Kafka Unlimited

if your ask isn’t an actual question I’m not publishing it. no nuance.

[toskarinfr]

next up on the docket: the author's blatant (and yet thematically relevant!) fetish

[toskarinfr]

it's not just a fetish thing, it's also commentary on how systems of abuse disempower and hang over people. it's also a fetish thing though

[franzkavkas]

[franzkavkas]

[franzkavkas]

are you and the dailykafka friends

no

[franzkavkas]

Typewritten 1934 letter from author Franz Werfel to doctor Robert Klopstock. Werfel and Klopstock were connected through their mutual friendship with Kafka, and both were in close contact with him in the years leading up to his death. Translation by me under the cut:

My dear Doctor Klopstock!

Your letter has truly brought joy to my heart. From the moment I first laid eyes on Franz Kafka a quarter century ago, I knew that he was the "herald of the king". I have never lost this feeling in his presence. There has always been a strange shudder mixed into my admiration and love for him. When he read The Metamorphosis out loud, the others were enjoying themselves with aesthetic delight at his so-called originality. On the other hand, I developed the feeling that this was not entirely about a human, but rather a being that had been tragically granted too much of the supernatural. Kafka is a prophet from above, a great chosen one, and only the era and its circumstances have allowed him to forge his transcendent knowledge and unspeakable experiences into literary parables. I was always aware of the distance that lay between him and I, a mere poet. Your story is thus a great honor to me and I thank you.

Always yours,

Franz Werfel

[franzkavkas]

However, these types of suspicions were an inherent part of fasting. No one could actually keep the hunger artist under observation all day and all night, no single observer could truly know if his fast was in fact perfect and unbroken; only the hunger artist himself could know, and thus he was the only truly satisfied spectator of his fast. He was, however, never satisfied for other reasons; he became emaciated —so emaciated that the public regretfully had to keep its distance because they could not bear the sight of him— perhaps not so much out of fasting, but out of dissatisfaction with himself. This was because he alone knew what no other initiate could know: how easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world. He was not secretive about this, but nobody believed him. They thought he was being modest at best, but most took him for an attention-seeker or a swindler for whom fasting was easy because he knew how to make it easy and had the gall to half-admit it. He had to take all of this, he had grown used to it over the course of the years, but this dissatisfaction gnawed inside him constantly, and after his fasts —one had to give him credit for this— he never left the cage of his own free will.

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist (trans. me)

[franzkavkas]

FRANZ (2025) dir. Agnieszka Holland

[franzkavkas]

“hey max I met this guy at the hospital he’s so tall and handsome and dreamy lying in bed in his nightshirt. anyways he’s looking for a job do you have any connections”

[franzkavkas]

Poor Dora, oh, we are all so poor, who in this world is poorer than us - she slept a little, but whispered nonstop in her sleep, one could only hear "my love, my love, my dearest"... I promised her that we would visit Franz again this afternoon if she would rest, and she did. "He is so lonely, completely alone, we have nothing to do but sit here, but we're leaving him there uncovered and all alone in the dark - oh my dearest, my dearest -" and so it went. What happened here is indescribable, and should never be described. Only those who know Dora can know what love is. So few understand love, and it only increases our pain and suffering. But you understand, don't you? You understand it! We still don't really know what has happened, particularly those of us who still have him by our side, but things will slowly become clearer and thus painfully dark. We're going back to visit Franz now - how stiff and unapproachable his face is, as pure and unrelenting as his soul. Unrelenting - the face of a king, from the oldest, most noble lineage. The gentleness of his human existence is gone, only his incomparable soul still shapes that precious, unmoving face, as lovely as an ancient marble bust.

Robert Klopstock, letter to Max Brod immediately after Kafka’s death, June 4th 1924 (trans. me)

[eyewishing]

an apple a day keeps the doctor away becauyse they don,t operate on bug,s

[7bitter]

three steps on the ladder of writing, helene cixous

[franzkavkas]

“But do you know what really is the holiest thing we could have of Goethe’s as a memento —the footprints of his solitary walks through the country— they would be it. And here comes a joke, a marvelous one, that makes God in His heaven weep bitterly and sends hell into hellish convulsions of laughter. It’s this: We can never have another person’s holy of holies, only our own — that’s a joke, a marvelous one.”

— Franz Kafka, 1902 letter to Oskar Pollak

[xrd]

[franzkavkas]

What exactly is at stake in the puzzle of Kafka’s ambiguous eye color? To a certain sort of reader, questions like this matter because they get us closer, or seem to get us closer, to the person, and thus to the origins of the published stories; these explorations allow us to re-enter the physical circumstances that preceded even the first drafts, and to partake in the exact moments when the life began to be art. This kind of literary fandom, as Geoff Dyer once wrote, in his case, about D. H. Lawrence, involves a backward reading in which “the finished works serve as prologue to the jottings.” Having reached the end of art, such readers begin a reverse quest: from the published material, back to the manuscripts, to the notes, to the letters, to the books and newspapers that the writer read, to the shopping lists he made. And it doesn’t stop there. It can go further, to the pre-literate realm of the relic—the desk where the author wrote those manuscripts, the hair brush he used before he sat down to write, the leaves that grew next to his childhood home.

Somewhere along the way, probably the result of falling a bit in love, those of us who indulge in this kind of backward reading may have come to believe that we need to look into Kafka’s eyes. But, in the end, that gaze is misdirected: what we really want is to look with those eyes, to share that vision.

Avi Steinberg, review of 99 Finds by Reiner Stach

[franzkavkas]

Most Kafka readers are familiar with Kafka’s stick-figure drawings, many of which have been used as illustrations or covers for his books. What most people don’t know about are these two drawings, dating from around 1911. 

The upper sketch is Kafka’s mother, probably while playing her nightly game of cards with her husband. The bottom sketch is unmistakably a self-portrait.

How do you like my drawing? You know, I used to be great at drawing, but then I started taking formal lessons from a bad painter, and she spoiled all of my talent. Just think!

Maybe not all of it was spoiled. While Kafka seems to have a bit of trouble with proportions (he probably didn’t receive formal art training for very long) he has a good grasp on shapes and like his stick figures, uses a minimum amount of lines to describe a form. 

[franzkavkas]

other anon, I'm not gonna answer the ask directly or in depth because I don't want to summon that side of tumblr here, but generally speaking I don't think it's possible to diagnose something like that from a distance. There is imo enough evidence to say that something was going on with Kafka's behavior and beliefs, and it would have probably gotten exponentially worse if his life got nudged in a slightly different direction, but there's no way of telling what it would have ended up looking like, or whether it would fit the patterns generally accepted as part of that disorder. That being said, the classification and diagnosis of these disorders is still wildly controversial in modern times with living patients so I wouldn't be too shocked about the uncertainty here.

If you've been reading older scholarship (from before the 90s or so) you may have already seen the term come up in reference to Kafka: please be aware that a lot of humanities scholars have a very loose relationship with medical terminology and many of them are using it as a catch-all term for "anxious" "hates the world" "gay" etc. and not a serious descriptor of Kafka's behavior.

[franzkavkas]

Hello! ! I've been a "Kafka fan" for about three years now, but have recently realized I've embarrassingly only read one biography ! (Frederick Karl's Representative Man)

Do you have any recommendations for books about Franz's personal life written by academic experts? And is Brod's worth reading?

YES I would recommend reading Brod's biography, but only after reading a biography that's more neutral so you have a fuller picture of what's going on. I haven't read Representative Man in full, but from what I recall Karl leans a little too hard into the "tortured ascetic" trope for my liking. Brod's biography is heavily limited by his circumstances (he can only write in detail about the parts of Kafka's life he was present for, he didn't have access to all the info/documents that modern biographers have) so not a great place to start, but it's still an essential part of the history of Kafka reception and you'll need to read it in order to understand all of the scholarship crafted in response to Brod.

I would recommend reading one of the biographies from the list below and then moving on to the others depending on what you're interested in. In no particular order:

Biographies

Kafka: A Biography by Nicholas Murray

Kafka by Klaus Wagenbach

The Early Years, The Decisive Years, and The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach (this trilogy is the current definitive scholarly biography)

Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son by Peter-André Alt

Franz Kafka by Sander L. Gilman

Books that are not biographies, but have a strong biographical focus

Als Kafka mir entgegen kam: Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka edited by Hans-Gerd Koch (extremely valuable firsthand accounts of Kafka from his friends, classmates, colleagues etc. If you can read German and only have time for one non-biography please read this one lol)

Kafka's Other Trial by Elias Canetti (more focused analysis of his relationship with Felice Bauer)

Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient by Sander L. Gilman (Kafka's views on his body and health in the context of antisemitism, medical advancements, gender and sexuality during his lifetime)

Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer by Michael Löwy (Kafka and leftist politics)

Kafka's Clothes by Mark M. Anderson (less about clothes and more about aesthetics/popular movements in art and Kafka's response to them)

Kafka and Noise by Kata Gellen (lots of good info on Kafka's interactions with technology and popular media during his lifetime, particularly music and movies)

Kafka: In Light of the Accident by Howard Caygill (deep dives on what Kafka did at work, and how it filtered back into his writing)

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings and Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner (more on Kafka's day job)

Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts: Studies on Language and Literature by Marek Nekula (focus on Kafka's Czech cultural influences, bilingualism/interest in learning languages)

Essays/essay collections

Franz Kafka on the 10th anniversary of his death by Walter Benjamin

Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Ronald Gray

Franz Kafka in Context edited by Caroline Duttlinger

Just for fun

Conversations With Kafka by Gustav Janouch (probably fictionalized account of Janouch's teenage friendship with Kafka, was published as a direct allusion/response to Eckermann's Conversations With Goethe to further mythologize Kafka, please exercise the criteria of embarassment and multiple attestation liberally when trying to read this)

The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel (kind of melodramatic and silly but like, sometimes that rules)

Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer (the rumor is out: does Franz Kafka is gay? Author seems to conflate being gay with literally anything that can be considered "sexually deviant" so watch out)

Franz Kafkas offenbares Geheimnis: eine Psychopathographie by Günter Mecke (you know someone's gonna have awesome takes on Kafka's sexuality when he starts bringing up hieroglyphics)

[nobrashfestivity]

STEPHANE MANDELBAUM Portrait of Kakfa circa 1985

Unknown, Franz Kafka