Does anyone have an experience with Kafka themed walking tours in Prague that they could recommend? Thanks so much!
Posted by
Chicago
653 posts
I didn't go on a walking tour, but in 2022 I visited the Franz Kafka Museum: https://kafkamuseum.cz/home/. It's not a traditional literary museum. The curators must have made it surreal, absurd and dark to reflect Kafka's worldview, but the museum isn't all existentialism. It presents material in a straight fashion on Kafka, too. It's worth a visit, but be prepared for a Kafkaesque experience!
Posted by
Cleveland
442 posts
We walked to the "The Head of Franz Kafka also known as the Statue of Kafka, [which] is an outdoor kinetic sculpture by David Černý depicting Bohemian German-language writer Franz Kafka". It rotates every hour if I remember correctly. It was nice but it wasn't exactly a highlight of Prague. Still it was a must see for my wife and me.
Growing up, I remember being utterly frustrated with Kafka. You'd invest hours and hours reading a book like the Castle only to realize hundreds of pages in that it wasn't got resolve in a way my poor teenage brain could handle.
Here are a couple Kafka jokes to tide you over until someone who knows Prague better than me gives you a better response:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in
the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around.
Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it
was going. It stands there still.
And the classic:
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” Alois asked again, more insistently.
“Knock knock.”
And so it went for years. It wasn’t until his deathbed Alois realized
he was on the outside of the door.