 The museum's exterior in 2015 | |
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| Established | 2005 |
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| Location | Prague, Czech Republic |
| Website | Official website |
The Franz Kafka Museum (Czech : Muzeum Franze Kafky) in Prague is dedicated to the author Franz Kafka. The museum hosts a number of first edition Kafka books. [1]
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. [2] 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. [2] [3]
The exhibition features copies of manuscripts as well as 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 located on transparent surfaces with exhibits in the same color as the letters. All texts are in English, some - mainly quotations - also in Czech and German. The impression therefore is that the museum is made mainly 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 that are inspired by Franz Kafka's unusual ideas. The space is dark and 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 into a lake shaped like the Czech Republic. It was created by Czech sculptor David Černý in 2004. [4]
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate oceanic climate, with relatively warm summers and chilly winters.
Max Brod was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist.
Amerika, also known as The Man Who Disappeared, The Missing Person and as Lost in America, is the incomplete first novel by author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. The novel originally began as a short story titled "The Stoker". The novel incorporates many details of the experiences of his relatives who had emigrated to the United States. The commonly used title Amerika can be traced to the edition of the text put together by Max Brod, a close friend of Kafka's during the latter's lifetime, after Kafka's death in 1924.
The German-speaking population in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, 23.6% of the population at the 1921 census, is usually reduced to the Sudeten Germans, but actually there were other German ethno-linguistic enclaves elsewhere in Czechoslovakia inhabited by Carpathian Germans, and among the German-speaking urban dwellers there were "ethnic Germans" and/or Austrians as well as German-speaking Jews. 14% of the Czechoslovak Jews considered themselves as Germans at the 1921 census, but a much higher percentage declared German as their colloquial tongue during the last censuses under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator.
Žižkov is a cadastral district of Prague, Czech Republic.
The National Museum (NM) is a Czech museum institution intended to systematically establish, prepare, and publicly exhibit natural scientific and historical collections. It was founded in 1818 by Kašpar Maria Šternberg. Historian František Palacký was also strongly involved in the foundation of the museum.
David Černý is a Czech sculptor. His works can be mainly seen in many locations in Prague.
The Franz Kafka Prize is an international literary award presented in honour of Franz Kafka, the Jewish, Bohemian, German-language novelist. The prize was first awarded in 2001 and is co-sponsored by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, Czech Republic.
Golden Lane is a street situated in Prague Castle, Czech Republic. Originally built in the 16th century to house Rudolf II's castle guards, it takes its name from the goldsmiths that lived there in the 17th century.
The Mánes Association of Fine Artists was an artists' association and exhibition society founded in 1887 in Prague and named after painter Josef Mánes.
Mikuláš Medek as a painter unites the artistic tradition of over three generations and thanks to the originality of his expression, depth and spirituality of his extraordinary work, he occupies one of the most prominent places in the Czech art history of the post-war period. Medek's entire work must be perceived in the context of the times, as it directly reflects the oppressive atmosphere of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He worked freely only for a short period between 1963 and 1969 and had only two exhibitions in Prague during his lifetime. He was the grandson of the impressionist Antonín Slavíček, the son of the general and writer Rudolf Medek and the brother of Ivan Medek. Medek's studio was one of the meeting centres for artists and art historians during the communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
The Spanish Synagogue is the newest synagogue in the area of the so-called Jewish Town; it was in fact built at the site of the presumably oldest synagogue, Old School. The synagogue is built in Moorish Revival Style. Only a little park with a modern statue of famous Prague writer Franz Kafka lies between it and the church of Holy Spirit. Today, the Spanish Synagogue is administered by the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Dr Ernst Weiss was a German-speaking Austrian physician and author of Jewish descent. He is the author of Ich, der Augenzeuge, a novel dealing with the Hitler period.
Kinský Palace is a former palace and now an art museum in Prague, Czech Republic. It is located on the Old Town Square in the Old Town quarter of Prague. The palace's name refers to its former ownership by the Kinsky noble family.
Federico Díaz is an artist of Czech-Argentinean descent, who lives and works in Prague. He has exhibited at the Mori Art Museum Tokyo, CAFA Museum Beijing, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Basel in Miami Beach, the Florence Biennale, at the 54thVenice Biennale, the Brno House of Arts, Royal Institute of British Architects and had a project with the University of Cambridge. In 2010 he represented Czech art at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. In 2007 he received the Premio Internazionale Lorenzo il Magnifico for digital media at the Florence Biennale.
Alena Wagnerová is a Czech author and journalist writing in both Czech and German.
The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections was one of the names for a travelling exhibition of Czech Jewish art and ritual objects that opened at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, U.K., in 1980. It subsequently toured the United States and Canada from 1983 to 1986. In 1990, part of the show was brought to Israel for a joint exhibition with the permanent collection of the Israel Museum. The travelling exhibition was relaunched in 1998 for a two-year tour of Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia.
Ivo Křen was a Czech graphic artist, art glass theoretician and curator.
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