While walking along the Vitava River, in the Lesser Town, we came across the Franz Kafka Museum. The museum's facade is simple, with a few doors and windows, with only a large black letter K in front of it. Uniquely, there is a statue of two people urinating into a pond in front of the museum. This controversial bronze sculpture, called Proudy, made by artist David Cerny, robotically moves their penises as if to spell out something with their urine.
The figures are made of bronze and look as if
they were made from stacked jagged metal slices. Each figure is holding its
penis and urinating, pouring it in a random pattern. They are urinating on a basin
shaped like a map of Czechoslovakia, so they are essentially urinating on
Czechoslovakia. How provocative.
The museum's rooms are dark, as dark as Kafka's
writings. The first section of this immersion into Kafka's world, titled
Existential Space, shows how Prague shaped the writer's life, the imprint it
left on him, and how that transformative force influenced him. His diaries and
extensive correspondence with family members, friends, lovers, and publishers
bear witness to this influence. The challenge for the viewer is to try and
grasp the central conflict in Franz Kafka's life, guided by the writer's
perspective.
The second section, titled Imaginary
Topography, shows Kafka describing his city without naming the places where his
stories take place, with only a few exceptions.
The reader may guess, for example, that the
anonymous cathedral in The Trial is none other than St. Vitus Cathedral; that
the road Joseph K. walks along in the final chapter of the same book leads from
the Old Town, across Charles Bridge towards the outer limits of the Lesser
Town. It is also said that the view from Bendemann's window in The Judgment
shows the embankment, the Vltava River, and its opposite bank in the same way
as it can be seen from Mikulášská Street (now Pařížská Street), where the Kafka
family lived in 1912. This is to prove that the topography of Prague as Kafka
wrote about is historical, even though no place names are mentioned.
However, for Kafka, this is irrelevant. His
writing transforms Prague into an imaginary topography. The city takes a step
backward, and is no longer recognizable by its buildings, bridges, and
monuments. It is no longer important to identify specific offices, primary or
secondary schools, universities, churches, prisons, or castles, as these
structures serve as metaphors and allegorical places.
THE END
Source:https://kafkamuseum.cz/en/exhibition
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