Just like his writing, Kafka’s neat little sketches possess an insidious blend of horror and humour. Even when they’re supposedly light-hearted, the figures seem squeezed onto the paper, folded in on themselves, twisted and confined. In one deadpan sketch, a body (possibly his own, as it’s split like the ‘K’ in his name), is slowly being prised apart by opposing forces, its rough looseness conveying the grim casualness of its conception.
The sketches are presented in glass vitrines, accompanied by original pages of the Czech writer’s diaries and manuscripts. In his elegant German script, we can read his private love letters, even the desperate missive he wrote to his emotionally tyrannical father containing a rational attempt to explain their inherent incompatibility. Multiple information sheets reveal his familial and social circles, as well as diagrammatic breakdowns of his life and preoccupations. We discover delightful insights – how he chewed each mouthful of food 32 times or how, bored of his factory job, he would stay up half the night writing, venturing out only for long walks with his best friend Max Brod.
One graphic board even attempts to tackle complex notions of his Jewish identity but offers only a frustratingly scant exploration of his exercise regime and state of mind, touching on Zionist ideas of “muscular Jewry” to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Such half-baked details make you wish they’d concentrated more on Kafka’s infinitely strange, contradictory character, instead of filling up all the available space with attention-demanding art films. Raising the question: does Kafka’s themes of alienation and existential isolation really need the “dark” darlings of contemporary art world to make them more visceral?
This is not to say the art isn’t good. Cory Archangel’s ‘Totally fucked’ (2003), a hacked videogame of Mario, marooned on a question-mark box, perfectly captures Kafka’s relish for the grotesque. And in ‘AI Winter’ (2022), Anne Imhof’s muse, Eliza Douglas, struts purposefully through the snow-bound wastes of Gorky Park; Kafka, obsessed by the performative act of making art, would have enjoyed its meta complexity.
This exhibition, which opened in December, marks the centenary of Kafka’s death in 1924. One of the show’s focal points is the action of his friend, Brod, who defied Kafka’s deathbed wishes by publishing much of his unfinished manuscripts. Without his efforts, we would have a far smaller selection of his short stories and none of his novels.
In the final room, Hito Steyerl’s 28-second film shows the artist smashing a chisel into a monitor, simultaneously creating and destroying a media-based artwork. In its impassive volatility, the work echoes the vivid atmosphere of Kafka’s most memorable short stories, where beneath the surreal scenarios and impenetrable bureaucracy, the line between gravity and absurdity is never quite clear. ★★★★
- Through 4 May, 2025, Jewish Museum Berlin, Mitte
