After his demise on 3 June 1924, a letter was present in Franz Kafka’s workplace in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Expensive Max, My final request: The whole lot I go away behind me … in the best way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my very own and others’), sketches and so forth, to be burned unread.”
His pal didn’t honour Kafka’s needs. “Brod was unshakably satisfied of their immeasurable worth to up to date and future humanity, and he was proper,” says Ross Benjamin, whose new translation of the Czech author’s diaries is printed on this centenary yr of Kafka’s demise.
Two months after Kafka died, Brod signed an settlement to publish his pal’s novels. The Trial got here out in in April 1925, The Fortress in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. The title of the final of those was Brod’s not Kafka’s: in a 1915 diary entry, Kafka had referred to as the novel Der Verschollene (The Lacking Particular person).
Brod later edited a bowdlerised version of Kafka’s diaries that, for one of the best a part of a century, has been the premise of German editions and the English translation which, overseen by Hannah Arendt, appeared in 1949. Brod eliminated passages with homoerotic undertones, put a blue pencil by passages about brothel visits, excised unkind descriptions of Kafka’s fiancee, and elided sslurs on these nonetheless residing, not least Brod himself.
“Kafka’s worldwide reception was formed by a misrepresentation of what he had really written,” writes Benjamin in his translator’s preface.
As an alternative, he reveals Kafka warts and all – as a sexual, troubled, generally self-loathing, literary experimenter – and a person extra knowingly compromised than Brod thought it correct for his readers to fulfill.
Listed below are a number of the recent particulars that may add to our understanding of the creator of Metamorphosis.
Dabbling in nudism
Throughout a keep at a nudist sanatorium, Kafka notes that he stands out among the many bare males by holding his swimming trunks on. “I’m often known as the person with the swimming trunks”. Lastly, he ditched even these to be able to be sketched, writing an entry that Brod trimmed: “Served as a mannequin for Dr Schiller. With out swimming trunks. Exhibitionist expertise.” Such modesty, Benjamin surmises, might need been due to shyness, or to do with being circumcised, however not due to the thesis superior in Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick, that he had a small penis. Benjamin says: “He writes so much about his physique and his discomfort along with his physique (unusually tall for the time interval, not an oz of fats, and so forth) however not about his penis.”
Homoerotic observations
On the identical nudist sanatorium, Kafka described “2 lovely Swedish boys with lengthy legs, that are so fashioned and taut that one may actually solely run one’s tongue alongside them”. Brod rendered the passage thus: “Two good-looking Swedish boys with lengthy legs.” After which there may be this, Kafka’s description of a fellow practice passenger, that Brod noticed match to delete: “His apparently sizeable member makes a big bulge in his pants [ie trousers].” For all that, it’s not but the second to mud off these “Uncensored diaries reveal homosexual Kafka” headlines, counsels Benjamin: “Maybe essentially the most that such passages inform us is that Kafka was able to admiring and – at the very least imaginatively – needing male our bodies.”
Brothel discuss
Throughout one go to, Kafka famous a lady by the door, “whose scowling face is Spanish, whose placing her fingers on her hips is Spanish and who stretches in a bodice-like costume of prophylactic silk. Hair runs thickly from her navel to her personal elements.” Brod omitted the final sentence, which maybe says extra about his than Kafka’s erotic compunctions.
In a later entry, Kafka is amongst congregants at Prague’s Altneu synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur when he notices the household of the proprietor of the brothel he visited a number of days earlier. Brod’s enhancing of this entry – shedding the title of the brothel – distorts Kafka’s which means. “The place Kafka unflinchingly implicated himself within the impurity and false piety he discovered within the synagogue, “ says Benjamin, “the retouched textual content portrays Kafka was judging the opposite congregants from a loftier, much less compromised place.”
Internalised antisemitism
Between 1911 and 1912, Kafka attended greater than 20 performances by a travelling Yiddish theatre troupe, befriending one of many actors, Jizchak Löwy. On this, Kafka stood out towards the unfairness of assimilated German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie like his father in the direction of impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jews from the east. One diary entry Brod excised reads: “Löwy – My father about him: He who lies down in mattress with canine will get up with bugs.” Benjamin factors out that such antisemitic tropes to do with hygiene, insect an infection to not point out comparisons with animals, resurface in Kafka’s fiction. Therefore Gregor Samsa waking up as a large insect in Metamorphosis.
Brod lower one other entry during which Kafka implicates himself in his father’s prejudices “L. confessed his gonorrhoea to me; then my hair touched his after I leaned towards his head, I grew frightened as a consequence of at the very least the potential of lice.”
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Contempt for his fiancee
“If F. has the identical repugnance for me as I do, then a wedding is inconceivable,” wrote Kafka in an entry Benjamin has reinstated. The lady in query, Felice Bauer was twice engaged to Kafka earlier than he, struggling signs from the tuberculosis that may kill him, broke it off together with her in 1917. Brod saved many disobliging diary entries about Bauer, comparable to this one: “Bony, empty face that wore its vacancy brazenly. Naked throat. A shirt thrown on. Seemed very home in her costume though, because it turned out, she not at all was. (I alienate myself from her a little bit by inspecting her so carefully …) Virtually damaged nostril. Blonde, considerably straight, unattractive hair, robust chin.” Nevertheless, he lower one passage during which Kafka mentioned she seemed like a maid.
Office ennui
Someday whereas working on the Accident Insurance coverage Institute, Kafka discovered himself struggling to discover a phrase for a bureaucratic report. Within the diary he wrote: “Eventually I’ve the phrase ‘stigmatise’ and the sentence that goes with it, however nonetheless maintain every thing in my mouth with a sense of disgust and disgrace as if it have been uncooked meat, lower out of my very own flesh (a lot effort has it value me). Eventually I say it, however retain the nice horror that every thing in me is prepared for a literary work and such a piece can be a heavenly dissolution and an actual coming alive for me, whereas right here within the workplace for the sake of so wretched a doc I need to rob a physique able to such happiness of a chunk of its flesh as being like robbing his physique of a chunk of its flesh.”
What’s Kafka as much as on this suppressed passage? “He’s self-dramatising, maybe with a point of comedian hyperbole,” says Benjamin, “and on the identical time elaborating on a picture that turns into a part of his literary repertoire, the poetics of (typically tortured and butchered) corporeality we discover all through his work.”
The literary course of
Brod eliminated Kafka’s first nice brief story, The Judgment, from the diaries. This story reverses the pure order by having a toothless, decrepit father throwing off his bedclothes and sentencing his son to demise. Benjamin reinstates the story, which now sits alongside an entry expressing Kafka’s elation at writing it in a single sitting on 22 September 1912. It represented for him “the overall opening of physique and soul,” during which “the story developed as a real start, coated with filth and slime.”
The place Brod was satisfied the perform of a diary was therapeutic, involving the expulsion of the insupportable on to paper (“Whenever you maintain a diary you normally put down solely what’s oppressive or irritating,” he wrote in his postscript). Benjamin reckons Kafka was doing one thing extra literary. It was “one of many locations the place he remodeled what he referred to as “the super world I’ve in my head” into literature.
Brod’s self-importance
“Though I’ve used the blue pencil within the case of assaults on individuals nonetheless alive, I’ve not thought-about this form of censorship vital within the little that Kafka has to say towards myself,” wrote Brod in his postscript to his version of the diaries. However a passage reinstated by Benjamin reveals in any other case. Kafka famous {that a} Berlin reviewer referred to as the novelist Franz Werfel “way more vital” than Brod, and that Brod “needed to strike out this sentence earlier than he introduced the assessment to the Prager Tagblatt [a Prague daily newspaper] to have it reprinted.” None of this seems in Brod’s version.
Lastly, I requested Ross Benjamin what he would have finished if he had been Max Brod. He says he wouldn’t have burned something both, and provides that Kafka had put his nice pal in “a horrible bind”. “He knew the pal he was instructing to do that was the individual least seemingly to have the ability to carry himself to do it,” says Benjamin. “From the time they met as college college students, Brod had recognised his genius, championed his work, prodded him to publish towards his personal resistance, and been instrumental within the publication and promotion of his work whereas he was alive. And so giving Brod this activity might be seen as a crowning act of ambivalence by the genius of ambivalence we all know Kafka to have been.” Simply presumably, Kafka made his request realizing it will go unhonoured.
