in his writing.
The museum features strange and absurd design elements inspired by Franz Kafka's unusual ideas. The dark space has special elements, such as a long, red-lit staircase and mysterious sound effects. Outside the museum is an exhibit called Piss, a bronze fountain of two men urinating in a lake shaped like the Czech Republic. It was created by Czech sculptor David Černý in 2004.
