Prague Xperience

The Prague opening of the long-term exhibition The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague takes place in summer, a time of special significance for Kafka. He was born here on 3rd July 1883, died in a sanatorium at Kierling on 3rd June 1924, and was buried in Prague on 11th  June.
The symbiosis between Prague and Kafka’s life and work is well known - a linking of destinies that, for several decades, Kafka scholars have studied from every possible angle. Newertheless, this unique exhibition prepared by Centre de Culrura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB) provides an opportunity to illuminate the crucial relationship between the man and the city in an entirely novel way. This is due not only to the nature of the exhibits themselves but also, and primarily, to the way the exhibition is thematically presented.

The City of K. opened in Barcelona in 1999 and transferred in 2002 to the Jewish Museum in New York, and in 2005 opened in Prague at Hergetova Cihelna.

The exibition has got two sections - Existential space and Imaginary Topography.

Existential space - In this first stage of our immerion into the world of Kafka, we look at what the city does with the writer, how it shapes his life, the kind of stamp it leaves on him. Prague acts on Kafka with all of its metamorphosing power, confining him to an existential space which he can only enter by “fixing my gaze on the surface of things”, Prague forces Kafka into a spatial stranglehold, perversely dosing out its secrets. Prague contributes the myth, its obscure magic, a magnificent backdrop, but it abhors clarity. And this is precisely what Kafka detects.

He sees the city as a “dear little mother with claws”, endowed with a past which is greater than its present, shielded by its charm, yet also raising a great, consiantly threatening fist. His Diaries and a voluminous correspondence with his family, friends, lovers and editors bear witness to this influence. Our aim is to explore the city, seeing it from Kafka’s pointz of view. An exclusively biographical or merely chronological approach would not be enough; the challenge lies in condensing the principal conflicts in the life of Kafka in Prague, guided by the writer’s own gaze. This means joining Kafka on his descent into the depths of his city, adapting ourselves to his sensorial range and cognitive register, becoming involved in a slow distortion of space-time - in short, agreeing to an experience where everything is allowed except indiffernce.

Imaginary topography - The way Kafka creates the layers of his city is one of the most enigmatic operations of modern literature. With the odd exception, Kafka does not name the places he describes in his novels and short stories. The city steps back, is no longer recognisable by its buildings, bridges and monuments. And even if they are recognised by an inhabitant of Prague or by a student of Kafka, they have become something else.

People are often keen to pinpoint real Prague places in Kafka’s fiction. It is generally recognised that the anonymous cathedral in The Trial is none other than Sv. Vitus cathedral, and that the path taken by Joseph K. in the last chapter leads from the Old Town to the outer limits of Kleinseite, over Charles Bridge. It is also said that in The Judgement, from Georg Bendemann’s window, we recognise the wharf, the river, the opposite bank of the Moldava, just as they could be seen from Niklasstrasse, where the Kafka family lived in 1912. Efforts have been made to prove that the topography of Prague is a constant which simply goes unnamed.

Yet this is not what really matters. In his fiction, Kafka carries out a more difficult operation: he turns Prague into an imaginary topography which transcends the fallacy of realism. Kafka’s phantasmal architecture has other ends. Rather than a particular house, school, office, church, prison or castle being important, it is what these constructions reveal when they act as topological metaphors or allegorical places. What surprises does this transfigured Prague hold in store? Just how far can the metamorphosis of a city take us?

HERGETOVA CIHELNA

Cihelná 2b
110 00 Prague 1-Lesser Town
Opening hours - daily 10.00 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Office/Contact address:

Kaunický palác, Panská 7, 110 00 Praha 1
Tel.: +420 221 017 111
E-mail: HLastovickova@copa.cz

www.kafkamuseum.cz