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Aafter his death on June 3, 1924, a letter addressed to Max Brod was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague. “Dear Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind…such as diaries, manuscripts, letters (mine and others), sketches, and so on, be burned unread.”
His friend did not respect Kafka’s wishes. “Brod was unwaveringly convinced of their immeasurable value to modern and future humanity, and he was right,” says Ross Benjaminwhose new translation of the Czech writer’s diaries comes out in this centenary year of Kafka’s death.
Two months after Kafka’s death, Brod signed an agreement to publish his friend’s novels. The Trial appeared in April 1925, The Castle in 1926, and America in 1927. The title of the latter was Brod’s, not Kafka’s: in a 1915 diary, Kafka called the novel Der Verschollene (The Vanished Man).
Brod later edited an edition of Kafka’s diaries that for the better part of a century formed the basis of German editions and the English translation that appeared in 1949, overseen by Hannah Arendt. Brod removes passages with homoerotic undertones, blue pencils through passages about visits to brothels, cuts unkind descriptions of Kafka’s fiancee, and removes insults to the still living, not least Brod himself.
“The world’s reception of Kafka has been shaped by a misrepresentation of what he actually wrote,” Benjamin writes in his translator’s preface.
Instead, he reveals Kafka, warts and all—as a sexual, troubled, sometimes self-loathing, literary experimenter—and a man who is knowingly compromised more than Brod saw fit for his readers to meet.
Here are some of the fresh details that may add to our understanding of the author of the Metamorphosis.
To engage in nudism
During his stay at a nudist sanatorium, Kafka notes that he stands out among the naked men by being in his swimming trunks. “I’m known as the man in the swimming trunks.” Finally he gave up even these to be sketched, writing an entry that Brod cut out: “Served as a model for Dr. Schiller. No swimsuit. An exhibitionist experience.” Such modesty, Benjamin suggests, might be due to shyness or circumcision, but not to the point made in Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick that he has a small penis. Benjamin says, “He writes a lot about his body and his discomfort with his body (abnormally tall for the time period, not an ounce of fat, etc.), but not about his penis.”
Homoerotic observations
In the same nudist sanatorium, Kafka describes “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, so shapely and taut that one can really only run one’s tongue over them.” Brod rendered the passage thus: “Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs.” And then there is this, Kafka’s description of a passenger on the train, which Brod saw fit to delete: “Apparently his big cock makes a big bulge in his pants [ie trousers].” For all that, it’s not yet time to dust off those headlines. Uncensored diaries reveal gay Kafka, advises Benjamin: “Perhaps the most that such passages tell us is that Kafka was capable of admiring and – at least imaginatively – to desire male bodies.”
Public conversations
During one visit, Kafka noticed a girl at the door “whose frown is Spanish, whose placement of hands on hips is Spanish, and who stretches out in a corsage-like dress of prophylactic silk. Thick hair descends from the navel to the private parts.”
In a later entry, Kafka is among those gathered at Prague’s Altneu Synagogue on Yom Kippur evening when he notices the family of the brothel owner he visited a few days earlier. Brod’s editing of this entry—the loss of the brothel’s name—distorts Kafka’s meaning. “When Kafka unflinchingly engages with the impurity and false piety he finds in the synagogue,” says Benjamin, “the retouched text depicts Kafka judging his fellow congregants from a higher, less compromised position.”
Domestic anti-Semitism
Between 1911 and 1912, Kafka attended more than 20 performances of a traveling Yiddish theater troupe, befriending one of the actors, Jizcak Lövy. In this, Kafka stands out against the prejudices of the assimilated German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie like his father towards the impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jews of the east. One diary entry cut by Brod reads: “Löwy – my father to him: He who goes to bed with dogs, gets up with bugs.” Benjamin points out that such anti-Semitic tropes related to hygiene, insect infestation, not to mention about comparisons with animals, reappear in Kafka’s fiction. From here, Gregor Samsa awakens as a giant insect in Metamorphosis.
Broad cut another entry in which Kafka engages in the prejudices of his father “L. confessed to me his gonorrhea; then my hair touched his as i leaned towards his head i was scared at least for the possibility of lice.
after the promotion of the newsletter
Contempt for his fiancee
“If F. has the same aversion to me as I do, then marriage is impossible,” Kafka wrote in a recording that Benjamin recovered. The woman in question, Felice Bauer, was twice engaged to Kafka before he, suffering from symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him, broke up with her in 1917. Brod kept many dispiriting entries in his diary about Bauer, such as this one: “Bonnie, a blank face that wore its blankness openly. Bare throat. The draped blouse. She looked very homely in her dress, although, as it turned out, she was by no means. (I’m getting a little alienated from her by looking at her so carefully …) Almost a broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin. However, he cut out a passage in which Kafka said she looked like a maid.
Boredom in the workplace
One day, while working at the Accident Insurance Institute, Kafka struggled to find a word for a bureaucratic report. In his diary he wrote: “At last I have the word ‘stigmatize’ and the sentence that goes with it, but I still hold it all in my mouth with a sense of disgust and shame, as if it were raw meat cut from my own flesh.” flesh (it cost me so much effort). At last I say it, but I retain the great horror that everything in me is ready for literary work, and such a work would be a heavenly dissolution and a real quickening to me, while here in the office, for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body, capable of such happiness, from a piece of his flesh, as to rob his body of a piece of his flesh.
What is Kafka doing in this silent passage? “He is self-dramatizing, perhaps with a certain degree of comic hyperbole,” says Benjamin, “and at the same time he develops an image that becomes part of his literary repertoire, the poetics of (often tortured and slaughtered) corporeality that we find throughout his work .”
The literary process
Brod removed Kafka’s first major story, The Judgment, from the diaries. This story upends the natural order, as a toothless, decrepit father throws away the bedclothes and sentences his son to death. Benjamin restored the story, which now stands next to a recording expressing Kafka’s elation at having written it all at once on September 22, 1912. It represented for him the “total opening of body and soul” in which “the story unfolds as a real birth covered with dirt and mud.’
Where Brod was convinced that the diary’s function was therapeutic, involving putting the unbearable on paper (“When you keep a diary, you usually record only what is oppressive or irritating,” he wrote in his afterword). Benjamin thinks that Kafka was doing something more literary. It was “one of the places where he transformed what he called ‘the huge world I have in my head’ into literature.”
Brod’s vanity
“Although I have used the blue pencil in the case of attacks on people still living, I do not think that this kind of censorship is necessary in the little that Kafka has to say against himself,” Broad wrote in his postscript to his edition of the diaries. . But a passage restored by Benjamin reveals otherwise. Kafka noted that a Berlin reviewer called the novelist Franz Werfel “far more important” than Brod, and that Brod “had to cross out that sentence before bringing the review to the Prager Tagblatt [a Prague daily newspaper] to reprint it.” None of this appears in Broad’s edition.
Finally, I asked Ross Benjamin what he would do if he were Max Brod. He says he wouldn’t burn anything either, and adds that Kafka put his great friend in a “terrible situation.” “He knew that the friend he was instructing to do this was the person who could least bring himself to do it,” says Benjamin. “From the time they met as students, Broad had recognized his genius, supported his work, pushed him to publish against his own opposition, and was instrumental in the publication and promotion of his work while he lived. And so giving this task to Brod can be seen as a crowning act of ambivalence by the genius of ambivalence that we know Kafka to have been. It is possible that Kafka made his request knowing that it would go unheeded.
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