The Private Franz Kafka

The Private Franz Kafka

Revealing new editions of Franz Kafka’s drawings, diaries and short reflections.

A photograph of Franz Kafka on his grave in the Prague Jewish Cemetery.PHOTO: CUM OKOLO/ALAMY

 

 

 

By Max Norman

Wall Street Journal, Feb. 17, 2023

 

 

 

Before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1924, a month shy of his 41st birthday, Franz Kafka made clear to his best friend and literary executor, Max Brod, that he wanted all of his unpublished writing—“diaries, manuscripts, letters (from others and my own), sketches, and so forth”—to be “burned completely and unread.”

 

Brod (1884-1968) famously and fortunately ignored his friend’s directive; he grew old editing Kafka’s Nachlass, his unpublished legacy, and promoting his Nachleben, his literary afterlife. The works Kafka published during his lifetime, among which number the most famous stories (“The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony” and others), amount to about 350 pages in the standard German edition. His unpublished tales (like “The Hunger Artist” and “The Burrow”), literary fragments, unfinished novels (“The Trial,” “The Castle” and “The Missing Person,” which Brod retitled “Amerika”) and above all his teeming diaries, kept from 1909 to 1923, extend to some 3,400 pages. In addition, some 1,500 letters survive. Brod shepherded almost everything into print. But he did it his way.

 

 

In one notable case, Brod refused to publish. Though he’d collected many drawings Kafka made as a student between 1901 and 1906 (as the writer clearly remembered in his will), they only became accessible in 2019, after the State of Israel, whose national library houses many of Kafka’s papers, won a suit against Brod’s heirs. “Franz Kafka: The Drawings” brings together this “last great unknown trove of Kafka’s works,” as the editor, Andreas Kilcher, calls them. And while the sketches and doodles—some of which resemble Paul Klee, others George Grosz—don’t fundamentally change how we read Kafka, they remind us that he was serious about the visual as well as the verbal, and “they reiterate, in a different register, some of [his writing’s] most fundamental concerns,” as Judith Butler argues in an engaging contribution to Mr. Kilcher’s volume. His figures are grotesques, sometimes comical, sometimes cruel, their bodies, often drawn in dark black ink, like Rorschach blots come to life; in his letters and diaries, drawings come when words aren’t sufficient to capture the impression of something Kafka sees or feels.

 

 

 

Perhaps their messiness, straight from the id, didn’t align with the Kafka that Brod sought to construct—one whose central work was the theological aphorisms he wrote in 1917-18 while on medical leave in the Bohemian village of Zürau, which Brod published in 1931 as “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way.” These pensées on “the indestructible” within all of us, and on cosmic justice (“It is only our concept of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by that name; it is actually a court martial”), have recently been republished in “The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka,” a bilingual edition with taut translations by Shelley Frisch. They are accompanied here by indispensable commentary by Reiner Stach, whose heroic three-volume biography of Kafka, published in Germany between 2002 and 2014, was a landmark in the ongoing effort to dismantle Brod’s vision of Kafka.

 

Brod’s editions “promoted a certain pious myth of Kafka that Brod also fostered in his interpretive works and memoirs: that of the saintly, prophetic genius, whose purity places him at an elevated remove from the world,” writes Ross Benjamin in his new translation of Kafka’s ”Diaries”: “Kafka’s worldwide reception was shaped by a misrepresentation of what he had actually written.” Brod’s edition of the diaries—which formed the basis for the standard English translations, published in 1948-49—unkinked muddled sentences, regularized punctuation and orthography (e.g., “Newyorck”) and cut out stray references to the brothels that Kafka occasionally visited. Brod put the entries into chronological order, a challenge since Kafka jumped between the 12 diaries he left behind. He also snipped a few unflattering details about himself.

 

 

Brod’s edition reads something like a finished work, Mr. Benjamin’s—based on the unexpurgated 1990 German critical text edited by Hans-Gerd Koch—like, well, a diary. In a departure from the elevated tone of Kafka’s previous English translators (most notably the Scottish couple Willa and Edwin Muir), Mr. Benjamin’s English sticks closer to the texture of the German original, much less polished than the crystalline prose of his published works, in an effort to “catch Kafka in the act of writing.” As might be expected of a critical edition mainly intended for a scholarly audience, it’s harder to read, and stylistically not quite placeable (there are many instances where the translation could have been relaxed even further). But, in prioritizing transparency above all, Mr. Benjamin’s translation doesn’t just supplant the previous edition—it inaugurates a new phase of Kafka’s afterlife in English.

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The firmness of Kafka’s prose comes not just from its ruthlessly meticulous and arbitrary logic, but also from embodied physical detail, and in the diaries Kafka is constantly living in and against his “body pulled out of a junk room.” “My ear felt fresh rough cool juicy to the touch like a leaf,” Kafka writes early on, reaching for, or through, adjectives, as he often does in these pages. (Compare this rock-skip of a sentence to the formality of the earlier translation: “The auricle of my ear felt fresh, rough, cool, succulent as a leaf, to the touch.”) For all his notes on reading—Dickens, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, the Bible—there are an equal number on headaches, stomach aches and constipation. Once, when his insides feel good, he fantasizes about gorging himself: “I shove the long rinds of rib meat unbitten into my mouth and then pull them out again from behind tearing through my stomach and intestines.” Physical and literary sensation blend together, too. Writing, Kafka often notes, gives him strength, and once he reads a novel out loud with “the same attentive pleasure with which I would run a piece of string over my tongue.”

 

The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world: “Her hair was in an already forgotten way beautiful,” he writes of a woman he sees in Wenceslas Square. Of the bottom of the sleeve of a young girl’s dress: “How rarely I achieve something beautiful and this unnoticed button and its unknowing dressmaker achieve it.” And for all the beauty he sees, there’s plenty of humor, too, particularly when his perceptive gaze X-rays the artifice of fakers. “Face serious in an almost strained way,” he writes of a pompous lecturer, “now resembling an old lady, now Napoleon.”

 

Kafka loved attending the theater, that laboratory of human experience, and the diary is filled not just with gossip about actresses and miniature reviews of the shows he saw almost daily, but also with dialogues working their way toward scenes, language that aspires to the liveness of performance. “Necessity of speaking about dancers with exclamation points,” he remarks. “Because in that way one imitates their movement, because one remains in the rhythm and then doesn’t disturb the thinking in its enjoyment, because then the activity always remains at the end of the sentence has a more lasting effect.”

 

Though there’s plenty of mundanity (from Saturday, June 19, 1910: “slept, woke up, slept, woke up, miserable life”) and it’s clear that Kafka lives in a version of Gregor Samsa’s suffocating world of timetables and meddling parents, everything in the diary orbits around Kafka’s work. Dream narratives (“I dreamed today of a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements . . .”) flow into fragments of stories. Kafka tries out ideas over and over, playing with a phrase or a paragraph until it works, kneading an idea on the page. Tantalizingly, he alludes to a “Study on the court jester” that one wishes he had written. In the diary’s most electrifying moment, we read along as Kafka writes “The Judgment” one blazing night in September 1912 (an entry Brod had excised) as if transcribing from a secret source: “Only in this way can writing be done, only with such cohesion, with such complete opening of the body and the soul.” The psychological implications of a story about a father denying his son’s grip on reality were immediately clear to the son of a dominating father (“thoughts of Freud naturally”), and he speaks of the tale itself as a kind of monster he created. “The story came out of me like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime and only I have the hand that can penetrate to the body and has the desire to do so.”

 

The diaries provide a “glimpse into Kafka’s workshop,” as Mr. Benjamin writes. But they also reveal a young man trying to understand his powers, and to balance the competing urges to be possessed by his work and to be possessed by another. There are flickers of same-sex desire (“2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them,” Kafka writes in one of the four brief travel diaries new to this edition), though mostly Kafka dwells on his endlessly frustrating relationship with Felice Bauer, his long-term love interest, who lived in Berlin and was as ambivalent about Kafka as he was obsessed with her. Maybe distance—over a five-year period, in which they were twice engaged and twice separated, the longest they ever spent together was just 10 days in Marienbad—was for him part of the appeal. They exchanged hundreds of letters (some copied into the diaries; the rest have also been published by Schocken), in which writing could substitute for closeness, and Kafka could feel and fantasize without compromising his solitude. “What I have achieved is only a result of being alone,” he writes in July 1913, trying to decide whether he should propose to Felice for the first time. “The fear of the connection, of flowing across. Then I’ll never be alone again.” He described the meeting in which they dissolved their engagement, tellingly, as “the tribunal.”

Cynthia Ozick once wrote that “in the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan ‘K’ attaches not to Keats but to Kant.” But, with the help of Mr. Benjamin’s translation, Kafka in English is shifting away from the abstract and back toward the real.

 

 

Mr. Norman is a freelance writer.