Lee's College & KAFKA

We visited Lee's college from 2020 and even got to meet his Principal and Assistant Principal. We had a son time as we were welcomed in and discussed his old times at school prior to having to leave Prague due to covid.

Kafka’s Prague is very evident from the statues, museum, bookstores and as we spoke with people, from the required curriculum for those educated here. The 36 foot high statue is a 21st century technical marvel in Prague. 42 moving floors form the face of Kafka. The sculpture by artist David Černý (SEE 3 VIDEOS) . It took 8900 hours from design to production to assembly. For the construction, the model was drawn on 2039 technical drawings. The build, which required the supply of bespoke special parts, took 6 months. We went to the Kafka Museum yesterday in the area where he had lived, learning about: the way Prague shaped the author's life, the mark it left on him and how it affected him. His diaries and extensive correspondence with family members, friends, lovers and publishers are witness to this influence. Interestingly, he rarely mentions the actual names of the places he writes about as if they were fictional imaginary places often used as metaphors (although many people have figured it out as the museum reveals). We learned of the many conflicts in Franz Kafka's life and how he made sense of them.

While Prague was for Kafka "a dear little mother with claws" who never let him go, his father became the huge, oppressive figure which he wrote about in his inner struggles. In the 1919 letter to his father, he addressed childhood, family, friendships, marriage, professions, literature and the rejection of Judaism and the search for its real roots.

The Jewish quarter of Prague for centuries it was home to Jewish mystics,
Hassidism and scholars of the Kabbalah. By the time Kafka was born, very little remained of the old tradition first rundown then rebuilt as a new city. The former ghetto lived on in Kafka's writings as well as the famous Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915). Czytaj więcej