EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

PAPER TRAILS AND TRAPDOORS: KAFKA AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY

NAXIME BORÉ

April 21, 2025

Franz Kafka asked for his manuscripts to be burned. Instead, they have been placed under glass at New York’s Morgan Library, flanked by cheerful wall texts that do their best to explain the inexplicable. An observance of the centennial of Kafka’s death, the exhibition pays tribute to a man who would have likely skipped his own opening—and filed a complaint about the signage. This is a review of that attempt, and of what gets lost when you try to frame the unframeable.

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Last year marked one hundred years since the death of Franz Kafka. It’s a centenary he himself would have found vaguely ridiculous, if not outright offensive. If Kafka had to be commemorated at all, he might have preferred to mark, say, the 104th anniversary of his death—or the 127th. Something arbitrary. Something that resists roundness. But he would certainly have preferred a celebration of his death over one of his birth. A birthday implies a beginning, a path forward. A deathday, in Kafka’s logic, is more honest: It suggests disappearance, fragmentation, the collapse of the known. He was not a man who placed much faith in origins.

This centennial has inspired exhibitions, new critical editions, public readings, anniversary publications of the major works, and a renewed bout of scholarly and institutional attention—an ironic afterlife for a writer who tried to disappear. Kafka, who famously asked for his manuscripts to be burned, has instead been given banners, vitrines, and panel discussions. We can only imagine how little he would have enjoyed attending any of them. One such celebration is an exhibition originally organized by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and recently on view at the Morgan Library in New York. 

The making of an icon

What does it mean to exhibit a writer who famously resisted legibility? To place Kafka in glass cases, surrounded by explanatory labels and biographical timelines, is to engage in a contradiction. His universe—of corridors with no exits, of laws without logic, of identities dissolving even as they are named—slips through such institutional gestures. Yet here we are, in 2025, at the Morgan Library, faced with an accumulation of postcards, diaries, manuscripts, and photographs.

The best way to know Kafka is, of course, to read him. No exhibition, however well intentioned, can reproduce the sensation of falling through his sentences. What it can offer instead is context: traces of the life, the social world, the small domestic details that surrounded the writing. These are not meaningless. Indeed, they are often moving—as with the letters to his sister Ottla, for instance, which brim with tenderness and dry wit. The exhibition is playfully installed, more gimmicky than profound. But despite the clever design, the tone remains academic, obsessed with the factual over the atmospheric. It is an exhibition about Kafka rather than of Kafka.

K and O

The curatorial framework attempts to “dismantle the myth” of Kafka as a solitary and tormented figure. It does so by presenting “evidence”: a less-cropped photo where Kafka stands beside a dog and a barmaid, or postcards showing his vacations, his friendships, his humor. One sees the effort here—to offer a fuller human portrait, to free Kafka from his own adjective. But does this accomplish anything beyond the obvious?

What was actually on view in the exhibition, you might ask? Well, the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis (1915) was perhaps the most iconic piece on display, its first lines scrawled in Kafka’s looping hand, giving us a glimpse into the moment when Gregor Samsa first stirred from uneasy dreams. The manuscript reveals subtle edits and crossed-out passages, a nervous precision that reflects Kafka’s obsessive relationship with revision and structure. Nearby, manuscripts of Amerika (written 1911–14) and The Castle (written 1922) extend this portrait of a writer mid-thought. In Amerika, with its episodic absurdities and unfinished sprawl, we see Kafka grappling with the illusion of freedom in the so-called New World; in The Castle, the prose grows more claustrophobic, its syntax more gnarled, echoing the alienation that defined his later years. These incomplete texts—spidery, dense, oddly spaced—are not just literary artifacts, but spatial ones, maps of a mind circling endlessly around the unsolvable.

Infinite Metamorphosis

His personal diaries are more fragile still, their pages filled with jagged entries that veer from philosophical aphorisms to mundane reports of indigestion or sleeplessness. They do not build a portrait so much as blur one. Each entry begins as if in mid-thought, as though we’ve arrived too late and are already being ushered out. They reveal a Kafka both tormented and amused by his condition, attentive to language’s betrayals, and obsessively attuned to the contradictions of his body, his job, his impulses.

The correspondence offers a softer counterpoint. Especially moving are the letters and postcards to friends and family, in which Kafka’s tone turns wry, affectionate, almost conspiratorial. These glimpses of domestic warmth stand in contrast to the image of the desolate writer alone at his desk. In them, Kafka is funny, self-deprecating, full of private joy. They remind us that he did not live in pure abstraction—that he had a life, even if he often longed to escape it.

Support group for misunderstood metaphors

Also on display are drawings and notebooks—lesser known but revealing. Kafka’s sketches, simple and angular, have the haunted levity of caricatures; they resemble walking coat racks, with faces formed of punctuation. These small figures seem to teeter on the edge of becoming characters. Meanwhile, his Hebrew study notebooks speak to a deeper intellectual and spiritual curiosity, his late-in-life desire to connect with Zionist thought and to learn the language he considered essential to a future he knew he would not live to see. These notebooks show Kafka as a student again—tentative, hopeful, and engaged in the labor of self-reinvention.

To present Kafka as a multifaceted individual is not wrong. It might just be unnecessary. What this tidying impulse disguised as correction misunderstands is that Kafka’s solitude was never photographic. It wasn’t about being seen alone. It was metaphysical.

And this is the deeper issue: Kafka is not a biographical subject so much as an existential vibration. The term “Kafkaesque” survives not because of who he was, but because of what his work feels like. That feeling—the gradual loss of orientation, the suspicion that the logic you’re following is your own undoing—cannot be exhibited. It must be experienced. So while the Morgan offers context, it cannot offer contact. The original manuscripts behind the glass vitrines are there to simulate intimacy—to let us stand close to Kafka, or at least to his papers. It’s a gesture of literary relic worship, romantic in spirit and fetishistic in effect, and it flatters our desire for connection while doing little to bring us closer to the work itself. Some might argue that handwriting retains a personal trace, that it reveals a twitch of the soul. Perhaps. But that twitch does not clarify the text—it only reminds us that the hand once moved. 

Postcard to a friend

Kafka made meaning disappear in the Prague-ian fog. His stories don’t unfold—they unravel. They seem to begin in clarity and end in a murk of contradictions, bureaucratic loops, and faceless judgment. His genius lies in making the world feel familiar until it turns foreign. That is not something that can be pinned to a timeline or framed on a wall. It is something you fall into.

There is, of course, some value in this archival mode. Seeing his handwritten manuscripts, the scrawl and slant of his pen, creates a kind of intimacy. His diaries in particular feel less like documents than like corridors in which thought loops endlessly. But even here, the vitrine contains what the writing refuses: finality.

What would a truly Kafkaesque exhibition look like? Not this. Perhaps no wall labels. Or perhaps many, all contradicting each other. A gallery map that leads nowhere. Visitors asked to sign forms in languages they don’t speak. A gallery tour guide who keeps changing names. Or no gimmicks at all—just atmospheres. Experiences of disorientation, opacity, absurdity. Kafka is not a subject to be known. He is a condition to be entered.

K. is institutionalized

Still, the Morgan does what it does. It gives us Kafka-the-writer, in paper and ink. It does not give us Kafka-the-nightmare, Kafka-the-condition. But it does remind us of a different truth: Before there was the Kafkaesque, there was Kafka. And Kafka was a man with a pen, a job, a family, and a desk. The exhibition doesn’t let us forget that. Whether that is a gift or a limitation remains to be seen.

Naxime Boré (b. 1968 in Krnov, Czechoslovakia) is a novelist, critic, and patron saint of literary second thoughts. She never met Kafka, except in dreams—usually while waiting in line. Her work explores the bureaucracies of memory and the poetics of unread footnotes.

Cover image: We are all Gregor Samsa