Adventures Across the Kafkasphere: A Disquisition on Modern Kafkalogy
IMAGINE WHAT IT WOULD TAKE to paint an accurate picture of one of your friends, a decade or even a century after he died. Everyone would have a different perception depending on the context in which your friend was known — your friend could be remembered as charming, annoying, hard-working, and flirtatious depending on who is asked. These different perspectives would help round out our understanding of that person, but the kaleidoscope of recollections and understandings would make it hard to paint a definitive portrait of someone’s life.
Biographers have an especially difficult task for this reason. And when the subject is as unique and visionary as the legendary writer Franz Kafka, the biographer’s charge becomes that much more serious. The Czech writer hardly left his hometown during his lifetime, but within only a few years of his death he was considered a “shaper of modern consciousness” and one of the preeminent literary voices of the twentieth century. His writings now influence the greatest writers of every generation.
Everyone who reads Kafka wants to know why he was the way he was. Scholars put Kafka under the microscope from early on and have scrutinized every aspect of his life for clues to his unique genius. No aspect of his existence has gone unexamined — “The regularity of his bowel movements was easily upset,” reports one biographer — and the past two decades in particular have seen a much-expanded understanding of his life and works. Out conception of his life has changed as more becomes known about his life and times, and this is helping to upend the common but simplistic conception of Kafka as a paranoid recluse who felt “guilty of being alive.”
Given the obsessive interest in the subject, Kafkology is a field peppered with illuminating, groundbreaking, and controversial events. From the discovery of Kafka’s “porn” to investigations into obscure Nazi archives to a trial concerning the fate of original manuscripts held in a house full of cats, Kafka alone seemed to be able to capture the strange reality necessary to tell the chapters of his ongoing story. Scholars have made careers out of studying Kafka, but the obsession goes much deeper than purely academic interest.
What follows are a few tales of modern Kafkologists and the adventures they’ve experienced while delving into the world of that enigmatic Czech scribe. If you think Kafka’s writings are perplexing, wait until you see what happens when you leave the page and delve into the Kafkaesque firsthand.
I. THE INFINITE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER UNIQUELY OPEN TO INTERPRETATION: on the monumental work of Mary Luise Caputo-Mayr and Julien Herz
FRANZ KAFKA WAS BORN July 3, 1883 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, then part of the Hapsburg Empire and a city alive with culture and commerce. He grew up in a German-speaking, secular Jewish household, the son of middle-class parents who ran a dry goods store in a happening part of town. Kafka was an intelligent, reserved boy who developed a love for reading early on. Crucial to his psychology and worldview was his tense relationship with his father, who was an old-school man’s man. The nature of their relationship would inspire a conception of the world present throughout his writings, in which domineering authorities and their arbitrary rules always seem to prevail. Indeed, Kafka wrote that one of the formative moments of his life was when his father locked him out on the balcony at night for crying too much for a glass of water.
Upon graduating high school, Kafka trained as a lawyer, received his doctorate of law, and eventually went to work for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, where he inspected factories, assessed claims, and calculated the likelihood of industrial accidents. By all accounts, he was a top-notch employee, noted for his thoroughness and competence. But he was permanently unsatisfied with his job and longed for the hours in which he could pursue his true passion — writing, that exhausting, wrenching, and soothing process of pulling prose from within himself.
With the help of fellow best friend, writer, and all around literary hype-man Max Brod, Kafka had his first story published in 1908. Like most writers, he had to find his footing — even Kafka’s early writings were “adolescent posturing,” according to John Updike — but he had his breakthrough when he wrote “The Judgment” in one sitting in 1912, a story in which a son obeys his dying father’s command to jump off a bridge. His experience writing the story was critical — it was a new artistic high and hinted at the productivity he could achieve if he could enter that zone of uninterrupted craftsmanship. His most productive period followed this story, when he wrote “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” and a good portion of the novel Amerika around the same time. Kafka was considered a writer to watch among the literati of his day (he was contemporaneously admired by super-serious novelist Thomas Mann), but he published relatively little during his lifetime and was never able to make writing a fulltime gig.
Kafka was engaged three times to two women, served unwillingly as part-owner of the family’s asbestos factory, and was even drafted into World War I (but was given a deferment on account of his value to his employers). He continued to work at the Insurance Institute until he was forced to retire early on account of tuberculosis, which he contracted in 1917. Despite stays at health spas and a lifetime of fastidious diet and exercise, the illness got the best of him and he died on June 3, 1924, one month shy of his 41st birthday. His final words were said to be a bit of black humor: “I’m not leaving,” the doctor said as he stood up. “But I am,” Kafka replied.
Kafka considered the bulk of his work incomplete, a failure even, and famously asked Brod to burn all of his manuscripts when he died. Brod of course did the complete opposite, publishing in short order Kafka’s three (unfinished) novels, dozens of short stories, and volumes of his correspondence and diaries. From there, Kafka’s readership grew and grew. The world quickly recognized what an otherworldly talent Kafka was and rushed to find meaning in his cryptic texts.
“Kafka” means “jackdaw” or “crow” in Czech (“kavka”), and is a name that accurately conveys the timbre of his works. His novels and stories primarily detail the strange situations that befall white collar workers and animals, and his mysterious tales are indistinct in time and location, leaving readers feeling like they’ve just read a “parable whose key has been stolen.”[2] Craft-wise he is a writer’s writer, full of unconventional narration and profligate run-on sentences.
Kafka’s psychological profile — obviously key to understanding his writings — has long been the subject of debate. The sheer number of works about his works showcases the rabid desire to get to the bottom of it all. His writings have been convincingly subject to every possible interpretation, and at one point, a new book about Kafka was said to have been published every ten days for fourteen years. As it turns out, so voluminous are the works about Kafka that it took more than three decades to assemble a comprehensive account of them all. The task was Herculean, and the associated mountain papers and files most certainly Kafkan. Remarkably, the bulk of the work was done by only two people.
Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr and Julius M. Herz, both professors at Germany’s Temple University, have singlehandedly catalogued almost every work, article, dissertation, and book on Kafka, no matter how obscure, that was published between 1955 and 1997. Their finished works, a bilingual German/English bibliography called Franz Kafka: Eine kommen tierte Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur (Franz Kafka: international bibliography of primary and secondary literature), runs more than 900 pages across three volumes and contains an estimated 20,000 entries. The bibliography was published in 1987 and then updated in 1998 not only catalogues the works on Kafka — including works on people tangentially related to Kafka’s life, books or studies that mention him only a few times, and Kafka in film and music — but in many cases summarizes each work’s strengths and weaknesses.
Herz and principle author Caputo-Mayr are both native German speakers (and multilinguists to boot) and were able to tackle much of the material written about Kafka in his native language. For works from other parts of the world, they collaborated with over forty national libraries and relied on colleagues around the world to submit entries from their respective countries. “Almost ninety percent of the material was personally reviewed,” the bibliographers write in the introduction, and their immense collection of file cards attests to it. Not bad for someone like Caputo-Mayr, who said that her first encounter with The Trial at age sixteen “so profoundly shocked me that I threw it away in disgust.”
“When you read [of the] interpretations, there is no end of wonder surprise, and so on,” Caputo-Mayr said laconically. “Anything goes, and is still going on a fertile ground for academia let loose.”
The bibliography also provides a sort of macroscopic look at the way Kafka’s writings have spread[4], which in turn speaks for how powerfully subjective his writings can be. On the one hand, his send-up of the drudgery of the office serves as a critique of the skewed work-life balance mandated by capitalism, while “‘Kafka the radical individualist’ became the symbol of alienation and decadence” in the USSR, where “the study of his works was usually viewed as Western-inspired revisionism and at the same time criticism of the Communist ideology of collectivism.”
The bibliography doesn’t even take into account the material published since 1997, which, thanks to the rise of the internet and the lapsing of the copyrights on Kafka’s works, likely exceeds possible quantification. Caputo-Mayr, who is in her mid-80s, is leaving the next bibliographical volumes up to someone else, though she will keep busy with the Kafka Society she founded and its annual journal and symposium.
But why has this author in particular inspired so much scholarship that he requires a bibliography of this scale? Do his works intrinsically contain so much meaning that they necessitate this level of dissection? To find out, German academic Reiner Stach chose to forgo abstruse academic philosophizin’ in favor of examining Kafka’s real, day-to-date life in as much verifiable detail as possible. Within in the quotidian lies the fantastic, and so Stach embarked on a twenty-year project to help his readers understand nothing less than “what it is like to be Franz Kafka.”
II. RIDING THE CONTOURS OF KAFKA’S BRAIN AND CRYING UPON HIS DEATH: Reiner Stach’s 25 years with Kafka
REINER STACH, A GERMAN WRITER, PUBLISHER, AND PUBLICIST, probably knows more about the daily minutia of Kafka’s life than anybody on Earth. Indeed, his biography starts with a quantification of Kafka’s entire life, from the time spent in school (16 and a half years) to the total number of days he spent abroad (45) and the number of seas he saw during his life (3). Stach has devoted more than twenty-five years of his life to studying Kafka, and his efforts have resulted in a hilariously exhaustive work that is likely going to be considered thee go-to work on Kafka’s life for the next few centuries.
Stach, now 66, a polymath with degrees in mathematics, literature, and philosophy (and “a long-distance runner who likes to pause for coffee and cake between stops”), took his first serious plunge into Kafkology when he wrote his graduate dissertation on women in Kafka, called “Kafka’s erotic myth: an aesthetic construction of femininity.” Kafka studies were put on hold as Stach engaged in other academic pursuits, but the paucity of serious Kafka biographies was an issue that weighed on his mind. In Stach’s opinion, most suffer from an eisegetic bias that says more about the author than the subject, and so Stach decided he would be the one to right this biographical wrong and present his life simply as it was. “In some ways, it was a megalomaniacal idea to want to correct the public image of Kafka with a couple of books,” Stach said. But literary posterity demanded it.
Starting in 1996, Stach began the research for what would become a 2,300-page, four-volume masterpiece. He began tracking down the unpublished memoirs of Kafka’s school chums, petitioned governments and estates, and synthesized newer research hidden across obscure academic journals. Scouring old newspaper archives, he pieced together daily life in Prague as the city adjusted to the changing technological landscape of the early twentieth century. (Kafka disdained the telephone but was captivated by cinema, and his novel Amerika even references a certain brown, sugary drink whose carbonation tickles the nose.)
Kafka: The Decisive Years was published in 2002 and covers Kafka from age 27 to 32, the most studied period of his life, as this is when he wrote his most well-known works. Kafka: The Years of Insight came next, in 2008, and explores Kafka from 32 to 40. The final volume, Kafka: The Early Years, was published in 2014 and ends at the beginning, covering his birth until age 27.[5] A fourth book, Is That Kafka?, collects ninety-nine interesting factoids Stach uncovered in his research and serves as a companion to the biography proper.
The publication of each volume was met with acclaim by critics and fans around the world. Readers revel in the instructive and poignant details from his daily life; for example, he was the “only Kafka at the dinner table who was always tanned,” given his love of rowing, hiking, and being outdoors.[6]
At times, the biographies chronicle Kafka’s life on a minute-by-minute, thought-by-thought basis. In fact, Stach spent so much time with the subject that when it came time to write the chapter in which Kafka withers and dies, it was like he was personally writing the demise of one of his closest friends. The experience affected Stach on nothing less than a spiritual level.
“When I wrote the death chapter, I could not leave the house for days,” he said. “It would have been unthinkable to have lunch with anyone or talk about politics or the weather. I actually had the feeling of losing a close person.”
Remarkably, however, in some cases Stach still didn’t have enough information to tell the whole story. The biography was not published in chronological order because Stach was unable to access certain biographical documents — he was stonewalled early on by an Israeli family with ties to Max Brod himself. The family was in possession of original Kafka material and a collection of Brod’s diaries that would illuminate parts of Kafka’s life, but they would not let Stach see them.
It wasn’t just Stach they were avoiding but scholars and government authorities around the world. The documents were at the center of a highly contentious legal battle, caught in legal limbo on account of uncertain post-mortem instructions. The documents were said to be stored in boxes within boxes in vaults in Zurich and Tel Aviv, but more distressingly, also stored on the floor of an apartment filled with dozens of cats. As the strange legal situation unfolded, journalists relished the opportunity to describe the situation with a word that had never been more appropriate — the situation was truly Kafkaesque.
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In the early 1950s, a puttering car made its way from Switzerland to England, traveling almost 750 miles northwest out of Switzerland through the mountains and forests of northern France and up to cross the Channel. The vehicle was carrying treasures of almost incalculable value, but fortunately for the driver, it was cargo that any would-be thieves would label as meaningless old junk. The real threats to this haul were much more pedestrian — they could easily catch fire, absorb a spilled drink, or fly page-by-page out a window. The driver tasked with safely delivering them to England was well aware of these dangers, and kept one eye on his precious cargo and one eye on the road, his hair standing on end for the duration of the route.
The man’s name was Sir Malcolm Pasley, and he was transporting a large collection of Kafka’s notebooks and letters, including the original manuscript of Kafka’s novel The Castle, to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Pasley, an unpompous and unpretentious lecturer in German at Oxford University, and had been given charge of the papers by heirs of Kafka himself.
As mentioned, Max Brod[7] published Kafka’s novels, volumes of his correspondence, and diaries within a few years of Kafka’s death. At one point, however, Brod had a falling out with the publisher, and the publisher held on to the original Kafka manuscripts in his possession and deposited them in safety deposit boxes in Zurich. As it happened, Pasley met Marianne Steiner[8], the daughter of Kafka’s sister Valli, through Steiner’s son, who was a student at Oxford. Pasley was tasked with transferring the documents to Oxford and was considered an honorary member of the Kafka family for his work. The Bodleian Library now owns approximately two-thirds of known original Kafka material.
However, the other third of Kafka’s known writings exist elsewhere. Some of it is in private hands — such as Kafka’s letters to his first fiancé Felice Bauer, “the most precise and exacting history of a human relationship that exists,” which sold in 1987 for $605,000 (the highest amount paid at the time for a literary relic) — and some of it is in Germany’s Marbach Literary Archive, including the manuscript of The Trial, which the Archive bought for two million dollars in 1988. (Marianna Steiner, Kafka’s 75-year-old niece, was pleased with the sale. ‘’I’m very happy because it won’t end up locked away in a drawer,’’ she said at the time.) The rest of Kafka’s oeuvre, which, counting Brod’s intermingled papers, is said to amount to twenty thousand pages, rested for decades in the hands of a reclusive mother and daughter in Tel Aviv, stored in a nondescript apartment building in a nondescript part of town.
When Brod fled Prague in 1939, on the last train out of town before the Nazis arrived, he arrived in Palestine with two suitcases, one of which held only Kafka’s papers. The contents of the suitcase included the bulk of the material Brod published after Kafka’s death, and when he was facing his own mortality, Brod bequeathed the lot to either the National Library of Israel or to his longtime friend and secretary Esther Hoffe. Hoffe ended up in possession of them, but an obvious choice was unclear. The confusion would make for a host of legal problems down the road.[9]
According to the lone account of the cache (which the Hoffe family permitted in the early 1980s), the hoard contained letters, two dozen unknown drawings done by Kafka, and possibly the photos Brod and Kafka took while on vacation together in France and Italy. Most tantalizingly, there are a number of Brod’s early diaries which presumably contain his reflections on a young Kafka. In fact, according to the inventory, a few of which were in an envelope on which someone had noted “Much about Kafka.”
The unresolved situation with Brod’s will inspired serious concern among literary scholars, as the Hoffe family had demonstrated they were willing to sell off the collection piecemeal to private buyers who had no obligation to share their purchases with the world. Hoffe was the person who sold the manuscript to the German archives in 1988, and she was making plans to sell the rest of the lot to the same archive when she died in 2007 at age 101. The sale was never completed, and the files passed to her daughters, Ruth and Eva, who could presumably do with them what they wished. The sisters would not let anyone see the collection, and for biographers like Stach, and the lack of public access to these documents bordered on the immoral.
The situation was doubly perilous for Kafkologists, as many of the documents were kept in Ruth Hoffe’s reportedly odoriferous apartment in Tel Aviv. The priceless collection was said to be in molding boxes, subject to the micturition of dozens of cats. “On almost every stack a cat was sitting,” said one archivist, though Eva refutes this and says the documents were safely in safes in her home. (The situation bore some traces of appropriate irony, as Kafka’s purported wishes that his manuscripts be destroyed came close to be carried out. As Israeli writer Etgar Keret said, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it an apartment full of cats, right?”)
The situation was doubly perilous for Kafkologists, as many of the documents were kept in Ruth Hoffe’s reportedly odoriferous apartment in Tel Aviv. The priceless collection was said to be in molding boxes, subject to the micturition of dozens of cats. “On almost every stack a cat was sitting,” said one archivist, though Eva refutes this and says the documents were safely in safes in her home. (The situation bore some traces of appropriate irony, as Kafka’s purported wishes that his manuscripts be destroyed came close to be carried out. As Israeli writer Etgar Keret said, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it an apartment full of cats, right?”)
The courts ultimately ruled against the sisters again and again. In 2012, a judge determined that Brod intended the papers to be transferred to one of the public institutions he mentioned in a letter. The sisters appealed this ruling (an era covered in Elif Batuman’s incredible article about the case), and in 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that the papers were definitively the property of the National Library of Israel. (The Tel Aviv Municipal Library was one possible recipient, but likely aware of the responsibility that would come with housing them, the library politely declined consideration.) The papers were transferred to the National Library starting in December of that year, the intention being to digitize the documents and make them available online to the public.[10]
Though Reiner Stach notes that the information contained in these unseen papers likely wouldn’t change much about our understanding of Kafka’s life — at most, it would flesh out a number of known details, he said, or bring to light what some of Kafka’s contemporaries thoughts of him — many speculate that these notebooks may contain as-of-yet unknown inspiring aphorisms buried in letters or diary entries, or even unknown stories. Whatever is there, and any new detail or minor revelation is sure to inspire a whole host of new analysis (to say nothing of how the world of Kafkology would explode if there proved to be an unpublished story).[11]
But the mysteries contained in the Brod papers goes even deeper. Within the Hoffe archive is a document detailing what can be found in another lost cache of Kafka papers, which disappeared into the revolting maw of the Nazis in 1933. This second cache of lost notebooks and letters are from what is arguably one of the happiest periods of Kafka’s life, a time in which he was in love, away from Prague, and was as close as he’d ever be to living the true writer’s life he’d always wanted. One writer from California has led the charge to retrieve these documents, and in the process has felt the overwhelming compassion of which Kafka was capable and the overwhelming terror of the fascist cloud that threated to envelope the world.
III. KATHI DIAMANT — One woman’s journey from morning show host to the preeminent chronicler of a central figure in Kafka’s life (who she may or may not be related to)
IF YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW what a Kafka pickup line would be, we actually know what one sounded like. On July 13, 1923, Kafka was recuperating at a seaside resort in northwestern Germany when he happened upon the 25-year old Dora Diamant, a Polish woman who was volunteering at the camp and preparing food in the camp’s kitchen. Kafka appeared at the door and looked at her with his big eyes as she cut up fish. “Such tender hands, and such bloody work for them to do!” he said. Who could resist a line like that? Dora was smitten with the kind Dr. Kafka, and from there began the final — and best — romance of his life.
The fact that Kafka was at one point happily in love is something that seems at odds with what is imagined about his character, and even at odds with his own history. Overall, he did seem to be a little weirded out by sex (“Sex is a disease of the instincts”; “Coitus is punishment for the happiness of being together”) and he did seem to relish the agony of romantic relationships (as rooted in genuine stress as his agony may have been). At one point he wrote that the heavy wooden furniture he and a former fiancée were buying for their apartment were like gravestones he could feel being moved over top of his grave. Reading the letters, one longs for Kafka to finally just make the decision to make happen a life where he is left alone to write.
But Kafka did not suffer from a lack of female attention, and had infatuations and lovers during any given time of his life. He was by many accounts the kind of guy that drew you in with his intelligence and sincerity, and this engendered what seemed like false modesty belying an awareness of his charm. He was engaged no less than three times, and wrote in his diary of his visits to brothels and of a waitress-lover who wrote him a cute little love poem and called him “Franzi.” His relationship with Milena Jesenská showcased Kafka at his most passionate — the letters between them talk about longing to be alone with his head on her bare breast, and are alive with the invigoration that comes from pure chemistry.
The relationship with Dora Diamant seemed to throw a wrench into the routine of past relationships, balancing an intuitive understanding of Kafka’s need to be left alone with the comfortable companionship he needed. Following their meeting in the kitchen of the resort, he and Dora and were inseparable during the last year of his life; he was happy, optimistic, and seemed to draw inspiration from their romance. He was able to finally move from his parents’ home and live for the first time with a lover, in “bohemian squalor” in Berlin, where he was enormously productive in his writing despite his scant pension and pain from tuberculosis so severe he had to be anesthetized to eat. (He would write and publish the final stories of his lifetime, including “Josephine, or the Singer of the Mouse-folk” and “The Hunger Artist,” during this time.) Dora and Kafka’s mutual regard was evident, and many people, from the attending doctors to Kafka’s friends, remarked on Dora’s unflagging dedication and care. As one of Dora’s relatives put it, “to know Dora is to know love.” Dora accompanied him to the end, and it was in her arms that Kafka died of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium in outside of Vienna in 1924.[12]
Dora, like most people who got to know Kafka, felt Kafka’s enormous presence throughout the rest of her life. She felt she knew him and his enormous capacity for compassion better than anyone, and she bristled at the notion that, as Kafka became more widely read, the Kafka she knew and understood would only become more obscured in posterity by others’ interpretations. And so she was truly crushed when the notebooks and letters she’d kept from the time they were together were stolen in a Nazi raid on her apartment, presumably never to be seen again. Dora had loved and lost early on, and her life would only get more intense from there.
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The year 1990 was a watershed year for San Diego native Kathi Diamant. A big part of her life was coming to a close — she was retiring as the Emmy-winning host of a San Diego morning talk show/news program, a gig she had held for almost a decade and that made her a popular personality around the city. Her job included interviewing celebrities, attending fancy dinners, and wearing designer clothes (even if she did have to return them after a taping), but Diamant was putting all of this behind her because it wasn’t scratching an important itch. As it would turn out, she would say goodbye to being a broadcaster only to become one of the preeminent literary detectives in all of Kafkology.
Kathi Diamant was born in 1952, the daughter of theater parents worked for the theater department of the US military. She grew up in Germany and South Korea, where she acted in plays before beginning a career in television. In 1981, she began producing and co-hosting a popular San Diego morning talk show. Known for her bright personality and engaging presence — at one point she was buried under six feet of snow for an on-air stunt — Diamant enjoyed the life of a local celebrity. When her stint on the talk show came to a close, Diamant realized she was interested in living the opposite lifestyle, alone with her thoughts and working quietly and productively on a few personal passion projects. She soon found herself picking up in earnest a project she’d pursued in fits and starts at least two decades: chronicling the life of Dora Diamant, a possibly-distant relative who seemed to be calling to her from a different time.
Back in 1972, Kathi’s college German class was translating Kafka’s Metamorphosis when her professor asked if she was related to Dora Diamant. She didn’t know much about her last name and decided to look into the connection. In doing her research, she not only learned a little about her own family history but about the life of Dora, who up to that point had little history aside from being a famous writer’s last girlfriend. Kathi found she was drawn more to Dora than she was Kafka, and felt a duty to expand what the world knew about her. The information she uncovered would manifest itself over the years as a screenplay, novel, and a play about their relationship.
Despite some interest in a movie about Kafka and Dora and a well-received play, Kathi’s Dora projects remained primarily in boxes on her shelves. Then struck her — instead of fictionalizing Dora’s life, Kathi realized should write the biography of Dora she’d always wanted to read but that didn’t yet exist. It was a fairly daunting task — significant biographical information about Dora’s life was missing and would require a good bit of international digging — but the more she thought about it, the more she knew she was being called to write Dora’s tale. Kathi began her work on the biography in earnest the same year as Reiner Stach — 1996.
As Kathi would uncover, Dora led a fascinating life. Born in Poland in 1898, she ran from an arranged marriage and worked as a teacher and seamstress in Germany, where she volunteered at the summer camp where she met Franz. Following Kafka’s death in 1924, she worked as a professional actress and then as an actress in communist agitprop theater. She fled to Russia as the Nazis took over, but then had to in turn flee Russia when her husband was exiled to Siberia. She eventually arrived in the UK, where she and her daughter Franzcisca (get it?) lived in an internment camp as enemy aliens. Later, when the War died down, Dora become a restaurateur and organizer of a Yiddish cultural society. Dora died in 1952 at age 54.
“Dora was there, she’d been ignored, and discounted and discredited, and that it was my job to make sure people paid attention,” Kathi said. “When I first put Dora’s Wikipedia page up, it was taken down twice and the reason was because she wasn’t important enough.”
Pieces seemed to fall right into place for Kathi as she moved forward with the book. A physician in Berlin introduced Kathi to Dora’s great-niece, who brought with her three photo albums full of photos of Dora that had never been seen by anyone outside the family.[13] By this point, the project felt very personal. “I started crying,” Kathi said. “I cried for three days.”
Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant was published in 2003 to acclaim by reviewers and by Kafka scholars around the world. Information that was dismissed as “anecdotal” when she first began talking about Dora and Kafka’s relationship was borne out by her extensive research. The insights the book helped to popularize kicked off a new wave of Kafka scholarship that revealed Kafka’s gentler side. While he was always known as polite, compassionate, and sincere, the book greatly expanded the understanding of this side of his life.
Her research for the book led to some surprising finds. She uncovered, of all things, Kafka’s hairbrush, which, aside from his desk and some books, is the only personal possession of his known to exist. (Diamant reported that no hair is left in the brush, and so it appears that a Kafka klone is not forthcoming. “Officially all I am saying about the whereabouts of the hairbrush is that it is in Israel,” she said. “This is in order to protect it and the family.”) And most poignantly, perhaps, Kathi assembled a group of Dora’s relatives in London in August 1999, where they placed a headstone to replace Dora’s previously unmarked grave.
“Most surprising is how [my work] has been embraced,” Kathi said. “My approach was a journalistic, Nancy Drew, “let’s solve a mystery” point of view. But when the book came out, I wasn’t eviscerated. I’m an American woman who has a bachelor’s degree in theater — I was not torn to pieces by the scholars but rather embraced. This is probably because the research I did was so solid, but also because I didn’t indulge in the usual bad behavior exhibited by some Kafkologists. There is a history of hoarding, but I share what I’ve uncovered and I returned documents I borrowed.”
The book also helped to amend Dora’s undeserved reputation and sent Kathi down further avenues of research that would take her deep into one of the world’s darkest times.
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Dora maligned in the early years of Kafka studies for fulfilling his wishes that she burn his notebooks but she had in fact held onto the vast majority of letters and notebooks from the last year of his life. (Though one of the notebooks she did burn which possibly included an unknown story about a blood-libel case in Kiev.)
Dora married Lutz Lask in 1931, the editor of a communist newspaper who came from a prominent communist family. Dora was herself a communist agitprop actress, and they were on the Nazi authorities’ radar as both subversives and Jewish. In 1933, the Kafka notebooks she had kept with her for nine years were ripped away when the Gestapo raided their apartment and took every scrap of paper they could find. Taken in the raid were 35 letters from Kafka and 20 quarto-sized notebooks, hauled off wholesale to some unknown fascist archive.
Dora initially told Max Brod she burned the lot because she was too ashamed to admit they had been confiscated, but she eventually revealed the truth. Brod could sympathize with her dilemma, as he had barely escaped the Nazis himself. Following her revelation, Brod and a cohort attempted to trace the papers through the Gestapo bureaucracy but were rebuffed by officials and warned away. The quest was attempted again in the 1950s.
“The police chief of Berlin told them that the papers were most likely in a train transport taken out of the country during the Allied bombing for safekeeping in the Eastern territories, probably in Silesia,” Kathi explained. However, the “impenetrable Iron Curtain ground the quest to a halt.” And there the search had stalled.
Kathi had of course become acquainted with the story of these lost papers over the course of researching Dora, and alongside doing research for the biography, she also became invested in tracking down the lost papers.
Kathi, alongside a bevy of international colleagues, picked up this search where it left off. She had founded the Kafka Project in 1996 as the official body to undertake this research ( “working pro bono on behalf of the Kafka estate and for the good of world literature”), and in 1998 was able to have the Project headquartered at San Diego State University, an official endorsement necessary to secure grants and other kinds of funding. (Given her expertise, Kathi also began working as an adjunct professor of Kafka studies at SDSU.)
Kathi and her colleagues sent alerts to universities, archives, and government institutions across Europe detailing precise dates of the letters, likely addresses used by both sender and addressee, and samples of Kafka’s singular handwriting. Kathi also embarked on many trips to Europe to dig through the grimly efficient records of the Nazi Reich.
The standard German archive building is quiet, austere, and antiseptic. Scholars pore over reams of old papers in a remarkable quietude befitting the gravity of the documents they’re inspecting. But her research wasn’t always this calm. At one point, she sensed something was off when she went to Israel to investigate a collection of records of more than 300 Diamant families. A year later she learned what was going on from someone who happened to work for Israel’s Ministry of Defense. It turned out Kathi was mistaken for a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and based on the mistaken identity, her hotel room was bugged and she was followed and surveilled for the duration of her stay in Israel.
Being taken for a terrorist aside, the work was simultaneously exciting and incredibly tedious, and Kathi would be at it for weeks at a time. The trips were not cheap, however, and after burning through the savings she earned as a TV presenter, she had to get creative to keep the project solvent. In 2012, she won a fellowship in which she worked with some of the topmost archivists in the world to continue her search, but one of her more successful ideas was to put together a sightseeing tour, in which literary-minded travelers could pay an all-inclusive fee to gallivant around European Capitals touring sites relevant to Kafka and Dora’s lives.
“Travelers will celebrate both Kafka’s birthday and Dora’s mission…to renew Jewish culture after WWII,” the trip’s brochure said. The tour wrapped up in Berlin, where “travelers will retrace Dora and Kafka’s love story and are invited to an exclusive Kafka Cocktail party with the world’s leading German Kafka scholars and writers and Dora’s own family members from Berlin and Israel.”
And so, however haltingly, progress was made digging through the archives in search of that specific lot of confiscated papers.
Brod’s search hit a dead end when the confiscated documents were sent to Russia for safekeeping during the War. But Kathi uncovered that sometime in the late 1970s, Russia sent piles of pilfered paperwork back to Germany, including the pile that included Kafka’s stash. The Kafka Project narrowed down the likely location of this as-of-yet uncatalogued document dump in Germany.
According to official estimates, the archives are probably in the form of six or seven floor-to-ceiling rooms’ worth of unorganized documents, and that it could be decades before the papers in these newly-uncovered archives are sorted out and catalogued. According to her sources, Germany and Poland have enormous amounts of each other’s documents and are seemingly keeping the wartime plunder hostage. Officials have been reluctant to dig into the pile because the information contained in these archives could reveal that many businesses and well-placed people in funded the Nazi war machine, and that they continue to profit from it.
“Nothing official is being done to inventory or catalogue what is still hidden from public view,” Kathi explained. However, “the positive aspect is that these documents are considered quite valuable and are [thus] carefully safeguarded!”
And that’s where the search stands now — Dora’s lost Kafka notebooks could be in an un-cataloged pile of papers waiting to be opened somewhere in Germany. At this point, Kathi feels that she’s gotten about as far as she personally can with the project. Her research has put Dora back into the Kafka canon, one of her objectives all along, and she reinvigorated the search for the invaluable manuscripts. But the finesse required to navigate German archives further requires the skills of a native German speaker and someone knowledgeable about the delicacies of research into Germany’s history, she said, and so she recently left the work of the Kafka Project in the hands of two capable German academics.
It is from Dora that Kathi felt encouraged to move on. She still dreams of Dora, she said, and can recall in tremendous detail visions in which the two met and later bid each other goodbye. A series of coincidences throughout her time studying Dora enhanced the feeling of a cosmic connection, and the dream goodbyes felt like a genuine, good-natured parting.
“I found that as long as I keep going and I do it as Kafka and Dora would have me do it, with absolute high standards, miraculous, amazing things happen,” Diamant said. “I am taken care of and I have an amazing life. I have celebrated the love that Kafka and Dora had in their lifetime, and the love they engendered has been visited upon me, and continues to be.”
Kathi was originally drawn to Dora on account of their shared names. Did she ever uncover a family tie somewhere in the past?
“I’ve never learned whether we are or aren’t [related],” Kathi said. “But it’s ceased to be the point. We are connected. I am the person I am today because of Dora.”
Kathi’s next plans are to move to Germany by 2020, and learn German well enough to read Kafka in the original language.[14]
IV. JAMES HAWES, AGENT PROVACATEUR: “Read Kafka before you waste your life!”
DESPITE THE SUBSTANTIAL RESEARCH that went into Kathi Diamant’s book and the tremendous appreciation expressed to her by the relatives of Dora Diamant, there have been some detractors to her work. The naysayers are primarily champions of the old-school perception of Kafka[15], who seem to object to the fact that Kathi’s work shows Kafka in an altogether more human light.
It’s no secret among Kafka scholars that the author was a multifaceted human being, at times drastically different from the person his writings might expect a reader to believe (and as the previously discussed scholars have shown).[16] However, the foundation of his immense status is predicated on the notion that he was in some way not of this world, a grim saint who foresaw the Holocaust, recoiled in horror at our evolving industrial society, and was filled with self-loathing. Early Kafkology holds in large part that it is this desperation that gives his works their urgency, timelessness, and genius.
But many modern scholars feel a more authentic understanding of Kafka’s work has been hindered by the obsession with his supposed otherworldliness. It is within his humor, his sexual habits, his casual behaviors and petty irritations that we find the real Kafka, not the trope of the tortured artist that has been promulgated for decades. For those looking to understand Kafka at his most authentic, it is of critical importance that the study of his life as he led it. And that’s where rogue British scholar James Hawes comes in. Where Stach exhaustively analyzes the mundane and Diamant focuses on Kafka’s love life, Hawes has taken to disabusing scholars of their antiquated notions in his own bombastic way.
In 2008, Hawes yelled into the ear of the literary world that his book Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life would upend everything we thought we knew about Kafka. The book, known more elegantly as Excavating Kafka in the UK, is an implosion of what Hawes calls the “K-Myth,” the collected misunderstandings that form the Kafka of old. Kafka was a completely regular guy, Hawes maintains, and one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that proves this point is the historical coverup of what Hawes calls “Kafka’s porn.” Kafka was apparently a man who had an active subscription to an erotic magazine, and Hawes says the images Kafka regularly took in are not the kinds of images befitting a man of such a vaunted reputation.
The incongruous term “Kafka’s porn” was widely used in marketing the book and in turn inspired a storm of controversy before it was even published, but Hawes maintains that such a radical step was necessary to wake people up. “Anything could be used to crack that frozen sea, however sensationalist it might seem, was justified,” Hawes explained, “if only it would help get back to Kafka’s writing as it really was, is, and always will be.”
Hawes is a satirical novelist and professor of at Oxford Brookes University who studied under Kafkology superhero Sir Malcolm Pasley (the guy who drove the Kafka manuscripts from Switzerland to England). Hawes found success with his crime-oriented novels A White Merc with Fins and Rancid Aluminum, proving himself a modern writer in the vein of streetwise novelists like Anthony Burgess and Irvine Welsh, and he was more recently lauded for the television adaptations of his works commissioned by the BBC and his concise, winsome histories of Germany and the conditions that led to the First World War. Hawes became obsessed with Kafka in college, and like practically anyone who reads him, Hawes became an obsessive fan intrigued by the mysterious writings.
In his “highly readable book-length essay,” Hawes starts by dissecting a few hallmark aspects of Kafka’s life and putting them into what Hawes feels is the proper context, thereby chipping away at the K-Myth. Far from leading a monk’s life, Kafka was fairly well-off, privileged, and indulged by his parents and employers. Kafka had a high opinion of himself and his writings, and his notoriously finicky nature seems to Hawes to be colored by a bit of pageantry. (“Saying that you are impure and dirty does not make you profound,” he writes.) And we should remember that one of the most famous photos of Kafka was airbrushed by a one publisher to give his eyes a more profound gleam and his lips a nobler pout, Hawes says.
We also seem to deliberately misinterpret facts from his life to fit a narrative, Hawes says, and attribute more importance to the aspects of his life that prove a scholar’s point. A fair amount of Kafka scholarship analyzes his relationship to Judaism, for example, which is indeed a worthwhile topic for exploration, as he was Jewish and did take interest in certain aspects of the faith and culture. However, it simply might not have meant as much to Kafka as some people assert. (As Kafka said, “What do I have in common with the Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself.”) In fact, how he identified himself may surprise readers. In Kafka’s daily life, he, like many others of his class and time, considered himself first and foremost a pro-Hapsburg German. He spoke German, bought German war bonds, and far from considering Germans to be a threat to his people, Hawes said, he was justifiably afraid of Russian ascension given that country’s propensity for brutal anti-Semitic violence.
Hawes also analyzes some of the themes of his oeuvre and invites readers to read them in context. Take Kafka’s obsession with bureaucracy, for example. According to Hawes, Kafka’s meditations on the subject as seen in The Trial and The Castle were not dire forecasts of fascism but rather satirical takes on the labyrinthine legal systems already in place. In The Trial, for example, protagonist K. uses a bicycle license to identify himself to his inquisitors. Any contemporaneous reader would understand the humor in this, Hawes said, because in Kafka’s day, so many hoops had to be jumped through to get even a bicycle license that it could in fact be used as a legit ID.[17]
And take the giant beetle at the center of The Metamorphosis. The symbolism certainly reflected Kafka’s feelings that he was a monstrous vermin to own family (the Samsa apartment has an almost identical floorplan to that of the Kafka family apartment), but an anthropomorphized beetle was also a well-known trope of the time the book was published, appearing in all manner of art and product design. It’s certainly artful symbolism, but it was also a common sight that Kafka would have easily picked up on.[18]
And finally, at the heart of the controversy surrounding Hawes’ book is “Kafka’s porn.” Though Hawes studied for years under Pasley (and even got to hold an original manuscript of The Castle), he says he only learned of the existence of the Kafka’s illicit magazine collection twenty years after he graduated, as Kafka’s subscription to the magazine was so shocking that scholars the world over pretended it didn’t exist or at most relegated it to a footnote or handful of buried sentences. So what is this collection of Hapsburgian filth, and will it really change how we think, feel, and read Kafka?
The illicit material in question is taken from a magazine popular among the Prague literati called Amethyst. Amethyst was published by a guy named Franz Blei, who ran in the same literary circle as Brod and Kafka and was one of the first people to publish the latter. (He published Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle” in his magazine Hyperion in 1908.) Blei launched Amethyst in 1905, which was a combination of high-brow literary writing and high-brow quasi-erotic art. Kafka and his pals subscribed to these magazines and were said to eagerly await the arrival of each issue, and Hawes insists this was because of their raucous sexual content. To be sure, the magazine did contain some erotic texts, and some of the published pieces of art certainly contain nudity and depictions of sexuality, but not in the manner one might be lead to believe, and probably not to the degree that Blei can be referred to as a “modern-day Larry Flynt.” As Hawes’ book shows, the artwork is surreal, arresting, and sometimes pretty funny. One picture, for example, is a drawing of a frog fellating a penis-shaped flower, while another has some miniature men standing on stairs underneath a sexy woman.
The book certainly made waves. Excavating Kafka was discussed in tones reserved for breaking a scandal in articles with headlines like “Kafka’s Porn Brought out of the Closet” and “Kafka, warts, porn, whores and all,” but other people were underwhelmed by the supposedly lubricious revelations. “Announcing you will be overturning an established notion is more exciting than telling readers that you are going to subtly revise one,” wrote one reviewer. Another said the “who cares?” factor was in full effect regarding the stuff in Amethyst because, after all, it really isn’t that bad. Either way, many people appreciated what Hawes was trying to do, and he did succeed in starting an international conversation not only about Kafka but about the nature of legacy itself.
But when it came to an academic assessment, he found his book roundly “rubbished” by many leading scholars, including Reiner Stach. “Open season was declared before a single copy reached German soil,” Hawes said. He does admit that the publishers induced him to play up the controversy a bit, but he was surprised at the vitriol aimed at his approach. A reviewer in Der Spiegel even declared him an anti-Semite and wrote “in the finest legalistic Deutsch” that she’d sue him.
“Imagine seeing your book rubbished by experts who you know for certain haven’t even read it — experts you yourself have repeatedly quoted,” Hawes said. “How can you possibly argue against the very scholars you have held up as reliable authorities? What a — well, yes — a kafkaesque nightmare!” But took he took the backlash from stodgy colleagues as evidence that his excoriation of the K-myth is still necessary. Once again, it’s about “cracking that frozen sea.”
But whatever you make of the revelations in the book — interesting ephemera or radical reassessment — there is a larger imperative behind deconstructing the K-myth, Hawes says, one that transcends Kafka’s fiction and is far more pressing than we realize. Asserting that only a tortured artist or ageless soothsayer like paranoid authors can recognize our deficiencies prevents us from taking the responsibility of confronting society upon ourselves. “What Kafka is obsessed with is our suicidal readiness to buy into grand narratives of redemption and absolute certainty, however ramshackle and visibly corrupt they may be,” Hawes said. “These are not tales of innocent people suddenly swallowed up by miscarriages of cosmic justice.”
In other words, Kafka’s heroes are complicit in their own entrapment, and in many cases unable to muster the reflection that could mitigate the circumstances of their own misery. We as readers and humans have this capacity and the potential to create a world that isn’t overrun by faceless authorities, labyrinthine bureaucracies, or Kafkaesque dread. The real nightmare, Kafka seems to say, is that we don’t.
CONCLUSION — Reading Kafka makes you smarter
ACCORDING TO ACADEMIC RESEARCH, reading Kafka legitimately makes you smarter. The University of British Columbia and the University of California Santa Barbara did a study in 2009 that showed that the “cognitive mechanisms overseeing implicit learning functions functioned more acutely” after readers read Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor.” In other words, the brain is more powerful after reading Kafka.
In “A Country Doctor,” a doctor makes a house call in the middle of the night. He travels on horses of mysterious provenance and ends up in bed with the patient and the patient’s gaping thigh wound. A horse pops its head through the window and shrieks horribly, and then the doctor crawls home. And these are just the highlights — clearly it is the stuff of unsettling dreams, and like unsettling dreams, the story’s perplexing imagery begs the dreamer to come up with some sort of meaning. According to researchers, this search for meaning kicks your brain into high gear.
In the study, some participants were given the text of the story and some were given a re-written version of the story that made more logical sense. After reading the story, both groups were asked to do a grammar-learning task that involved finding patterns in strings of letters and then finding and marking similar patterns in other strings.
As it turned out, those who read the story were actually more proficient in recognizing patterns than those who read the more “normal” version of the story, said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the research. As it turns out, after reading a story in which something “fundamentally does not make sense,” the brain responds by looking for some other structure in the environment. Hence, the participants strived to make sense of the string patterns.
“People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings — clearly they were motivated to find structure,” said Travis Proulx. “The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events [in the story], and they had no way to make sense of them.” They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did, he said. In other words, Kafka readers are brilliant just for reading him in the first place, and become even smarter once a story is finished.
****
But seriously though, aside from the notion that reading Kafka apparently makes you smarter, what exactly is it that makes him so compelling? What is it about his works that accounts for the unbelievable amount of scholarship? Is there something at the heart of the Kafka enigma that, if unlocked with the right key, would help the reader see the world in an entirely new light? Are people so obsessed with Kafka because that key hasn’t been discovered yet?
Well, for all of the scholars’ investigative work, the interpretation and decoding, and the attempts to think as much like Kafka as Kafka himself, the conclusions about what it all means, about why Kafka is so important, about the riddle of his works and the meaning of his visions, make for an answer that is surprisingly ambiguous, if not a little disappointing. The almost universal response to the question of why Kafka is so revered is because, to use Kathi Diamant’s words, “Kafka is a mirror.” In other words, whatever you get out of him is what it means. “Whether you’re making the case that he’s schizophrenic, homosexual, obsessed with being Jewish,” Kathi said, “Whatever anybody takes from it, you can find it. It’s like Dora says — it’s like interpreting the Bible.” There is no definitive interpretation, but there is something remarkable enough to add some kind of direction, philosophical or otherwise, to any reader’s life. There are millions of details from Kafka’s real and fictional worlds that can extend his beauty as far as one wants it to go.[19]
This is true for everyone from readers enjoying Kafka at home to Stach, a heavy-hitting intellectual who trusts explicitly in Literature. Kathi Diamant, quite taken with Kafka and Dora as a couple, reads his works knowing of Kafka’s capacity for love and the fulfilment that comes when it is found. Bibliographers Herz and Caputo-Mayr have seen so many works about Kafka that they are sure any definitive reading is impossible. “Anything goes and is still going on a fertile ground for academia let loose,” said Caputo-Mayr. Kafka, a man “made of literature,” would surely understand that the enduring beauty of any work (including maybe his own) rests the deep, deep impressions it leaves in the lifetime readers and the generations of fans who haven’t read him yet.
And this is Kafkology — a reflection of the strange, singular joy that comes from getting to know his fiction, his aphorisms, his visions — whatever you want to make of them — and even the most banal moments of his day to day life. Kafka’s works are a bizarre life force that gives infinite meaning to our own.
BONUS ADDENDUM:
KAFKA OF THE FUTURE — What do scholars think Kafka’s life and career might have looked like if he didn’t die so prematurely?
IT WOULD CERTAINLY BE INTERESTING to know what Kafka would make of his posthumous fame, and that the “tremendous world he had inside his head” was being studied with privacy-invading rigor by people from all over the world. Would he recoil at the extreme invasion of his privacy? Or would he laugh, blush at the attention, and flash the bashful smile he is known for, finally content in his abilities and unique voice?
Who would he have married? Would he have made it to Palestine and Israel as he fancifully planned? Perhaps fans could have seen Kafka as an old man walk across a stage and hear his reportedly “mellifluous baritone” for themselves when he gave his acceptance speech after winning the Nobel Prize.
At the very least, he would have loosened up a bit, been kinder to his abilities, and really tapped unhindered into the incredible current at the core of his being. His published stories are utterly unpredictable — “Blumfeld, the Elderly Bachelor” is about a man followed around his apartment by two floating balls; “Investigations of a Dog” describes the ruminations a dog has about existence — how many more fascinating worlds could readers the world over been able to explore? Or perhaps he would have continued to agonize over his “scribblings,” publishing relatively little and leaving a trail of even more uncompleted (but still beloved and wildly studied) fragments and novels behind.
It’s a world of speculations, and of course no answer is going to be complete. Here is how the scholars featured in the article above respond to the question of “What would Kafka’s life have looked like if he survived?”
Maria Luis Caputo-Mayr
“No idea. Why don’t you ask how Mozart’s or Schubert’s life would have continued had they not also died around the same age.”
Reiner Stach
From an interview in Süeddeutsche Zeitung Magazin:
What would contemporary literature look like if Kafka had not existed?
We would probably still be much closer to the realistic narrative of the nineteenth century. Kafka has ensured that the fragmentary, the paradoxical, the broken, the contradictory and mutilated find access to the literature and get there its own dignity. All of these literary forms reflect something of the twentieth-century essence, and if Kafka had not pre-excercised that for us, these forms would not be accepted as naturally by readers or by authors as we are familiar with today.Apart from that, without Kafka we might not know what enormous potential for expression and communication the basic vocabulary of the language already possesses. Even simplicity can be highly refined, as Kafka has taught us.
What would have happened to his work if Kafka had not died in 1924?
I think he would not have left his ascetic attitude to language, but he might have returned to storytelling. The reflective prose he ultimately favored was a direct result of the horror he experienced in his last years. If he had survived the tuberculosis disease, he would probably have been more interested in telling, in spitting and coloring witty, fantasy-saturated events. I think that strange reticence about telling was something that did not really suit him. This was under the pressure of having to take stock of the situation: under the pressure, in a sense, to catch the last truths in free fall.
From an interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
What would you like to ask Kafka?
It would be funny to confront him with the approximately 20,000 books written about him. I would like to know how he really thought about his friend and supporter Max Brod. The intellectual and linguistic gap between the two was blatant. If you read Brod’s private notes, you think that’s what a pubescent 14-year-old wrote, it’s bleak. But Kafka needed Brod, and he liked him too, over all those differences. The suspicion is obvious, however, that he has spared him in his diary, in the expectation that Brod will one day read anyway. So, Doctor Kafka, how was that really?
Kathi Diamant
Diamant said that she has thought often about this question, and one deeply sad but horribly plausible answer is that Kafka would have been killed in the Holocaust, just like many of his friends and family.
This depressing likelihood aside, Kathi said that one of the most perfect answers to this question came in the form of a final project submitted by one of her students, Zach Schwartz. Schwartz wrote an epistolary short story that chronicles the correspondence between Kafka and Dora and their friends back in Germany after the Kafkas move to California in 1924.
As Schwartz imagines, Dora’s fervent prayers are answered and Kafka recovers slowly but surely from his crippling tuberculosis. An unknown benefactor helps the family move to the United States, where they live the lives of Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century. The couple has kids (one named Max), Dora gives Hebrew lessons and become a costume designer in Hollywood, and Kafka’s “Josephine, or the Singer of the Mouse Folk” becomes a cinema classic. There are jokes about learning English, Kafka in the company of movie stars, and a touching discussion of Kafka’s writings about his father following his father’s death.
Far from the decidedly Kafkan fate imagined by Philip Roth (see below; “Thank God [Kafka] died before this happened,” Kathi said) Schwartz’s quite beautiful outline of Kafka’s future life feels genuinely plausible. There is a gentleness and beauty in the piece that harkens the renewed optimism Kafka felt when he was with Dora and the successes this may have engendered in his life. So taken was Kathi with Schwartz’s project that, when she was taking a screenwriting course, she found herself pondering the ethics of “borrowing” a student’s work for her own project. She didn’t end up doing this, she laughed, and takes enough pleasure in the world Schwartz imagined.
Bonus answer: Philip Roth
From the essay “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka”:
I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age) — it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known as a man, and the year of his death. His face is sharp and skeletal, a burrower’s face: pronounced cheekbones made even more conspicuous by the absence of sideburns; the ears shaped and angled on his head like angel wings; an intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure — enormous fears, enormous control; a black towel of Levantine hair pulled close around the skull the only sensuous feature; there is a familiar Jewish flare in the bridge of the nose, the nose itself is long and weighted slightly at the tip — the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school. Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters.
Of course, it is no more horrifying to think of Franz Kafka in Auschwitz than to think of anyone in Auschwitz — it is just horrifying in its own way. But he died too soon for the holocaust. Had he lived, perhaps he would have escaped with his good friend Max Brod, who found refuge in Palestine, a citizen of Israel until his death there in 1968.But Kafka escaping? It seems unlikely for one so fascinated by entrapment and careers that culminate in anguished death. Still, there is Karl Rossmann [the protagonist of Amerika], his American greenhorn. Having imagined Karl’s escape to America and his mixed luck here, could not Kafka have found a way to execute an escape for himself? The New School for Social Research in New York becoming his Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma? Or perhaps, through the influence of Thomas Mann, a position in the German department at Princeton… But then, had Kafka lived, it is not at all certain that the books of his which Mann celebrated from his refuge in New Jersey would ever have been published; eventually Kafka might either have destroyed those manuscripts that he had once bid Max Brod to dispose of at his death or, at the least, continued to keep them his secret. The Jewish refugee arriving in America in 1938 would not then have been Mann’s “religious humorist” but a frail and bookish fifty-five-year-old bachelor, formerly a lawyer for a government insurance firm in Prague, retired on a pension in Berlin at the time of Hitler’s rise to power — an author, yes, but of a few eccentric stories, mostly about animals, stories no one in America had ever heard of and only a handful in Europe had read…just a Jew lucky enough to have escaped with his life, in his possession a suitcase containing some clothes, some family photos, some Prague mementos, and the manuscripts, still unpublished and in pieces, of Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, and (stranger things happen) three more fragmented novels, no less remarkable than the bizarre masterworks that he keeps to himself out of oedipal timidity, perfectionist madness, and insatiable longings for solitude and spiritual purity…
Was it Dora Dymant or was it death that pointed the new way? Perhaps it could not have been one without the other. We know that the “illusory emptiness” at which K. gazed, upon first entering the village and looking up through the mist and the darkness to the Castle, was no more vast and incomprehensible than the idea of himself as husband and father was to the young Kafka; but now, it seems, the prospect of a Dora forever, of a wife, home, and children everlasting, is no longer the terrifying, bewildering prospect it would once have been, for now “everlasting” is undoubtedly not much more than a matter of months. Yes, the dying Kafka is determined to marry, and writes to Dora’s Orthodox father for his daughter’s hand. But the imminent death that has resolved all contradictions and uncertainties in Kafka is the very obstacle placed in his path by the young girl’s father. The request of the dying man Franz Kafka to bind to him in his invalidism the healthy young girl Dora Dymant is — denied!
If there is not one father standing in Kafka’s way, there is another — and another behind him. Dora’s father, writes Max Brod in his biography of Kafka, “set off with [Kafka’s] letter to consult the man he honored most, whose authority counted more than anything else for him, the ‘Gerer Rebbe.’The rabbi read the letter, put it to one side, and said nothing more than the single syllable, ‘No.’ ”No…Thou shalt not have, say the fathers, and Kafka agrees that he shall not…So no is no; he knew as much himself. A healthy young girl of nineteen cannot, should not, be given in matrimony to a sickly man twice her age, who spits up blood (“I sentence you,” cries Georg Bendemann’s father [in Kafka’s “The Judgement”], “to death by drowning!”) and shakes in his bed with fevers and chills. What sort of un-Kafka-like dream had Kafka been dreaming?
NOTES
[1] As biographer Reiner Stach elucidates, events, decisions, romances, and relationships fed into a mind that “escalat[ed] the act of seeing…to such a pitch of intensity that it is converted into experience.” Kafka had to be a writer as a way to comprehend and assess the events large and small that happened to him in real life. Consequently, the many agonies Kafka felt in his life take on monstrous parallels in his work, a way of channeling the frustrations caused by these impositions: Kafka didn’t like his job, and so many of his characters are suffering in some way because of bureaucracy; a fight with his family results in a story in which a protagonist is literally a repulsive insect that makes life difficult for his parents and sister.
“He believed in an autonomous spiritual world beyond the physical one. A world, however, that is completely closed to us, that we can only catch a glimpse of in literature and art,” Stach said. “That’s how I imagine it — he had privileged access to psychic processes that appear in our dream at best. This is of course a very stressful life. He was constantly flooded, inside and out, and sometimes had to write it down to get rid of particularly unpleasant fantasies. Therefore, the irritability, sensitivity to noise, insomnia, headache.”
[2] “A Common Confusion” encapsulates what the reader is in store for in only three paragraphs: A and B have business to transact but keep missing one another. At one point A twists his ankle and cannot continue his efforts to meet B, angering the latter and prompting him to walk out of A’s life forever. And that’s it. Now imagine the feeling emanating from this piece, but more grotesque. In “A Country Doctor,” a horse bursts his head through a window and starts braying in a room where a doctor has just gotten in bed with a boy with a festering leg wound. This is quintessential Kafka, alternately banal or upsetting — often both — but always compelling.
[3] “The book demonstrates how clothing functions as a semi-private code of meaning in his literary works and the extent to which the aestheticist notion of becoming the work of art haunts Kafka’s conception of writing throughout his life.”
[4] The first language Kafka was translated into was Czech, done in 1920 by a fiery journalist named Milena Jesenká, with whom Kafka had a brief romance. In 1922, “A Hunger Artist” appeared in two American German-language newspapers in New York and in Chicago, and there were Hungarian, Norwegian, and Catalan translations by 1924. The first illustrations to his works came out in 1929; the first English translations appeared in 1930. Korean translations were published 1955, Estonian versions in 1962, and in Albanian ten years later. The first collection of essays about his work was the Czech book Franz Kafka a Praha, which was published in 1947. And when the copyright for Kafka’s works lapsed in 1994, the bibliographers write that it “set off an international run on the lucrative Kafka market among publishers and translators” and inspired a new round of editions and studies.
[5] The English versions are translated by Shelley Frisch, a professional German translator, who said that “A key challenge for me was to come as close as possible to the high stylistic bar Reiner Stach had set with his superb, engrossing prose. His multifaceted voice was not the easiest to capture […] Each volume took me about one and a half years to translate, and an additional half a year to work with editors and production people. I am both thrilled and woeful that the project is over; I will miss the years I spent with Franz.”
Frisch was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Stach’s books and is currently serving on three translation juries.
[6] Kafka also seems to have defined himself by his tendentious back-and-forth agonizing about minor things; to Stach, the inability to make up one’s mind, or to overthink a situation is the hallmark of a genius. Stach takes it upon himself to go deeper into Kafka than Kafka himself, to examine the wounds real and imagined in all of their psycho-social import. As such, his biography presents fairly minor events in Kafka’s life as if they were the greatest struggles that a person could face, and sometimes feels a little overwrought. Kafka’s initial letter to the woman who would become his first fiancé requires Stach to invoke the mother-whore complex, when, in reality, the “agonies” expressed in the letter seem more like the flirtations of a guy feigning aloofness but who knows he is actually quite charming. Kafka’s refusal to take a laxative but refusal nonstop complaining about constipation (as Max Brod recalled almost ruined a day of their vacation together) and the wrenching choice of how to order pieces in an upcoming book are similarly life-or-death struggles. Stach presents these trials as if nobody on Earth has ever felt anything so deeply before, whereas if any of your friends acted similarly, you’d probably tell him to knock it off. But either way, exaggerated affectations or true neuroses, for Kafka, the struggle was real, and it’s because of this that we have incredible stories and novels that truly have no equal.
[7] Max Brod met Kafka when the latter engaged him at an argument about a speech Brod had given about Schopenhauer. The two became fast friends, and Kafka was impressed that Brod was already a published author. Brod gets a lot of flak for his hero-worshipping biography of Franz and his reportedly sub-par literary output (he was a prolific writer, publishing 83 books in his lifetime), and he has been blasted by modern scholars for an indelicate hand in arranging Kafka’s disorganized and unlabeled writings into the pieces we know today, as he possibly obscured the nuance that the much more skilled Kafka would have included. (But he did hear Kafka read his works aloud and spent years by his side, so he was probably familiar to some degree with what Kafka might have envisioned.)
But Brod is the person responsible for helping Kafka published the little that he did, and of course for publishing his works after he died. In fact, Brod was said to be a truly tireless champion for numerous known and unknown authors of the time. Kafka bibliographers Marie Luise Caputo-Mayr and Julien Herz say that Brod “single-handedly” gave the world Kafka, “despite his professional career and many other obligations…Yet as editor and administrator of Kafka’s literary estate he received very little money: it was for him a labor of love. All through his life he continued to publicize his friend’s works and inspired a growing circle of Kafka readers.”
[8] Biographer Stach said that he met Ms. Steiner, who “looked like Kafka [and] still had the old Prague accent,” and it took him “a few minutes to recover” upon meeting her.
[9] Specifically, Brod wrote that “…it should be obliged to make sure that after their death their heirs are still entitled to the material rights, but that the manuscripts, letters and other papers and documents of the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem or the public library in Tel Aviv or another public archive in Germany or abroad should be handed over for safekeeping, if Mrs. Ilse Ester Hoffe did not dispose of her otherwise during her lifetime…”
[10] According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the lawyers for the Hoffes protested the removal of the documents, saying that the state’s actions have been “unworthy of a democratic state” and are characteristic of “dark, despotic regimes.”
And the process had in no way been easy for the Hoffe sisters. According to remarkable profile full of biographical information most other articles haven’t even attempted to include, when Eva Hoffe met the article’s author, she was “swathed in layers of faded clothes (‘I have no choice, I don’t have heating at home’) and holding a plastic bag from a coffee-bar chain, out of which protruded a bag of Bamba snacks (‘I live on bread and cans of conserves’). There are also the missing teeth, which for her are definitive, defiant proof of her abject poverty: ‘I know that people look at me, but I don’t have the wherewithal to fix them, so I walk around like this, without feeling ashamed.’”
Eva Hoffe also shaved her head in protest of the courts’ decisions. “Because for me, it is mourning and I wanted to feel it in myself, to give it a sign,” she said, noting that the hairdresser initially refused her request. ‘He said he wasn’t capable of doing it, that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night afterward,’ she told the reporter. She waited there from the morning until the afternoon. After all, what are a few hours in a beauty parlor compared to the nine years of the trial that, she says, ‘stole my life’?”
“‘The trial destroyed me, nothing remains. I’m living, but only ‘as if,’ she said. “‘I was made out to be a liar, a millionaire, greedy, abnormal, useless…I lived a quiet life, and then I was attacked by horrible pincers. It’s been nine years, and I still can’t believe [it happened].’” It was ‘unequivocally untrue’ that there was a financial motivation to holding onto the papers. “You tell me: How is it possible to say about an 82-year-old single woman with no children or grandchildren that all she wants is to get rich? What for? To buy a luxury garden apartment and live there for two days? That’s how the mind of you people works, not mine.”
Ruth Wiesler, the older of the Hoffe sisters, died at the age of 80 in 2012. Her daughter believes that the trial brought on her death. “A woman who was healthy all her life suddenly gets cancer and dies — she was absolutely annihilated from it,” she said.
[11] Stach now gives lectures on Kafka to high schools and universities, but has done about all he can, biographically speaking, and is considering writing about a much broader topic: a portrait of Prague at the turn of last century. But Kafka is an inexorable part of his life, and Stach continues to run the most trafficked Kafka website on the web — franzkafka.de — which gets between 900–1100 unique views per day.
[12] JP Hodin’s 1948 article “Memories of Franz Kafka” features an extensive interview with Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last love, who offered some incredible reflections on Kafka’s bearing. This article and a few others that capture the impressions of people who actually knew Kafka, allowing readers the opportunity to sense what it would be like to observe Kafka if were sitting across from you, or if you saw him walking down the street.
As Diamant recalls, Kafka “was tall and slim and dark skinned and had a loping walk that at first made me believe he must be a half-breed Indian and not a European. He swayed a little, but held himself straight. Only he carried his head a little on one side. That was typical of him. It expressed a relationship-symptom. Kafka had the bearing of the lonely man who is always in relation to something outside himself…
“He attached great importance to being carefully dressed. He would have regarded it as a lack of courtesy to go somewhere without having his tie perfectly knotted. His suits were made by a first-class tailor and he always took a long time about dressing. It was not vanity. He looked into the mirror without complacency, quite critical and judicial. It was done in order not to offend the world…
“The essential characteristics of his face were the very open, sometimes even wide-open eyes, whether he was talking or listening. They were not staring in horror, as it had been said of him; it was rather more an expression of astonishment. His eyes were brown and shy. When he spoke, they lit up; there was humor in them; but it was not so much irony as mischievousness — as if he knew of something that other people didn’t know. But he was entirely without solemnity. Generally he had a very lively way of talking, and he liked talking. His conversational style was full of imagery, like his writing. Sometimes one got the impression of a craftsmanlike satisfaction, when he succeeded in expressing well what he wanted to say. His wrists were very slender, and he had long, ethereal fingers, speaking fingers which took on shape while he was telling a story and accompanied what he said much more than the hands did. Later on we very often amused ourselves making shadows on the wall with our hands. He was extremely clever at it. Kafka was always cheerful. He liked to play; he was the born playmate, always ready for some mischief. I don’t think that depressions were a dominant characteristic of his, except before he began to write…
“He liked to go shopping ; he liked simple-people. His appearance with the shopping-basket or the milk-can was a familiar sight in our neighborhood. In the mornings he often went for a walk alone. His day was strictly planned, all with a view to his writing. On his walks he always took a note-book with him, or if he forgot it, he would buy one on the way. He loved Nature, although I never heard him say the word…
“Among the things of which he was particularly fond was his pocket-watch. When we got into trouble with our landlady about the electric light-for he often wrote all through the nights — I bought a paraffin lamp. He loved its soft, living light and always wanted to fill it up himself; he would play about with the wick and continually found new virtues in it. He did not take a kindly view of the telephone and was distressed when it rang. I always had to answer it. I think he did not feel quite comfortable about machines and mechanical things. He was very fond of my calendar, which had a proverb for every day. Later we had one each and on special occasions Kafka used to ‘consult the calendar.’ Once, when I was washing grapes — he was fond of eating grapes and pineapples — I broke the glass. Immediately he appeared in the kitchen, holding the calendar in his hand, and said, wide-eyed: ‘One moment can ruin everything.’ Then he handed me the page. The truth sounded so trivial. He smiled.”
[13] She registered the photos she used in her book with the Library of Congress, so that the family will benefit financially if anyone wants to use them for future projects.
[14] But as Dora Diamant said, German was too modern for Kafka — he needs an older language to get across what’s at the soul of his works, If not more than one language. In ruminating about Kafka, Dora herself wrote in in English, Hebrew, German, and Polish.
[15] Diamant imagines that’s why many are so tetchy about making the more human sides of him more widely known: any challenge to that enshrined sententiousness is an attempt to sweep the legs out from under entire careers’ worth of work.
Kathi recalled her conversation with one academic who conceded that Kafka might have been able to physically laugh, but the laughter certainly wasn’t full of mirth. “He didn’t laugh like ‘hahaha,’” Diamant was told. “He laughed with tears in his eyes.” The animus was especially strong from Czech Kafkologist Josef Čermák, who Kathi said will only refer to her as “That Woman.” He was so incensed by her research and the resulting conclusions that he convinced a Czech publisher not to publish a Czech translation of her book by threatening to torpedo it with a bad review. “If my name was Diamant, I could have written the book too,” Cermak told her snidely. “Oh well,” Kathi said. “He’s ninety now. May he have a long life!”
[16] At one point Kafka was so moved by the plight of a little girl who lost her doll that he wrote her letters once a week from the doll’s perspective, telling the girl not to worry because the doll was off having a grand adventure.
[17] Moreover, propensity for exaggeration seemed to be a trait of his city. “Everything fantastic always had great appeal for the people of Prague,” the contemporary wrote. “If someone cannot get any coal, it becomes a tragic experience.” As novelist and essayist Zadie Smith points out, Kafka upheld this tradition: “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” he wrote to a friend. The prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague, Kafka wrote, is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.” Taking some every single one of Kafka’s utterances at face value is like ascribing deep psychological meaning to using “I’m going to kill myself!” as an ironic way to respond to a minor setback.
[18] The humor in Kafka’s works has often gone overlooked as well. Brod famously described Kafka giving readings and laughing so hard at the absurdity of the situations that he had tears in his eyes. Recall that Kafka was a fan of slapstick and highly expressive Yiddish theater. Taking this into consideration as you re-read his works, the slapstick elements in his work are much more obvious, having previously been masked by the assumption that Kafka could only be deadly serious. Maybe Kafka, a personable and charming guy, sometimes just wanted to be funny. (Seriously, read the scenes with the boarders staying at the Samsa apartment in The Metamorphosis — hilarious!)
As one writer reminds us, “Kafka was fascinated by parables, a genre not usually suspected of comedy. But the parable, in fact, is often religion’s outlet for humor, and Kafka not only wrote funny parables but was funny on the subject itself, as when a character complains that parables are no use in daily life. Kafka has a second character cleverly argue that if one obeyed a parable, one would, in effect, become a parable, thus solving all of one’s everyday problems: ‘’I bet that’s also a parable,’’ the grumbler says.
‘’You have won,’’ his friend says. ‘’But,’’ the second man laments, ‘’only in parable.’’
[19] This article hasn’t even touched on translating Kafka, which is an incredibly complicated and contentious issue in its own right with its own camps and their defenders, nor has it even come close to transmitting the sheer nuance of the studies into different aspects of his life.
