Review of
"The City of K.
Franz Kafka
and
y
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disembodied (quite the opposite, the
suffering body is its protagonist), then
deliberately pared down, flayed alive, at
least metaphorically. Nor are there
original artifacts from Prague. For in fact
the exhibition is dedicated neither to
Kafka nor Prague but rather to the City
of K, the space of Kafka's fiction, which,
the show maintains, is a fantasmatic
overlay on Prague. The task that the
exhibition sets for itself, and achieves
with a tour de force of museum
installation, is to make the fictional space
a palpable ambience, a mood. In effect,
the exhibition is a performance piece in
which the viewer is the performer, a role
not wittingly chosen, but rather foisted
upon one, and so much like the
situation of most of Kafka's characters.
at The Jewish Museum,
New York, August 11, 2002
to January 5, 2003
V'"~>V ne passes the metal detectors
(
I and the well-lit foyer of the
V — J e w i s h Museum in New York,
and, with barely time to register the odd
fact that the exhibition originated in
Barcelona, one enters the darkness of
"The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague."
The first, and indeed, all the galleries are
black, the pinpoint lighting emphasizing
more than disrupting the obscurity. The
first displays are disorienting. Immediately
ahead on the wall are the familiar names
of Franz Kafka and his favorite sister
Ottilie, in what is certainly a
genealogical arrangement; but the
family tree has been felled, and the
trunk is inscribed as a horizontal
line stretching down the gallery.
Before pursuing it, while still
standing on the threshold, one
looks to the right: still photographs
of the other protagonist of the
show—Prague—are projected on a
panel of simulated roof slates, scrolling
vertically, so as to give the sensation that
one's gaze is lifted in an impossible,
indefinite ascent. This vertical Prague is a
Tower of Babel, and among the images,
the sculptural relief of the raised arm,
sword in fist, of the story, "City Coat of
Arms." It is perhaps only later, sitting in
the mirrored chamber of the video
installation more than halfway through
the show, with its images of lofty, distant
castles, and swirling haze, that one
realizes that in addition to the more
evident allusions at the entryway, one
also stood upon the bridge of that family
line. While "gazing upward into the
seeming emptiness" beyond the scrolling
architecture, one was already in the first
paragraph of The Castle.
In order to proceed at all, one is
obliged, for instance, to retrace the
genealogical line (the only alternative is
to leave the exhibition, to put the book
down, as it were) to where it is
obstructed by an enlargement of a photo
of Hermann Kafka, father of the author,
mounted perpendicular to the wall. As
one reaches this point, onefindsoneself
in the space labeled, "The Primal Scene,"
and headed by an epigraph drawn from
Kafka's notebooks: "A cage went in
search of a bird." The label reflects upon
the image, which will return in various
guises throughout the show. The text also
proposes in passing a personification of
Prague in referring to "the city's face." Is
that face other than Hermann Kafka's,
hanging opposite? An adjoining display
case develops the point. It includes a
facsimile of a portion of Kafka's "Letter to
|For in fact the exhibition is dedicated neither
to Kafka nor Prague but rather to the City of K.,
the space of Kafka's fiction, which, the show
maintains, is a fantasmatic overlay on Prague."
20
This is an exhibition of scant objects—
some first editions of Kafka's books, but
above all facsimiles of photographs,
manuscript pages, letters, and other
documents—as one should well expect,
where the subject is a life, if by no means
his Father," which, once again, will return
often, perhaps the most frequently cited,
and certainly the most variously situated
text in the exhibition. The label for the
case alludes to the common Freudian
interpretation of that text, with this
addendum: 'Yet the letter goes further,
turning Kafka's dispute with his father
into an endless leave-taking, and a
rejection with universal implications." I
would not have said so (the
universalizing is Freud's; non-arrival,
rather than leave-taking seems to me to
be more crucial), but I nonetheless
recognize this and other labels as
true critical interventions in the
reading of Kafka, and not simply the
communication of information. And
however one reacts to this particular
interpretation, the careful integration
of the show makes for multifarious
interconnections: Freud's theorizing
of the primal scene also involved the
elaboration of the concept of screen
memories, and the face of Hermann
Kafka is such a screen, literally
blocking the view of the author's
more distant forebears on the
genealogical line on the gallery wall.
That line is transformed, moreover,
into the route that the child Franz
walked to school in the company of
an annoyed and overbearing cook,
which one traverses oneself through
a series of photographs along its path
that lead beyond the family into the
social and artistic circles of Prague
frequented by Kafka, the subject of
the next gallery. But then one never
does quite take leave of the prior stageneither in the exhibition nor in Kafka's
writing. Instead, Kafka's childhood walk
is subtly promoted as a primal scene or
screen memory that he is compelled to
repeat in his life and his fiction.
The enactments are not always so subtle
and not always entirely successful. The
limited animation of one of Kafka's own
drawings adds nothing of importance; the
telephones placed high on the walls of
gigantic file cabinets on which one may
listen to imperious instructions (e.g. from
The Trial), are a touch of kitsch. On the
other hand, the gallery dedicated to "In
the Penal Colony" succeeds in bringing
disparate elements to bear both on the
elucidation of the context and in the
creation of a "Kafkaesque" space, as the
labels sometimes read. The gallery is
dominated by a series of panels
constituting a stylized version of the
harrow-like apparatus of that story: an
effort at suggestion, not verisimilitude.
Thefirstof these is a lattice-work of
straps, recollecting the image of the cage
proposed at the outset of the exhibition;
the last presents a close-up photograph
of human skin enlarged to the point
where, for lack of bounded shape, its
Franz Kafka with sister Ottilie, 1914
legibility blurs: a canny commentary on a
story in which the making of the skin
into a legible text is the very issue. Here
the opportunity to step between the
panels and subject oneself to the device
is available, but not enforced. But so, too,
the opportunity is available to read the
stylized device, and so the story, as a
social mechanism that included Kafka,
and continues to include the viewer,
against one's will. That is, the chief label
for the room directs the viewer to
philosopher Michel Foucault, and the
thesis that "Justice distances itself from
the punishment it metes out by situating
the execution in an autonomous sphere,
but at the same time the prison model
spread throughout society." This thesis
is explored in the twin display cases in
this gallery, "Punishment" and
"Mirrors," that record the reception of
Kafka's public reading of "In the Penal
Colony" in Berlin, but also provide
facsimiles of the passports and
associated documents that enmeshed
Kafka in a Foucauldian surveillance
system when he made that trip.
The show is divided into two large
portions, "Kafka in Prague: Existential
Space" and "Prague in Kafka: Imaginary
Topography," although, as noted,
the existential and imaginary are
never truly separated. Historicallyminded viewers, therefore, might
balk at being introduced to "a
myth called Prague" as the text of
the label to "The Primal Scene"
reads, and not to Prague itself.
When one reads further in the
earliest galleries that "the ghetto
was home to scholars of the
Kabbalah and other Jewish
mystics, learned Hasidim,
alchemists, astronomers, and
astrologers," the myth is
reinforced, but the lives of
ordinary Jewish women, especially,
and also more down-to-earth
Jewish men, are left out of
account. It may be, of course, that
Kafka himself was anything but
ordinary, yet his importance
resides in that his stories, even
when informed by Jewish
mysticism and haunted by the
myth of the Prague ghetto, speak
nevertheless from and for the common
experience of Jews in modernity. If this
show does not develop the historical
evidence, then it is to the stories that
one might wish to repair to fathom that
modern Jewish experience. Hence, the
place to begin or end the visit to the
exhibition, were it only possible, might
best be in the middle, or more
precisely, just slightly beyond the
existential city to the side of the
imaginary topography, where one
traverses a wooden labyrinth—
something of a cage—named as,
inscribed with and evocative of "The
Burrow." "Kafka's heroes," the label
reads, "wander through places that do
not belong to them and that they do
not understand. They are lost in a
world where distance and proximity
have no relevance." The exhibition of
"The City of K." is such a place.
Andrew Bush
Vassar College