Access Kafka

One hundred years after Franz Kafka’s death, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin places key aspects of his oeuvre in dialogue with works of contemporary art. The term “access” serves as the guiding principle: in his literary works, Kafka poses universal and timeless questions relating to access and belonging. How do Kafka’s ideas resonate in the present day? In six chapters entitled Access Denied, Word, Body, Space, Law, and Jewishness, contemporary art is placed alongside documents, letters, and drawings by Kafka. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features contributions by the curator of the exhibition, Shelley Harten, as well as by Kafka experts Carolin Duttlinger, Reiner Stach, and Vivian Liska, which provide another perspective on Franz Kafka’s life and work.