Franz Kafka Museum

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, lived almost his entire life within a single square kilometer of the Old Town, wrote some of the most unsettling fiction of the 20th century, and asked his friend Max Brod to burn every word of it after he died. Brod ignored the request, and the world got "The Trial," "The Castle," and "The Metamorphosis" — works so distinctive that "Kafkaesque" became an adjective in dozens of languages. Prague was Kafka's raw material: its labyrinthine bureaucracy, its claustrophobic streets, its overbearing authority figures.

The museum sits in a converted brick building — the former Hergetova cihelna — on the Lesser Town bank of the Vltava, and it opened in 2005. The permanent exhibition is split into two halves: "Existential Space" and "Imaginary Topography." The first documents Kafka's actual life through manuscripts, diaries, letters, and photographs. The second recreates the atmosphere of his fiction through disorienting audiovisual installations — dark corridors, looping sounds, and projections that make you feel like you've wandered into one of his stories.

Outside, the museum's courtyard features David Cerny's sculpture of two men urinating into a pool shaped like the Czech Republic. The figures move mechanically, and you can text a phone number to make them spell out messages. It's provocative, absurd, and weirdly perfect for a museum dedicated to a man who wrote about people turning into insects.

Kafka moved constantly but never left Prague for long. His birthplace near Old Town Square is marked by a plaque, and he spent time writing at No. 22 Golden Lane inside Prague Castle. The city absorbed him, and he absorbed the city.