The City of K: Franz Kafka and Prague

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory January 1, 2002

Source

Taylor - Encircling Kafka: A Review of the City of K. - JCRT 3.3

Encircling Kafka? The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague

a review of "The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague," The Jewish Museum, New York, August 11, 2002 to January 5, 2003.

Victor Taylor
York College of Pennsylvania

August 17, 1921
Esteemed Director: I am writing this letter in bed. I wanted to return to Prague on the 19th of this month, but I am afraid that it won't be possible. For several months I have been almost free of fever, but on Sunday I woke with a fever which climbed to over 38 degrees and still continues today. It's probably not the result of a cold, but one of those chance things common to lung disease which one cannot avoid. The doctor who examined me and found my lungs to be in good condition except for a stubborn remnant considers this acute fever to have little significance.

Kafka in 1923-24

The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague is an ambitious and unsettling postmodern exhibition, with original documents, facsimiles, and materials relating to Franz Kafka's literary works, life, and cultural surroundings carefully presented in a series of thematically organized "districts": "The Primal Scene," "A Little 'Ravachol,'" "Life in a Circle," "The Civil Servant and the Artist," "The Theater of Purity," "The Constantly Postponed Marriages," "The God of Suffocation," "The Burrow," "The Endless Office," "The Castle," "In the Penal Colony," and "The Threshold." The alignment of such diverse items as photographs, audiovisual installations, letters, and music allow the exhibition space to simulate Kafka's or K.'s existential space by extending an opposition between surface and depth into the various aspects of the author's literary works and Jewish cultural life in early twentieth century Prague. Key passages from Kafka's diaries, novels, and short stories written in white block letters on dark, "muddy" walls, wooden pallets, or an ascending staircase leading nowhere interrupt the eye as one passes from exhibit to the next. Early on, photographs of the Old Town rest submerged on a rock bed against a wall length, portrait filled genealogy of the Kafka family. Of the several excerpts inaugurating the exhibit, a line from the "Third Octavo Notebook" seems to capture the spatial and existential tensions presented throughout the exhibition: "A cage went in search of a bird."

> This is not a city. It is a fissure in the ocean bed of time, covered with stony rubble of burned-out dreams and passions, through which we'as if in a diving bell'take a walk. It is interesting, but after a time one looses one's breath.

> Prague doesn't let go. Of either of us. This old crone has claws. One has to yield, or else. We would have to set fire to it on two sides, at the Vy'ehrad and at the Hradčany; then it would be possible for us to get away.

Audiovisual Traffic (Verkehr)

_The Civil Servant and the Artist_ 

_Measures for the Prevention of Accidents_ 





_The Burrow_ 

From the installation _In the Penal Colony_ 





_Prague Castle_ 

_The Threshold_

The Exhibition catalogue contains several historical, biographical, and theoretical essays on Franz Kafka. In particular Mark M. Anderson's essay provides an analysis of Kafka's transformation of the modern. The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, New York.

Notes

Victor Taylor is author of Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture (Routledge), The Religious Pray, The Profane Swear: The Civil War Writings of Robert L. Drummond (Davies Group Publishers) and editor of The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (Routledge) and Postmodernism: Critical Concepts (Routledge). He is an assistant professor of comparative literature and humanities at York College of Pennsylvania and executive editor of the JCRT.

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