We have been lied to about Kafka. Our received image is that of a morose manic depressive, a gloomy and sickly bundle of nerves hacking away at his craft in isolation, like some Lana del Rey avant la lettre. But as shown by his diaries, published afresh by Penguin on the 100th anniversary of his death, nothing could be further from the truth. We have Franz Kafka’s best friend and spin doctor Max Brod to blame for this hackneyed distortion.
To be fair to Brod, there would be no Kafka without him. As Kafka’s literary executor, Brod did posterity a favour by refusing to consign his friend’s diaries to flames, as was instructed of him. Fifteen years later, in 1939, he did another good turn, ferrying the files to Palestine along with him when Prague fell to the Nazis. By then, however, Brod had already committed his original sin of apotheosising his mate in Kafka: Eine Biographie, which came out in 1937. There, Kafka appeared less the sex fiend that he was in reality, and more the tortured saint that he later became in the public imagination.
Brod set the tone. After the war, he ran his blue pencil through Kafka’s diaries, which appeared in two volumes in English in 1948-9, the second translated by the humourless Hannah Arendt. It was on the strength of Brod’s bowdlerisation that the contemporary TLS reviewer was able to conclude that Kafka’s diary was “one of the saddest books ever written”. Brod himself artfully leaned into the theme. Kafka’s diaries, he wrote in 1955, “resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that registers only the lows, the hours of greatest depression, but not the highs”.
This was, to say the least, utterly disingenuous. If there were no highs in his edition, it was because he had expunged all of them. He had his reasons, of course. In canonising Kafka as a writer with serious pretensions, he was seeing to it that his own star rose. There was perhaps a touch of pudeur, too, in his calculus. Brod may not have wanted kith and kin to find out about their nocturnal escapades to brothels together. Not for nothing did Kafka’s father think Brod was a meshuggener ritoch — a crazy hothead.
Ross Benjamin, by contrast, has no axe to grind. In translating a German edition brought out by the S. Fischer Verlag, he has now restored the diaries to their original form. What we have here is a record of Kafka’s life in all its messy glory. Benjamin has essentially given us a facsimile: 700 dense pages of mid-sentence pauses and spelling mistakes, anachronisms and repetitions, doodles and drafts.
This is, above all, the portrait of a sex-mad dandy. “Wrote nothing,” reads more than one diary entry. “Nothing, nothing,” reads another. As a writer, I can attest to the inverse relationship between living and writing. What was he doing? Those laconic entries tell us that the man who wrote little knew how to live a little. A trip to Paris finds him and Brod living it up during the last gasps of the belle époque: “how easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” Back in Prague, we find Kafka among his friends, all of them cackling heartily as he read aloud drafts of his stories. The Kafka of these diaries is a bon vivant, a man who enjoyed his puerile jokes and Quaker oats, a theatre aficionado who hit it off with a Yiddish theatre troupe, the kind his father — an assimilated German-speaking Jew — disapproved of.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe