The Kafka year is coming to an end, the Jewish Museum Berlin opened the last major Kafka exhibition of 2024 in mid-December. “Kafka would have said: the very last,” explains museum director Hetty Berg, referring to the Jewish writer’s lines: “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will not be the last come on the very last day.”
The exhibition in the Jewish Museum Berlin is already necessary – not only because the examination of one of the most important writers of the 20th century is not a question that only arises in the 100th year of his death.
After the Kafka exhibitions in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, in the Bodleian Library Oxford and in the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem, it sets its own accent and presents Kafka as an artist whose work, as the catalog says, is also difficult to understand immediately like the works of modern visual artists.
It is important because it broadens your horizons. And last but not least, it is necessary because many of the works shown in Berlin come from Jewish artists – at a time when many creative people from the Jewish state are confronted with calls for boycotts on the global art scene. Curator Shelley Harten explains that numerous Israelis are represented, among other things, by the fact that she is very familiar with the Israeli art scene.
In the stairwell to the first floor there are posters with the inscription: “If you want to become an artist, get in touch!”
Access Kafka is the name of the exhibition. In the stairwell to the first floor there are posters with the inscription: “If you want to become an artist, get in touch!” The call is a quote from Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Der missing people or America. The character Karl Roßmann, who emigrated to the USA, is confronted in the book with an identical call from the “Natural Theater of Oklahoma”. The appeal goes on to say: “Everyone is welcome!”
Manuscripts and drawings from the estate are shown
The same also applies to Access Kafka. The show provides a low-threshold insight into six rooms – even for visitors who are not or barely familiar with Kafka's work. Manuscripts and drawings from the estate are shown, some on loan from Jerusalem, Oxford and Marbach. In each room there is a sheet to take home with a Kafka text such as A Hunger Artist (1922) or Josefine, the Singer or The People of Mice (1924).
But this exhibition is also something for readers who know Kafka's work well – and for those who would like to understand it better, but are still in it Lock stuck. There is a way, says curator Shelley Harten in the exhibition catalog, “to endure the depressing, the tensions in Kafka's work and the contradictions of his person.” The key lies “in the attempt to encounter Kafka as a visual artist and his texts as sculptures or paintings that exist spatially in an exhibition alongside other works of art.”
What Franz Kafka would have said about that? He himself refused illustrations of his works. His publisher Kurt Wolff pointed out that Gregor Samsa was in no way depicted as a beetle on the cover of The transformationg may appear: “The insect may not be drawn. You can’t even see it from a distance.”
A choir sings the Yiddish partisan song “Mir Zaynen Do!”
Two black curtains hang in front of the “Access Judaism” room. Anyone who pushes it aside and enters the room stands directly in front of a video installation by Yael Bartana from 2024. A choir of white singers sings the Yiddish partisan song “Mir Zaynen Do!”
In between, black singers appear in magnificent costumes. The hall is quickly empty, and at the end the choir director, an older, very correctly dressed white woman with a pearl necklace, is the only one left behind. The rusty chairs allow for all associations, from transience in general to the stacked wrecked cars of the victims of the October 7, 2023 massacre at the Nova festival in southern Israel.
Who are Yael Bartana's singers, why did they choose a song that – according to the Yiddish lyrics – was sung by “a people between falling walls with guns in their hands”? The catalog provides information: “In the ruins of the Teatro de Arte Israelita Brasileiro” (TAIB), in the basement of the Casa do Povo in São Paolo, two groups meet as if in a dream: Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street music ensemble, (… ) and the Coral Tradição, a Jewish-Brazilian choir that sings Yiddish songs. (…) Both groups appear, demonstrate their cohesion and ask who will own the stage in the future.«
Many Russian artists are represented – such as Yuval Barel, Yael Bartana, Guy Ben-Ner, Uri Katzenstein, Alona Rodeh and Roee Rosen.
The work of art in the same room is shocking Airman Antiexodus (2020) by the Jewish painter Yuval Barel, a black and white acrylic painting of a person sitting on the ground with a bird, in the background a building with a chimney from which smoke rises.
In the catalog, literary scholar Vivian Liska examined Kafka's relationship to Judaism: “The failure to achieve a goal (…) corresponds to the fundamental view of the Jewish textual tradition that the Bible is 'not in heaven' but on earth. It shows a direction, not a result. It does not invite you to enter, but rather, like Kafka the country man before the law, to a lifelong examination of it and everything it stands for.
The doorkeeper parable is on display in the “Access Law” room
In the “Access Law” room, where Kafka’s Doorkeeper Parable is displayed, a 56-minute long video by the Israeli artist Roee Rosen can be seen. He has his life confession repeated in Hebrew by migrants who live illegally in Israel and do not understand the country's language. The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2007/2008) is one of the most shocking works in the show (as an examination of a Shoah survivor as a father and fictional insights into the channeling of Gush Dan). The short animated film is also shown Altars made of sand (2023) by Alona Rodeh.
A short video will be shown in the entrance area, Hit (2010), presented by German filmmaker Hito Steyerl, in which someone activates a flat screen with a hammer and chisel. In the middle room there is a carousel by Martin Kippenberger, which the artist completed in 1991. An ejector seat on colorful rails is activated for a wild ride – a symbol of an artistic vicious circle that can only be broken by the person standing at the crank.
And there are works by Marcel Duchamp, Maria Lassnig, Maria Eichhorn, Trevor Paglen, Guy Ben-Ner, Mary Flanagan, Cory Arcangel, Uri Katzenstein and others that you have to take your time to absorb. Plan for no less than three hours Access Kafka one, don’t skip the catalog – but look at the art first. Your head will open. Your thoughts may scare you, but you'll feel better afterwards.
“The Messiah will only come when it is no longer necessary,” writes Franz Kafka. Until that happens, let's console ourselves Access Kafka in the Jewish Museum Berlin.
The exhibition can be seen in the Jewish Museum Berlin until May 4, 2025.
