Franz Kafka Museum

The Franz Kafka Museum occupies the former Herget Brickworks, a repurposed industrial building on the Lesser Town bank of the Vltava, looking across at the Old Town where Kafka was born and spent his working life. The permanent exhibition was originally conceived in 1999 as a travelling show, displayed first in Barcelona and then at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2002–03, before finding a permanent home in Prague in 2005. It is divided into two sections: "Existential Space" — tracing how Prague shaped Kafka's life through manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, and audiovisual installations — and "Imaginary Topography", which maps how the physical reality of Prague was transformed into the metaphoric landscape of his novels. The collection includes first editions of most of Kafka's works and correspondence and drawings never previously displayed. In the courtyard stands David Černý's provocative sculpture of two urinating figures — a Prague landmark in its own right. Kafka (1883–1924) wrote in German, worked as an insurance official, published almost nothing in his lifetime, and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Brod did not comply. Allow 1–1.5 hours.