Prague: The Kafka Museum

October 29, 1:36 PMNY Budget Travel ExaminerSusan Finch

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Finding value with a souvenir is easy if you're simply looking from shop to shop for the best price.  But finding value in balance with money, time, and experience is harder to discover and recognize at first glance.  Each one is equally important and deserves a certain amount of attention and consideration. It's really not enough just to be a tourist looking for the best $6 Bohemian glass necklace at the street fair, you need to uncover the real value of a city's story.

Today we went to the Kafka Museum in Prague and admittedly I wasn't thrilled to go. I preferred to be outside walking around and soaking up local culture.  I was looking forward to a $1 Pilsner Urquell and some people watching in Prague's Old Town. But my husband is an avid reader and museum monger and off to Kafka we went.

I was pleased to discover our admission was 15% off with our Prague City Cards and our total came to just over $5 USD.  We entered the museum and I had little expectation other than to learn more about this infamous writer and make my husband happy.

Instead, I was surprised to find a completely aesthetic experience waiting inside.  Disorienting music, photographs under water, meticulously placed mirrors, bits of letters, photographs, and films and sketches all capturing the essence of Kafka.

And just as importantly, it gave me a sense of what life was like for a German speaking Jew in Prague's late 1800's.  Clues to the city's anti-semitic atmosphere abounded through Kafka's letters and brooding portraits.  Stories of his love and appreciation for Yiddish theater, his petitions to the government for permission to travel to Munich, requests for time off due to illness, and maps of his walking route to school guided me through the museum. 

Visiting the Kafka Museum gave me a better sense of understanding of how Prague's narrow Venice-esque corridors and pedestrian style canals would feel claustrophobic and gripping in a sea of weeping statues and looming towers. I began wondering who had built the city and lived it in over the centuries, how communism and the Velvet Revolution effected its underlying energy, what had been lost in its censorship, what has yet to be uncovered, and what Prague would look like another 100 years from now.

I always thought that you couldn't really get a sense of a city until you walked it, but I'm starting to think you can't really know a city until you've seen its winding history as an insider.