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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

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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.

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.

#this is NOT a pro psych blog but I do believe there needs to be specificity in language #hmmm. idk what to tag as

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)

#asks #franz kafka #literature #history #authors #german literature

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STEPHANE MANDELBAUM Portrait of Kakfa circa 1985

Unknown, Franz Kafka

#art

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Although Kafka always claimed that he was not very good at his job, this was not the opinion of his employers, who promoted him several times. Like many writers in such a position who knew that their heart and soul are elsewhere, he may have been extra careful to discharge his duties diligently to avoid the charge of lack of commitment. An office colleague from this time, Alois Gütling, remembered him as tactful when handling people able to speak good office Czech, and much admired by his colleagues for his legal acumen. Another colleague, who joined the Institute several years later, when Kafka was becoming ill, V. K. Krofta, recalled his habitual reserve: "Through his build and his thoughtful abstractedness he made a very timid and a reticent impression; those around him considered him a kind of Don Quixote. He spoke an elegant literary Czech always with little pauses and the utmost concentration...He gesticulated vigorously when he wanted to emphasize his meagre sentences and words."

Nicholas Murray, Kafka

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“Kafka was in very good spirits. ‘You sparkle today,’ I said. Kafka smiled. ‘It is only a borrowed light. The reflection of a friendly word.’”

— Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (via traumakafka)

#it’s his birthday…

funeral

Kafka noted in his diary: 'I do not hope for victory, I do not enjoy the struggle for its own sake, I could only enjoy it because it is all I can do. As such the struggle does indeed fill me with a joy which is more than I can really enjoy, more than I can give, and I shall probably end by succumbing not to the struggle but to the joy.' He wanted to be miserable for his own satisfaction: the most secret part of this misery was such an intense form of joy that he spoke of dying of it. [ . . . ] Death alone was vast enough, sufficiently well hidden from the 'action-pursuing-the-goal' . . . In other words, in the acceptance of death, within the limitations of death, subordinated to the goal, Kafka found that sovereign attitude which aims at nothing, wants nothing, resumes, in a flash, its fullness and its wildness. There was nothing he could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken.

Georges Bataille on Franz Kafka, Literature and Evil

#georges bataille #about #quotes #2nd lit

dailymaxfka

- Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, February 14 to 15, 1913

#letters to felice #writing to your gf about your insane best friend's adoration of you #and how you could kiss him for all his absurdities #on valentine's day #is a decision I suppose

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dijeh

Description of a Struggle, Franz Kafka

trans. Tania and James Stern

#quotes #description of a struggle

girlsludged

please consider writing to Prarieland defendants Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, they are both trans lesbians incarcerated in men's prisons for protesting an ICE facility

prosecution established affiliation by way of defendants having fucking anarchist zines, the kind of shit you see in a punk house. this is what they want and are willing to pursue for all of us who aren't willing to lay down and die, imprisonment and torture and the absolute stripping of our dignity (the govt gleefully included their deadnames in a press release yesterday; Morris' public defender has consistently deadnamed and misgendered her despite her legal name change)

there is no one who will protect us except us, and if our sisters are lost to us and forgotten as soon as they are grabbed by the prison system (ie if the system is allowed to work as intended) then we are failing, and we are woefully unprepared for a world where they start taking more of us

Autumn is a loving wife and is interested in religious history and mythology. Write to her at FMC Fort Worth.

Meagan Elizabeth Morris is loved by her wife housemates, and dogs. Her name was legally changed in 2007, but the federal complaint used her

A primordial drive to goodness takes shape in Kafka’s story (The Stoker)—no resentment, rather something of the submerged passion of childhood for Goodness; the feeling of an agitated child’s prayer, and something of the fretful eagerness of painstaking schoolwork, and much for which one can conceive of no other expression save moral tenderness. The demands of that which one must do; are here posed with a conscience that is not driven by ethical principles but by a fine, haunting oversensitivity, which incessently uncovers small questions of great significance and which reveals remarkable convolutions in questions that for others are merely smooth uninteresting solids.

Robert Musil, 1914 review of The Stoker for Die Neue Rundschau

#franz kafka #robert musil #quotes #literature #history #amerika #the stoker #about

Tremendous amount of sputum, easily, and still pain in the morning. In my daze it went through my head that for such quantities and the ease somehow the Nobel Prize.

Franz Kafka, 1923-1924 conversation slip

#franz kafka #quotes #literature #authors #op #what can I even say...#letters to friends #<- putting any conversation slip posts in here

I do not mean to deny the consistency of Kafka’s intuitions of alienation and hopelessness when I suggest that sometime around 1920 he became more human: neurotic anxiety edged toward “the commonest sort of funk, the fear of death,” as he wrote to Brod in 1921, and a new breadth and benevolence descended upon his writing. After three years of severe sickness and of distractions that included his third broken engagement, his possibly cathartic letter to his father, and his last serious spate of work at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, he began to write again, and the fiction he produced between 1921 and his death—”The Castle,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and the four stories of “A Hunger Artist”—lifts Kafka into the empyrean of the epic artists. The strange struggles and nightmarish details—the infested wound of “A Country Doctor,” the rotting apple in the back of the metamorphosed Gregor Samsa, the penal colony’s scintillating torture machine— of the early fiction yield to a cosmic comedy, fables of anthropomorphic animals and elusive, inscrutable authorities. His letters, too, grow less tortured and arch, plainer and more genial. With Robert Klopstock he has the most relaxed of his male friendships, the least defensively needy, just as with Dora Dymant he falls at last into a complete liaison. He resumes his lessons in Hebrew and ponders Jewishness afresh. Becoming a bookbinder in Palestine had been one of Kafka’s joking dreams. Among the playing children of the vacation camp maintained by the Berlin Jewish People’s Home at Moritz, he writes a correspondent in Palestine, he is “not happy . . . but on the threshold of happiness.”

John Updike, Advancing Over Water (article for the New York Times)

#franz kafka #literature #history #john updike #quotes #authors #daily kafka #about #the tragedy and calm of the 'mature kafka' as some call it (his life can be divided 2 ways)#(pre/post judgement and pre/post TB)

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Dr. Franz Kafka Attending a Performance of “Shulamith” in the Yiddish Cafe Savoy, Prague on 13th October 1912 by Mick Rooney. This painting was displayed by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1999.

#art

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June 19th, 1916

Franz Kafka, Diaries (1914-1923)

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