BFT23 - Kafka

 

Pro-tip: If you’re going to go to Prague you really should become familiar with Franz Kafka.

Kafka was an insurance lawyer who through hard work and incessant effort rose to complete obscurity as an author in his lifetime but became famous for it later (the writing, not the insurance) in a way that he would have found perfectly understandable and grimly humorous. He hovers over the city in much the same way that Marianne hovers over Paris, John Bull over London, and Gritty over Philadelphia. He is the spirit of the city, its daimon, the city made manifest.

It isn’t every author whose name becomes an adjective in common English, after all. Especially if that author didn’t originally write in that language.

As part of our preparation for this trip Kim required us all to read The Metamorphosis, a short story in which an office drone wakes up one day to discover he has become a large cockroach. “Loaded with laughs,” as the old comedian Shelley Berman once noted. It was a chore, really, but I suspect that Kafka intended this as part of the message of the story so you have to hand it to him on succeeding. I’ve read other things he’s written, some of which I inherited from my grandmother when she passed away back in the 80s, and those I enjoyed more.

You’ll find Kafka pretty much everywhere you go in Prague, often in the strangest places.

On our first night in the city, after we left Wenceslas Square and the Golden Chicken had done its thing for us, we found him on one of the street signs that Europeans insist on putting high up on buildings rather than lower down on posts the way Americans do.

 

This discovery introduced us to two things. First, the ubiquity of public art in Prague, as the bronze artwork on the wall was more than what would have been required for just a street sign. And second, the equal ubiquity of Kafka.

If you’re interested, according to Google Translate (as loosely retranslated out of the computerese by yours truly), the signs read:

Franz Kafka Square, Old Town – Prague 1

And

A native of Prague, a German writer, a lawyer by profession at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Company. He left behind a simple but prophetic body of work, such as The Metamorphosis.

I have to say that I really love the description, “simple but prophetic.”

Kafka was born in 1883 where the Square now stands, and he lived there for a couple of years before his family moved elsewhere in the city. The house was torn down during his lifetime when that part of town was cleared in 1897. We passed by this corner a few times during our stay there, and every time we felt a certain obligation to note this fact. It seemed appropriate.

We also found Kafka at Prague Castle.

After you’ve gone through the courtyards and the Cathedral and the various other bits and bobs that make up the Castle complex, you find yourself on a small road known as the Golden Lane, lined with even smaller houses, many of which now have been turned into shops. Toward the beginning of this road there is a light blue one, No. 22.

Kafka lived here for a while in 1916-1917. Like everything else in Prague you’re not really supposed to take photos of it and like everything else in Prague everyone does anyway. It’s an unassuming little place, but well marked.

There’s also this statue that Kim and Oliver ran across when they were exploring the Jewish Quarter of town. It’s tucked between the Spanish Synagogue and a church, and there seems to be some debate in the various sources I’ve looked at while writing this over which of the two figures is actually Kafka or if neither of them are and it’s just the spirit of the whole piece that is meant to evoke Kafka, and this is another thing I suppose he’d find funny.

But if you’re going to explore Kafka, the place to go is – not surprisingly – the Kafka Museum. Because of course there is a museum for him, although this one isn’t really that old and you have to wonder what took them so long to set one up.

The over/under on the opening of the Gritty Museum in Philadelphia is 2032 by the way. You heard it here first.

Lauren was the one who really wanted us to go to the Kafka Museum but it took us a couple of tries to get there. We’d thought about visiting after our trip to the Castle, but the timing didn’t quite work out – it’s hard to tear yourself away from the Castle, and the Museum does eventually close – so we made a concerted effort to get there the next day.

It’s an unassuming place from the outside, highlighted by a pair of statues that you have to look at twice just to make sure that you’re actually seeing what you think you’re seeing.

There are two things that may not be obvious about these statues from the photo.

One is that the pool they’re standing in is shaped like Czechia. You’re looking from north to south in the photo, so the northern border of the country is actually at the bottom of the picture, and the guy on the right is standing more or less on Prague while the other guy is standing near Brno, the second largest city in the country. The fact that they’re pissing on the rest of the country is probably a statement of something.

The second thing is something I learned by watching the innumerable tour groups that walked by. The groups would circle up around the statue while the tour guide would go into long explanations of things in languages I didn’t understand (admittedly a wide range) and after a while the tour guide would reach over to the nearest statue and move its dick. Yes! The dicks go up and down! And they never stop pissing! This is how you know it’s Art.

Lauren and I watched these statues for a while, taking it all in, both before we went into the museum and after we came out since we didn’t stick together in the museum and we had some time to sit on the bench outside and just observe while Kim and Oliver finished up their more thorough examination of the displays. This is where we found out that Lauren actually got the job she had interviewed for when we were in Irsina, so she and I went across the way to a little bakery and bought celebratory gingerbread.

You can’t actually buy your tickets for the museum at the museum – you have to do that across the courtyard in the little gift shop, which is a lovely little absurdist touch when you think about it. We spent a fair amount of time and money in that gift shop afterward, and we regret nothing.

There’s also the giant K statue just outside the door, and you have to appreciate that.

Speaking as someone who has run a museum, the Kafka Museum is really well done. It’s dark and twisty, much as you would expect given its subject, and it is packed with information about Kafka’s life and times. Whoever put together really loved their job and understood the assignment. It’s not a place that will take you more than an hour or two, but it is definitely one you should put on your list if you find yourself in the city.

If you open the drawers in that room full of filing cabinets, sometimes you find phones where you can listen to things.

After we left the Kafka Museum we mostly wandered around the city for a while, stopping to look at grocery stores and various bits of artwork before we stumbled into our final bit of Kafka.

For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom but which probably involved a fair amount of distilled liquor, sometime in 2014 the city installed an 11-meter (36-foot) high statue of Franz Kafka’s head made entirely out of horizontal slices of highly polished steel, which means it looks a lot like the pissing guys by the museum except those are bronze. This is not a coincidence, since both were done by the same artist, a man who seems like he’d be a lot of fun late at night in a rundown bar. Each slice moves on its own, and every few minutes the whole thing starts rotating at different speeds so for a while it looks rather disheveled but then it all sort of magically snaps back to the original shape, though usually facing in a different direction from before. And then it does it again a few minutes later.

We watched it for a while and then realized two things: first, that it was raining a bit harder than it had been for most of the day, and second, that we were hungry and standing in front of an indoor shopping mall that had a food court in it. So we went inside and, for the second time and in a second country on this trip, we ended up at a McDonald’s. It’s slightly different in Czechia than either Italy or the US and for that reason more interesting, but not all that different really. Sometimes you’re just hungry and wet and happy to have something hot and familiar.

There are very few experiences I’ve had in my life that have been more surreal than sitting in a McDonald’s on a grey rainy day in Prague and watching the giant motorized head of Franz Kafka slowly spin around and around. It makes you question things, yes it does.