Franz Kafka Museum

The museum, opened in Prague in 2005 after versions in Barcelona and New York, does not present Kafka's life as a chronology in cases. It is built as an atmosphere: dark rooms, low sound, filing cabinets, water, projected text and reflections, arranged in two parts - Existential Space, on the city that formed him, and Imaginary Topography, on the Prague that appears transformed in the writing. Manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs and first editions are there, but the presentation is the point and it divides visitors sharply between those who find it apt and those who find it overdone. In the courtyard outside stands David Cerny's Proudy, two bronze men urinating into a basin shaped like the Czech Republic, hips and streams moving mechanically to write out quotations - a piece that has nothing to do with Kafka and gets more photographs than the museum.

History

The exhibition began in Barcelona in 1999 as "The City of K.: Franz Kafka in Prague", one of three shows on writers and their cities, alongside James Joyce's Dublin and Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon. It moved to the Jewish Museum in New York in 2002 and then found a permanent home in the Herget Brickworks in Prague's Malá Strana, where it opened in the summer of 2005 (Wikipedia, Franz Kafka Museum).

Highlights

• An atmosphere, not a chronology - dark rooms, sound and projection over cases.
• Manuscripts and letters - diaries, photographs and first editions within it.
• Two halves - the city that formed him, and the city as it appears in the work.
• Cerny's Proudy - the mechanical urinating figures in the courtyard.

When to go

All year. Two hours.

Before you go

The presentation is heavily stylised and not everyone takes to it; readers wanting a straightforward biographical museum may be frustrated. Small and priced at central Prague rates. Photography restricted.

Nearby

Charles Bridge and Kampa island are a short walk away.

Key facts