The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Kafka uncensored: anguish, sex and swimming trunks
A frank new translation of the novelist’s intimate notebooks lets English readers inside his mind like never before. Its editor introduces some of the highlights
Between 1909 and 1923, Franz Kafka kept what he called his Tagebücher, or “diaries”. At first glance, much of their content is strikingly unrecognisable as diary entries – often undated, penned deep into the night in dense handwriting, with crossings-out, corrections and insertions, now and then accompanied by drawings.
Across these 12 notebooks and two bundles of loose paper, the German-speaking Jewish Prague native interspersed many different kinds of writing: not just records of daily events, reflections and observations, but also drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, outbursts of anguish and bouts of self-torment, enigmatic aphorisms, and all-butfinished stories.
It’s often difficult to discern whether Kafka is registering a private experience, crafting fiction, or transforming one into the other. Yet, what emerges is an unprecedentedly rich picture of the writer wrestling his literary vision into being – a picture that, until now, has been obscured for anglophone readers.
The sole previous version of Kafka’s Tagebücher in English, first published in the late 1940s, is based on the outdated, bowdlerised German edition prepared by Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, Max Brod, decades after the diarist’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. Brod applied a heavy editorial hand. Occasionally concerned with his own reputation, cutting unflattering lines about himself, he also excised texts that could be considered literary works, and censored, camouflaged or sanitised passages of a sexual nature, such as those referring to visits to prostitutes. In particular, he removed anything with a tinge of homoeroticism.
My new translation – from which the below extract is taken – is the first to give English-speaking readers access to the complete text, based on the German critical edition published in 1990 and edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, which restored all that Brod had omitted and altered. From Kafka’s description of a fellow train passenger, for example, Brod deleted the line “His apparently sizable member makes a large bulge in his pants.” An entry written during Kafka’s stay, in July 1912, at a nudist sanatorium that in my translation reads “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them” was condensed by Brod to “two handsome Swedish boys with long legs”.
At the sanatorium Kafka stood out among the naked men in keeping on his swimming trunks (“I’m known as the man with the swimming trunks”) but finally allowed a new acquaintance to sketch him fully unclothed, as he recorded in his notebook: “Served as a model for Dr. Schiller. Without swimming trunks. Exhibitionistic experience.” Brod’s version reads only: “Posed for Dr. Sch.”
Brod also covered up occasional lapses in Kafka’s generally positive and open-minded attitudes toward Eastern European Jews – lapses that the diarist himself was quick to register in his own self-examination.
For instance, in a line expunged by Brod, Kafka records the following moment from an evening at the theatre with Yitzchak Löwy, a Warsaw-born Yiddish he had befriended: “Moreover, L confessed his gonorrhea to me; then my hair touched his when I leaned toward his head, I grew frightened due to at least the possibility of lice.” Here Kafka confronts his own Western European Jewish anxiety about the hygiene of his Eastern European Jewish companion.
Brod’s unwillingness to publish such lines in his edition of the diaries runs directly counter to Kafka’s recognition that whatever highmindedness he elsewhere exhibited (for example, when he expressed indignation at his father’s contemptuous comments about Löwy) did not necessarily exempt him from reflexive, even visceral prejudices. His edition thus does a disservice to the writer’s inclination to probe these very corners of himself.
Brod’s skewed adaptations of Kafka’s unpublished writings above all promoted a myth of Kafka as a literary saint, whose purity placed him at an elevated remove from the world. In my new translation of his unexpurgated diaries, I hope to reveal Kafka in all his complexity, as a less exalted, more embodied and multifaceted figure.
Franz Kafka: Diaries, tr Ross Benjamin (Penguin Classics, £24) will be published on Thursday
[From First Notebook]
In my external appearance I’m a person like others… and even if I’m rather short and somewhat fat, I’m still appealing to many people, even girls. About that there’s nothing to say. Just recently one of them said something very reasonable “Oh, if only I could see you naked one day then you must be especially pretty and kissable” she said.
But if I were missing my upper lip here, an ear there, a rib here, a finger there, if I had hairless spots on my head and pockmarks on my face, it still wouldn’t be an adequate counterpart to my inner imperfection.
[March 29 1911]
My visit to Dr. Steiner.
A woman is already waiting […] but implores me to go in before her. We wait. The secretary comes and holds out hope to us. Glancing down a corridor, I see him. A moment later he comes toward us with arms half spread. The woman declares that I was here first. Now I walk behind him as he leads me into his room.
His black frock coat, which on lecture evenings appears polished, (not polished, but only shiny due to its pure black) is now in the light of day (3 o’clock in the afternoon) dusty and even stained especially on the back and shoulders. In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by looking for a ridiculous place for my hat […] Only you can’t look around, because he keeps trying to hold you with his gaze. But whenever he doesn’t do so, you have to watch out for the return of the gaze.
He begins with a few loose sentences: So you’re Dr. Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long?
But I press forward with my prepared speech: I feel a large part of my being striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the utmost fear of it. I’m afraid, namely, that it will bring about a new confusion, which would be very bad for me since my present unhappiness itself consists of nothing but confusion.
This confusion lies in the following: My happiness, my abilities and any possibility of being in some way useful have always resided in the literary realm. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) […] in which I dwelled completely in every idea, but also filled every idea and in which I felt myself not only at my own limits, but at the
He admires two ‘boys with long legs… one could really only run one’s tongue along’
limits of the human in general.
[Yet…] I cannot now devote myself fully to this literary realm, as would be necessary, and indeed for various reasons. Leaving aside my family circumstances, I couldn’t live off literature if for no other reason than the slow emergence of my works and their special character; moreover, my health and my character also hinder me from devoting myself to what is in the most favorable case an uncertain life.
I have therefore become an official in a social insurance institute.
Now these two professions could never tolerate each other and permit a shared happiness. The least happiness in one becomes a great unhappiness in the other. If I have written something good one evening, I am aflame the next day in the office and can accomplish nothing. This back-and-forth keeps getting worse. In the office I outwardly live up to my duties, but not my inner duties and every unfulfilled inner duty turns into an unhappiness that never leaves me.
[…] He listened very attentively, without appearing to observe me at all, completely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strong concentration. At first a quiet head cold bothered him, his nose was running, he kept working the handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger at each nostril
[The entry cuts off abruptly.]
[October 2 1911]
Sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep easily, but after an hour I wake up as if I had laid my head in a false hole. I’m completely awake, have the feeling of having slept not at all or only under a thin skin, have the work of falling asleep ahead of me anew and feel rejected by sleep. And the rest of the night until toward 5 it goes on in such a way
that I do sleep but at the same time intense dreams keep me awake. I am practically sleeping next to myself, while I myself must grapple with dreams. Toward 5 the last trace of sleep is used up, I only dream, which is a greater strain than being awake. In short I spend the whole night in the state in which a healthy person finds himself for a little while before actually falling asleep. When I wake up all the dreams are gathered around me but I take care not to think them through. Toward morning I sigh into the pillow, because for this night all hope is gone. I think of those nights at the end of which I was raised out of deep sleep and awoke as if I had been confined in a nut.
[October 16 1911]
In the train carriage: Tip of the old woman’s nose with almost-stillyouthfully taut skin. Does youth thus end at the tip of the nose and does death begin there?
[October 24 1911]
Yesterday it occurred to me that I have not always loved my mother as much as she deserved and as I could only because the German language hindered me from doing so. The Jewish mother is no “Mutter”[.]
[October 30 1911]
This longing I almost always have, once I feel my stomach is healthy, to heap up in myself fantasies of taking terrible risks with food. I satisfy this longing especially in front of smokehouses. If I see a sausage labeled as an old hard Hauswurst, I bite into it in my imagination with all my teeth and swallow quickly, regularly and heedlessly like a machine. The despair that this act even in the imagination has as an immediate result increases my haste. 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. I eat dirty grocery stores completely empty. Fill myself with herrings, pickles and all the bad old sharp foods. Candies are poured into me like hail from their tin pots.
[November 2 1911]
This morning for the first time in a long while the pleasure again in imagining a knife twisted in my heart.
[November 5 1911]
I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead. I’m sitting in my room in the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment. I hear all the doors banging, their noise spares me only the footsteps of those running between them, I hear even the slam of the oven door in the kitchen. My father bursts through the doors of my room and passes through in his dragging dressing gown, the ashes are being scraped out of the stove in the next room, Valli [the second oldest of Kafka’s three sisters, Valerie] asks shouting into the indefinite through the hall as if through a Paris street whether Father’s hat has been cleaned yet, a hiss that wants to be my friend raises the cry of an answering voice. The apartment door is unlatched and makes a noise as if from a catarrhal throat, then continues to open with the brief singing of a woman’s voice and closes with a dull manly jerk that sounds the most inconsiderate of all. My father is gone, now begins the gentler more scattered more hopeless noise, led by the voices of the two canaries. I thought of it before, but with the canaries it occurs to me anew, whether I shouldn’t open the door a little crack, crawl like a snake into the next room and thus on the floor ask my sisters and their governess for quiet.
[May 23 1912]
This evening out of boredom washed my hands three times in succession in the bathroom.
[September 23 1912]
[This passage appears immediately following the text of Kafka’s short story The Judgment]:
This story “The Judgment” I wrote at one stretch on the night of the 22 to the 23 from 10 o’clock in the evening until six o’clock in the morning. My legs had grown so stiff from sitting that I could hardly pull them out from under the desk. The terrible strain and joy, how the story unfolded itself before me how I moved forward in an expanse of
water. Several times last night I bore my weight on my back. How everything can be risked, how for all, for the strangest ideas a great fire is prepared, in which they die away and rise again. How it turned blue outside the window. A carriage passed. Two men walked across the bridge. At two o’clock I looked for the last time at the clock. As the maid walked through the hall for the first time, I wrote down the last sentence. Putting out the lamp and daylight. The slight heart pains. The tiredness passing away in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters’ room. Reading aloud. Beforehand stretching in front of the maid and saying: “I’ve been writing until now.” The appearance of the untouched bed, as if it had just been carried in. The confirmed conviction that with my novel writing I am in disgraceful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such cohesion, with such complete opening of the body and the soul.
[June 21 1913]
The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times better to be torn to pieces than to retain or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here, after all, that’s completely clear to me.
[July 3 1913]
When I say something it immediately and definitively loses its importance, when I write it down it always loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.
[July 21 1913]
Compilation of all the arguments for and against my marriage [Kafka would become engaged to Felice Bauer on May 31 1914; the engagement was subsequently broken off ]:
1) Inability to endure life alone, not inability to live, on the contrary, it’s even improbable that I know how to live with someone, but the onslaught of my own life, the demands I make on myself, the attack of time and age, the vague surge of the desire to write, the sleeplessness, the nearness of insanity – all this I’m unable to endure alone. Perhaps, I naturally add. The connection with F[elice]. will give my existence more power of resistance.
2. Everything immediately gives me pause. Every joke in the comic paper, the memory of Flaubert and Grillparzer [two of Kafka’s favourite authors, neither of whom ever married], the sight of the nightshirts on my parents’ beds, which have been prepared for the night, Max [Brod]’s marriage. Yesterday my sister said: “All the married people (of our acquaintance) are happy, I don’t understand it” this statement too gave me pause, I became afraid again.
3 I must be alone a great deal. What I have achieved is only a result of being alone.
4 I hate everything that doesn’t relate to literature, it bores me to carry on conversations (even if they relate to literature) it bores me to pay visits, sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversations take from everything I think the importance, the seriousness, the truth.
5 The fear of the connection, of flowing across. Then I’ll never be alone again.
6 In front of my sisters, especially in the past it was so, I have often been a completely different person than in front of other people. Fearless, exposed, powerful, surprising, moved as otherwise only while writing. If through my wife’s mediation I could be like that in front of everyone! But then wouldn’t it be at the expense of the writing? Anything but that, anything but that!
7. Alone I could perhaps one day really give up my job. Married it will never be possible.
[November 19 1913]
I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores. Passing them entices me, that remote but nonetheless existing possibility of going with one. Is that vulgarity? But I know no better and carrying this out seems to me basically innocent and causes me almost no remorse. I want only the fat older ones, with outmoded clothes made, however, to some extent luxurious by various adornments.
[October 16 1921]
If I have the great wish to be a track and field athlete, it is probably the same as if I wished to go to heaven and to be permitted to be as despairing there as here.
[April 10 1922]
As a boy I was (and would have remained so for a very long time if I had not been forcibly pushed into sexual things) as innocent and uninterested with regard to sexual matters as I am today with regard to, say, the theory of relativity. Only trifles (but those too only after precise instruction) struck me, such as the fact that the very women who on the street seemed to me the most beautiful and the most beautifully dressed were supposed to be bad.
© Ross Benjamin 2024