Jul 17 2008
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka statue
In the middle of Prague’s Dusni Street in Prague there is a little square where you can find sculpture of Franz Kafka. In was installed recently in 2004, 80 years after his death, and designed by Scultpor Jaroslav Rona from bronze and located near the historic Jewish Quarter in Prague where a Catholic church and a synagogue stand next to each other and where Kafka spent most of his life - and often features in his novels and short stories.
The tall black sculpture represents a man with a Homburg hat on the head, sitting upon the shoulders of a massive, headless creature without arms and it’s hardly to understand its entity. It seems like this creature exists solely and just lifts the man above the ground in order to get an enhanced view of what is going below. We can see a shade of a smile in the man’s face, however the expression is sad. The right arm of the man is bent at the elbow, and his forefinger extends outward. This man represents Kafka pointing somewhere - maybe at 27 Dusní Street, where he lived for a long time, or maybe he just points at Prague, the city where he spent all his life. Probably the key lies in Franz Kafka’s eye—and it is his mind’s eye that the statue makes into metaphor here. Author of the statue Jaroslav Rona found inspiration for his work in Kafka’s early short story “Description of a Struggle”. If you look at the ground under Franz Kafka statue you might make out the legs of an insect, which recalls his short story “Die Verwandlung”, and you may understand that the man sitting on a faceless body represents the struggle with bureaucracy.