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Kafka show makes exhibition design history

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP
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NEW YORK, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Exhibitions dealing with famous authors no longer need to be dull displays of manuscripts, first editions, letters, photographs, and personal artifacts now that a Spanish curator has demonstrated new ways to illuminate and dramatize a literary life with a show about the Czech writer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

Titled "The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague," the show was organized by Juan Insua for the Centre de Cultura Contemporanio in Barcelona and is on display at the Jewish Museum on upper Fifth Avenue through Jan. 5. Insua has shunned the usual biographical, chronological approach to present what he calls "12 Kafkaesque environments."

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Broken down into two parts that Insua has labeled "The Prague in Kafka" and "The Kafka in Prague," the show takes a multimedia approach in a series of galleries painted dark green where black, gray and white are the dominant color scheme.

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It includes a ramble whose see-through curtained walls reflects video projections, a mirrored room for "mirage making," a twisting wooden walkway, and an animation based on Kafka's amusing cartoons. The aural background consists of period music, the soothing flow of the Moldava River and contrasting ominous but unidentifiable sounds, and a voice-over of a man speaking German who represents Kafka's hated, authoritarian father.

The most ingenious effect is a dimly lit maze walled by outsize steel filing cabinets, representing Kafka's frustrating experience as a lawyer in the service of one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's bureaucratic offices. An occasional file drawer is pulled open to display appropriate Kafka books and manuscripts including "The Castle," "The Endless Office," and "In the Penal Colony," and old-fashioned wall telephones offer the chance to hear recorded translations of Kafka texts, which he wrote in German, not Czech.

Circular café tables, the kind at which Kafka and his literary cronies sat at the Café Arco (the source of their nickname "The Arconauts"), are used as display cases for documents and books relating to Kafka and his circle. The visitor learns about his series of engagements to women he never married, his fascination with and alienation from his Jewish heritage, and his friendship with Jewish scholar Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and Max Brod, who saved Kafka's unpublished manuscripts when the author died of tuberculosis and became his biographer.

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The show makes the point that Kafka grew up in a time of terror very much like the world of 2002.

The terrorists were not Islamic fundamentalists but international anarchists, opposed to the status quo in general. They managed to assassinate a number of world leaders over a period of 30 years including U.S. President William McKinley, French President Sadi Carnot, Russia's Grand Duke Serge, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria. In 1892 alone there were 1,000 anarchist assassinations in Europe and 500 in the United States.

Kafka was a 9-year-old schoolboy at the time, a troubled child and trouble-maker who was nicknamed by his family's cook "Ravachol," the nickname for the notorious French anarchist Francois Koenigstein. The show puts in perspective Kafka's anomalous position in Czech social and cultural life, his growing personal unhappiness, even despair as he found himself trapped in a civil servant's job at the Worker's Insurance Bureau that allowed him little spare time to write.

But he put on a good front with friends who generally found him a cheerful young man though reserved, according to correspondence and other literary evidence on display in the show. He felt himself blessed to have been born in Prague and was always happy to return there after one of his numerous trips. He wrote that the old city center is "the most beautiful set in the world" and a narrow circle that "encompasses my entire life."

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A visitor will learn a lot more about Kafka, the city he loved, and the roots of Existential literature from this show at the Jewish Museum than one could ever expect to learn from most literary exhibitions. It sets such high standards that other museums will have to change their old-fashioned concepts of presentation in order to match it for thorough research and dramatic, amazingly absorbing display.

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