2024-05-27 21:13:32
The place did the author Franz Kafka keep, whose loss of life can be 100 years outdated on June 3? Journalist Judita Matyášová and photographer Jan Jindra have been on the lookout for it. They visited and documented the locations he wrote about in his books and letters. The consequence is a photograph exhibition and a newly printed ebook With Kafka on the Highway, which is a information to areas linked to his life.
Jindra and Matyášová have been engaged on the undertaking since 2003. They have been on the lookout for locations the place Franz Kafka visited throughout holidays or enterprise journeys. There have been dozens of all of them over Europe. They found that he had all types of hobbies: he admired airplanes, he was serious about trendy know-how and a wholesome way of life.
“Originally of our undertaking, I had no thought the place Kafka had traveled. I regularly began on the lookout for details about particular person areas in his diaries, letters to kin and pals,” Matyášová describes what preceded the work within the discipline. She was not solely in why Kafka went to a particular place, but additionally within the historical past of particular person cities and villages. One of many essential themes that runs by way of the complete undertaking is Kafka’s curiosity in a wholesome way of life.
Therapy procedures at Lahmann’s Weisser Hirsch sanatorium in Dresden. | Picture: Aktuálně.cz / Unknown writer / Archive Klaus Wagenbach / through Judita Matyášová and Jan Jindra: Venture “The Journeys of Franz Kafka” 2024 / With permission to make use of, Colorization: Dan Poláček
The authors of the undertaking visited, for instance, the previous sanatorium in Dresden or the Jungborn sanatorium in Harz, Germany. “It is normally stated of Kafka that he was unwell all his life, however actually he was a lot better match than lots of his pals. His uncle was a health care provider and was serious about various drugs. What we’re discovering as we speak, for instance stays in nature away from civilization, was additionally fashionable in Kafka’s time. Identical to as we speak, center and higher class folks lacked train and didn’t eat very healthily,” says Matyášová in regards to the photos from the previous Jungborn sanatorium, the place Kafka lived in a easy wood home. The procedures there included train within the contemporary air, washing with chilly water or mud wraps.
Kafka was fascinated by airplanes and the Paris metro
One other matter that in all probability few folks affiliate with the well-known author is up to date trendy know-how. In 1909, Kafka was on trip along with his finest pal Max Brod and his brother Otto at Lago di Garda. After they learn that a global air present was being held close by, they set out on an journey. Kafka wrote his first (and sadly additionally his final) report in regards to the expertise of this occasion. A yr later, he went to France once more, the place he was fully fascinated by using the Paris metro.
In keeping with Judita Matyášová, essentially the most details about Kafka and his wanderings seems in his diaries and letters. Probably the most apt quotes is that this excerpt from the author’s diary: “Sitting like that in a railway carriage, forgetting about it, residing as if at residence, abruptly remembering, feeling the carrying energy of the prepare, changing into a passenger, taking a cap out of the trunk, treating fellow passengers extra freely, extra heartily, extra emphatically, to be undeservedly carried away to the purpose, to understand it as a toddler, to turn into the darling of girls, to succumb to the enticing energy of the window, to at all times have at the least one hand prolonged by way of the window body.”
Picture writer: Labyrinth
Touring with Kafka: ebook and exhibition
- Ebook: Jan Jindra and Judita Matyášová – Touring with Kafka. Revealed by the Labyrinth publishing home. The primary presentation of the ebook happened on the World of Books honest in Prague.
- Exhibition: Journeys of Franz Kafka – Bať Institute in Zlín, from 5 June to 16 July